Pathedy of Manners

      “Pathedy of Manners” by Ellen Kay attempts to represent the life of a woman who was privileged, intelligent and well-educated as inherently worthless after she accumulates some age. The woman spoken of was known for her beauty and was very popular with the opposite sex. The woman traveled extensively and new much about art; she scorned Richard Wagner, likely because many considered his antisemitism to be detrimental to his reputation, even though he was a notable composer of operas. She also praises the dancing girls of Degas, who was known for being one of the founders of Impressionism, a man whose work can be considered to be supportive of womens' rights in a time where such thinking was frowned upon. Because Degas painted working women (even his dancers were portrayed as either in rehearsal or backstage, making it seem like they were working professionals), it can be inferred that the woman spoken of is supportive of womens' rights, making her more of a radical intellectual, especially considering the time period (the poem was published in 1931), where few women received college degrees at all. The mystique of the woman is increased by the third stanza, she is said to have gone to Europe and done interesting and high-society things, she rejects the advances of a marquis, and by having her learn to distinguish real Wedgwood (a luxury pottery manufacturer based in England, a company that is now known as Waterford Wedgwood, the well-known crystal maker) from fake reveals the high class lifestyle she must have been living. The woman then goes on to make an ideal marriage with an intelligent young man who is equal in status to herself, which is shown by the authenticity of his pearl cufflinks. They then go on to purchase an ideal house, however they have lonely children. One must wonder, if the marriage and the house are ideal, then for what reason would the child be lonely, and the only reason would be that the children are not ideal.

Hi there

     

      Then the fifth stanza comes around, and this is where the poem makes a major turn. The narrator injects herself into the story, saying, “I saw her yesterday at forty-three.” Suddenly the whole meaning of the poem is flipped on its head, the narrator, who the reader initially assumes is omniscient, has in fact only seen the woman in question twice, once, when she was twenty, and then again twenty-three later, only learning as an outsider the details of her life. When the narrator sees the woman again, she has lost her husband and attempts to present the woman as pathetic and broken, with a wasted life and no friends (the woman has one hundred callers, but apparently none of them are friends. But because this is a textbook unreliable narrator, a narrator whose entire perspective is based upon two very separate incidents, it seems that the narrator is merely seeming to slight the woman because of, what I'm assuming is class bias and jealousy towards the woman because of her privileged backgrounds.