When I started putting together this post (a mere four months ago), I was going to do a “Top 10 Literary Moments of the Golden Girls.” But then I realized that the greatest show in the history of television (at least in my mind) deserved something better, something grander, something more epic. Subsequently, I decided to document every single literary reference that came up in the series. This took time, dedication, and access to the entire series. Which I own. On DVD.
Day after day, I sat and watched and laughed and transcribed by hand (so please excuse any mistakes/inaccuracies- I’m sure there are many) the rich bounty of literary references in the show. My definition of “literary reference” is broad; I included all real-life authors and actual books mentioned, plus some other literary-adjacent stuff that I found humorous or interesting (including library references, because I HAD to). I also tried to provide context for the lines where I could, so that the humor could completely shine through as intended. “The Golden Girls” deserves only the best, as do you, dear reader. I hope you enjoy.
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON ONE
S1E7: “On Golden Girls”
Picture it: Blanche’s unruly visiting teenage grandson Bobby mouths off to the girls, gets slapped by Sophia, and storms off, followed closely by Blanche.
Rose *distraught*: “This is like the long day’s journey into light!”
Dorothy: “‘NIGHT,’ Rose.”
Rose: “Night, Dorothy” *exits*
Literary Reference: Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night
_________________________________________________________________________________
S1E9: “Blanche and the Younger Man”
Picture it: Blanche is on a date with a much younger man (her aerobics instructor) and is starting to realize that they have very little in common.
Blanche *after an awkward silence*: “Read any good books lately?”
Dirk: “Pumping Iron. I saw the movie too, but I don’t think it did the book justice.”
Blanche *with resigned sarcasm*: “How could it?”
Literary Reference: Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding by Gaines and Butler
_________________________________________________________________________________
S1E10: “The Heart Attack”
Picture it: Sophia is having chest pains and the girls talk as they wait for an ambulance.
Rose: “There shouldn’t be heart attacks. Or cancer, or anything like that. There should just be a certain age when you have to turn your life, like a library book.”
Literary Reference: libraries
_________________________________________________________________________________
S1E12: “The Custody Battle”
Picture it: Blanche is going after a role in the town play. (And a man while she’s at it.
Dorothy: “Where are you going?”
Blanche: “Out to dinner with Jason, the director of our community theater. He’s considering me for the role of Lady Macbeth in Mr. William Shakespeare’s masterpiece Macbeth. I feel sure after our date he’ll make a decision in my favor.”
Dorothy: “Oh, come on now, you’re not just using this guy to get a part in the play?”
Blanche: “‘Course not, Dorothy. I’m going to let him use ME to get a part in the play.”
Literary Reference: Shakespeare’s Macbeth
_________________________________________________________________________________
S1E25: “Big Daddy”
Picture it: Blanche’s father Big Daddy is there for a visit and Blanche slips into Southern-speak.
Blanche: “Oh, fiddle-dee-dee.”
Dorothy: “Fiddle-dee-dee?”
Rose: “This is so much fun, it’s like being in Gone With the Wind!”
Literary Reference: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
_________________________________________________________________________________
S1E26: “The Way We Met”
Picture it: the girls are traumatized after watching the movie “Psycho.”
Blanche: “It always upsets me. It’s the reason I prefer not to shower alone.”
Sophia: “Sure, Blanche. And Goldilocks and the Three Bears is why you prefer not to SLEEP alone.”
Literary Reference: The Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON TWO
S2E1: “The End of the Curse”
Picture it: Blanche feels bad about getting older.
Blanche: “The only reason I’m sticking around is to read Danielle Steel’s next book.”
Literary Reference: Danielle Steel, American novelist
________________________________________________________________________
S2E3: “Take Him, He’s Mine”
Picture it: Rose flips out after Dorothy’s boyfriend in the Navy cancels a date.
Rose: “I knew it! The minute I heard you were dating a sailor I said to myself there’ll be nothing but heartaches. Those swabbies drift into port, park their ditties on your doorstep, show you some tricks they learned in the orient and then it’s ‘avast me hearties’ and they shove off with a serpent tattoo and your heart as souvenirs!”
