The Large Cool Store

The Cool Store by Phillip Larkin

How does Larkin explore ideas of inequality between social classes?

This poem ‘The Cool Store’ is a description of a shop which sold cheap, dated but fashionable clothes basically a Marks and Spencers shop in Larkin’s time. I think that Larkin does explore ideas of inequality between social classes as the themes of this poem are clothing and fashion, Larkin comments on the working class and the illusions they have, thinking that they are better if they dress a certain way.  I think that Larkin explores the ideas of inequality between social classes through what clothes they wear and what that represents as you’d normally think that the richest people wear nice clothes but poor people don’t.

The language used in ‘The Large Cool Store’ is simplistic and contains mostly monosyllabic words which are used to evoke the look and feel of department stores. Larkin used words such as ‘browns and greys’ to portray the dull lives of proletariat. Larkin uses the contrast in between ‘browns and greys’ of weekday clothes and more glamorous colours such as ‘lemon, sapphire, moss green’ when they are dressing up at night. This show how advertising creates the false consciousness people can escape their dreary lives in the way you dress. This also shows how materialistic people are as they can only happy if they have nice clothes, this is called consumer culture. The structure of the poem is ABABA; this is a very monotone and boring structure to the poem to show how the people’s lives in the poem were like. The society that is created in this poem portray to me that materialistic things only matter because if you wear drab clothes, you must be of the lower class and if you wore nice clothes, you were considered higher in the social class. Also if you were poor and couldn’t afford clothes like that, then your life, like described in this poem, was boring and was wishing to be like the people who could afford it.

The characters in this poem are the people who are poor and the people who are rich, also the women and how they are described for example when it says ‘flounce in clusters’ this shows how people thought women were really dramatic that they ‘flounce’, this shows how people were stereotypical back in that day with saying how they think women act. The characters of the poor society were shown as people whose lives were very drab and boring as it says ‘who leave at dawn low terraced houses, timed for factory, yard and site.’ This shows that the poor people who work in places like factories and sites which aren’t great, have to leave their terraced houses at dawn so this shows that no matter how hard poor people are working, they still live in terraced houses and have to leave early. They wore drab clothes in the day for when they went to work because of where they worked and what they did, but then in the evening, they wore much brighter colours because that’s when they aren’t working and aren’t being labelled as being in the poor society and wearing much brighter and bolder colours shows how much they think that you can only live happily if you dress a certain way.

The key characters in this poem sort of do believe in the prevailing social order because they just get on with it and they don’t question it. They have to work at factories or sites and have to wake up at dawn and still leave their small terraced houses, and they have to wear such horrible clothes whilst wealthy people get to wear nice clothes, they think this how society is and that you if you wear designer clothes, people will look at you a different way and that’s what the lower class actually believe because in the night they would dress properly because then people would think more highly of them.  The author of this poem is Philip Larkin; the social status of him was that he was middle class as he lived in a middle class home so he wasn’t upper class or lower.

The characters in this poem who are the poor and the rich (the proletariat and the bourgeois) they are products of what society has created, the reason for this is because society is made them thinking like they need to wear this to show their status etc. Wearing drab and disgusting clothes made people look down on you and then treat you in a different way than how people would treat upper class people, this is called the class struggle, this shows how people would struggle to get to the higher class because they know their lives would be much different, this shows that the ideas that people had and then society followed.

The ideas presented about society can be used in a Marxist perspective, as this society is all based on hierarchy, this is the levels of how people are ranked and this is how people are laid out in this poem as the upper class would be at the top because they have the money and the power and then the lower class at the bottom because they don’t have much power and work for the upper class. There is also a materialist philosophy, this is that, you should have certain things to look a certain way and to be treated a certain way. Furthermore, other ideas are the proletariat and the bourgeois, this is the poor and the rich, and this is how they class you whilst living in that society.

To conclude, what this poem is trying to get across is that buying these materialistic things will define you in society as to whether you are wealthy or not and that wearing dull clothes represents your life, that you are living a dull life and if you are wearing bright, glamorous clothes, this shows you can pay more which shows that you are wealthy and then you should live a better life.

Komal Mahal