[In the following essay, Seidel offers a feminist and capitalist interpretation of The Light in the Piazza.]

In Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza (1960) Margaret Johnson must decide whether to tell the Nacarelli family that her twenty-six-year-old daughter Clara has the mental age of a ten-year-old. The novella begins conventionally, with Margaret, a matron from Winston-Salem, playing well the role of a 1950s wife. Devoted to her daughter, she agonizes over the unraveling of her marriage because of the issue of what to do with Clara. Her husband, a tobacco executive, is a businessman whose credo is the bottom line. In Florence on a holiday, Margaret and Clara meet Fabrizio, the son of an old Florentine family, and romance blooms in the Florentine spring. Spencer uses this dilemma to critique the role of wife and mother endorsed in the late 1950s, allowing Margaret to become a successful capitalist who adroitly uses the marketing philosophy of the public relations deluge after World War II. Armed with the tools of capitalism, Margaret markets a work of art in the oldest art marketplace of capitalism, Florence.

Several sociologists and writers who were contemporaries of Spencer's write about the place of women in the years after World War II. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan charts the sociological debate of the day regarding the “cultural definition of femininity [which endorses] the continued infantalizing of American women” (133, Friedan's emphasis). The healthy, well-adjusted woman of the 1950s was taught to be dependent first on her parents and later upon her husband; she was taught to earn B's, not A's, to defer to males' achievement in school, to regard education as training for her future role as a homemaker. Friedan surveys the sociological establishment and finds constant and repetitive examples endorsing role differentiation and adjustment to the prescribed roles for men and women as the signs of the healthy individual. Friedan identifies three responses among married women to these expectations: one can be a “true housewife,” rejecting modern conveniences and thus be labeled by the public relations postwar blitz as old fashioned or, even worse, one lacking the means from her husband to purchase appliances. Or one can be a “Career Woman,” an abnormal type who is unconcerned about the family meals or the laundry. Or one could be “The Balanced Homemaker” (210), a woman with the education and wide interests to be a “creative” homemaker. This woman will use her mathematics to calculate cost savings for her home, her creativity to decorate the house beautifully; her sense of worth will come from her success in this arena. In fact, what Betty Friedan finally asserts is that “the really important role that women serve as housewives is to buy more things for the house” (206).

Friedan presents a compelling analysis of the advertising industry's relentless campaign to endorse this role for women. Her work parallels in many ways and is derived from that of Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, a popular book written in 1957, which identifies marketing and advertising as a powerful new force in American society. Packard explains the contribution of social scientists to “motivational research,” as it was called in the 1950s. The conclusion of this research was that consumers react consciously and unconsciously to images and designs and, further, that advertising can create within them a desire to own a particular product, even though marketers also observed that people were fairly easily satisfied with what they already had (14). The challenge to this complacency was to convince consumers that the fabulous output of consumer goods after World War II produced items that they needed if they were to be happy. The challenge was to stimulate consumer buying by creating desire, which would produce demand for commercial products. Packard identifies eight appeals which were recommended by psychologists and sociologists: selling emotional security, selling reassurance of worth, selling ego gratification, selling love objects, selling a sense of power, selling a sense of roots, selling immortality (61-70). Methods for success in most of these areas involved employing sexual overtones, appeals to security, oral gratification and its relationship to maternal security, and so forth.

As a case in point, Packard has some curious observations about the sale of cigarettes in the 1950s. He quotes a Chicago advertising executive who says, “Smoking in general serves to relieve tension, impatience, anger, frustration, just as sucking does to the infant” (83). Packard also quotes a research director in a New York advertising agency as saying that despite a strong loyalty to a brand of cigarettes, in tests people cannot tell it from other brands. “They are smoking an image completely” (38). Another unnamed tobacco public relations man tells Packard, “You want the customer to fall in love with your product and have a profound brand loyalty when actually content may be very similar to hundreds of competing brands” (39). This challenge to the tobacco executive of the 1950s is exactly the challenge which Margaret Johnson has observed her husband encounter and one which she embraces in attempting to sell her product, Clara, to the customer, the Nacarelli family. Packard ends his book by questioning the morality of manipulating consumers in this way. Indeed, Margaret Johnson is well aware that hers is a moral dilemma. She visits the Catholic priest to see if a religious institution will give her guidance in regard to her decision. As with her industrialist husband, however, Margaret's thoughts regarding morality are merely a wisp that is blown away easily by the prevailing winds of glamour and pleasure sweeping across American and European society in the 1950s. As Packard writes, “When irrational acts are committed knowingly they become a sort of delicious luxury” (228).