Dorothy: “You’ve been reading Treasure Island again, Rose.”
Literary Reference: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E4: “It’s a Miserable Life”
Picture it: Rose tells one of her infamous St. Olaf stories about Mr. Minky, her town’s surly librarian.
Rose: “One summer, I worked up enough nerve to check out the latest Nancy Drew mystery and Mr. Minky was stamping my book and his tie got caught in the stamping machine. He’d have choked to death if I hadn’t cut his tie with my Girl Scout knife. Well, he was so overwhelmed with gratitude he let me check my book out for a whole week!”
Blanche: “What’s so special about that?”
Rose: “Oh, usually he’d only let you check your book out for an hour. Mr. Minky always said ‘Books belong in a library.'”
Dorothy: “Really, Rose. I always thought Churchill said that at YALTA.”
Literary Reference: the Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene; libraries
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E6: “Big Daddy’s Little Lady”
Picture it: Rose chats awkwardly with Blanche’s father, Big Daddy.
Rose: “Atlanta is a lovely city. Have they rebuilt it much since they burned it down in Gone With The Wind?”
Literary Reference: Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (again!)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E8: “Vacation”
Picture it: the girls get stranded on a desert island while on vacation and start confessing their secrets.
Rose: “I’m crying because we’re all gonna die and I still have so many things to tell you.”
Blanche: “Like what?
Rose: “Like…once, I read your diary,”
Blanche: “You what!”
Rose: “Well, it was an accident! You left it open on the kitchen table. I was 20 pages in before I realized it wasn’t a Sidney Sheldon novel!”
Literary Reference: Sidney Sheldon, American author
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E13: “The Stan Who Came to Dinner”
Picture it: Stan tries to guilt Dorothy into staying home from a date to help him deal with a crisis.
Stan *forlornly*: “I’ll still be here when you get back, God willing.”
Dorothy: “We have tickets to see Merv Griffin in The Crucible. I’ll risk it.”
Literary Reference: The Crucible by Arthur Miller
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E14: “The Actor”
Picture it: the girls discuss the new play (and man) in town.
Blanche: “You are never going to guess who we got to star in this year’s production at the community theater!”
Dorothy: “Oh, Blanche, please, you say that every year and every year we end up with Miami’s answer to Meryl Streep, Phyills Hammeril. She stinks.”
Rose: “Oh, I thought she was terrific last year in The Diary of Anne Frank.”
Dorothy: “Oh, Rose, please. During the entire second act, the audience kept yelling ‘She’s in the attic! She’s in the attic!'”
Literary Reference: The Diary of Anne Frank
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E20: “Whose Face Is It Anyway?”
Picture it: Blanche goes missing before a potential surgery and the girls are looking for her.
Sophia: “There’s no one in the kitchen now, but I think she was there. The coffee is still warm.”
Dorothy: “Oh, Ma, that’s because we were in there drinking it less than an hour ago.”
Sophia: “Excuse ME, Miss Marple. I’m new at this.”
Literary Reference: Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series
_________________________________________________________________________________
S2E26: “Empty Nests”
Picture it: Blanche gets a bit worked up when giving life advice to the daughter of a friend.
Blanche: “You wanna go to college where there are green lawns and willow trees and young men in chinos and ties and professors with just a touch of gray at the temple. Wise, learned men who look up your skirt if you’re sitting in the first row. Meetings with them so they can explain Plato and they lean over your books with you and you can smell their pipe tobacco and their maleness and then their arm accidentally brushes against your bosoms and the room is filled with the heat of a taboo lust!”
Literary Reference: Plato, philosopher and writer
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON 3
S3E3: “Bringing up Baby”
Picture it: the girls prepare for taking care of (what they think is) a human baby (but actually turns out to be a pig. Long story).
Blanche: “I’m reading this Spock book on baby care and he says it’s very important for a young child to have a male role model around during its formative years, now what are we going to do?”
