The Lesson

Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1972

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Symbols & Motifs

The Clown Toy

While the narrator is dazzled by many of the toys in the fancy toy store, it is a relatively inexpensive clown toy that most haunts her. As well as being cheaper than—for instance—the $1,000 sailboat in the store window, the clown toy is also closer to being an actual toy, rather than just an ornament. It is still too expensive for the narrator, however, and she finds herself anticipating what objections her mother would have to her spending $35 on a toy, and what that money could buy for her family instead.

As different as the narrator’s world is from the world of the Fifth Avenue toy store and its wealthy customers, both the narrator and the customers are consumers, and creatures of want. They all live in the same capitalist society, which has trained them to seek worth and solace in material objects. The clown toy is one such object, and remembering it makes the narrator feel trapped and confused, for reasons that she cannot quite articulate. She wants to leave the outing to the toy store behind her, and finds that she is unable to completely do so.

Four Stolen Dollars

Miss Moore gives the narrator $5 to pay the cabdriver, assuming that the narrator will give her back the change. However, as a kind of revenge on Miss Moore, the narrator keeps the money instead. She then does not even spend the money, at least not immediately. Rather than following her friend Sugar to their usual sweet store, to spend all of the money on sodas and candy, the narrator takes off on her own instead. The stolen $4 symbolizes the narrator’s attempt at freedom and independence, not only from Miss Moore and her hectoring ways but from a society that encourages the spending of money while also allotting this money to only a few. The narrator wants a little freedom from wanting, and therefore freedom from competition as well.

Church

It is no accident that the atmosphere in the Fifth Avenue toy store reminds the narrator of that in a Catholic church. Both environments induce a cowed silence in her, even though she has had an inclination to subvert them both. She has been mocking and boisterous outside of the window of the toy store, along with the other children on the trip; likewise, she recalls that she and Sugar went into the Catholic church with the specific intent of disrupting the service. Part of the narrator’s discomfort in the store is racial and cultural; she is aware that she and her group stand out and are being watched. She is also aware that the silence of the store is a reverent one, just as much as in a church, and something in her cannot help but respect the silence. In this case, she understands it to be an expression of power—not of religion, but of money.