The Atlantic Monthly/Volume 94/Number 563/My Clothing
MY CLOTHES
BY WINIFRED KIRKLAND
In the dear, naughty Memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not inaptly named by the author the Journal of a Wicked Old Woman, you remember that scene in the pleasaunce at Château Vernot, where the turf was like fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes unarboreal, she liked to have her trees dressed, she said, “There is something indecent in great naked branches sprawling the good God knows where.” The little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory cane across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with her little old-ivory hands, while she scolds Aimée, as always. Aimée has just come through that brisk little encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems to have allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn. “Go dress yourself, baby,” cries Madame Great-Aunt. “Will you let your very laces whimper? Into your rose velvet brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts than they ’ve ever broken: the second, men’s; the first, women’s. Now you think you have a soul; when you are my age, you will know that women are not souls, but dresses. I look back; my history is the history of my gowns; undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are myself.” (A few lines above I used the
word “remember,” but merely for the sake of an effective start-off. Madame and her Memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am not the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am merely the first to confess it. To proceed.) It is not the first time that the little old de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is she true in this passage, or merely epigrammatic? If my history is the history of my clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as it were, the meditations of the pupa upon its successive integumenta. Yet the figure is infelicitous. In fact, the chrysalis image is not over pretty as regards this side of eternity: pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chestnut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with one’s self which makes life entertaining; there is nothing chat-worthy in a worm. Be it granted me to regard these accidental rags of lawn or wool or silk I find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands and feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital, not as a worm incarcerate, but with the detachment and uplift of the incipient butterfly.
Why not my philosophy of my clothes, the pronoun italicized, meaning not Teufelsdröckh's, but my own, both the clothes and the philosophy? Let me here and now make some effort toward system and definition, toward order out of chaos, in that long chapter in a woman’s story, my lady’s wardrobe. How far have these successive wrappings around and prankings out of diverse colors and tissues that are to my fellow passengers labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of what age, sex, nation, education, and caste I may be,—how far have these clothes of mine served for triumph or undoing in my spiritual history, the life-history of this “celestial amphibian,” myself?
The clothes of babyhood first. It is a strong-minded adult who does not grow sentimental in regarding the garments of his infancy,—those caps and bibs and socks reminding us of the wabbling heads, the aching gums, the simian feet, of the days when we, for all our present arrogance of maturity, were the sport of colic and nutritive experiment.
How explain the repugnance of the newly-born to clothing, the birth-wail that pleads for the sincerity of the nude, protests against the cloakings of con-vention? Strange paradox that the first emotion of the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink, squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we were popped into them; it is a merciful long while before we are old enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away inside, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego, with its eerie eyes.
Thus it is that when I first find myself in those early, misty recesses I see myself all dressed, dressed for company inspection; I am a little girl wearing a crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white muslin; I wear white stockings and Burt's shoes. I recognize, also, quite in the same way, as enveloping facts, without which I may not present myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate temper, and an imagination, that is what seeing people in void air and talking to them is called. Thus clad and ticketed, I go pattering along the pilgrimage.
How little clothes mattered then! All spun about with fairy films and the witchery of talking trees and singing winds, I did not remember my clothes. But at times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness. I well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand. My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye on them. The mitten episode marks a step in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson I have not yet found it safe to unlearn.
In those days there was a pleasant interest attached to the Burt’s shoes, not when new and shiny, but later, when they had become well worn. Some unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather toe. The hole being not yet so large or so alarming as the cobbler’s charges, a piece of black silk was adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole, and behold, only mother and I knew the difference.
Penury as such was not yet known to me. The consciousness of shabbiness had not yet frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was merely interesting, beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording meditation on the ingenuity of mothers.
Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my relations to my garments, until, at the age of six, I found myself—infelix! removed to a town possessing a bleak climate and many woolen manufactories. It was the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the piece direct from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander, and the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flannel was cut a garment, a continuous, all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every child in that town might have been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like after the morning bath. A pattern was given to our mother. The hair shirt—I laugh when I read! By definition the hair shirt must have possessed geographical limits of attack, but my flannels left no pore untickled, untortured; they heated the flesh until scarlet fever paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the milk of amiability within me forever. The rotation of the seasons reduced itself to terms of red flannel. In the autumn, when the happy fowls and foliage alike moulted, shed the superfluous, when bracing October set the body in a glow, I alone of living things must be done up in flannel! And more,—did you ever try to draw on your stocking smoothly over a red flannel tumor at the ankle, and then attempt to button over the whole the shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing at all? Did you ever tear off shoe and stocking, and, dancing red-legged and barefooted, cry out in frenzy that you would eschew breakfast and school, aliment and enlightenment, but never, never, never again would you wear footgear? Thus autumn. And spring, that season of vernal bourgeoning, was the time when I, too, like any other seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy incasings, and could sprout and spring in air and sun, clad in blessed, blessed muslin. I shall never forget the corroding bitterness induced by flannels. At times they absolutely reduced me to fisticuffs with my religion, so that filial piety, the ordaining of the seasons, and the very catechism itself, hung in the balance of the conflict. I believe I can hardly over-estimate the spiritual detriment done me by my flannels.
