Written By: Raphaëlle Béhar
Modern cities promise freedom of movement and self-invention. Yet for many women, these freedoms are tightly packaged within consumeristic systems that sell their desires back to them. In The Gender of Modernity, Rita Felski argues that, for women, what feels like autonomy is often pre-structured by patriarchal and capitalist narratives that profit from female desire and limit their agency. Literature, particularly the short story, offers a privileged lens for understanding how these structures unfold in the grain of everyday life, where desire is felt most intimately.
This essay reads Kate Chopin’s “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Sexy” (1998) as feminist critiques of what might be called “false autonomy”: moments in which women experience desire, pleasure, or self-recognition that may appear freely chosen but are, in reality, produced and contained by intersecting forces of consumerism, patriarchy, and class. Though separated by a century, both stories center around women’s experiences navigating urban environments that promise a sense of liberation. Mrs. Sommer’s afternoon of shopping, “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” and Miranda’s affair with a married man in “Sexy,” unfold within cities that operate as carefully curated stages, on which women must perform versions of themselves that remain legible and profitable within existing social hierarchies.
Producing Desire in Consumer Spaces
In both stories, consumer spaces shape desire and, in turn, identity. Department stores, restaurants, magazines, and transit systems all reflect female desire within a logic of supply and demand, as women’s wants are anticipated and met. In anticipating these wants, consumer spaces open an interpretive process that produces female identities, sustaining them by cultivating a sense of absence that fuels further consumption. They offer temporary access to pleasure, visibility, and fantasy, while foreclosing more durable forms of agency. Before the rise of consumer culture, women were not meant to inhabit public space independently; their movements were closely monitored, often requiring chaperones, and regulated through social conventions that limited them to caretaking and attending church. The emergence of consumer culture in the mid-nineteenth century marked a pivotal moment when women could enter the public sphere in socially acceptable ways, provided they were shopping (Felski 68). These spaces offered women, particularly those with limited financial means, a rare sense of “intimacy and pleasure” (68) by mimicking the privacy, leisure, and aesthetic order of the bourgeois home within a public setting. In “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” Mrs. Sommers’ shopping trip, which is set in motion by a rare surplus of money, gives her a brief feeling of inclusion in the world of the well-dressed elite (Chopin 2); her purchases allow her to momentarily inhabit a different social identity. For Miranda, whose story takes place a century later, the dynamic has shifted; though women’s presence in public is no longer radical, the store remains a site of fantasy. Here, she can project and rehearse a version of herself aligned with Dev’s world: the cosmopolitan and sexually sophisticated mistress. While Mrs. Sommers longs to be seen among the wealthy, Miranda yearns to become desirable in the eyes of Dev. In both cases, the department store marks a threshold between public and private spaces, where desires for class mobility and gendered self-fashioning are only provisionally realized.
Within the department store in “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” class division is rendered spatial, dividing consumption into zones of necessity and luxury. Mrs. Sommers presents two distinct modes of female consumption cleaved along class lines. For lower-class women, shopping is portrayed as an act of endurance and struggle. Chopin vividly describes these women as combatants, who “besiege breast-works of shirting and figured lawn” (1). The term “breast-works,” an old military reference to makeshift barricades, casts the bargain counter as a battlefield, where shopping demands “strength and courage” (1). In contrast, the experience of luxury shopping is shaped by abundance, leisure, and performance. While the bargain section is chaotic and exhausting, the luxury section offers a slower, curated experience, accessible only to those who can spare both time and money. Mrs. Sommers’ hesitation before entering the bargain area sheds light on the visible spatial segregation of class within the store itself. The store’s physical bifurcation becomes symbolic as Mrs. Sommers is caught between a transient capacity for indulgence and the habitual self-denial imposed by her role within the family.
Notably, the word “multitude” is used to describe both the crowd of impoverished women at the bargain counter (1) and, later, the “well-dressed multitude” (2) Mrs. Sommers imagines herself joining. The repetition collapses the distinction between the women, suggesting that despite differences in dress and financial status, they remain interchangeable, absorbed into an undifferentiated mass. The department store depends on this tension: it produces the desire for distinction while offering only its performance. It provides wealthy women with a space to display their status and poorer women with the fantasy of joining them, often through impulsive, aspirational purchases. It is within this architecture of seduction and segregation that Mrs. Sommers finds herself drawn into a chain of acquisitions, each one less about utility than about performing belonging to the more attractive class, however fleetingly.
