The Elastic Illusion of Wealth: On Gender, Power, and the Stories We Tell Ourselve

By Seraphina Delacroix

There is a quiet, almost invisible cruelty in the way society scripts our inner narratives about wealth. A poor man—so the story goes—accepts he is poor. Not happily, not without a fight, but with a kind of existential resignation, a metaphysical shrug. His poverty is presented to him as an ontological category: you are what you have, and you do not have much. A rich woman, by contrast, rarely imagines herself as poor even when every practical indicator points toward some form of deficit—emotional, relational, or existential. She simply believes she has chosen the wrong man.

It is an elegantly destructive idea, one that says more about the architecture of desire than about money itself. The poor man internalizes scarcity; the rich woman redirects it. The poor man’s lack becomes his identity; the rich woman’s lack becomes someone else’s fault. These are not moral differences but narrative ones. They reveal how profoundly class is gendered even before a word is spoken.

The poor man’s resignation is not naïveté; it is the rational conclusion of a lifetime of being told the world is fixed. His poverty is woven into the universe like gravity. To dream, for him, is to trespass. His aspirations are treated as charming at best and delusional at worst. And so he accepts the story assigned to him: You are poor, and that is that.

The rich woman, however, is taught a different grammar of possibility. Wealth—material or symbolic—is portrayed as a natural extension of her femininity, her charm, her birthright to be adorned. If something in her life is misaligned, it must be a flaw in the constellation around her, not in her own celestial body. The wrong man, the wrong partner, the wrong admirer: these become placeholders for a cosmic mistake.

This does not make her foolish. It makes her dangerous. A woman who believes she is owed a better life is a woman who is difficult to contain. She mobilizes dissatisfaction as fuel; her discontent becomes propulsion. The poor man’s despair paralyzes him, but the rich woman’s indignation animates her.

And yet, both are trapped in illusions. The poor man’s is the illusion of immovability: the belief that one cannot become anything other than what one already is. The rich woman’s is the illusion of exchangeability: that fulfillment is merely a matter of pairing oneself with the correct partner, like a piece of jewelry needing the right wrist. In both cases, autonomy is outsourced—either to fate or to romance.

What is perhaps most striking is how these narratives collide in the cultural imagination. The poor man who accepts his station is rarely pitied; he is expected. The rich woman who refuses to accept hers is chastised: greedy, fickle, spoiled. And yet who among us has not blamed another person for the part of our life we find intolerable? Who has not, in a moment of private honesty, sensed the gravitational pull of both stories—resignation and displacement—dueling inside?

To interrogate these narratives is not to moralize them but to recognize their power. The poor man and the rich woman are not archetypes of individuals but archetypes of belief. They reveal the mythologies we inherit about what can be changed and what must be endured.

Perhaps the truth, unromantic as it is, is that both have misread their circumstances. The poor man is not condemned to poverty, but he has been taught to accept it; the rich woman is not destined for abundance, but she has been taught to expect it. Both are held captive by inherited scripts. And it is only when we examine the stories we tell ourselves—quietly, privately, at the level of assumption—that we begin to see the architecture of our own desires.

About the Author

Seraphina Delacroix is a Paris-born cultural theorist and essayist whose work explores the mythologies of gender, class, and desire. Known for her incisive, baroque prose and unapologetically cerebral tone, Delacroix examines the psychological undercurrents of modern identity. Her essays have appeared in Lemniscate Review, The Aesthete Journal, and Europa Quarterly.