A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin
Quick answer: A Pair of Silk Stockings by Kate Chopin: complete summary and ending, characters, themes of duty and desire, plus the craft of its famous last line.
Mrs Sommers comes into fifteen unexpected dollars, spends a night mentally dividing every cent among her children's clothes, and then, tired and hungry at a department store counter, lets her hand rest on a pile of silk stockings. What follows is one of Kate Chopin's slyest studies of desire: a single afternoon in which a worn-down mother buys pleasure for herself, item by item, and the reader is never once invited to condemn her.
Chopin published the story in Vogue in 1897, in the same decade of work that produced The Awakening. It is short, almost plotless by conventional standards, and yet it moves with the suspense of a heist. Students read it for its themes of consumer culture, gender and self-denial. Writers study it for something rarer: how to make a sequence of small purchases feel like a moral event, and how to end a story on a wish the character cannot say aloud.
The story in brief, ending included
Little Mrs Sommers, who once knew better days but now stretches every coin across a family of children, unexpectedly finds herself the possessor of fifteen dollars. For days she plans its spending with scrupulous care: shoes for one child, fabric for others, caps and stockings all around, everything for the children and nothing for herself. On shopping day she arrives at the store faint, having forgotten to eat lunch, and sits at a counter to gather her strength. Her hand falls on silk stockings, cool and pleasant to touch. She asks the price, and then, almost without deciding, she buys a pair and changes into them in the fitting room.
The rest of the money follows the stockings. She buys well-fitting boots, then fine gloves fitted at a counter where such luxuries are draped over cushions, then two expensive magazines of the kind she read in her better days. She lunches alone at a fashionable restaurant, unhurried, with wine and a small tip, then finishes the afternoon at a matinée at the theatre, weeping and laughing with the well-dressed women around her. When it ends, she waits for the cable car. A man watching her puzzled face cannot decode what he sees there. Chopin tells us: it is a poignant wish that the car would never stop anywhere, but go on with her forever. The story ends on that unspoken wish, with the return to duty left entirely to the reader's imagination.
The characters and what they want
The story is a portrait with a crowd behind it.
Themes and meaning
Standard readings are all defensible and worth naming in an exam: the cost of self-sacrifice demanded of mothers, the seduction of consumer pleasure in the new department-store economy, and the gap between social appearance and inner life. Chopin is careful to note that Mrs Sommers has no time to remember the past and is too absorbed by the present to dread the future; the fifteen dollars briefly buys her a present tense of her own.
The sharper point is that the story refuses to moralise in either direction. It is not a cautionary tale about a frivolous woman, and it is not quite a liberation story either, since the money is finite and the cable car does stop. Chopin's real subject is appetite as information: the purchases reveal a self that all the budgeting had buried alive. The tragedy, if there is one, is not that she spends the money on herself but that it took an accident of fifteen dollars to reveal that self at all.
The craft: escalation by object
Structurally the story is a staircase. Each purchase is slightly larger, slightly more public and slightly less excusable than the last: stockings hidden under a skirt, then boots, then gloves fitted by another woman's hands, then a meal eaten alone in full view, then art. Chopin never announces the escalation; she lets the objects do it. A writer can steal this whole engine: choose a desire your character has forbidden themselves, then design five concrete steps from private indulgence to public claim, and let each step be a scene.
The other masterstroke is the point-of-view swerve in the final paragraph. After an entire story inside Mrs Sommers's sensations, Chopin steps outside her, into the eyes of a stranger who cannot interpret her face, and only then names the wish. That one-step withdrawal turns a private mood into a mystery witnessed, and it is why the last line aches instead of explains. Writory's Short Story Contest rubric gives separate marks for emotional impact, and endings that show a feeling through a witness rather than a statement are reliably the ones that earn them.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, anchor the theme of self-denial in the early budgeting scene and contrast it with the restaurant scene, the two poles of the story.
- Name the department store as setting and symbol: the new consumer economy that both exploits and briefly frees her.
- Quote or cite the final wish that the cable car would never stop; it is the story's thesis in one image.
- Writers: escalate desire through a graded sequence of concrete objects rather than through introspection.
- Try ending one story from the outside, through a witness who sees but cannot read your protagonist.
- Keep the aftermath offstage; the return home would only weaken what the ending implies.
Try it yourself
Give a dutiful character a small, unexpected windfall and one afternoon. Write their spending as five escalating choices, each one a scene, and end at the moment before they must go home, without showing the return.
Questions
What is the theme of A Pair of Silk Stockings?
The story explores the conflict between maternal self-sacrifice and personal desire, set against the temptations of the modern department store. Mrs Sommers's afternoon of spending reveals a buried self that her life of duty has erased.
What happens at the end of A Pair of Silk Stockings?
After the theatre matinée, Mrs Sommers waits for the cable car to take her home. A man observing her cannot read her expression, which Chopin reveals as a poignant wish that the car would never stop and would carry her on forever.
Why does Mrs Sommers spend the money on herself?
Faint, hungry and exhausted after days of planning to spend everything on her children, she touches the silk stockings at a moment when her guard is down. The purchase is less a decision than a surrender, and each comfort that follows makes the next feel natural.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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