Performance

The author explores the effects of social performance through the Markey and the Andros couples' senseless fighting. The main stage for the short story is the Markeys' baby party for their two-year-old son, Billy. When Edith first tells John about the event, and requests his presence, he amuses himself by imagining the mothers and babies together. "What a peach of a mess," John thinks, "A dozen mothers, and each one looking at nothing but her own child...each mama going home thinking about the subtle superiority of her own child to every other child there" (63). Though these lines are contained to John's private consciousness, Edith is thinking something very similar. When the third person narrator shifts behind her consciousness at the end of the second page, the narrator reveals how desperate Edith is to make an impression. After "calculating shrewdly," Edith decides she and little Ede...