Class Consciousness
The entire first third of the story is the narrator telling and Rosemary Fell showing the reader that she belongs among the higher classes of British society in the pre-WWI era. She is fabulously rich. She is fawned over by high-end antique salesmen. Her husband is said to absolutely adore her. She has it all. Then she meets a young woman too poor to afford a cup of tea with whom she can find no common bond other than sharing the same gender. By the time the young woman has satiated her hunger inside the Fell’s gaudy home, Rosemary has been reduced to petty jealousy of the woman’s looks and bouncing on her husband’s knee like a child as she herself must beg him for permission to buy an enamel box. Rosemary has come to a moment of class consciousness by awakening to the realization that she shares much more with the poor beggar-girl than she could ever imagine.
Gender Inequality
The story opens with Rosemary wanting to buy that antique box that she has fallen in love with. Despite being “really rich” she leaves the store without it even though she clearly is wealthy enough to have indulged in an impulse without the debit making even a slight dent in the Fell’s finances. The story does end with Rosemary receiving permission to go ahead and buy the little box but in that moment she is actually being bounced on the knee of her intensely unlikable husband as if she were a little girl asking daddy to buy her something. Philip Fell treats both the beggar-girl and his wife equally. In his eye there is really no question of class division going on in his house. It is a home firmly entrenched in patriarchal misogyny. He even makes what he takes to be a cute little remark that is actually a metaphorical equation of the girl with a prostitute and his wife with being the customer she picked up off the street. The starkest indicator of this theme is how the narrator specifically uses the plural pronoun when asserting “they were rich, really rich” whereas by the story’s conclusion it is clear that Philip is the only member of the household who is really rich. Rosemary has nothing unless her husbands allows it to be so.
Critique of Consumerism
Rosemary Fell isn’t really rich but she thinks she is and behaves as though she is. The titular beverage is for the poor girl a physical necessity. She is hungry and thirsty and has no money. For Rosemary, who has just been delayed in her desire to buy the antique box by the understanding that permission must first be granted by her husband, the girl herself becomes a substitute purchase. Miss Smith becomes a possession that Rosemary must have in lieu of going home with what she really wants. The story thus becomes a critique of consumerism while suggesting that the more money one has to waste on non-necessities the more one looks at everything in the world as a potential item to be possessed. Ultimately, of course, the story ends on an ironic reversal. Rosemary is every bit viewed as a possession byher husband and Miss Smith was to Rosemary.
