Kate Chopin's "A Pair of Silk Stockings": the marital burden and the lure of consumerism.

Stein, Allen

IT IS NO NEWS THAT, FAILING TO FIND FULFILLMENT in their marriages, wives in Kate Chopin's fiction are sometimes driven in their desperation to suicide, adultery, or desertion. But in "A Pair of Silk Stockings," (1) a story too rarely discussed at length, Chopin presents a woman who tries a different expedient to escape the difficulties imposed by her marriage, a brief foray into the realm of consumerism. The effort fails, as Chopin shows that, however fashionable what Thorstein Veblen called "conspicuous consumption" might seem in the expanding national economy of the late 1890s, it can offer only ephemeral and illusory gratifications for one enmeshed in the enduring constraints imposed by her marriage.

Finding herself "the unexpected possessor" of fifteen dollars, "little Mrs. Sommers," who has known "better days," now long past, "before she had ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers," decides immediately to use the money for children's clothing so that she might have "her little brood looking fresh and dainty and new for once in their lives" (p. 500). (2) On impulse, however, this long-deprived woman spends all the money on herself, striving for one day at least of self-indulgence, one day that might hint of some personal autonomy in a pinched and narrowed existence.

At a quick glance, Mrs. Sommers's effort seems something of a success. She buys herself a pair of silk stockings and then, to complement them, one pair of costly shoes and one of kid gloves; next, her spree in the store completed, she treats herself to two "high-priced magazines," browses through them while having a pleasant lunch in an upscale restaurant, and closes her day by attending the theater for a matinee performance. She has enjoyed herself thoroughly. Further, as Doris Davis sees it, Mrs. Sommers has used her money "to nurture her sense of esthetics, an action that Chopin seems to suggest is important for this character's development." (3) Davis goes on to argue that "Mrs. Sommers has developed a feeling of independence and fulfillment in her judicious use of money, and might well serve as a model for Edna Pontellier's emerging sense of autonomy" (p. 148). Similarly, Mary E. Papke comments that Mrs. Sommers, "physically and spiritually exhausted, arrives 'at [a] moment of contemplation and action.' In choosing to buy the pair of silk stockings, she 'experiences a sensuous moment' that reawakens her female self." (4)

A close look, though, both at Mrs. Sommers's little rebellious spree and what precedes it, indicates, as I noted, something decidedly less hopeful, and that is that Mrs. Sommers, from the moment she gets the fifteen dollars to the moment that she has spent every bit of it, never has any more autonomy than she has had at any recent point in her married life. Rather than confronting the terrible constraints under which she labors, rather than seeking through such confrontation to forge what Melville characterizes as a "sovereign sense of self," Mrs. Sommers, understandably enough but also sadly, seeks merely escape from her life and from herself through her brief flight into consumerism. Such venturing, Chopin conveys implicitly here, is futile and devoid ultimately of anything approximating meaningful freedom. Peggy Skaggs notes aptly that "the reader feels deep compassion" for Mrs. Sommers. (5) One might add that what is perhaps most poignant, finally, about her situation is that her reaction against her circumstances is both so abortive and so misdirected.

Appropriately, the story opens with an implicit suggestion that this woman is more one caught up in circumstances than a shaper of them--she is, after all, as the first line asserts, one "who found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars." She does attempt, however, to take charge of this pathetic little windfall, as the "question of investment ... occupied her greatly," and she is "absorbed in speculation and calculation," lying awake at night "revolving plans in her mind" for "a proper and judicious use of the money." (6) The right use of the money, Mrs. Sommers finally concludes, of course, is to buy much-needed clothing for her children, and she mentally apportions the funds according to their needs. This is typical of her, as invariably "the needs of the present absorbed her every faculty" (pp. 500-501), and she has come to know the "value of bargains" and has learned to "elbow her way" through a crowd "if need be" and to "clutch a piece of goods and hold it and stick to it with persistence and determination till her turn came to be served" (p. 501). This, then, Chopin establishes, is a woman capable of decision and determination whose latitude for genuinely meaningful choice has been reduced drastically.

