44 pages • 1 hour read
Michel TremblayLes Belles Soeurs
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Stamps
Germaine’s three boxes of a million trading stamps (and one box of booklets) are the central symbol in the play. They are what bring the women together, and they are the currency that gives Germaine the social status to demand that the women work for her. Grocery and department stores handed out these trading stamps with customer purchases or sometimes included them in products. Buyers could collect the stamps and exchange them for prizes in a catalogue. They were a method of rewarding customer loyalty and ensuring that customers would return to spend more money since spending felt like earning. For housewives doing the shopping while their husbands earned money, there was little opportunity to bring money into the house themselves or to affect their household’s financial status. Therefore, trading stamps were like a currency. Women could exercise one of their few financial freedoms—to choose the store where they shopped—and accrue “income.”
In reality, the cost of the merchandise that the stamps could buy was very much integrated and paid for in price mark-ups on the items customers bought with money. What’s more, customers could only use trading stamps after pasting them into booklets, which meant hours of tedious work. A book of stamps that wasn’t filled completely was worthless. Proprietors who used stamps as a marketing tool counted on a large percentage of people never putting the work into properly collecting and trading them. It’s notable that amidst Germaine’s windfall, there are no husbands or other men at her party. This suggests that the presence of men, who likely would not take the stamps seriously, would shatter the illusion of Germaine’s wealth and thus her standing in front of the other women. Her stamps cannot purchase anything that would legitimately improve her life. She may have enough to redecorate, but that will only create the appearance of wealth while trapping her in the domestic sphere she and the other women complain about. When she imagines buying a lawn mower, Germaine even fantasizes that the new belongings might necessitate a larger home; consumerism encourages an endless cycle of acquisition that makes accumulating wealth (or often maintaining it) impossible even when the women’s income increases.
In the end, the women steal the stamps because they place as much significance on them as Germaine does, but they can also get away with stealing the stamps because they have no real value. The stamps ultimately symbolize the trap of consumer capitalism and its promise of wealth and luxury, which constantly recedes as one struggles to attain it. When they rain down on Germaine’s head, the moment mirrors the stamps’ arrival at the beginning of the play. It’s purposely theatrical and highlights the artificiality of the stamps in the first place. Throughout the play, theatrical moments of absurdity reach beyond what the characters can express and accomplish realistically. At the end of the play, realism can take them no further, and the final moment of absurdity makes the point that the underlying cause of the women’s struggle and angst is that their country has failed them and left them to suffer in poverty instead of recognizing real humans with lives and dreams.
Contests
The women speak constantly about entering contests. Marie-Ange sets the tone in her monologue shortly after her first entrance. She is bitter and angry because she feels that she deserves the winnings more than Germaine, complaining that she is sick of working herself to death and receiving nothing in return. She and the other women are too mired in their envy to recognize that contests are a matter of pure random chance. When cornered, Marie-Ange admits that she doesn’t like these contests because only one family benefits instead of everyone. This so offends Germaine that Marie-Ange nearly leaves. However, despite Marie-Ange’s professed interest in the well-being of the collective, the women’s actions and their obsessions with contests prove that they are highly individualistic, clamoring to step on each other to climb their way out of poverty.
This is not surprising, as the play suggests that such contests serve the interests of capitalism, giving people just enough hope that they might strike it big to quell discontent. The women certainly see a prestige to winning contests—a sign of luck that might mean something for their lives. Yvette speaks at length about the honeymoon to the Canary Islands that her son-in-law won as if it’s her own good fortune, but no one other than Germaine has ever won anything in these contests. They each take their turn talking about the puzzles they’ve solved, the word games they’ve played, and the mysteries they’ve answered, but each time Yvette asks, “Did you win anything yet?” (36), they each reply, “Do I look like someone who’s ever won anything?” (36). The only exception is Lisette, who claims that she doesn’t need the prizes and only does the puzzle for fun, responding, “Do I look like I need such things?” (39). The women relish bingo and its door prizes, regardless of the fact that the door prizes are cheap and unnecessary junk. Rose admits to spending $2 a week on stamps to enter contests she never wins.
The women’s obsession with contests and winning also extends to matters of luck in the real world. Germaine tells the party about a neighbor’s child who fell off a second-floor balcony and was completely unharmed, presenting the story as a marvelous instance of luck. However, Marie-Ange points out that he was only unharmed because he landed on another neighbor, who now faces three months in the hospital. Similarly, they gossip about premarital pregnancy, condemning the women who have the misfortune to become accidentally pregnant. Lisette notes that pregnancy isn’t always the woman’s fault, but the others insist that their poor luck is really a matter of poor character, even though most of their own children are also having sex. Like their capitalist society, they see good luck as a reward for good people; the fact that they therefore feel entitled to steal from Germaine’s lucky winnings implies that in the prevailing economic system, “luck” is usually theft and comes at someone else’s expense.
“O Canada”
In the last moments of the play, as the women are brawling over the stamps, Olivine starts to sing “O Canada.” This seems at first like a random interjection from a woman with a deteriorating memory, and it adds to the humorous cacophony of the scene. However, after the women have left and as Germaine wails about the loss of her stamps, the rest of the women start to sing “O Canada” from offstage. Even amid the heartbreak of having lost everything, including her trust in her family, Germaine gathers strength from the anthem and joins in the singing. She finishes the anthem on her feet, her eyes full of tears, as stamps rain down from the ceiling.
The women in the play lead desperate lives. Poverty and overwork have made them tough and bitter but also proud. They clash and undercut each other, hurling insults and perpetuating endless small betrayals to hoist themselves up by stepping on each other’s faces rather than commiserating about their similar lives. They seem irreconcilable as individuals—15 women who don’t like each other and shouldn’t continue pretending to be friends. One might expect the play to end with a lot of irretrievably broken relationships between sisters and neighbors. Instead, the women unify because ultimately they are all Canadians. The play was controversial and revolutionary because it depicted working-class women, a demographic that had largely been ignored in representation. It showed them within the private domestic sphere, relating to each other without the presence of men and speaking in the vernacular dialect joual, which was considered vulgar and unworthy of the theater. The play makes the point that these working-class women are significant and deserve to be included in national ideals and conversations.