Dorothy: “We’ll all wear Yankee caps and scratch our behinds after every beer.”
Literary Reference: Dr. Benjamin Spock, author of many books about child-rearing
_________________________________________________________________________________
S3E7: “Strange Bedfellows”
Picture it: the girls help out with a political campaign.
Rose: “Don’t you guys just love being in politics? I haven’t had this much fun since I worked on the Dewey campaign.”
Dorothy: “Rose! You worked for Thomas Dewey?”
Rose: “No, Melvil Dewey! The founder of the Dewey Decimal System.”
Literary Reference: The Dewey Decimal System (though since Dewey died in 1931, this would have been unlikely).
_________________________________________________________________________________
S3E8: “Brotherly Love”
Picture it: Dorothy and Blanche fight over a man.
Dorothy: “How could I allow a man to come between me and my best friend? Blanche is never going to forgive me.”
Blanche: *coming out from behind drapes* “I forgive you!”
Dorothy: “Honey, where did you come from?”
Blanche: “I was hiding behind the drapes.”
Dorothy: “What is this, Hamlet?”
Literary Reference: Shakespeare’s Hamlet
_________________________________________________________________________________
S315: “Dorothy’s New Friend”
Picture it: Dorothy becomes friends with a local writer, Barbara Thorndike, who turns out to be not quite the inspiration Dorothy had hoped she would be.
Rose: “Barbara Thorndike is coming HERE? Wow, I’ve never met a real author before!”
Blanche: “I have! I once stood in line two hours at a bookstore for Schwarzenegger’s autograph.”
Dorothy: “You know, when I think of great literary figures of our time, it’s usually Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Schwarzenegger.”
Later…
Barbara: “And so Dorothy Parker turned to Alexander Walker and said ‘If you laid all the women in this room end to end,’ I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”
Later, Dorothy accepts Barbara’s invitation to a writer’s symposium even though it conflicts with a prior commitment.
Rose: “Dorothy, the masquerade ball is Friday night! You know how much it means to me. I’m counting on you to be the rear end of my horse!”
Dorothy: “Rose, sweetheart, this Friday I can choose between rubbing elbows with Normal Mailer, or doing the hokey pokey in a horse costume with your behind in my face.”
Rose: “Well? Which is it gonna be?”
Later, Barbara and Dorothy go to lunch at a place known as “THE hangout for Miami’s literary intelligensia.”
Dorothy: “I’ve never seen a menu with a table of contents before.”
Barbara: “Skip ahead to chapter five, it’s the lunch menu.”
Dorothy: “Gee, everything sounds so good. ‘The Crepes of Wrath.’ ‘The Old Man and the Seafood Salad.’ I think I will have the ‘For Whom the Stuffed Bell Pepper Tolls.'”
Barbara: “And I’ll have a turkey sandwich on ‘Catcher in the Rye’ bread with a side of ‘George Bernard Slaw.'”
The food arrives.
Barbara: “I didn’t order the french fries.”
Waiter: “Oh, right, you get the ‘Edgar Allen Poe-tatoes,’ and the ‘Ice Water Cometh.'”
Dorothy: “You know, a little of that goes a very long way.”
Literary References: (Do you really need me to list all these? I have faith you can figure them out.)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S3E16 “Grab that Dough”
Picture it: the girls are contestants on a game show.
Host: “What famous Tennessee Williams play was recently made into a film by Paul Newman?”
Rose: “Was it The Glass Menagerie?”
Host: “That’s correct for 100 points!”
Literary Reference: The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
_________________________________________________________________________________
S3E23: “Mixed Blessings”
Picture it: Sophia makes a slightly insensitive comment when meeting her grandson’s in-laws.
Sophia: “What is this, a revival of A Raisin in the Sun?”
Literary Reference: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON FOUR
S4E4: “Yokel Hero”
Picture it: Rose is nominated for St. Olaf’s Woman of the Year
Rose: “Last year Gretchen Lillyhammer won for running into the burning library and saving all the books!”