When we apply these ideas to Margaret Johnson, we can see that she played the role of balanced homemaker well early in her marriage. Spencer describes her as “the busy American housewife, mother, hostess, cook and civic leader who paid attention to her looks” (10). As time passes and Clara grows older, however, the labor-saving appliances have been purchased, and the home as a focus of Margaret's energy ceases to attract her. Her husband, the premier American capitalist who ceaselessly works to acquire possessions, is more or less absent from the home; “he owned part interest in a cigarette company and devoted his whole time to the firm” (16). His response to Clara's accident is a patient but angry criticism of Margaret's attempts to prove that Clara is still normal. His cool assessment of his daughter's commodity value occurs too early for Margaret. Her approach, to try to retain the value of Clara, sets up a competition in the marriage regarding who is right about Clara. In the organization known as marriage, Margaret decides that she has a product to sell, albeit flawed, and that her approach is superior to that of her husband's. Like two corporate executives, Margaret and her husband regard their product and assess its value. In the marketplace of the United States, Mrs. Johnson's “valuing” of Clara may be unrealistic, but in a different setting—or market—new possibilities occur.

This competitive attitude prepares Margaret for her test as a capitalist in the marketplace of the most famous and earliest jewel of western capitalism, Florence. Spencer's selection of setting for Margaret's dilemma is all too purposeful, and the plot is uniquely suited to the city. Florence attained its prominence as a Renaissance city because of the wealth of powerful merchants. Families such as the Medicis earned their fortunes through the trade and sale of commodities such as cloth, gold, jewels and leather goods. Tied by blood and money to the Vatican, the merchant families received the protection of the Pope's armies and opinion. If one takes the Medicis as the premier example, the stories of their ruthlessness, cruelty, and betrayal of one another in order to increase their power and wealth speak to the darkest Darwinian perspective on capitalism as a competitive struggle for survival.

The vestiges of these powerful families are still found in Florence. Streets are named for them, the famous sign of the Medici family, three balls arranged in a triangle, appears on a large number of public buildings including churches. Commerce thrives in Florence, from the swank stores of chic designers to the gold and silver marketplaces on the old bridge over the Arno, the fish and tripe markets near the Duomo and the straw and leather goods markets which dot the city. An architectural jewel, Florence sparkles with the gilt which has become defined as “florentine.” Commodities are exchanged with zest and enthusiasm as one bargains for a pair of shoes or a straw basket. Spencer was very familiar with Florence; in 1953 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship which allowed her to live in Italy from 1953-55, and again from 1956-58.

One may expect Margaret, as a fifties housewife, to feel intimidated by the raw excesses of the world of money, but instead she rises to the occasion like a Harvard MBA. Her B-school consists of two curriculi: what she has learned of marketing from her husband and what she has learned of marketing from her heritage as a southerner. Were Mr. Johnson to arrive in Florence marketing his new world product, tobacco, his marketing strategy would be “common sense”; one can only imagine the response of the Italians to common sense as a reason to smoke cigarettes. He does not yet seem to understand, as Margaret does, that glamour and style are everything, whether one is selling laundry detergent, automobiles or young women. Mr. Johnson in the novel appears to be a minor character, but like Margaret and Mr. Nacarelli he is a capitalist of the first order and a typical organizational man of the 1950s, as William Whyte would describe him. His focus is entirely on the bottom line, that is, the sale of products for his company and the acquisition of status in his personal life. His time is entirely devoted to his organization; his salary purchases, not for himself but for his family, tremendous amounts of leisure time and possessions. They display his wealth and power so that while he must stay at work in the United States, they are free to travel, that is, to be at leisure and consume goods. In this scenario, which echoes Thorstein Veblen's analysis of the family in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Mr. Johnson's wife and children become emblems of his ability to purchase material goods (69).

It is no accident that the product which he sells for his company is tobacco. Even in the 1950s, prior to the more recent Surgeon General's report, there was evidence that tobacco is a flawed product. Tobacco companies were challenged to describe this product in a positive manner that defies the actual attributes of tobacco. One can argue that Mr. Johnson is unaware of the negative properties of tobacco. If we are to believe the whistle blowers from tobacco companies who are speaking out today, however, knowledge of the deleterious effects of tobacco was common in the 1950s, common enough for studies to occur which led to the Surgeon General's report. Indeed, one may read the novel as suggesting a striking parallel between the selling of Clara as a product of glamour whose innate substance is flawed, and the selling of tobacco similarly conceived as a product bringing glamorous attributes to its users. This theme is advanced in John Kenneth Galbraith's book, The Affluent Society, in which he argues that the climate of the 1950s was such that media presented goods glamorously, that is, as necessary for attainment in order to keep up with one's neighbors and prove that one was indeed affluent. As he writes, in “the years immediately following World War II, a certain mystique was attributed to the satisfaction of wants” (266-67). Goods were promoted as satisfying “a nonexistent need” (269).

