Hazel Morse, meet Gloria Patch. Gloria, Hazel. You two should get along just fine.

One can’t read Dorothy Parker’s Big Blonde without seeing flashes of Gloria Patch throughout the entire piece. Hazel Morse, with the exception of the attempted suicide and various suitors after her husband leaves her, is strikingly similar to Fitzgerald’s Gloria. So similar, in fact, that the same images I visualized for the settings of Beautiful and Damned were the very same that came to mind when reading Big Blonde. Now, this may be a case of my brain just being lazy and unwilling to create a unique world for Hazel to exist within, but I like to think it is not a coincidence.
In fact, I wouldn’t consider it too much of a stretch to imagine Big Blonde as a close retelling of Beautiful and Damned from the perspective of Gloria instead of Anthony. The way they are introduced is especially similar, and their attitudes towards the men around them cinches this concept of their relation to each other. It’s extremely interesting to go from Beautiful and Damned to Big Blonde, because knowledge and experience in one invariably adds to the other a great deal. Fitzgerald does a fine job characterizing Gloria, but it’s more often than not seen through the tinted goggles of Anthony (for better or worse). With Big Blonde, however, we get a close look at what it means to be a “vamp,” a depressed and alcoholic one at that, which is something we just didn’t get in Beautiful and Damned.
It’s actually worth noting that upon finishing Fitzgerald’s novel, I was completely satisfied with Gloria’s role in the story and how she turned out in the end. After reading Parker’s work, however, it becomes apparent that Gloria got off far too easy. Hazel Morse comes off as a much more realistic interpretation of what women who lived the lifestyle that both she and Gloria lived. Fitzgerald seems to forget Gloria’s issues at the end, having her clean herself up and be the responsible one, leaving Anthony to fall apart emotional and mentally. Sure, she is described as “unclean,” but she escapes the story with at least some dignity. Hazel Morse, however, does not. She awakens, having failed at killing herself and then gets scolded for taking her life for granted. Even the doctor seems to think that her life is a waste of effort, having to be pulled away from another woman to even see her. In a way, this seems like the ending Gloria should have received herself. Granted, Hazel Morse had it a bit worse than Gloria, but I still feel that Gloria got off too easy and the fate of Hazel brings this fact into light.
I do not mean to take up this whole blog arguing about whether Gloria or Hazel had a worse life or which character I liked more. I just felt it was necessary to bring their apparent similarities to light. So what, then, does this mean? Why does it matter that Gloria and Hazel are similar?
The most important concept I pulled from this is the simple fact that it proves the authenticity of both Parker’s and Fitzgerald’s rendition of the 1920s woman. Two authors, so very different in a great many ways, interpreted two different characters in a very similar fashion, so there must be some truth behind it. I understand that it’s not a coincidence that we are reading these two stories so close to each other, but I must reiterate how much they complement each other. I enjoyed them both individually, but together they speak volumes more and with greater authority than they ever could have on their own.