“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.
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