The Parvenue by Mary Shelley

The main character in this short story is called Fanny, who is a young girl that grows up with her rather large family in great poverty. Her mother is described as very loving and wise and Fanny absolutely adores her. Her father seems to be more of a strict and rude type of person because further into the story we find out that he treats his wife very badly due to economic difficulties. The reader gets to experience the main character’s feelings about the things that occur in the story since it’s told from her perspective. This makes it easier to understand her decisions and the way she thinks. From this, we find out why she for example decides to make the decision to stay with her family when her husband asks her to make this choice.

I believe that the characters in The Parvenue are dynamic since they individually go through changes during the story which changes their personalities. In the beginning for example, her family seems rather satisfied with their lives before the accident when their property caught fire and was destroyed. After she marries Lord Reginald her family seems happy for her and wishes her all their best in her new upper-class life. But after some time they start to become greedy and ask Fanny and her husband for more and more money, requests that her husband finds offensive and refuses to reply. So here we see a vast character development from the beginning and the end of the story.

As mentioned earlier, the mother is described as a stereotypical “perfect mother” where she is expressed as angelic, caressing and affectionate. Although we don’t find out a lot about her physical appearance, the reader gets to see that the main character has a very good relationship with her mother. After she has been married for a while Fanny and her husband’s relationship develops rather badly and it all ends with him leaving her after she is forced to make a choice.

In the story it is not possible to find any real dialogues so you can’t really say that we find out a lot about the characters through these. Basically all we have is the narrator’s descriptions and opinions on them. So what we know is that the characters are pretty basic and the way they speak sounds very typical for the era that it took place in, which is fairly formal and proper. There are very few environmental descriptions to be found, but through the few, we find out that it all takes place out in the countryside on the British Isles and somewhere abroad in the very beginning of Fanny’s marriage. Neither are there any specific descriptions of the time in which it takes place, but since the story was published in 1836 during the romanticism/ beginning of the realism, we can assume that it took place in the present. Since there are such few descriptions of the setting, we can come to a conclusion that is isn’t very relevant to the story.

The theme is a bit hard to decide precisely, seeing that there isn’t just one, but at least two messages that I believe the author wants to convey to the reader. But I’ve interpreted that the most important theme is basically that you shouldn’t let greedy people use you for your economic situation even if it means saying no to your family. I believe that Shelley wanted the reader to feel free to interpret the theme as they liked since it clearly says in the beginning of the story that Fanny wants others to judge her and her actions by reading her story. Through rhetorical questions she ponders about if the decision she made was right, if she is a wicked person by making the choice she made and about her altered life as an outcast to society.

The conflict in The Parvenue is more of an external conflict since there are hardly any monologues and it’s mainly about dilemmas in the main character’s surroundings. The main conflict is about Fanny’s feelings for her marriage and also how she deals with her difficult family who greedily pleads for her wealthy husband to provide them when they find themselves in troublesome economic situations. So in essence, you can say that the actual conflict has very clear connections with the theme and message of the story. The conflict also revolves around her new life in the wealthy marriage with her husband Lord Reginald in which she cannot bare to keep all her riches to herself. So therefore she donates a large amount of it to charity and dresses unsuitably for her position in society, which greatly displeases her husband. After a while it all becomes too much for Lord Reginald and it is here the story reaches its climax.

Earlier it was mentioned that the main character had to make a difficult decision and this is where the climax takes place. After her family becomes greedier and greedier over time, her husband has finally had enough with them and he tells her that she needs to make a decision. It’s either him or her family. In the end she chooses to be with her family and the young couple part ways. It’s all rather predictable since there is a build up during the story which causes the ending to not have a very surprising effect on the reader. Although the last few lines of the story gives it all a very dark and melancholy feel when she tells the reader that the loss and sorrow of her lost husband and parents, has caused her to no longer see the purpose of life. At this point she speaks in metaphors about how she’s about to decay from this dreadful outcome and misfortune.

The Parvenue is written in a very precise style, but with some figurative language. It’s possible to find metaphors describing specific emotions or actions such as “Soon will the hand he once so fondly took in his and made his own, which now flung away, trembles with misery as it traces these lines, moulder in its last decay”. This is the last sentence of the short story where she describes her misery of her loss as mentioned earlier, where she metaphorically speaks about dying of sorrow, such as “her hand mouldering in its last decay”. One of the similes in the text is the classical and iconic saying “… but a drop of water in the ocean” which in this context conveys how the father gets a sum of her husband’s fortune that doesn’t do much to improve his economic position in society. The author also uses rhetorical questions which Fanny asks herself in the beginning and I believe this creates a certain bond to the reader.