Small Pleasures

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Chapter 5

Chapters 6-15

Chapters 16-19

Chapters 20-29

Chapters 30-Afterword

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Repression and Self-Sacrifice

The novel’s women characters are expected to perform their gender by inhibiting their own exploration of desire and pleasure. Jean, though freer than her mother, has lived in a repressed society: “A lifetime of quiet watchfulness” has “convinced her that the truth about people was seldom to be found in the things they freely admitted. There was always more below the surface than above” (34). Jean sees this pervasive self-negation in the men with whom she works, the women she interviews and passes on the street and, of course, within herself.

Jean disallows indulgence in cosmetics and clothes—Jean is practical and not lavish. As the novel opens, Jean spills veal blood on her woolen skirt, which makes her furious because it was such an excellent skirt for riding her bike. Similarly, she feels that “cosmetics had always made her look painted and clownish, and they were now consigned to her drawer of treasures, to be admired as artifacts but never displayed” (180). Jean’s emphasis on efficiency rather than luxury is not complete, however: Though Jean doesn’t wear makeup, she still holds onto products she describes as “treasures”—language that makes clear that the desire for sensual enjoyment cannot be fully eradicated.

Jean finds self-policing normative, arguing that “people deny their feelings all the time […] Isn’t that what parenthood is all about—sacrificing your happiness for your children’s?” (211). In contrast, Gretchen cannot completely commit to self-sacrifice. Once Gretchen abandons her sense of duty to pursue her relationship with Martha, however, she finds her happiness won’t be complete without Margaret. Gretchen therefore struggles between her identities as woman in a socially frowned on lesbian relationship and a mother—an impossible situation that demands she abandon one piece of herself to fully inhabit another.

Repression and self-sacrifice, as methods of social maintenance, eventually harm those that internalize the way they police proper behavior because, as Small Pleasures points out, these mechanisms of self-control inevitably fail. The prices people pay to deny themselves their wants and needs are often not worth it.

Duty, Decorum, and Surveillance

The novel’s 1950s England perpetuates domesticity through a system of social surveillance. Jean is hypercritical of everyone she encounters, judging how they behave and using social expectations to gauge how she should respond. This practice eventually fails her, however, since these rigid standards leave little room for humaneness, empathy, and love.

When Jean visits the Tilbury’s home, every observation she makes is evaluative. She negatively compares herself to Gretchen’s ideally feminine self-presentation, and then speculates about the Tilburys’ marriage based on their separate beds, an arrangement that seems at best “an alternative to (unthinkable) divorce” (79). The word choice is telling. Jean names a couple splitting up as “unthinkable”—meaning so far out of the bounds of social appropriateness as to be anathema—and yet, it is exactly what her parents did. The disconnect points at Jean’s reasons for being as judgmental as she is—she is directing outward what she imagines being the target of. After her father left her mother, “she felt this terrible shame and guilt, as though it was somehow her fault for not being able to keep her husband” (113). Jean subjects Gretchen to a similar shaming when Gretchen leaves Howard. The social mechanisms Jean has internalized operate insidiously, forcing people to regulate one another rather than connecting.

Jean also deploys judgment against herself to ensure she presents as a proper woman. Because she isn’t a housewife, the most acceptable form of female identity, Jean wants to appear as practical and professional, feeling that any divergence from that would mean social ostracization. But being surveilled at all times is so oppressive that Jean’s inner life explodes out of her as soon as she finds a safe space with Howard, to whom she immediately confesses her childhood miseries, her abortion, and other secrets: “She was aware of the risk she had taken in unburdening herself so freely, but the relief was so powerful she couldn’t regret it” (116). Jean’s humanity demands that she share how she feels, but society forbids it. For Jean to be truly honest is to take a risk.

Toward the end of the novel, overburdened with Gretchen’s secrets and her mother’s need for more intensive care, Jean realizes that maintaining proper outward decorum is detrimental to survival. She thinks back on the night when the woman who’d been shoved by her mother refused Jean’s help, realizing that “She had clung to her proud self-sufficiency and they had both been diminished that night. Insight, overdue but dazzling, opened Jean’s eyes to the truth that when help is accepted, both parties are enriched” (327). Small Pleasures argues that judgment only widens the gap between people, while asking for help and revealing one’s humanity is the true pathway to civility and society.

Women’s Identity in 1950s England

Small Pleasures uses a variety of feminine archetypes to explore women’s identities—like modern women, tomboys, and housewives—in 1950s England. It examines how these archetypes interact with each other, as repressive gender roles of the 1950s fracture relationships, arguing that women are both protected and constrained by them.

Gretchen seemingly embodies the 1950s housewife ideal. The perfect upkeep of her home engenders wonder, jealousy, and shame in those who cannot live up to her self-presentation. For example, when Jean first approaches the Tilbury home, she notices the sheen of the brass knobs, an observation that immediately feels like a critique of her less gleaming home. Seeing Gretchen, Jean is “caught between admiration and envy. She would have liked to wear that style of nipped-in waist herself, but she had no waist to nip” (17). Later, Jean judges her baking skills as inferior to Gretchen’s and she wonders whether her moral compass is better when Gretchen walks away from her family.

In contrast, Jean, though still tied heavily to domestic obligations, is a career-driven, childless woman—an outlier in that era, though certainly not unique. Jean is solely responsible for both the financial and domestic responsibilities of her home, an impressive feat given the lack of opportunities for women in professional spaces at that time. However, Jean is frequently jealous of other women, coveting her sister’s exciting life and Gretchen’s motherhood: “to have the unthinking love of a daughter like this, to watch her grow every day and know that she was completely yours” (65). Jean simultaneously feels pride in her accomplishments and shame about her status, having taken on a more modern feminine archetype but not having fully internalized its validity.

Most removed from prescribed women’s identities is Martha, who lives ostensibly with complete freedom to avoid domestic labor and instead concentrates on art. However, Martha’s rejection of gender norms is socially unsupported; she is responsible for the finances and her home is chaotic and stressful to Gretchen and Margaret, making their would-be family impossible. The only woman who can live out her eccentricity is Aunt Edie, whose wealth insulates her from the kinds of dangers the novel’s other women face.

None of these women live up to the image they present to the world. Though they’ve adopted or rebelled against available female archetypes, the reality is that none of them embody one. Far from the perfect housewife, Gretchen is a lesbian woman forced into a marriage of convenience to avoid life as an unwed mother after a rape. Jean, the monitor of propriety, has had an abortion and embarks on an affair with a married man. Finally, Martha, who claims to be the antithesis of heteronormativity, subjects Gretchen to jealous emotional abuse because Gretchen’s pregnancy marks her as not sexually pure. Small Pleasures explores the ways the impossible expectations placed upon women cause rifts not only in interpersonal relationships, but also within themselves.