Stockings and the Privatization of Femininity
Stockings in both “Sexy” and “A Pair of Silk Stockings” operate as symbolic objects through which women negotiate class performance and redirect desire within consumer culture. For Mrs. Sommers, stockings offer a public performance of elevated social status; for Miranda, they stage a private fantasy of sexual sophistication meant for Dev’s eyes alone. Though the class dynamics in Lahiri’s story are less explicitly marked within the department store itself, Miranda’s purchases are similarly shaped by her desire to perform an identity above her actual social position by appealing to a man who represents that elevated world.
In “Sexy,” Miranda’s purchases at Filene’s Basement consolidate this shift toward a private, male-directed performance of femininity. At work, she wears a pantyhose, but during her second visit to the store she buys “sheer stockings” (1229), a more explicitly erotic garment aligned with her role as Dev’s mistress. This shift reflects her growing investment in a form of femininity oriented toward male desire. Her encounter with a nude older woman in the changing room, who encourages her to buy seductive clothing for an assumed male lover, makes this logic explicit: Miranda is being instructed on how to consume in order to become desirable. The woman, who pauses to check her own stockings for snags, faintly echoes Mrs. Sommers; yet, where Mrs. Sommers’ dressing up leads to public visibility, Miranda’s remains oriented toward a private, male gaze. Even within the public space of the department store, this instruction unfolds in an intimate, almost conspiratorial register. Miranda’s purchases—cream, a slip, and a cocktail dress—are not meant for the world, but for Dev. When the return of Dev’s wife cancels their dinner plans, Miranda never considers wearing the cocktail dress on her own, as without the gaze that gives it meaning, its appeal collapses. Consumption here does not enable self-fashioning so much as bind femininity to a private performance whose value depends entirely on male recognition.
The spatial setting of the store reinforces this privatization of feminine performance. Filene’s is located in a basement, physically below the city’s surface, emphasizing Miranda’s retreat into a private fantasy space through consumption. Furthermore, instead of buying perfume or makeup, which can be perceived externally, Miranda favours facial cream and undergarments. In contrast, Mrs. Sommers experiences consumerism as public theatre: she lifts her skirt to reveal her silk stockings as she crosses the street (2), her bodily transformation performed openly before others. Miranda’s purchases are more discreet, mirroring a shift in consumer culture where women, though more materially independent, remain ensnared in fantasies of desirability constructed around male approval in private. She is shopping for a role rather than for herself, one dictated by a man and shaped by commodities.
Chopin’s description of the silk stockings as “glisten[ing]” and “serpent-like” (1) infuses them with sensual energy and a sense of transformation as private desire finds a public outlet. The snake metaphor suggests a kind of class rebirth, as Mrs. Sommers slips into a version of herself that can belong among the “well-dressed multitude.” But this transformation, like the stockings themselves, is fragile: luxurious, yet thin and impermanent. The changing room becomes a ritual site of false metamorphosis: for Mrs. Sommers, it allows her to swap out cotton for silk (2) and step into the role of a woman with means. For Miranda, the changing room is a space of private preparation, where she fashions herself into the kind of woman Dev might love. Thus, in both stories, the department store and its clothing function as sites where women momentarily alter their status through consumption. But these transformations are ultimately illusory, exposing the deeper structures that mediate female desire through class and commodification.
Illusion of Autonomy in ‘Silk Stockings’
Though both Mrs. Sommers and Miranda experience moments of fantasy and perceived autonomy, their desires are shaped in advance by the very structures they operate within. In both stories, the city presents a tension, acting as a space of liberation while orchestrating the terms of desire. It permits women’s fantasies while regulating the conditions under which they can imagine or enact them. The department store, where both narratives begin, becomes the ultimate symbol of this curated freedom: a site where female desire is encouraged, but only within the constraints of capitalist consumption. Temporary indulgences are enabled by the system even as they are foreclosed by it. This thematic containment is also formal: the brevity of the short story mirrors the fragility of these performances, and narrative space contracts just as the women’s fantasies begin to take shape. Agency, in turn, becomes increasingly illusory. For Mrs. Sommers, the structure directing her movements is consumerism itself; for Miranda, it is Dev, whose attention—and subsequent withdrawal after his wife returns—governs her emotional trajectory and her movements through the city.
