The speaker in Ellen Kay’s “Pathedy of Manners,” which consists of seven rimed stanzas, evaluates the life of a former acquaintance.
The problem with the portrayal of this poor little rich girl is that it is painted by a person who knew the wealthy woman at age twenty and then did not see her again until the privileged woman was forty-three. Yet the speaker expects her readers/listeners to accept this pathetic portrayal as factual.
This poem sneers at this woman and draws conclusions about her life about which it is impossible for the narrator to know. The speaker, who essentially victimizes her subject, has not been an actual observer of her victim’s life; there is no way she can draw the conclusions she draws except that they are clichés that so many readers are apt to accept without sufficient thought.
First Stanza: “At twenty she was brilliant and adored”
Readers, at first, will be open to the claims made by the speaker, because until the fifth stanza, they are tricked into thinking that this information is coming from an omniscient source or perhaps a source intimate with the subject, a sister or cousin. So it is easy to accept that the subject was indeed “brilliant and adored,” and very intelligent in school and popular with the opposite sex.
Second Stanza: “She learned the cultured jargon of those bred”
The speaker continues to portray the upper class qualities that the woman enjoyed: she was able to recognize “antique crystal and authentic pearls,” and she knew the deficiencies of “[Richard] Wagner,” whose anti-Semitism tarnished his reputation.
This sneer at the wealthy young woman for “scorn[ing] Wagner” implies that her conservative values offend radical feminist ideology that embraces the socialist, Wagnerian stance.
The speaker then adds a dig that the young woman spoke when she should have thought first, which would indeed be a personality flaw.
Third Stanza: “She hung up her diploma, went abroad”
The woman after college traveled to Europe as many wealthy debutantes did. She “rejected an impoverished marquis,” but “learned to tell real Wedgwood from a fraud.” These trivia add to the mystic of the highfalutin ways of the rich.
Fourth Stanza: “Back home her breeding led her to espouse”
After returning home from abroad, the woman married and “had an ideal marriage, and ideal / But lonely children in an ideal house.” At this point, the reader has to wonder why the children were “lonely” if the marriage, the children, and the house were “ideal.” If the children were “lonely,” they were probably not “ideal.” The attempt here is to wax ironic, in hopes that the reader will infer that “ideal” at best means ideal in outward appearances.
Fifth Stanza, Sixth, Seventh Stanzas: “I saw her yesterday at forty-three”
The speaker/poet makes a huge gaffe by inserting herself into the narrative. After not seeing the woman for twenty-three years, the speaker then sees her and manages to recoup the woman’s entire life: the details as well as what they mean. The impossibility of this indicates that the whole preceding narrative is a contrivance.
And that the speaker’s conclusion that the woman has wasted her life, has no friends, but “a hundred people will call” her, and “she will walk / Alone in brilliant circles to the end,” is an absurd fantasy. The speaker has concocted a tale about a woman’s life based on class and gender bias.
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