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FROM THE TELEPHONE'S EARLIEST HISTORY in America, white middle- and upper-class users have considered the instrument tailored to the projects of desire.1 Providing a sheltered space that isolates lovers from the scrutiny and supervision of the outside world, the telephone "cuts a dyad out of the speech community and wires it into an exclusive, private, two-person community" (Hopper 30). The proximity of mouth to ear-orifice to orifice-encourages a sense of conspiratorial intimacy. Marshall McLuhan has gone so far as to argue that "it is quite natural to kiss via phone" because the instrument, like the "language of love," "unites voice and ear in an especially close way" (266). Yet even as the telephone can bring the beloved near, it can also keep the beloved (or the unwanted admirer) far away. As a material thing, the telephone is an ambiguous monument, signifying both presence and absence, proximity and distance: "the telephone line holds together what it separates" (Ronell 4). Comfort and curse, the instrument offers the possibility of possessing an absent Other while simultaneously imposing distance and loss.
Dorothy Parker's fiction of the twenties and thirties taps this paradoxical line, amplifying the uneasy intersection of telephonic ardor, gender, and social prescription. Four of Parker's stories-"A Telephone Call," "New York to Detroit," "Dusk Before Fireworks," and "Advice to the Little Peyton Girl"-portray the telephone as a site of female anxiety and urgent desire, the locus of a power struggle between heterosexual lovers. Through its capacity to command and disconnect, advance and withdraw, the telephone promises to level or circumvent the power imbalance between lovers while at the same time reinforcing it. In their order of publication, the stories chart women's increasingly desperate attempts to short-circuit the telephone tactics men use to retain the upper hand and to disentangle themselves from the traditional discourse of love that holds them captive. Ultimately, the stories argue, any attempt to subvert the masculine hegemony in telephone discourse-or in the love affair-is futile.
Because the telephone's disembodied "electric speech" hides the identity of the person calling, it typically sets up an imbalance of power between caller and answerer. Avital Ronell explains that in the act of answering the telephone, "You're saying yes, almost automatically, suddenly, sometimes irreversibly. Your picking it up means...