SOURCE: Seidel, Kathryn Lee. “Madonna of the Marketplace: Art and Economics in Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza.” Southern Quarterly 35, no. 2 (winter 1997): 16-22.

In the following essay, Seidel offers a feminist and capitalist interpretation of The Light in the Piazza.

In Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza (1960) Margaret Johnson must decide whether to tell the Nacarelli family that her twenty-six-year-old daughter Clara has the mental age of a ten-year-old. The novella begins conventionally, with Margaret, a matron from Winston-Salem, playing well the role of a 1950s wife. Devoted to her daughter, she agonizes over the unraveling of her marriage because of the issue of what to do with Clara. Her husband, a tobacco executive, is a businessman whose credo is the bottom line. In Florence on a holiday, Margaret and Clara meet Fabrizio, the son of an old Florentine family, and romance blooms in the Florentine...