Chopin emphasizes Mrs. Sommers’ loss of agency through a shift in narrative tone. Initially, she is presented as deliberate and logical, favoring “speculation and calculation” over indulgence (1). But once she enters the department store, her movements become increasingly automatic and fragmented. The narrative begins to describe a chain of purchases in which one item justifies the next: stockings lead to boots, gloves, lunch, and magazines. The language employed by Chopin reflects this loss of volition: “her hand” (1) finds the stockings, rather than Mrs. Sommers herself. Later, she observes her own foot and ankle with unfamiliarity: “[s]he could not realize that they belonged to her and were a part of herself.” (2). This bodily dissociation is symbolic as much as it is psychological; her body is reconstituted as a display, a visual commodity to be admired. The glove becomes a telling symbol: instead of putting it on herself, she allows the saleswoman to slip it onto her hand (2). She is no longer an agent but an object being adorned, fitted, and absorbed into the consumerist system.
This dissolution of agency maps onto broader critiques of consumer culture as a deterministic force, particularly for women. When read from a feminist lens, Jean Baudrillard’s claim that individuals consume not out of need, but according to a “social logic of signs” helps explain how the female body becomes a privileged site of commodification, the “finest consumer object,” precisely because it is made to signify beauty and sexuality (129). Within this logic, the city’s commercial landscape does more than just offer women opportunities for pleasure or self-expression; it produces a stylized version of autonomy that remains tethered to patriarchal market ideals of luxury, sensuality, and display. The stockings themselves embody this system. These pieces of fabric are symbolic, erotic objects whose fetishization redirects Mrs. Sommers’ desire away from material security or self-determination and toward consumption itself. Even the title of Chopin’s story mimics the language of advertising, inviting the reader into the same seductive economy that entraps Mrs. Sommers, and exposing how women’s longing is both incited by and contained within consumer capitalism.
Chopin’s description of the stockings as “serpent-like” (2) deepens this metaphor. The snake evokes temptation, transformation, and, critically, original sin. Mrs. Sommers, in this comparison, aligns with the deceived Eve: she is acted upon and manipulated, her desires rewritten by a system she does not fully understand. The seduction here is less by a snake—or the devil—than by a machine of consumption, one that, once initiated, runs on “some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility.” (Chopin 2). This behaviour is not a lapse in character, it is a program, and Mrs. Sommers is caught within its loop.
Spatialized Patriarchy in “Sexy”
In “Sexy,” Miranda’s movements are less dictated by consumer desire and more by romantic fantasy, but they are equally shaped by patriarchal structures. Dev, her older, married lover, guides both her experience of the relationship and of the city. He is the one who approaches her in the department store and initiates the affair. He takes her to restaurants, the Nickelodeon, Davis Square, the MFA, and Symphony Hall (Lahiri 1227-1228); cultural landmarks that become sites for their emotional projection. Though Miranda is American, she is a foreigner in the city, an outsider, and Dev, Indian-born, is paradoxically her native guide. She follows his lead, quite literally, through unfamiliar terrain.
This imbalance is most poignantly rendered in the Mapparium scene (Lahiri 1228). Inside the glass globe, Miranda and Dev stand on opposite ends of the world, separated by geography but connected by a bridge. The space is a literalized metaphor for their relationship: cultural, generational, and emotional distance masked by the illusion of proximity. Dev confidently points out global landmarks, occupying the role of the knowledgeable man in control of the structures they’re physically inside. When he gestures toward “the deepest spot on earth, seven miles deep,” the emphasis on depth suggests a kind of authority and knowledge that Miranda mistakes for intimacy. His attention is shallow; while Miranda listens attentively to stories about his childhood in India or his immigration to America, he only wants to know about her sexual history. What she interprets as intimacy is exposed as projection.
Even the acoustics of the Mapparium are deceptive. Though they stand far apart, she hears Dev whisper, “you’re sexy” (Lahiri 1227). The whisper travels across the dome as if he was whispering in her ear, lending it intimacy, when in fact, the structure enables such an illusion. Miranda clings to the phrase, misunderstanding it as romantic affirmation. In reality, it encapsulates the limits of Dev’s interest: he does not see her, but rather the sexual role she performs. That performance is materially constructed through forms of consumption designed to secure his desire. Her desire, like Mrs. Sommers’, is co-opted, shaped by systems that reward this performance of femininity while obscuring the possibility of genuine connection.
Magazines and the Pedagogy of Desire
In both stories, magazines function as meta-objects; self-reflexive artifacts that ask the reader to step back and consider how consumer culture shapes female desire. They symbolize the content women consume, but also embody the structures that teach them what to want, how to look, and how to behave. As Rita Felski argues, magazines are a vehicle of cultural pedagogy, instructing women on how to read the world, and themselves, through a consumerist and patriarchal lens (Felski 63).