Nothing that occurs once Mrs. Sommers begins her shopping foray ever really widens this narrow range of actual possibility for her that Chopin establishes at the start of the tale. Arriving at the department store for "the shopping bout," Mrs. Sommers is, Chopin notes, "a little faint and tired," having actually forgotten to eat lunch, "between getting the children fed and the place righted." While seated at a counter, "trying to gather strength and courage to charge through an eager multitude that was besieging breast-works of shirting and figured lawn," she feels an "all-gone limp feeling" come over her, and she rests her hand "aimlessly upon the counter." Gradually, she "grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch," the silk stockings that prompt her to the first of the purchases for herself. For a moment Mrs. Sommers tries to resist their soft allure. Thus, when a salesgirl asks her if she wishes to examine the store's "line of silk hosiery," Mrs. Sommers smiles 'lust as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it." However, as "she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things--with both hands now.... [feeling] them glide serpent-like through her fingers," the "two hectic blotches" that "came suddenly into her pale cheeks" indicate that she has been seized by a yearning more powerful than her commitment to domesticity, and she asks, "Do you think there are any eights-and-a-half among these?" (p. 501).

Mrs. Sommers's first step, then, into an afternoon of self-indulgence begins not with a carefully thought-out decision but with a pleasant physical sensation made all the more appealing by hunger, fatigue, lightheadedness, and a moment's release from the frantic round of responsibility. Further, though Chopin's account of how the "soft, sheeny luxurious" stockings seem to "glide serpent-like through her fingers" is obviously in the traditional language of temptation and thus would seem to invoke moral choice, that suggestion can only be Chopin's ironic reminder that an ethical framework grounded in religious teaching does not apply here, for she shows that choice itself, whether moral or immoral, just does not come into play in this woman's situation. At most, the notion that the temptation to buy for oneself is sinful is merely an irrelevancy that Mrs. Sommers's tired, duty-driven mind conjures up out of habit before impulse carries her along.

Lest there be any confusion about this, Chopin states explicitly that Mrs. Sommers "was not going through any acute mental process or reasoning with herself," indeed "was not thinking at all" and instead "seemed for the time" to have "abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility" (p. 502). (7) Thus, ironically enough, if Mrs. Sommers has little latitude for free choice in her dutiful daily life, she seems to have even less as she yields to the impulse to self-indulgence. In fact, not only do fatigue and long deprivation prompt her to yield to impulse rather than to make conscious choices, the sorts of self-indulgence to which she is impelled to yield seem less a reflection of needs or aspirations intrinsic to her own nature than a reflection of the artificially induced needs and aspirations of a consumer society. The story thus confirms Papke's observation that one of Chopin's primary "general themes" is "the role of social determinism in class and personal crises" (p. 3).

Barbara C. Ewell notes tellingly that "the power of money to enhance self-esteem and confidence is the core of this poignant tale." (8) More specifically, one might observe, Chopin shows that the value society places on having money can foster the insidious and misguided self-esteem that arises merely from believing one has acquired status in the eyes of others. Thus, as soon as Mrs. Sommers has put on the silk stockings that she bought on impulse, she "crossed straight over to the shoe department and took her seat to be fitted," and the fitting itself is manifestly a part of the pleasure she derives in buying the costly pair of shoes she does. With the girl at the glove counter, as we have seen, she had asked timidly, "Do you think there are any eights-and-a-half among these?" (p. 501). Now, though, on the strength of one purchase, one new addition to her wardrobe, her whole demeanor with the store's sales staff changes. Now she is "fastidious," and, noting that "the clerk could not make her out ... could not reconcile her shoes with her stockings," she shows that "she was not too easily pleased." Trying on shoes to go with her new stockings, she takes satisfaction in observing that "her foot and ankle looked very pretty," and, Chopin relates, she tells "the young fellow who served her" that "she wanted an excellent and stylish fit" and "did not mind the difference of a dollar or two more in the price so long as she got what she desired." Completing her purchase of the shoes, Mrs. Sommers is immediately at the glove counter--Chopin, in fact, does not even describe her getting there; instead she simply notes, "Now she rested her elbow on the cushion of the glove counter," suggesting how swiftly the growing momentum of impulse and the sudden desperate yearning for quickly attained self-esteem are carrying Mrs. Sommers along. At this new venue she relaxes luxuriously when "a pretty, pleasant young creature, delicate and deft of touch, [draws] a long-wristed 'kid' over Mrs. Sommers' hand." So in the space of perhaps twenty minutes Mrs. Sommers's response has undergone a marked transformation. Shyness and insecurity have given way to a certain self-satisfaction and calculated effort to impress and then, finally, to acceptance of attention from the pretty (and no doubt poorly paid) "creature" at the counter as her due--and all because she has spent some money on a few fashionable items of clothing.