David Riesman points out in The Lonely Crowd that leisure time is to be filled by consumption of goods by the working man's wife (333). Her leisure time is to be filled with activities such as clubs, gardens and children, not the activity which could be called monetarily compensated work. Ironically, the possession of goods was presented to women as allowing equality. Equality for women, however, was restricted to equality in play, not in the workplace. Thus, Margaret Johnson, in possession of money, leisure time and a flawed product to sell, takes upon herself to have an occupation, a job as it were, to market a product. She resembles an executive stationed in a foreign country. Far from the controlling home office, she has the ability to make a number of decisions without the interference of her boss/husband. As a representative of her family's capitalist system abroad, Margaret exercises authority and takes advantage of the informal power which she has. As Melville Dalton writes in The Sociology of Economic Life, in a great many firms the role of the assistant to the executive can have enormous flexibility in decision making (341). Margaret is an assistant who proves that she is the true 1950s executive of her family.

Contemporary feminist Luce Irigaray analyzes these observations of organizations as they apply to the family. In the patriarchal family a man regards his wife as a possession whom he wishes to immobilize in order to keep her under his control (28). The symbolism of mass consumerism of the 1950s was indeed that of the constriction of home; products glamorized the nature of women's place within the home. Advertisements of that time do not depict women traveling, in the workplace or in settings other than the domestic scene.

As a southern matron, Margaret could never expect to find a suitable husband for her daughter, that is, a buyer for the flawed product, in the constraints of the United States. When Margaret sees Clara and Fabrizio together, however, the narrator reports, “The life she had thought forever closed to her daughter spread out its great pastoral vista” (9). Like figures in a pastoral, Clara and Fabrizio are suited perfectly, in spite of the different cultures, their differences in age—she is three years older than he—and their very disparate IQ's, because Clara is all that a woman is supposed to be—beautiful, good and able to bear children who will inherit the Nacarelli name and fortune. Low IQ or not, she is the ideal product of her culture, available in the marriage marketplace and surprisingly competitive in the Italian market.

As the innocent American abroad, Margaret at first embodies an extreme version of the Jamesian ideal; she is naive but quickly recognizes that the Italian temperament is replete with “subtleties” which were “strange and new” (12), passions which defy the logic of her ordered life as a businessman's wife. Her husband's so-called common sense holds no sway. To enter into a negotiation with the suave and worldly Signor Nacarelli might appear to be a daunting task for a southern matron, but Margaret proves to be an outstanding marketing executive.

Margaret Johnson eludes American societal constraints by the fact that she has left her southern place and entered the teaming and more sophisticated marketplace of Florence. In fact, Margaret attains not only a commercial equality with her husband but also toys with sexual freedom, which is still taboo for women within American society. Margaret's flirtation with Signor Nacarelli in part asserts her willingness to use her own sexuality as an inducement to cementing the premarital negotiations with him. But there is clearly also an element for herself in the flirtation; the kiss that they share not only seals the bargain, but it also assures Margaret that she herself is attractive and alluring, just as Signor Nacarelli, is assuring himself of possessing the very same appeal. Margaret is not a matron like Signora Nacarelli, cloistered in her home with her religious objects and her family. Margaret has attained an equality with Signor Nacarelli and an ascendancy over her own husband's power. As Irigaray comments, women's rights include asserting sexual rights so that they are valued as women, not simply mothers (31), and, I would add, not simply consumers.

When Margaret determines to promote the marriage and delude Signor Nacarelli, she proceeds, as Elsa Nettles writes, “with the determination of a general mapping a campaign” (83). She resolves to deceive no less an opponent than Florence, the old deceiver. She bargains carefully with Nacarelli, mentioning the ＄5,000 her husband gave their son when he married. Nacarelli counters with a nearly damaging blow: he threatens to call off the marriage when he discovers Clara is older than Fabrizio. Margaret delivers the winning thrust by upping the ante and promising ＄15,000 of her husband's money. Signor Nicarelli immediately replies, “That is L9,375,000” (59). The deal is sealed.

More decisive and better at business than her culture endorses, Margaret also deceives her husband by permitting the marriage to occur before her husband can arrive. He “would spoil everything,” she says. He'd be annoyed by the siesta, the “inefficient way of life” (45), the stones and painting of Roman Catholic works of art and the pointed shoes of Fabrizio. While he allows that Italians had more “intellect, education, and art” than Americans, they did not have that one shining American attribute: “ordinary sense” (47). Thus, she leaves her husband behind; as Peggy Whitman Prenshaw points out, she allows Clara to go free, but not only for Clara's welfare but also to enhance her marriage.

