Let Me Be a Dancin' Fool

Question 1:

Parker does not allow her characters to stop waltzing because to stop waltzing would have been uncouth for the time period. The narrator is very caught up in this idea of how one should behave in society. While she may not agree with it, as we see in her rather cynical soliloquies, she is a woman and society expects her to behave a certain way. There are time-honored traditions that have been set up that this narrator cannot necessarily go against. This is in fact how the waltz starts in the first place. While the narrator begins by stalwartly stating that she doesn’t “want to dance with him. I don’t want to dance with anybody. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be him” she realizes that she cannot go against the social norms of the time and that she is trapped (Parker 491). Still with a zest in her syntax the narrator explores this idea: “What can you, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you, I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d like to awfully, but I’m having labor pains…No. There was nothing much for me to do, but say I’d adore to…All right Cannonball, let’s run out on the field. You won the toss; you can lead” (Parker 491). Despite serious objection and serious consideration of saying no to the man, the narrator know that society will not allow her to say her true feelings. Tradition was programmed her to only be able to say yes to men. It is for these reasons that the flattery continues and the dancing does not stop. Parker is demonstrating just how trapped women are in societal values—how the ideals that the masses follow truly ensnare women. As the text progresses she even goes so far as to say that women will be trapped like this until their dying day, and that the waltz eventually becomes a “danse macabre”. While morbid, the narrator’s cynicism drives the wit of this piece to make it both amusing to read and poignant.

Question 2 (Parker):

The narrator’s “double-voice” present in the text allows Parker to expose her points about being trapped by society in a way that would not have been otherwise possible, and also in a comedic fashion. Using the double voice shows the dichotomy of what the narrator really wants to say, and what she has to say. It quite explicitly tells the audience what it may have been like back in those times; it makes us relate to that woman. This concept draws in a bit of Ong as he talks about the difficulty in relaying messages to audience members over a wide span of time and distance. Well, through Parker’s “double-voice” she brings her audience into the scene and immerses us in exactly what it would have been like in the 1930s. The humor that the “double-voice” provides in the text allows the audience to see how ridiculous a scenario as such is. It shows the audience that it is actually comical how radically different the narrator’s feelings are from her spoken words, and this gives everyone a grasp on the “moral” of the prose. The humor makes us question if the way society functions is actually the best way and forces us to realize the change is necessary because the current stylings are outrageous.