Il valore dell’indipendenza: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes di Anita Loos

This article examines Anita Loos’s 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes which, although originally rewarded with great popular success and admired by such canonical authors as Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and James Joyce, only began to attract critical attention after the mid-1970s. Narrated in the form of a diary, the novel follows the adventures of Lorelei Lee in the Unites States and Europe as she juggles several suitors who try to claim possession of her person under the guise of “improving” her mind, or in exchange for satisfying her seemingly compulsive desire for jewels and other valuable commodities. The analysis highlights Loos’s masterful deployment of ambiguity in her treatment of Lorelei’s relationship with men, as evidenced by the lack of consensus among critics and scholars, as to what (if anything) Lorelei gives her suitors in exchange for their patronage. By contrast, what is very much on display in the language and actions that Lorelei’s admirers deploy in the novel, is the possessive, coercive nature of their attitude towards women. In the best tradition of American irreverence, Loos makes use of her heroine’s European tour to satirize simultaneously American materialism and European pretentiousness and decadence. In the final part of the novel, Loos draws from her own Hollywood experience, to expose the hypocrisy of self-proclaimed moral crusaders through her devastating portrayal of Henry Spoffard. Even though Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ends with Lorelei’s marriage to Spoffard, Loos emphasizes her commitment to her new career and the ability with which she asserts control not only over her husband, but his entire immediate family. As the novel draws to a close, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that for Lorelei, independence and agency are far more precious than all the jewels she had previously collected.