In 1899, two years after the publication of "A Pair of Silk Stockings," Thorstein Veblen observed that "since the consumption of ... more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes more honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit." (9) Clearly a product of her society, though obviously not of its "leisure class," Mrs. Sommers, Chopin shows, succumbs to the pervasive social pressure and struggles to avoid the stigma of "inferiority and demerit." Similarly, Philip Fisher has noted of the connection between one's sense of self and shopping in modern urban America that "the self-experience and recognition reached earlier by thinking is, under the conditions of the city, obtained by shopping." (10) Further, it is noteworthy, as well, that Mrs. Sommers is shopping in a department store, for as Alan Trachtenberg has observed in his The Incorporation of America, (11) department stores have long thrived on inspiring the belief that merely purchasing items in such large, well-run, modern establishments as theirs makes one somehow successful, part of all that is fashionable and therefore estimable. Consequently, though Mrs. Sommers might seem to be suddenly asserting a longing for personal autonomy in the midst of an existence of dreary constraint, she is actually a driven being, prodded by the conspicuous spending of all those about her and, like all of them, manipulated by those who shape the ideology and practice of consumerism.

On leaving the department store, Mrs. Sommers, newly clad, appears a different woman from the humble, put-upon one who entered it. With her new shoes, stockings, and gloves, she seems to feel herself more the woman she was in those "better days" before she had "ever thought of being Mrs. Sommers." Thus she buys two costly magazines, "such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things." Significantly, she carries the magazines conspicuously, "without wrapping," apparently eager to show all about her that she can afford them. At street crossings, "as well as she could she lifted her skirts," presumably so that those passing might note her fashionable shoes and stockings. Mrs. Sommers's purchases, says Chopin, "had worked marvels in her bearing--had given her a feeling of assurance, a sense of belonging to the well-dressed multitude" (p. 503), a sense of belonging, obviously, that she has not known since her marriage and that she has missed a good deal more than she has realized. Chopin's use of "multitude" here is suggestive, for, as Veblen asserts, "consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city than in the country" because "a relatively greater expenditure in this direction is required to indicate a given degree of pecuniary decency in the city" (p. 88). Similarly, as Dreiser would show with his own fervent shopper Carrie Meeber, just a few years after Chopin's tale, the urban crowds make the impressionable eager both to fit in and to stand out splendidly through the conspicuous fashionableness of their appearance. The sadness and futility that Dreiser, Veblen, and Fisher would subsequently see as inherent in such desperate yearning on the urban scene are conveyed strikingly by Chopin as she depicts the rest of Mrs. Sommers's poignant afternoon spree.