The metaphor which Spencer uses to accomplish this plot is that of Clara as the perfect product of her culture, the southern belle, the most important work of art of her culture. By the standards of the 1950s, the healthiest and happiest woman in the novel is the one who is the most infantalized, eternally dependent upon her family. Not Margaret but Clara is the fifties ideal of womanhood, sweet, immature, nonintellectual, adoring of children, playful and sincere. Clara and Fabrizio spend their days talking about movie stars, eating and drinking, and shopping. Conspicuous leisure, as Veblen points out (75), displays wealth, which both the Nacarellis and the Johnsons are eager to exhibit. The fact that her innocence and other traits result from a childhood accident and not the steady messages of her society is a misfortune only if one takes a literal view of Clara. Of course, what Spencer expects of the reader is an ironic appreciation of Clara's “misfortune.” If Clara were simple because she had been taught to be so, she would be in conformity with the expectations of her father and his milieu. Spencer's sly selection of an accident as the cause of her malady underscores the loss of intellect which is required for the many millions of American women who behave like Clara, by choice. Innocent and exuberant, she is like the girl on Keats's Grecian urn; because of her accident, she will remain forever young and fair. The romance of Clara and Fabrizio is a frozen pastoral indeed, in the midst of the cunning business negotiations pursued by Margaret and Signor Nacarelli.

Margaret wishes to allow her daughter to become a woman to the extent that her daughter is capable of doing so. Defined by Mr. Johnson and herself as a perpetual child, Clara arises from this limiting definition in the sunshine of the Florentine spring. Representing spring in the mythic sense of an awakening, Clara discovers her own sexual feelings and experiences as a separation from her mother. She rebels in small though important ways in terms of her own development. When Clara goes off by herself and appears in a straw hat with a peasant blouse falling from her shoulders, Margaret sees her daughter's dawning sexual feelings. Margaret tries to dampen these feelings by whisking Clara to Rome where she would no longer see Fabrizio and thus have ample opportunity to return to her prepubescent state of dormancy. But in the end Margaret gives Clara the right to feel what she feels, to be in control of the sexual aspects of her being just as we see that Margaret can use and control her own sexuality. Margaret is a woman well beyond the fifties guardians of the home. She asserts her right to her own sexuality and acknowledges with grace her daughter's right as well. And of course, by freeing her daughter, Margaret can enter into a delicious new realm of freedom with her husband or so she thinks. Margaret is like Demeter, who has the choice to keep her daughter Persephone imprisoned in a prepubescent Hades with no creature within it other than the monstrous father. In freeing Clara, Margaret is no longer buried alive in the culture, to use Irigaray's term, but rather, is free (199).

There is an outstandingly beautiful painting in the Uffizi Museum in Florence that embodies the pastoral idea to which Spencer alludes. This is La Primavera by Sandro Botticelli, in which Flora, the Lady of Spring with flowers in her hair, is pursued by the faun, the young male, half man and half animal, in a sense an icon for young Italian manhood. The painting places these two young people together in the golden Tuscan sunshine, much as Spencer does in her story.

When Fabrizio thinks of Clara, he thinks of her as a face on a fresco in an ancient church, “closed off, unused for years,” created by “some ancient name … a lost work” (61-62). Seeing her as a work of art suggests Clara's place in southern society. She is the lovely, innocent belle who will forever belong to the springtime. A product of the fifties, immature and lovely, she has the requisite personality and beauty to attract a suitor. The real dilemma is whether she can also become the dependent and virtuous matron which her southern society expects and which is also the desired role for Italian wives?

The Nacarelli family is of the merchant class—they are sellers of shoes, one of the chief products of Italy since World War II. Their home connotes an ancestry which is impressive. The walls are covered with oil paintings, most of which Signor Nacarelli declares to be worthless, except for the Ghirlandaio, which is not famous, he says, but commemorates the wedding of one of his ancestors. His modesty notwithstanding, like the great art patrons of the Renaissance, Signor Nacarelli's family has commissioned artists and can closet these paintings away from public scrutiny, thus increasing their value. As John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, one of the manifestations of power and wealth among the Renaissance Florentines was the accumulation of collections of paintings and sculptures within their houses. To seclude a painting from the public was to enhance its value as an item defined as rare and for the eyes only of the owner. Both the wealth and the private pleasures of the owner/patron became possible during the Renaissance, as Berger points out (92). The idea that art should be displayed to the public in a museum, which is a concept only slightly less elitist, nonetheless was still centuries in the future when the Medicis commissioned Michaelangelo.