Blanche: “That is amazing, how’d she do that?”
Rose: “She took two books in one hand and one in the other and ran like the Dickens.”
Dorothy: “Your library only has three books? What happens when a person’s read them all?”
Rose: “I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Literary References: libraries, Charles Dickens
_________________________________________________________________________________
S4E5: “Bang the Drum, Stanely”
Literary Reference (episode title): Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris (novel)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S4E13: “The Impotence of Being Ernest”
Literary Reference (episode title): The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
_________________________________________________________________________________
S4E20: “High Anxiety”
Picture it: the girls are playing a spirited game of “Gugenspritzer” (a traditional board game in St. Olaf).
Dorothy: “I can either buy the library or the phone booth in the center of town. I’ll buy the library.”
Rose: “If I were you, I’d buy the phone booth.”
Dorothy: “Why?”
Rose: “People USE the phone booth.”
Literary Reference: libraries
_________________________________________________________________________________
S4E22: “Sophia’s Choice”
Literary Reference (episode title): Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
_________________________________________________________________________________
S4E25: “We’re Outta Here: Part I”
Picture it: Blanche gets home from a theater date.
Blanche: “I just love the legitimate theater. You know, I missed Mr. Lee J. Cobb in ‘Death of a Salesman,’ I missed Mr. Marlon Brando in ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’ Well, I was damned if I was going to miss Mr. Dick Butkus in ‘Pal Joey’!”
Literary References: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller; A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON FIVE
S5E1: “Sick and Tired: Part 1″
Picture it: Blanche decides she wants to be writer.
Blanche: “I’m gonna be a novelist. A great romance novelist! That is my destiny. I shall become a great Southern writer, carrying on the tradition of the other great Southern writers like…uh…all those others so famous they need not be mentioned. Oh girls, it’s gonna be so exciting! I’m gonna make a fortune! And I won’t even have to use my imagination. My life is a romance novel.”
Sophia: “Your life is a sports page.”
Later….
Blanche: “Well, now I know why Hemingway killed himself. Oh girls, I have writer’s block! It is the worst feeling in the world.”
Sophia: “Try ten days without a bowel movement sometime.”
Blanche: “You just sit there hour after hour…”
Sophia: “Tell me about it.”
Blanche: “I just don’t know what to do. I don’t think there’s any worse feeling in the world than facing that blank piece of paper.”
Dorothy: “Tell me, how much have you written so far?”
Blanche: “Well, that’s just it, nothing! That’s how I know I have writer’s block.”
Dorothy: “Blanche, you have to have WRITTEN to have writer’s block. Otherwise all of us have it.”
Later still…
Blanche: “I don’t believe it. Another rejection! And this one isn’t even personal, it’s a form letter. They just filled in my name at the top, see? Oh, I’m so upset. I put everything into this, Rose, all of me. I held nothing back. And to have some snot-nosed little kid from Harvard send me a form letter. I’m so mad I could scream.” *Blanche screams*
R: “That’s the first time I ever heard anyone say ‘I’m so mad I could scream’ and actually do it!”
Literary References: Ernest Hemingway; writing problems
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E3: “The Accurate Conception”
Picture it: Blanche’s daughter plans to get artificially inseminated and Blanche is not happy about it.
Blanche: “You are a Devereaux. A Devereaux has never had to pay for it!”
Dorothy (to the doctor): “She’s always depended on the kindness of strangers.”
Literary Reference: Dorothy’s line is a riff on one uttered by the character Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E15: “Triple Play”
Picture it: Rose and Miles get home from a date.
Miles: “We saw a marvelous production of The Glass Menagerie.”
Dorothy: “Oh, that is one of my favorite plays.”
Rose: “Frankly, I was a little disappointed.”
Miles: “Really?”
Rose: “Yeah, when you told me you were taking me to a revival of Tennessee Williams, I was expecting something more along the lines of a seance.”
