Marjorie Harvey
Bernice's cousin and host: clever, admired, contemptuous of other girls, and the person who teaches Bernice everything and then takes it back.
To go on being the girl who does not have to try. Her own test for whether she loves a man is whether she forgets him when she is away from him, and she always does.
The book
At a glance
- Bernice's cousin and antagonist in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”
- Eighteen
- Five cartwheels in succession at a dance at New Haven, and a great deal of mail
- No female ones. She considers girls stupid
- Warren McIntyre, nineteen, at Yale, who grew up across the street from her
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMarjorie Harvey is the cousin Bernice is staying with in “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the story's engine. She is the most popular girl in a small Midwestern city: a fairylike face, a dazzling and bewildering tongue, and a local celebrity for having turned five cartwheels in a row at a dance at New Haven. She gets great heaps of letters in various masculine handwritings, and she has no female friends at all, because she considers girls stupid.
What makes her more than a stock beauty is that she has a theory and states it clearly. She thinks the qualities people call feminine are mostly inefficiency, that a girl has to run her own campaign because nobody else will, and that charm is a matter of technique that can be taught. She proves it by teaching it. Then, when the pupil starts winning the one thing Marjorie considered hers, she wrecks her in three sentences and never raises her voice.
How the book draws them
- How she is introducedThrough Warren McIntyre, who grew up across the street and has long been crazy about her: besides the face and the tongue, she is celebrated for the five cartwheels at a New Haven dance, and she has told him gravely that she does not love him, because when she is away from him she forgets him and has affairs with other boys.
- What she says behind the doorTo her mother, about Bernice: “She’s absolutely hopeless!” She has been polite, she has made men dance with her, and they will not stand being bored. Her mother objects that popularity is cheap, and the answer is the line the story turns on: “It’s everything when you’re eighteen,” said Marjorie emphatically.
- Her opinion of womanly womenTold by Bernice that she has not a feminine quality in her, she erupts: “Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities.” She then describes what happens when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes he has built his ideals around.
- The distinction she does makeBernice is confused to be told to fix her eyebrows and straighten her teeth by someone who despises dainty femininity. Marjorie separates the two: “I hate dainty minds,” answered Marjorie. “But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”
- The curriculumEyebrows brushed straight, less leaning on a partner, and above all the unpopular boys: amuse three of them in an evening and the attractive ones will see there is no danger of being stuck. Her governing rule is that charm is what is left over once you can stop thinking about yourself: “The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have.”
- The hair, as an afterthoughtBernice, awkward with gratitude, says she knows Marjorie does not like sentiment. Marjorie is looking in the mirror and thinking about something else entirely: “Oh, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was considering whether we hadn’t better bob your hair.”
- How she takes it backWhen Warren McIntyre's car starts appearing outside the house for Bernice, Marjorie laughs it off in public and then, in the hall before a bridge party, does the whole job in three sentences: “You may as well stop making a fool of yourself over Warren McIntyre. He doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about you.”
- The trapAt the bridge party she mentions, pleasantly, that the bobbed-hair line is only a bluff, and keeps saying so until the crowd is on its feet and a summer bobbing party is arranged. Her last word before Bernice gets into the car is thrown to the room: “Don’t worry — she’ll back out!”
She wins the evening and loses her hair. After the barber shop she is gracious about it. She apologises for having forgotten Mrs. Deyo's dance, offers to take Bernice to a hairdresser in the morning, and says she really did not imagine she would go through with it. Then, in her nightdress, twists her own hair into two long blond braids in front of her cousin, looking, the narration says, like a delicate painting of some Saxon princess.
Bernice cuts both braids off while she is asleep. Marjorie is not shown again. The last the reader knows of her is one detail the narration saves: a curious narrowing of Bernice's eyes in the barber's chair, which Marjorie remarked on to someone long afterward.