The painting in the Nacarelli house is a Madonna and Child, done in light blues and pinks. Clara admires it deeply, having developed a fascination with the image. She herself in contemplation is described as a “transported Madonna” (20), especially when she is in Fabrizio's company. In the Uffizi Museum, in the room devoted to Botticelli's paintings, is his painting of the Madonna and Child. The model for the Madonna is the same woman as in The Birth of Venus and La Primavera. The bright, energetic gaze of this woman is present in all three paintings, but in the first two, her gaze addresses the artist and wealthy patron. The Madonna, however, is not available to the patron in that same way, for she looks at the infant, who gazes back with identical rapture into his mother's eyes. Spencer appears to be using this work of art to mark the transition of the young woman from belle to matron, from a commodity for sale to one which has been purchased and placed safely in its proper niche. Thus, the selection of a Madonna as the painting which transfixes Clara indicates that she is slowly being transformed into an art work who will no longer be displayed for purchase but will grace the rooms of the Nacarelli household.

Clara's moment of freedom is short lived. Upon her marriage to Fabrizio she will become the Madonna whose portrait will grace the inner walls of the Nacarelli palazzo. She will become like Signora Nacarelli. And so Margaret's gamble in releasing her daughter is more a parole than a door to full freedom. Commentators on the work of Elizabeth Spencer agree that the preservation of a sense of community which conflicts with the freedom of the private self is a major theme in Spencer's work. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw in Elizabeth Spencer makes this point (67-68) as does Terry Roberts in Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. In a recent article in the Mississippi Quarterly Sally Greene asserts that Spencer “is committed to an enduring sense of community” (93), which we take to be the southern community. When Margaret leaves her southern community to free her daughter, she nonetheless is preserving the community by excising from it a defective southern belle. As Betina Entzminger points out, emotional distance is a narrative strategy in Elizabeth Spencer's fiction (73); her female characters attempt to elude patriarchal ordering of domestic roles and thus set up a tension between freedom and community.

By the story's end, Clara's transformation from a southern belle into an Italian work of art is complete. In her Venetian lace wedding gown, “she might have stood double for a Botticelli” (63). Fabrizio too is beautiful at the story's end, “like an angel appearing in a painting” (63). While the modern world has abandoned the pastoral for tobacco futures and shoe sales, Clara and Fabrizio create a living tableau, a frozen pastoral familiar to southerners and Italians alike. Margaret can return to her husband, a successful capitalist, and enjoy the fruits of his labors with no nagging doubts. She can play bridge, buy commodities and wear lovely clothes, knowing that the accomplishment of her chief role as matron has occurred.

Spencer's voice is tinged with admiration for Margaret's toughness in the face of the more experienced capitalists. Yet the irony of Spencer's statement is that the happiest and most fulfilled women of the 1950s are lobotomized. Thus, for all its enchantment, the novel joins the work of Riesman, Friedan and Packard as a searing critique of expectations in the 1950s for American women.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972.

Brown, Laurie L. “Interviews with Seven Contemporary Writers.” Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984. 3-22.

Dalton, Melville. The Sociology of Economic Life. Ed. Mark Grandvetter and Richard Swedberg. Boulder, CO: Westfield P, 1992.

Entzminger, Betina. “Emotional Distance as a Narrative Strategy in Elizabeth Spencer's Fiction.” Mississippi Quarterly 49.1 (1995-96): 73-88.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society. Boston: Houghton, 1958.

Greene, Sally. “Mending Webs: The Challenge of Childhood in Elizabeth Spencer's Fiction.” Mississippi Quarterly 54.1 (1995-96): 89-98.

Irigaray, Luce. The Irigarary Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

Nettels, Elsa. “Elizabeth Spencer.” Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. Ed. Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990. 70-96.

Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. New York: McKay, 1957.

Prenshaw, Peggy Whitman. Elizabeth Spencer. Boston: Twayne, 1985.

———. “Mermaids, Angels and Free Women: The Heroines of Elizabeth Spencer's Fiction.” Women Writers of the Contemporary South. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984. 147-64.

Riesman, David. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. New Haven: Yale UP, 1950.

Roberts, Terry. Self and Community in the Fiction of Elizabeth Spencer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1994.

Spencer, Elizabeth. The Light in the Piazza. 1960. Rpt. New York: McGraw, 1971.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. Rpt. Boston: Houghton, 1973.

Whyte, William. The Organization Man. New York: Simon, 1956.