Literary Reference: The Glass Menagerie (again!)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E18: “An Illegitimate Concern”
Picture it: Rose tells another never-ending St. Olaf story.
Sophia: “What an injustice. Hemingway ran out of stories to tell and shot himself. SHE just keeps on going.”
Literary Reference: Hemingway (again!)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E20: “Twice in a Lifetime”
Picture it: Miles asks rose to go to the movies and she turns him down because she has secret plans.
Miles: “It’s too bad, I was gonna take you to see Henry the Fifth.”
Rose: “It’s just as well. I mean, I always think by the time they get to number five, those sequels get pretty predictable.”
Literary Reference: Shakespeare’s Henry V
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E21: “Sisters and Other Strangers”
Picture it: Blanche’s sister publishes a romance novel (there’s a lot of funny publishing/writing-related dialogue about this that I didn’t have room to quote, so I suggest you watch the episode). The girls go to the book store for the signing, taking along Stan’s visiting cousin Magda, who is visiting from (what used to be known as) the Soviet Union.
Dorothy: “Magda, there are two books that I want you to read. The first one is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I think it will give you some idea of what freedom is all about. And the second is Vanna White’s autobiography.”
Cousin Magda: “Why should I read this?”
Dorothy: “It’s just a hell of a book.”
Literary References: Common Sense; Vanna Speaks
_________________________________________________________________________________
S5E22: “Cheaters”
Picture it: Rose tells a long, involved dream she had about Charlie Brown gang.
Rose: “What do you suppose it all means?”
Dorothy: “‘Peanuts’ envy?”
Later…
Rose: “Back in St. Olaf, there was a shepherd boy who tended his flock on the hill above the town. A wolf kept coming down and stealing his sheep. But the boy never caught him doing it. Because he never saw it happening, He became known around St. Olaf as the boy who DIDN’T cry wolf. Anyway, one day the townspeople heard the boy out on the hill yelling ‘WOLF, WOLF!’ They all figured, if the boy never cried wolf when the wolf WAS there, if he yelled NOW it stood to reason the wolf WASN’T there.”
Sophia:”Boy, nothing gets by you people.”
Rose: “Damn straight, it was a bear! A huge, ferocious grizzly bear.”
Sophia: “What happened to the boy?”
Rose: “He became known as the boy who cried continuously.”
Literary References: Peanuts by Charles Schultz; Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON 6
S6E6: “Feelings”
Picture it: Dorothy attempts to tutor a football player who is very reluctant to read.
Kevin: “Look, it’s not that I’m lazy, Ms. Zbornak, I’m just really busy with ball. I wanted to read A Tale of Two Cities, but I didn’t have the time.”
Dorothy: “Well, that was my fault, Kevin, for interrupting the high school experience with a BOOK.”
Literary Reference: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E7: “Zborn Again”
Picture it: Blanche has a moment with the daily paper.
Blanche: “Oh, Marmaduke. Lookit how he drives that car. I love my comics. Every day Marmaduke and Apartment 3G.”
Rose: “I haven’t read Apartment 3G since 1962.”
Blanche: “Oh, well, let me catch you up! It is later the same day…”
Literary Reference: COMICS! Marmaduke and Apartment 3G
_________________________________________________________________________________
Episode S6E10: “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun…Before They Die”
Picture it: the girls talk about some advice they’ve gotten over the years.
Rose: “I haven’t had such bad advice since my drama teacher told me I’d be perfect for the lead in The King and I. So, stupid here shaves her head and doesn’t get the part!”
Literary Reference: The King and I musical (based on the novel Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon)
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E11: “Stand By Your Man” (Note: this episode has a LOT of great bookish/libraryish references, so I only included my favorites. Watch the episode for more.)
Picture it: Dorothy and Blanche go to the library and Blanche meets a nice man (who later turns out to be not-so-nice).
Dorothy: “Excuse me, my friend would like to apply for a library card.”
Librarian: “What friend?”
Dorothy: “The one whose checking out everything but the books.”
Later…
Blanche: “Whatcha reading? Oh, you must be a passionate man! Females to Fondle?!”
