A Pair of Silk Stockings

The major conflict in this text might seem to be an internal one, or even one between Mrs. Sommers and her children, but it is also a conflict between Mrs. Sommers and society, as a result of the demands that it makes on women and mothers. The theme of Society’s Expectation of Women’s Self-Sacrifice addresses this struggle between late Victorian society’s expectation that a wife and mother ought to be utterly self-sacrificing with a very human, personal desire for comfort, freedom, and choice.

As if to avoid either condemning or overtly supporting the way Mrs. Sommers spends the $15—on herself rather than on her children, as her social duty would mandate—Chopin adopts a nonjudgmental tone. Chopin’s ambivalent handling informs her main theme of Duty Versus Desire. There is no language in the text to suggest that Mrs. Sommers ought to be criticized or blamed for spending the money on herself; for example, she is never referred to as selfish, greedy, or any other word that invokes a negative connotation. There is also no language to confirm the idea that Chopin or the reader should wholeheartedly endorse absolute self-indulgence. However, through word choice, Chopin subtly suggests that Mrs. Sommers’s one afternoon of self-indulgence is not blameworthy and that she is a character with whom the reader ought to sympathize. The frequent references to her “little[ness]” or the “small[ness]” of her hands and face combine to make her seem rather innocent and pitiable rather than avaricious. Further, the description of her lack of “any acute mental process” as she is enjoying her the feel of her new stockings and the fact that “[s]he was not thinking at all” helps to support the idea that she is acting on “impulse,” almost on instinct, now a purely physical being rather than an intellectual one (12).

The text employs a third person narrator, revealing the experience of Mrs. Sommers but without becoming an internal monologue. Chopin adopts a “show, don’t tell” style which is observational and leaves space for conjecture on the part of the reader. The reader comes to understand the dutiful ways in which Mrs. Sommers planned to spend her $15 compared to the personal ways in which she actually spends the money. All other characters are quite minor and their presence in the text short-lived as they pass through Mrs. Sommers’s day: Their perspectives on her and attitudes toward her help us understand how others interpret her appearance and demeanor throughout the day.

Because of this access to her thoughts and feelings, we can discern that the conflict is not within Mrs. Sommers, as she does not experience any inner turmoil regarding whether to purchase items for herself or feel any regret having done so. She is simply acting on an impulse, having been “freed […] of responsibility” (12) for others’ care and well-being and responding only to her own desire for rest, comfort, and confidence. That this instinct exists and triumphs over Mrs. Sommers’s rational, dutiful plans for the money suggests that the Victorian ideal of the “angel in the house” is an unrealistic and, therefore, unreasonable model for wives and mothers. To hope, let alone expect, that a woman completely dissolve her own sense of identity and selfhood and think only of her family compels her to deny part of her humanity. Human beings like to be comfortable, to eat well, to experience leisure time, to feel attractive and confident: In short, these desires seem to be part of our nature, and we have a Human Need for Self-Indulgence. When the narrator refers to the stockings as “serpent-like” in Mrs. Sommers’s hands, the simile suggests how they tempt her away from her duty and move her to embrace the wonderful way they feel, physically. Serpents are often used in literature as an allusion, connected to the idea of temptation, because of the form Satan assumes to tempt Eve in Genesis. According to religious teaching prevalent in the 1890s, women were responsible for humanity’s suffering through the Fall of Man, as a result of an inherent weakness and immorality. However, Chopin does not depict Mrs. Sommers as disobedient or weak and seems to be challenging the simplistic and misogynistic nature of this tradition. Although the word “temptation” appears only one time in the story, it is preceded by the word “next,” suggesting that each of Mrs. Sommers’s indulgences—from the stockings to the theatre—have similarly tempted her, silencing her critical faculties, including those of duty to family. Her only “disobedience,” then, is to society’s conventions. However, by making her sympathetic as a character, Chopin renders Mrs. Sommers’s temptation the result of her humanity, rather than any perceived inferiority associated with her gender.

Readers are encouraged to sympathize with Mrs. Sommers who had “better days” before she married, presumably with more money for luxuries and more leisure time too (4). The narrator’s description of the magazines she buys as being like the ones “she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things” (17) reiterates how much more affluent and worry-free her life had been prior to marriage and motherhood. However, her life now requires her to sacrifice so much that she feels weak and exhausted, having completely forgotten to eat. At first, she’d thought that she had “swallowed a light luncheon” (6)—not enjoyed; rather, her meal would have been something merely edible to meet her most basic needs. But even hunger is not fully met in her life: The narrator says that, on a different day, she would simply go home, brew some tea, and have “a snack of anything that was available” (18). Again, there’s no mention of her enjoyment of this food as her pleasure and comfort is not a priority in her life typically, but by confirming that Mrs. Sommers’s impulse to indulge herself is as instinctual as eating, Chopin implies that Society’s Expectation of Women’s Self-Sacrifice is impossible for anyone, including women, and that women are not and should not be thought of as “angels” because they are human. If abject self-denial is what women’s duty requires, it’s no wonder Mrs. Sommers can be so repeatedly tempted away from it.

Even her final desire, “a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever” (25) is phrased in such a way that it seems hard to blame Mrs. Sommers for her wis. She doesn’t wish her children away or even want, explicitly, to avoid them. She doesn’t regret motherhood or complain that she never ought to have married. She simply wants the break from the “laborious and fatiguing function” (12) of thinking to go on, perhaps because she realizes it is likely never to happen again. The reader is left with a feeling of deep compassion and the suggestion that if anyone has been harmed by her brief experience of pleasure, it may be Mrs. Sommers herself.