Silas, La Femme?

I know this is pretty far stretched, but bear with me for a little bit.
French being my first language, I have the tendency to speak to myself in French (yes, I speak to myself ALL the time). So when I picked up a copy of The Rise of Silas Lapham, this is what inside my head sounded like: "Oh, ze rise of Seelah La Femme."

So for a while I went around calling the book that, which in French means "The Woman".
And "The Woman" was for me a really cool book, except its protagonist happened to be, well, a man. So subconsciously, while I knew Lapham was a man all along, I sort of identified him as woman...

and bizarrely, things sort of made sense that way.

What I mean is, socially Lapham is the equivalent of "the woman" in the room (yes I tried to make a pun there by substituting elephant with woman). In a patriarchal society, men lead have dominant and active roles. To put it bluntly, men are always at the top, while the women (passive and docile) can never fit in where men belong. And that's what Lapham and his family try to achieve, the top, the "upper class"... to be part of the elite. But no matter what he does, Lapham can't fit in. Not because he doesn't try enough (he does plenty of times and ends up making a fool of himself), but because his origins have not prepped him for "the ways" of society, because his blood, his biological beginnings "hinder" his image and his acceptance in society...wait, sounds like women's problems all along, no?

So in a way, high society is an effeminating factor for Lapham. As Howells expresses at the very end of the book, only when Lapham loses his house and moves away does his title of "colonel" apply to him again. Howells writes, "The colonel...was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay" (339). It seems that once Lapham displaces himself from high society he regains his masculinity. But in high-society, Lapham is emasculated and takes on socially constructed traits that women are supposed to possess: They are not good conversationalists (how could they, they have no brains), are obsessed with aesthetics (Lapham is obsessed witht he way his house looks), and of course, they are good house-keepers -- they normally cannot obtain any high positions, that is, they cannot be more than what they are.

So while La Femme and Lapham have probably nothing in common, I thought that phonetically (for a Frenchie!), the relationship was pretty interesting...