5 - Smiling through Pain: The Practice of Self in The Rise of Silas Lapham

Summary

The Puritan wanted to be a man of calling [Berufsmensch] – we must be.

– Max Weber

Two brief scenes from the latter half of The Rise of Silas Lapham interest me. In the first scene, Penelope Lapham faces Mr. Corey, the rich young man who loves her but whom everyone else had assumed loved her sister, Irene. He has come to find out why, after his confession of love, Penelope refuses to have anything to do with him, since no one has bothered, especially not his beloved, to explain the confusion to him. “He came toward her, and then stood faltering. A faint smile quivered over her face at the spectacle of his subjection” (p. 253). In the second scene, also involving Penelope (alone with her mother), the girl's faint smile at Corey's subjection returns, only this time in a context that suggests the gradual dissolution of her resolve. When she learns that Corey had offered “on her account” to invest money in her father's business in his time of financial troubles, Penelope twice censures such efforts as vain and silly attempts to change her. However, in “repeating the censure” the second time, we learn that her mother thinks “her look was not so severe as her tone; she even smiled a little” (p. 302). It seems a change is going to come.

It also appears as if the repetition of the spectacle of another's subjection has the power of changing one's cruel smile into a look that betrays the diminishing severity of such cruelty.