Even with her new clothing it appears that for Mrs. Sommers to maintain her sense of belonging she must keep spending--and spending in ways of which the "well-dressed multitude" would approve. Thus to appease her hunger--which is offered here by Chopin as at once literal and metaphorical--Mrs. Sommers goes into a restaurant. Another time, she would have "stilled the cravings for food" until reaching home, but now "the impulse that was guiding her would not suffer her to entertain any such thought." The restaurant she enters is one she has only seen from the outside previously, catching "glimpses of spotless damask and shining crystal, and soft-stepping waiters serving people of fashion." As with Dreiser's Carrie, the restaurant becomes for Mrs. Sommers a place where one does not merely enjoy creature comforts in a pleasant setting but an almost magical realm in which one has a surge of self-worth simply by being waited upon. Indeed all that is attractive in the place itself--its furnishings, its plate, glassware, silverware, and tablecloth, the very quality of the food--is testimony to one's worth, grounds for validation of one's self-esteem. At her leisure in sumptuous surroundings, Mrs. Sommers savors her meal, browses in her magazines, dwells lovingly on her new clothes, and feels at one with "quiet ladies and gentlemen" who are "lunching at the small tables like her own." Then, taking her departure, her whole manner making clear to the waiter that "the price ... made no difference," she leaves a nice tip, "whereupon he bowed before her as before a princess of royal blood" (p. 503). As with the department store, then, impulse leads to forms of pleasure and self-esteem both dictated largely by the lures of the prevailing consumer culture.

Mrs. Sommers's third stop, at the matinee, is perhaps the most poignant, as it is not merely the last bit of self-indulgence she can afford but the one that seems to reflect most keenly her longing both to ensconce herself in a realm of beauty and to play a part in the theatrics of self-exhibit continually generated by consumerism. (12) Fittingly, given Chopin's portrayal of the powerful tug of consumerism on her, Mrs. Sommers yields to advertising. Knowing that "there was still money in her purse," she succumbs to the "next temptation," which "presented itself in the shape of a matinee poster" (p. 503). Once inside the theater, Mrs. Sommers finds herself sitting "between brilliantly dressed women who had gone there to kill time and eat candy and display their gaudy attire" (pp. 503-504). Chopin notes, as well, that "there were many others who were there solely for the play and acting." Mrs. Sommers, though, fits in neither group: "It is safe to say there was no one present who bore quite the attitude which Mrs. Sommers did to her surroundings. She gathered in the whole--stage and players and people in one wide impression, and absorbed it and enjoyed it" (p. 504). Feeling as if she belongs where she now finds herself, she is pleased to be both observer of the play and participant in the fashionable spectacle; "she laughed at the comedy and wept--she and the gaudy woman next to her wept over the tragedy. And they talked a little together over it." Certainly not the least fulfilling part of the whole afternoon's pleasure is the moment when the "gaudy woman" beside her "wiped her eyes and sniffled on a tiny square of filmy, perfumed lace and passed little Mrs. Sommers her box of candy" (p. 504).

The play on stage is both tragic and comic; so it would seem is Mrs. Sommers's whole spree. Desperate to bring some autonomy and beauty into her meager, overburdened existence, she rebels against the conditions under which she has been laboring; but her rebellion takes the form merely of blind, impulsive, utterly desperate submission to the dictates of a commercially driven consumer ethic that insists that one's true worth is determined by the quality and worth of one's possessions and amusements. (13) It is both terribly sad and faintly comical that Mrs. Sommers seems for a time to believe her genuine needs satisfied by a few pieces of clothing, a bit of bought lunch, and some shared tears and candies with a vapid lady of fashion at a matinee. Whether or not Chopin knew her Thoreau, it is eminently clear that she is implicitly aware of the sort of widespread modern desperation he lamented and excoriated. It is also unremittingly sad that Mrs. Sommers's children will go without some truly needed clothes as a result of these few hours of impulsiveness. But it is not that Mrs. Sommers has been irresponsible--that is not Chopin's point. What she does convey is that this woman, trapped at home, is also, whether she is aware of it or not, trapped out in the world.

