29 pages • 58 minutes read
A Pair of Silk Stockings
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Themes
Duty Versus Desire
Options for middle-class Victorian mothers were few, and the actions of Mrs. Sommers certainly exemplify the conflict between the rigors of doing one’s duty as a mother and the temptations associated with the desire for freedom. Marriage and children were expected, as was a wife and mother’s devotion to her family. Although Mr. Sommers’s whereabouts are never revealed, it is obvious that all responsibility for the domestic sphere falls to his wife. Chopin’s omission of the husband in fact points out how alone, and perhaps unappreciated, Mrs. Sommers is in her efforts, whether or not her husband is living. Though her neighbors remember the relative affluence she enjoyed prior to her marriage, Mrs. Sommers “herself indulge[s] in no such morbid retrospection” (4) because her family’s present needs require all her efforts. At times, however, she worries about the penniless fate that could await her and her brood, and it seems to her like a “gaunt monster” at the door (4). Her duties consume her, and she has no thought for her own needs or desires.
In her duty to care for her children to the very best of her ability, Mrs. Sommers has learned to neglect her own needs and to fill her time with the tasks of mothering. She knows “the value of bargains” and what it is like to have to sacrifice to get a good one; she is determined to “elbow her way” if need be, embodying “persistence and determination” for hours, as she waits her turn to be served when there is a particularly inexpensive deal (5). On this shopping day, so harried is she from readying her children and tidying their home that she actually forgets to eat. In addition, she had been awake “during the still hours of the night” making plans for how she would spend her unexpected $15 all on her children (2). She fails to fulfill her own basic needs, so wrapped up is she in her duty to her family. This pattern of self-neglect causes her to develop an “all-gone limp feeling” that necessitates a short rest before she enters the “besieging” crowd of shoppers, and it is during this moment of rest—one she takes only so she can continue to do her duty as a mother—that she encounters desire (7).
It is against this background that Mrs. Sommers makes the almost accidental decision to buy the silk stockings. Once Mrs. Sommers has broken the complete pattern of duty, she seems apparently unable to reign herself back. She has “abandoned herself to come mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility” (7). Her experience of the day is described as a “dream.” This language apparently mitigates Mrs. Sommers spending the money on herself: It is as though she is guided by her subconscious.
In these ways, Chopin suggests that society asks too much of women and that their position is unsustainably difficult. Her story explores the extent to which a woman can continue in constant duty when the opportunity for a small amount pleasure arises, and how unconscious desire—for enjoyment, freedom, and self-determinism—is a strong and natural force.
Society’s Expectation of Women’s Self-Sacrifice
During this era, the idea of complementary duties based on one’s gender was commonplace. Men were to occupy the public sphere while women were to remain in the domestic. Middle-class white men in America could join the professions, had the right to vote and own property, enjoyed relationships and identities that were professional, social, and legal. Women were generally expected to marry, stay at home, and become mothers. Men could, literally and figuratively, move around in the world, while women were expected to remain, for the most part, in the home. If such a woman were out in public, it was most likely in service to her home, her husband, or her children, just as Mrs. Sommers goes shopping in order to purchase clothing and shoes for her family. Thus, a middle-class Victorian mother, especially one with a modest income, was expected to put others’ needs before her own. Mrs. Sommers is an afterthought in her own life. In the narrative, this is not presented as anything extraordinary or unusual.
It is Mrs. Sommers’s transition from girl to wife that has led to her change in circumstances. Although Mrs. Sommers knew “better days” long ago, she has learned to “clutch a piece of goods” until she makes her way to the front of a pushy, surging crowd of other shoppers (6). She has been compelled to give up her previous leisure activities and is reduced to eating “anything that was available” after her family is fed (18). Her lifestyle fails to meet even her most essential needs for food and rest. Mr. Sommers is absent from the narrative, but it is suggestive that, while Mrs. Sommers is evidently meeting all the demands placed on her as wife and mother in the home, the economic needs of the family—her husband’s responsibility—are not being fulfilled. It is Mrs. Sommers who compensates for this in the home.
Since the ideal mother in the 1890s was often presented as an angel—self-effacing, utterly devoted, and devoid of self-interest—good women were supposed to be content with their lot. It makes sense in this context that the protagonist is known in the text as “Mrs. Sommers” only and often described as “little.” The fact that her first name is never shared with the reader is a significant clue that it is, as a symbol of her identity, absolutely inconsequential. We never see her interact with or even think of a friend, and no loving or supportive husband is present; even her neighbors think of her as “little” Mrs. Sommers. She has no personal identity because society does not require it; it is enough that she is a wife and mother. The requirements and effects of the self-sacrifice expected of her is highlighted by her “small[ness]” in the text.
The Human Need for Self-Indulgence
While fulfilling one’s duty seems to require a great deal of thought, planning, and careful energy, self-indulgence, on the other hand, requires no thinking or planning, but only the abandonment of one’s responsibilities and the embrace of pleasure. The temptation of silk stockings, glistening like a “serpent” and “soothing” to the touch, initiates this abandonment for Mrs. Sommers. When she seeks to satisfy her own pleasure by putting them on, the feeling is so satisfying and relaxing to her that the ability to resist further desire seems physically impossible. Significantly, the narrator describes Mrs. Sommers’s indulgence as a “mechanical impulse,” which sounds akin to instinct and lacking true volition (12). Such an impulse is physical, not requiring the use of one’s mental faculties, and thus seems to allow them to rest. Of course, this would be welcome to one—like Mrs. Sommers—who spends most of her time, money, and energy thinking about people and things that are not herself.
Further, the narrator presents most of Mrs. Sommers’s temptations and their initiation, at least, as outside of her control. Only when she recognizes how soothing and pleasant the stockings feel does she become conscious of them and think of how unlikely she is to buy them. The temptation, though, provokes a physical reaction, as “[t]wo hectic blotches [come] suddenly into her pale cheeks” (8). She flushes, a completely involuntary physical response to the temptation, just as her capitulation to it and the others which follow seem to be. This imagery is strikingly sexual, as is, “How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh!” when she puts them on (13). Because her inclination to self-indulge is presented as something like instinct, and it is met with a reflexive and spontaneous physical response, the quest for comfort and freedom appears to be connected with the release of pent-up desire. Mrs. Sommers doesn’t give in to temptation because she is weak but, rather, because she is human.
Thus, the temptation to self-indulge is not simply a test or measure of a woman but, rather, it is a human challenge. Perhaps, Chopin seems to suggest, women would not be quite so susceptible to this very human temptation to embrace self-indulgence were they not expected to relinquish their very identities in order to fulfill society’s demands that they sacrifice themselves to their families.
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