“And it seemed the Revolver had shot Mr Jennings.”
Not telling the whole story in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Anita Loos’s 1925 book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes brings us the journal of the novels leading character and narrator, Lorelei Lee. Loos paints Lee as a somewhat naïve young woman who has what comes across as a streak of unwarranted arrogance. The novel takes the form of Lorelei’s diary, in which Lorelei writes down the events of the day, in an often stream of thought like manner. In it she discusses her day to day affairs and her relationships with various, wealthy, male suitors. However, Lorelei’s narration is not completely trustworthy.
On the very first page of her diary Lorelei tells us that she is writing the diary at the suggestion of Mr Eisman, one of Lorelei’s gentlemen friends. It is therefore possible that the reason for Lorelei’s seemingly deliberate vagueness in her diary is to mask the whole truth, should Mr Eismen, or anyone else for that matter, read it. So instead of the blunt, tell all honesty that we might associate with the diaries of our older sisters, we get a diary with gaping holes, ambiguity and innuendo.
Perhaps the best example of this vagueness is in chapter four of the novel. In this chapter we see Lorelei, after tossing aside another man in Gerry, board a ship to Europe with her friend Dorothy, at the request of a presumably jealous and protective Mr Eismen. Once aboard the ship Lorelei recounts a traumatic moment from her past in which she murdered a man in Little Rock, Arkansas. This, however, is not how she tells it. Instead we see Lorelei’s unreliability as a narrator come to the fore when she says:
“So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr. Jennings I had quite a bad case of histerics and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings” (pg 25)
This passage highlights Lorelei’s unreliability. Whether this omission of the facts of the incident, or her guilt in the matter, is due to her want to conceal the truth or her brain concealing the truth from her is not altogether clear. It is however clear that Lorelei’s recount of the matter is not to be trusted.
However, Lorelei’s omission of facts in her recount of the shooting is not the only reason to mistrust Ms. Lee. Her recounts of the time spent with the men of the book always seem to be lacking some sort of plausibility. On page 4 of the novel Lorelei discusses her evenings with Mr Eismen, suggesting that he often stays long into the night leaving her quite fatigued the next morning. She tells us that the even was spent talking about the topics of the day. The manner in which she recounts these long bouts of talking gives you quite a different impression than she does when she says :
“I mean Gerry likes to talk quite a lot and I always think a lot of talk is quite depressing..” (pg 16)
For me at least, there is an unescapable feeling that the talking she has done with Mr. Eismen is quite different to the talking that depresses her with Gerry. This sense of ambiguous sexual innuendo is prevalent throughout her diary with another example being in her recount of that dark time in Little Rock, when she refers to Mr. Jenning’s female friend as being a woman who is known for “…not being nice.” It is also not convincing that Lorelei’s “brains” are the object of male interest in the novel and that perhaps Mr Eismen is more interested in “educating” her “brains” then he is in educating her brain.
It is not at all farfetched to assume that Lorelei is substituting the details of her sex life with innuendo, as we see Lorelei seeks to sensor others in her life also. On page 22, after we read a recount of something Dorothy had said, Lorelei admits that she always has to tell her friend not to use slang. We had also previously seen that it was deemed unsuitable for our young Lorelei to be listening to “riskay” jokes. So it seems that in the highly censored times of the 1920’s we are seeing Ms. Lee censoring herself.
When one takes all this into account the picture of just how untrustworthy Lorelei is as a narrator starts to complete itself. More than just her lack of grammar, punctuation and her spelling mistakes, Lorelei seems to deliberately try to mislead her intended audience, whether that is us, another man, or herself. It is thus clear that Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee is a very good example of the unreliable narrator.
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