When the curtain comes down on the stage world of illusions, it comes down, as well, on Mrs. Sommers's afternoon of illusory escape. Chopin comments, "The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to the corner and waited for the cable car" (p. 504). The rhythm of this passage is almost funereal, as if Chopin were sounding a dirge for her protagonist's dreams. The strong caesura-like pauses of the first sentence make each clause in the series seem virtually a part of a measured and terrible tolling, and that rhythm persists to the end of the passage. The scattering people become in this context almost the visual equivalent of the coming apart of Mrs. Sommers's sense of belonging to some community of the fashionable. Finally, the cable car ride looming ahead for her seems like nothing so much now as an inescapable trip to an unavoidable and tightly constraining fate. One might argue, in fact, that, figuratively speaking, she has never really been off the cable car and its iron tracks.

Once Mrs. Sommers is literally back on the car, Chopin shifts the perspective suddenly to that of "a man with keen eyes" who sits across from her and studies her "small, pale face." Keen as his eyes may be, though, he is unable "to decipher what he saw there." He sees nothing, insists Chopin, unless "he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever" (p. 504). Most men, as Chopin has shown in other works, are anything but wizards in understanding the needs of women in the society of her day, and unfortunately, as this tale shows, too many women, while knowing that their lives are unfulfilling, are unprepared to know just what to do about their situation, unprepared to see in what directions fulfillment might lie. As Papke notes acutely, "For Chopin there is never an easy resolution to woman's quest for self and fulfillment of desire" (p. 66); but she suggests, as well, that those characters in Chopin's work who achieve any sort of stable, mature selfhood and fulfillment do so "only after questioning authority, admitting self-will, and accepting self-doubt and continual self-transformation as the basis for existence in an, at-best-amoral world" (p. 47). That this process is a lonely and difficult one goes without saying, and perhaps this is why Chopin makes no reference to a Mr. Sommers. Clearly, whether he is alive or dead, supportive or abusive, an industrious but ineffective breadwinner or complacent layabout is of no real significance to Chopin here. She wants to keep the focus on Mrs. Sommers herself and on how she confronts the difficulties and dissatisfactions that her marriage has brought her; she shows that Mrs. Sommers does not undertake the arduous process of self-awareness and self-formation that Papke describes. "Sometimes," Chopin reveals, "a vision of the future like Some dim, gaunt monster ... appalled [Mrs. Sommers]," as she struggles daily with the difficulties her married life has thrust upon her, but, Chopin adds ironically, "luckily to-morrow never comes" (p. 501). Never confronting this "monster," Mrs. Sommers never confronts the terms of her existence, and her long-delayed reaction against it takes the form of nothing more than an afternoon's escapist indulgence in the ephemeral pleasures of consumption.

So the cable car will stop, of course, and Mrs. Sommers will get off and return to her dull, endless round of duty, her brief illusion of autonomy only heightening her sense of the dreariness of it all. (14) In seeking to escape the burdens imposed by marriage, she cannot ride forever any more than Chopin's Louise Mallard could soar forever free on the wings of her imagination or Edna Pontellier could swim forever out into an endless sea. (15) As Cynthia Griffin Wolff observes, Chopin's works constitute a "fiction of limits," (16) a body of work constantly reminding us that the world does not as a rule accommodate itself to personal desire. Mrs. Sommers certainly feels the pinch of the limits in her own life, but the feelings of constraint do not prod her to meaningful action. Certainly a little more money might make for a few more pleasantly escapist afternoons such as this, but, in fact, Mrs. Sommers's situation would remain fundamentally the same.

In speaking of another work depicting the terrible power of money in a consumption-driven culture, Wharton's House of Mirth, Wai-Chee Dimock comments that though Lily Bart is "busy marketing herself throughout most of the book" as a potential bride, she ends up, ironically, finding no takers and "paying so dearly" for her few efforts at being something other than marriageable merchandise. (17) Mrs. Sommers, too, is on this one afternoon "marketing" herself--not for marriage, obviously, but for the approval of "the multitude." And, like Lily, she fails. Her failure resides not in her simply being unable to spend more than one afternoon among the fashionable (just as Lily does not fail simply because she does not win a wealthy husband) but in her inability or refusal to establish a sustained examination of the terms of her existence.