In “Sexy,” the first magazine Miranda encounters is a copy of The Economist, brought to her by Dev. His condescending comment—“nothing you’ll ever need to worry about” (Lahiri 1228)—reduces her curiosity to childishness, reinforced by the patronizing “[tap]” on her head. Later, when Rohin finds the same magazine under her bed and draws an airplane on it (Lahiri 1238), The Economist becomes a symbol of fantasy and projection, of the jet-setting book-reading global elite. This moment also marks the first articulation of Dev’s full name, Devajit Mitra, suggesting Miranda’s delayed recognition of his full individuality. Until then, Miranda’s image of him had been shaped by orientalist fantasies: “deserts and elephants, and marble pavilions floating on lakes beneath full moons” (Lahiri 1231). These visions tied to wealth, sensuality, and otherness reflect the racialized desires Miranda has unconsciously internalized. In this way, the magazine does not simply represent a world beyond her reach, but has trained her to desire it, mediating both how she imagines Dev and how she positions herself in relation to him.
Magazines also appear in “A Pair of Silk Stockings,” where they are tied explicitly to performance and display. Mrs. Sommers sees them in a shop window, purchases them during her shopping spree (Chopin 2), and chooses to carry them unwrapped as a visible accessory to her performance of elevated class. At the restaurant, in public, she even cuts out pieces of the magazines (Chopin 3), further emphasizing the performative nature of her reading. The use of a knife, typically meant for eating, to cut a magazine—an inedible, symbolic object—signals confusion between the desire for consumption and materialism. This reflects how Mrs. Sommers’ desires have been rerouted into consumer objects that cannot truly satisfy her. She’s trying to consume something unconsumable, underscoring the futility and artificiality of the fantasy she’s performing. These details are not incidental: Chopin’s story was originally published in Vogue, and the text invites that very audience to reflect on their own consumer habits. The magazine here becomes a mirror not just for Mrs. Sommers, but also for the reader.
In the late-twentieth century world of “Sexy,” magazines extend their influence to the body, shaping how women eat, desire, and regulate themselves in accordance with beauty standards. When Miranda browses women’s magazines at the bookstore to pass time (Lahiri 1227), readers are invited to see her as part of the story’s readership: passing time, flipping pages, and absorbing aesthetic ideals. These 1990s magazines generally dictate not only how to look but also how to eat, how to regulate pleasure and hunger. Miranda’s own appetite fluctuates depending on Dev: when she is with him, she mirrors his tastes, “pickled herring, and potato salad, and tortes of pesto and mascarpone cheese” (Lahiri 1230). The polysyndeton in this sentence emphasizes the overwhelming intensity of his appetite. Alone, however, she eats salads (Lahiri 1232), enacting a form of bodily discipline aligned with the beauty standards such magazines promote, in which restraint becomes a means of producing a desirable, controlled feminine body.
This dynamic of sacrifice is amplified when Miranda takes on a caregiving role. She buys Dev food, performs attentiveness, and later redirects this same impulse toward Rohin, who at seven years old eerily mirrors Dev: he is Indian, he dresses in business-casual, he looks like he smokes cigarettes (Lahiri 1233), and he naps (1237). Their dynamic is a distorted echo of Miranda’s relationship with Dev. Rohin commands her, showing off his knowledge of country capitals with his almanac, reminiscent of The Economist (Lahiri 1234-1235). As his babysitter, Miranda is more explicitly placed in a caregiving role, “feed[ing]” him rice cakes (Lahiri 1235), tending to him and anticipating his needs. Their imbalanced dynamic is further exemplified by the emphasis on his physical smallness: he “barely made a dent in the director’s chair” (Lahiri 1234).
Importantly, “sexy” is not part of Miranda’s vocabulary. When she sees the sexualized Bollywood dancers at the Indian grocery store, she calls them “beautiful” instead (Lahiri 1232). “Sexy” is a term imposed from without, a language through which men define women and their desirability. Miranda’s relationship to sexiness is thus mediated by how she is seen rather than how she sees herself. She internalizes the word, buying the lingerie and cocktail dress it seems to demand, but it never becomes hers. Her epiphany at the end of the story is not simply that Dev does not love her, but that she has spent the relationship enacting his fantasy, not her own. In contrast, male desire appears as already formed and self-assured. When Rohin repeats Dev’s phrase, “you’re sexy” (Lahiri 1237), Miranda assumes he must have encountered it on the cover of a magazine. Yet even at seven, Rohin has already absorbed and reproduced a script that equates female value with sexual appeal. The same media that teach women how to become desirable teach men how to recognize and demand that desirability, producing a gendered asymmetry in how the message of “sexiness” is internalized.