Man: “It’s volume seven of the encyclopedia.”
Later…
Dorothy: “My mother talked me into getting her the new Stephen King.”
Librarian: “Well, we do have the one that came out last Tuesday.”
Dorothy: “As long as it’s not about some little creature who finds new and inventive ways of terrorizing a household. It’s for my mother, I don’t want to give her any ideas.”
Later…
Dorothy, to the librarian: “I’ll put the book on my card. I want you to know my card is always current, I come to the library at least three times a week, and my books are always returned promptly during regular library hours, rain or shine WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE ME?”
And lastly…
Blanche, praying: “As god as my witness, I will never pick up another man. In a libary. on a Saturday. unless he’s cute. And drives a nice car. Amen!”
Literary Reference: libraries, encylopedias, Stephen King
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E13: “The Bloom Is Off The Rose”
Picture it: Rose prepares for a literary-themed date with Miles.
Rose: “It’s the 117th anniversary of the birth of Robert Frost.”
Sophia: “I love him, always nipping at your nose.”
Rose: “That was JACK frost. Robert Frost was the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon on TV. HaHA. Who’s the dumb one now?”
Dorothy: “You’re still the reigning champ, Rose. That was DAVID Frost. Robert Frost was a famous American poet.”
Sophia: “And when I was with him, he was always nipping at my nose. Some people found it obnoxious but for me, it was a turn-on.”
Later, Miles has to skip town because his life is in danger…
Rose: “Miles, your poetry book!”
Miles: “Keep it. And when you read page 73, think of me.”
Rose, reading out loud: “And when to the heart of man, was it ever less than a treason, to bow and accept the end of a love, or of a season.”
Literary Reference: Robert Frost and his poem “Reluctance”
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E20: “Even Grandmas Get the Blues”
Picture it: Dorothy teaches a class; Blanche auditions for another play.
Dorothy: “Well, Ma, I just cant do it now. I’m going to be teaching that honors program class and it’s going to be a challenge. I’m going to have students who know that Chekhov is a brilliant Russian playwright, not the guy who was the navigator on the Enterprise.”
Rose: “I didn’t know the guy from Star Trek wrote plays!”
Later…
Blanche: “It so happens our community playhouse is doing The Taming of the Shrew and I am to audition for the role of Kate, the firey tart of Patuan no man could tame! *doorbell rings* Hark! Perhaps a suitor doth approacheth.”
Dorothy: “Do you think he’ll thtay all night?”
Later still…
D: “I feel as trapped and isolate as Søren Kierkegaard in his final days.”
Literary References: Anton Chekhov, Kierkegaard
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E24: “Never Yell Fire in a Crowded Retirement Home”
Picture it: the girls have just gotten home from bailing Sophia out of jail for allegedly starting a retirement home fire years ago.
Rose: “Well, all’s well that ends well.”
Blanche: “What?”
Rose: “It’s the title of a Shakespeare play.”
Blanche: “Well, Rose, nothing is well and nothing has ended.”
Literary Reference: Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well
_________________________________________________________________________________
S6E26: “Henny Penny, Straight No Chaser”
Picture it: Dorothy explains how she was just made producer of a production of “Henny Penny” for children.
Blanche: “That was never one of my favorites. There’s no prince in it! I like a fairy tale with a nice prince in it. A handsome prince with a big ol’ codpiece and deep dark eyes, powerful thighs, and muscles rippling beneath his tunic…”
Dorothy: “Blanche, you could get aroused by Humpty Dumpty.”
Later…
Dorothy: “I don’t right off recall a hen in Hamlet.”
Rose: “We set the play in a barn yard. Luckily, the symphony was out of town at the time.”
Later…
Dorothy: “There’s no reason to be upset about Henny Penny. Fairy tales just show kids how complicated life can be and it does it on their terms.”
Blanche: “I remember when I first read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, it had a profound influence on me. Seven lonely men, living in the woods, needing a woman, all of them with Napoleon complexes, something to prove.”
