Les Belles Soeurs

The characters in the play are working class, which means that they are at the bottom of the class hierarchy. As women and housewives, they also have very little agency over the financial status and wealth of their households. The women are neighbors and therefore within the same socioeconomic sphere. Nevertheless, they still participate in the capitalist game of competitive consumerism. They don’t commiserate with one another regarding their poverty but hide their struggles in shame, only truly opening up in the monologues and moments of non-realistic poetry. They value themselves and each other based on visible displays of financial wealth, the social currency of respectability, and the general idea of winning and good luck; capitalist culture thus exacerbates the women’s hypocrisies and petty cruelties. Thérèse turns the burden of caretaking into a performance to show off her selflessness while also implying Olivine’s presence is a consequence of her family’s increased wealth. Lisette affects high-class sophistication, looking down on the others, who she genuinely believes are lower than her. She wishes that she could never see or think about these women again, but the fact that she is there shows that she likely doesn’t have more upper-class options.

Germaine, with her sweepstakes win, is the woman of the hour. She is queen for a day, and the others show up regardless of their resentment and envy. Germaine uses her power to create a literal sweatshop, expecting her friends to work in a cramped kitchen and refusing to open the window because the stamps might blow away. She offers no sharing or compensation but a pittance of meager refreshments—too few bottles of Coke (which she forgets to serve at first), some peanuts, and potato chips. However, Germaine’s expectations for the array of things that she will buy with her stamps become unrealistic over the course of the play. She fantasizes about buying not only what she needs and can use, but also things like a lawn mower, even though she doesn’t have a lawn. Saying that she will spend money on something that she doesn’t want or need is a way of claiming that she has reached the level of having expendable income.

Like Germaine, the women see a million stamps as an infinite amount. They steal surreptitiously as if they won’t get caught, not realizing how quickly they will hit the limits of a million and make their theft obvious. In reality, the stamps are worthless bits of paper that allow housewives to feel as if they are accumulating actual currency. Grocery and department stores issue them as customer rewards to create more customer loyalty by making spending feel like earning. Stamps have to be pasted into booklets to be redeemed—a tedious task that requires time and organization, both of which a put-upon housewife would struggle to find and maintain. Furthermore, while a million is certainly a lot of stamps, the fact that Rhéauna needs three booklets (in addition to whatever stamps she has collected herself) to buy a single dustpan suggests that they don’t stretch terribly far.

The women’s constant participation in contests that they don’t win is similarly futile. They perform an “Ode to Bingo” because they value door prizes, even though those prizes are typically junk such as doorstops and ashtray floor lamps. At the end, the women revert to an individualistic capitalist free-for-all, performing the animalistic struggle that they have been battling all along in more polite, metaphorical ways.