Movement and Its Limits
Public transportation also emerges in both stories as a powerful metaphor for women’s entrapment within systems that appear mobile but are fundamentally restrictive. Even when Mrs. Sommers appears to move freely through the city, her movements follow paths already laid out in advance. The city’s commercial landscape directs her movement, guiding her from one site of consumption to the next while organizing her desires along the way. The cable car, where her story ends (Chopin 3), evokes freedom on the surface; its motion suggests escape, an open-ended journey. But its tracks are fixed, and it will thus always stop. Her poignant wish “that the cable car would never stop anywhere” is tragically hollow: the fantasy of sustained liberation cannot survive within a system built to return her to an ultimately oppressive position. Like consumer culture itself, the cable car offers only the illusion of autonomy, not freedom. The very structure that transports her also contains her. Her day of purchases has not liberated her; it has merely allowed her to perform a different self for a brief moment. As De Certeau writes, the city is already coded with systems of economics and spatial power (Certeau 103), and Mrs. Sommers, however briefly she tries to write herself into it, remains on the track laid out for her.
In “Sexy,” the metro appears early as a marker of Miranda’s subordinate status. Her lack of a car, a symbol of mobility and control, contrasts with Dev’s suburban affluence and freedom. However, by the end of the story, Miranda has shifted her relationship to both the city and herself. Her final walk is the first time the reader sees her moving through Boston alone without the goal of consuming or pleasing someone. She passes by spaces once charged with romantic fantasy (Lahiri 1239)—the restaurants, the Mapparium—but feels no grief nor longing. She revisits the city, but no longer through Dev’s gaze. This movement is, in De Certeau’s terms, tactical; it does not overturn the structures that constrain her, but reworks her relation to them from within. “Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses […] it is a process of appropriation of the topographical system” (Certeau 99). Her steps through the city thus register a modest but genuine reclamation of agency.
Miranda’s story ends not in the motion imposed by others, but in contemplative stillness. Seated on a bench outside the church, coffee in hand, she gazes “at the clear blue sky spread over the city” (Lahiri 1239). Her attention turns away from Dev, from self-scrutiny, and from fantasy, settling instead on the natural world that persists within the urban landscape. The gesture marks a shift from internalized, male-mediated desire toward a more grounded and directed sense of self. Though she is not fully transformed, she is no longer caught in the loop of commodification and consumption. Both stories suggest that while female desire remains shaped by structures of capitalism and patriarchy, there are moments, however fleeting, of resistance. Where Mrs. Sommers is carried forward helplessly by the system, Miranda, at last, chooses to walk.
Taken together, “A Pair of Silk Stockings” and “Sexy” reveal how modern capitalism carefully manages female desire. Both Chopin and Lahiri show women moving through urban spaces that promise choice, pleasure, and self-definition, only to discover that these promises are structured by consumerism, patriarchy, and class. Mrs. Sommers’ shopping spree and Miranda’s romantic fantasy each offer moments of heightened sensation and self-recognition, but these moments remain fragile and ultimately contained. Chopin renders consumer culture as a mechanical loop that absorbs Mrs. Sommers, while Lahiri reveals how Miranda’s desire is shaped by racialized and patriarchal scripts of desirability predating her choices.
Yet, these narratives do not end in total resignation. If the logic of consumption directs Mrs. Sommers’ movements, Miranda learns, albeit imperfectly, to step away from its demands. Though her gestures remain small and provisional, they register a loosening in her attachment to the forms of desire she has been taught to inhabit. Viewed through a feminist lens, Chopin and Lahiri’s stories suggest that resistance under capitalism rarely takes the form of escape or full awareness. Instead, it appears in altered relations to desire itself, in moments where women are no longer fully absorbed by the roles they perform. If the city offers women any freedom, it lies in these partial reorientations: in the ways they begin to move through its structures with a measure of detachment, rather than simply consuming the desires it sets before them.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. SAGE Publications, 2016.
Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press, 1984.
Chopin, Kate. “A Pair of Silk Stockings.” MyCourses, uploaded by Professor Peter Gibian, mycourses2.mcgill.ca/.
Felski, Rita. “Chapter 3: ‘Imagined Pleasures: The Erotics and Aesthetics of Consumption.’” The Gender of Modernity. Harvard University Press, 1995.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. “Sexy.” Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th edition, Volume E, pp. 1222-1239.
