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Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Burmese Days, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Imperialism and Hypocrisy
Status and Racism
Class, Gender, and Sex
Freedom of Speech, Self-Expression, and Loneliness
Friendship and Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
Elizabeth lies on a sofa at the Lackersteens’ reading a novel, These Charming People by Michael Arlen, her favorite author. She is a 22-year-old orphan. In a flashback, toward the end of the war, her father, a tea-broker, makes a great deal of money and sends Elizabeth to a fancy private school. There, she learns that expensiveness is “Good” and poverty is “Bad.” When her father loses all his money in 1919, Elizabeth is exiled to cheap schools. Shortly after, her father dies. Elizabeth and her mother move to Paris to economize—and because Elizabeth’s mother fancies herself a painter. In Paris, impoverished Elizabeth works as a tutor for the children of a French bank manager who sexually harasses her. Elizabeth longs for the “decent world” epitomized by her rich former classmates. She loathes her irresponsible, bohemian mother, her mother’s “artist” friends, and anything “Highbrow.”
Michael Arlen is the pen name of Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian (1895–1956), whose ethnically Armenian family moved to England fleeing conflict in Bulgaria when Arlen was a child. His most famous works are frothy high-society romances set in England. The allusion to Arlen suggests that despite Flory’s romantic assumption that Elizabeth was reading intellectual French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922) while in Paris, she has far more conventional tastes—and may not be the companion that Flory has been hoping for to cure his loneliness. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s economic dependence first on her father and then on a sexually predatory French employer shows the precarious position that women occupy in a society where they are excluded from high-paying work and are expected to be dependent on men.
Themes
After two years in Paris, Elizabeth’s mother dies. The Lackersteens cable Elizabeth from Burma inviting her to come live with them. (Mrs. Lackersteen is annoyed at the bother and hopes Elizabeth can find a husband within a year.) Immediately Elizabeth sets sail aboard a fancy ship, which she loves for its “air of wealth,” and looks forward to life in Burma because she imagines the servants and club life will make it similar to “being really rich.” After landing in Rangoon, she took a train to Kyauktada, where Mrs. Lackersteen and Mr. Lackersteen greeted her—the latter with an oddly enthusiastic kiss, though they’ve never met before.
Mrs. Lackersteen’s immediate assumption is that to get rid of Elizabeth, she must marry her off. This assumption underscores a cultural norm according to which women remain economically dependent on their families until they marry and become dependent on their husbands. Meanwhile, Mr. Lackersteen’s oddly enthusiastic kiss of Elizabeth may foreshadow that Elizabeth will have more problems with sexual harassment to come.
Themes
After dinner, Mrs. Lackersteen praises Elizabeth’s looks and asks how she managed to spend two years in Paris without getting married. When Elizabeth admits that she was poor and working, Mrs. Lackersteen bemoans the idea of “lovely girls having to work for their living.” Then she drops broad hints that Elizabeth should try to get married immediately—and not be too choosy about her husband. The following morning, after Elizabeth has returned from Flory’s, she tells the Lackersteens at breakfast about meeting Flory’s “laundress.” Mr. Lackersteen begins to say that the men do the laundry in Burma when, suddenly, he cuts himself off “as though someone had trodden on his toe under the table.”
When Mrs. Lackersteen bemoans “lovely girls having to work for their living,” she makes explicit the cultural assumption that high-class women should not have to work—an assumption that would leave Elizabeth scrambling to find a husband to support her. When Mr. Lackersteen is about to reveal to Elizabeth that Flory lied to her about his “laundress”—really his mistress, Ma Hla May—the text implies that Mrs. Lackersteen steps “on his toe under the table.” This detail hints that Mrs. Lackersteen is already hoping Elizabeth will marry Flory and thinks that Flory’s having had a Burmese mistress would lower his status in Elizabeth’s eyes.
Themes
