In Vogue

Simplicity. It creates an impact. The author Kate Chopin (1850-1904) knew this and used it to her advantage: “A Pair of Silk Stockings” displays how a conservative amount of words and quotidian events can have a deep emotional impact on the reader. The protagonist, Mrs. Sommers, unexpectedly receives fifteen dollars and goes shopping with the most practical of intentions. However, as a result of the softness of stockings, she indulges in a department store spending spree, lunches at an upscale restaurant, and takes in a matinée. Short even by short story standards, how could a few pages about a woman buying stockings be my favorite example of the genre?

In short, the answer is that Chopin targets our most elemental emotions. Even possible judgements are suspended, because we are wrapped up in Chopin’s deft (and simple) descriptions of sensory pleasures. Of course Mrs. Sommers would do this, or do that—how often have we done something similar to soothe some personal trouble, large or small? The plain subject matter, curtly reported, is deceptively deep, and we go along with it easily, without having to wade through wordy prose and elaborate situations. It’s simple, and we understand what is happening. No re-reads with this one: we go shopping with Mrs. Sommers, and wish our trip home would never end. To borrow from Thoreau, the “quiet desperation” of Mrs. Sommers is succinctly described in the last few sentences of the story:

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. 

A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing—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. 

The cover of the September 1897 Vogue that contains Chopin's short story. Mrs. Sommers’ $1.98 stockings would cost $57.33 in today’s dollars.

This intense wish is a result of hosiery, of all things, and Chopin’s talent makes this completely believable. The original format of this story bears mentioning: it was published in Vogue magazine in September 1897. How many women in the late 1800s read this and saw themselves as Mrs. Sommers, or glanced about for others like her? Chopin creates a bond between the 1897 reader and the protagonist by mentioning magazines several times in the story. For instance:

Mrs. Sommers bought two high-priced magazines such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things. (...) [S]he picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. (…) A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle breeze was blowing through the window. She tasted a bite, and she read a word or two, and she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in the silk stockings.

Likewise, the last two sentences above are prime examples of the sensory emotions Chopin appeals to throughout the text: hearing, taste, sight, and touch. Touch is very important in Chopin’s narrative, as it is the feel of the silk that beguiles Mrs. Sommers into the sad fairy tale of her afternoon:

An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. A placard near by announced that they had been reduced in price from two dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and ninety-eight cents; and a young girl who stood behind the counter asked her if she wished to examine their line of silk hosiery. She smiled, just as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it. But she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things—with both hands now, holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers. 

The stockings are described as serpentine, which suggests that Mrs. Sommers is a Gilded Age Eve. She yields to the temptation, is soothed by purchases and diversions, and is then spit out into a cable car, banished from the exclusive Eden of late 19th-century consumerism. The shortness of “Stockings” is tantalizing. Would Mrs. Sommers find happiness in wealth, whatever amount of money “wealth” meant to her? Or would the emptiness that Carrie feels in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) accompany it? What about us? If it isn’t wealth, is there something missing that would make us happy? Chopin leaves Mrs. Sommers open enough for the reader to squeeze into her place.

I have wanted to create a design in relation to this story since I started Carte Blomst, but I struggled with what to put on paper. I took the colors of the stockings as my starting point: light-blue, lavender, black, shades of tan and grey. I thought about the story’s simplicity and decided to do something simple, too. The modest dots are repeated to make an impact much like Chopin’s story.

The design on a windowsill under shadows of a palm.