Dorothy: “And JOBS, Blanche, they all had jobs.”
Blanche *dreamily*: “In a diamond mine!”
Later still…
Dorothy: “It’s Devereaux. It’s only pronounced DeverUX in limericks.
Literary References: Hamlet; Humpty Dumpty; Snow White; Henny Penny; limericks
_________________________________________________________________________________
SEASON 7
S7E2: “The Case of the Libertine Belle”
Picture it: Blanche talks about a murder mystery weekend she is planning as a work outing.
Rose: “That sounds like fun! You know, back in Minnesota, I was known as the Sherlock Holmes of St. Olaf.”
Later…
Dorothy: “Blanche, are you kidding ? I have read every word Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler ever wrote. Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe have become a part of me. ‘She had more curves than the Monaco Grand Prixe and was twice as dangerous. Her jewelry was mute testimony that Charlie Chaplin wasn’t the only tramp who hit it big in this town.'”
Sophia: “You do this on first dates, don’t you, Dorothy.”
Later…
Blanche: “I do declare, your sweet words could charm the morning dew right off the honeysuckle.”
Dorothy: “That was good, Blanche. Now do Br’er Rabbit.”
Literary References: Dashiel Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Br’er Rabbit
_____________________________________________
S7E4: “That’s For Me To Know”
Picture it: Sophia becomes a landowner for the first time.
Sopira: “Rabbits. Gonna raise me some rabbits as big as your head.”
Literary Reference: Sophia’s line is play on one from Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
_____________________________________
S7E7: “Dateline: Miami”
Picture it: Dorothy has a date for the night and feels pretty good about it.
Blanche: “Oh, good God, Dorothy Zbornak has a date on a Saturday night and Blanche e does not? That sounds like an idea for a Stephen King book.”
Later…
Dorothy: “Well, I’m off. If you need something to keep you occupied tonight, Rose, why don’t you take out a good book and see if you can find Waldo?”
Literary References: Stephen King (again!); Where’s Waldo? by Martin Handford
_________________________________________________________________________________
S7E15: “Goodbye, Mr. Gordon”
Picture it: Dorothy’s former teacher (and crush) comes back into her life in a disappointing way.
Dorothy: “For forty years I’ve had this fantasy that Mr. Gordon would come swooping into my life like Sir Lancelot. Now I don’t even have that.”
Literary Reference: Sir Lancelot of Arthurian Legend
_________________________________________________________________________________
S7E19: “Journey to the Center of Attention”
Picture it: Blanche drags Dorothy to her favorite dive bar, but gets upset when Dorothy starts getting attention from the men for her singing ability.
Blanche: “I didn’t know you were gonna come in here and just take my place away from me. I would never do that to you, Dorothy. Do you see me going down to sing at the library?”
Literary Reference: libraries
_________________________________________________________________________________
S7E20: “A Midwinter Night’s Dream”
Picture it: Blanche throws a “Midnight Madness” party and things don’t go exactly as planned.
Dorothy: “You know, it really has been like Shakespeare with magic and moonlight and the wrong people falling in love. What does puck say in the last speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream? If we shadows have offended think but this and all is mended that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear and this weak and idle thing no more yielding but a dream.”
Sophia: “Well, pardon me while I play the grand piano.”
Literary Reference: Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
_________________________________________________________________________________
S7E23: “Home Again, Rose: Part 1″
Picture it: I honestly can’t remember the context, but we’ve almost reached the end, so let’s just go with it.
Blanche: “We’ll be just like the Three Musketeers!”
Literary Reference: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
_____________________________________________________________________
S7E25/26: “One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest”
Literary Reference (episode title): One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
_________________________________________________________________________________
THE END
Thank you for reading. And thank you for being a friend. (You know I had to say it.)
You just finished reading Literary Moments of "The Golden Girls": A Complete List! Consider leaving a comment!
Connect with Book Riot!
The post Literary Moments of “The Golden Girls”: A Complete List appeared first on BOOK RIOT.