Exactly where such a sustained examination might lead Mrs. Sommers is impossible to say. Finding some means of leaving the demands of her "brood" behind seems anything but a viable option, and, as we have noted, we cannot even be sure that a Mr. Sommers is on the scene. Similarly, launching a career of her own seems for a woman in her situation the stuff only of dreams. Suffice it to say, though, such an examination might well lead to awareness, and awareness might lead to the beginnings of autonomy. Meanwhile, though, her marriage has shaped her existence to needs not her own, and, unable to perceive or confront what a life freely chosen by herself might entail, she has paid dearly for her little afternoon spree. Impulsively pursuing identity, diversion, and distraction, all offered up by others, she now must pay the cost in guilt and bewildered longing. Marriage, as Chopin so often shows here and elsewhere, can bring a woman terrible burdens; succumbing to the blandishments of consumerism, she also shows so powerfully, will not ease those burdens.

(1) The Complete Works of Kate Chopin, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969). "A Pair of Silk Stockings" was first published in Vogue in September 1897.

(2) Significantly, Chopin never says how many are in the "brood," merely mentioning "Janie" and "Mag" and "the boys." Her indefiniteness subtly suggests a number too large for Mrs. Sommers to cope with comfortably, too large to allow her anything but an unending round of harried duty.

(3) "The Awakening. The Economics of Tension," in Kate Chopin Reconsidered, ed. Lynda S. Boren and Sara de Saussure Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 148.

(4) Verging on the Abyss (New York: Greenwood, 1990), p. 65.

(5) Kate Chopin (New York: Twayne, 1985), p. 60.

(6) Chopin's use of words like "investment" and "speculation" for such a small sum certainly elicits the compassion of which Skaggs speaks and is also perhaps a touching reminder of the "better days" Mrs. Sommers has known, days when any possibilities of investment or speculation might have involved sums far greater than fifteen dollars.

(7) Bernard Koloski notes in this connection that "what Kate Chopin calls 'impulse' runs strong in many of her works, but seldom does it dominate a narrative as completely as it does in 'A Pair of Silk Stockings'" (Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction [New York: Twayne, 1996], p. 73).

(8) Kate Chopin (New York: Unger, 1986), p. 119.

(9) The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Vanguard, 1926), p. 74.

(10) Looking Around to See Who I Am: Dreiser's Territory of the Self," ELH, 44 (1977), 732.

(11) New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

(12) Again Chopin seems to anticipate Veblen, who points out that "Abstention from labour is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more strenuous insistence on leisure" (p. 41).

(13) Charlotte Perkins Gilman asserted in 1898, in her Women and Economics (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), that "The modern woman [has been made into a] priestess of the temple of consumption" (p. 120), one who is "forbidden to make, but encouraged to take" (p. 118).

(14) Papke observes tellingly that Mrs. Sommers's brief sense of freedom has thrown her "into a despair from which there is no rescue" (p. 66).

(15) Walter Benn Michaels, in a brief comment on "A Pair of Silk Stockings," asserts that "Mrs. Sommers's desire to shop forever anticipates by several years Edna's swim into the infinite, but the spirit of consumption and the attempt to take seriously the responsibilities of consumption predominate in both texts." He adds, "Mrs. Sommers ends up embodying and ... Edna pushes to the limits of embodiment, the responsibility of consumption to mobilize desire at any cost ..." ("The Contracted Heart," New Literary History, 21 [1990], 499). Michaels's comment is useful in linking Mrs. Sommers and Edna, but if Mrs. Sommers embodies any "responsibility of consumption," it is only initially, before she gives up her plan to shop for family necessities, unless Michaels is suggesting that as a product of her society she is intuitively responding to the dominant societal notion that her "responsibility" as a consumer is to try to satisfy her deepest, most inchoate desires through buying.

(16) "Kate Chopin and the Fiction of Limits: 'Desiree's Baby,'" Southern Literary Journal, 10 (Spring 1978), 133.

(17) "Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton's House of Mirth," PMLA, 100 (October 1985), 783, 787.

ALLEN STEIN

North Carolina State University