One incident of this, my first decade, I recall with mingled respect and envy:—
“It is not now as it hath been of yore.”
“Choose,” commanded my mother, “will you have a new dress this winter or St. Nicholas for next year?” I was stung at the implication that for such as me there could have been a doubt of the choice. St. Nicholas, of course! A magazine doth not wax old as doth a garment, and besides, is not reading more than raiment? Alas for the high intellectuality of eight years old! If the choice lay now between the dress and the book, would I hug the volume and walk among my fellows gladly shabby? I would not.
About at this same period we were visited by a family of strange little girls. There were three of them; they stayed three days, they changed their dresses three times a day, and they never wore the same dress twice. We regarded them as we might have regarded the fauna of Mars,—they were an utterly new thing. It was wonder at first, then pity, then wonder again, for we found that they liked it! Being little human animals even as we, they would rather be tricked out in fresh frocks than play tag! What were we going to wear that evening, they asked. Why, how in the world should we know? Something clean, of course. Our visitors’ bits of frocks were embroidered, beribboned, bevelveted in a manner simply incomprehensible. What in the world happened when they got dirty? That visit filled me with prophetic misgivings; some day I should have to wear stuff goods. In-a vision I saw the great gulf that separates the grown-up who cannot be put through the wash-tub from the child who can. Horror of the unwashable! “Shades of the prison-house,”—Oh, no!
Just here the retrospect reaches the place where the road turned; I do not say, forked, for it was not a question of alternatives; I was a woman-child, and I had to keep on in the only way. Hitherto my clothes had been as much or as little myself as the down of the chick, or the fur of the rabbit. Providence and my parents had provided my apparel without the faintest solicitude on my part, leaving me free to attend to my body and soul. This could not long endure. It is the era of Mother Hubbards that bridges together the old time and the new. The Mother Hubbard was so noteworthy, so startling, in fact, after the trimness to which we were accustomed, this
“Robe ungirt from clasp to hem.”
It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation like the pictures in the mythology. I first admired, then coveted, then teased my mother into making me one. It was finished just after dinner, and though it was yet early for dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon the street, which, to my disappointment, was empty of children. There I strutted, and swelled, and waited for the others to come and see, and was exalted, not recognizing the first shackles of my slavery. Now, first, I become acquainted with Fashion; now, first, I regard other people’s clothes as the most important factor in the production of my own. Too truly it is the close of the first chapter, the end of innocence, the end of joy, the end of sexlessness. I am irrevocably a woman: imitation and emulation are henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume. Now, first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and then I look a little higher to see that face and that mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what colors best suit them. I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they tell me, and I wonder what external clothes and conduct are most becoming to those eyes and to that inner meshed personality they reveal. What is becoming! The word is epitome of all that the grown-up is and the child is not.
The period of my teens was the period when my wardrobe was continually in abeyance upon the higher claims of my education. It was not possible simultaneously to beautify my brain and my body. I acquiesced in the circumstance, for the most part, with occasional fits of passionate revolt, and more or less constant misanthropy. I blush to recall that at one time the light which was in me turned to darkness for a year or more, and all on account of my clothes. I found myself at a great city school, I a shy little country waif, most curiously clad. I looked at the clothes of my compeers, and I locked my lips and my heart against all converse with my fellows, and I walked to the top of my classes in a desolation of spirit that was tragic. I would have exchanged my monthly reports with those of my most addle-pated classmate if I could have had her clothes. Never since have I approached the intellectual achievement of fourteen; but the shabbiness of my motives was greater than that of my costume. The effect was not wholly evil, but I here confess that I never should have learned Latin rules if I had been prettily dressed. I wanted to show those stylish misses that there was no backwoods brain under my backwoods hat—that was all! I attributed to others a snobbishness wholly my own, and for that once clothes came perilously near costing me all human joy in human friendship. If my wardrobe had never bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,—and incidentally have furnished meteoric display for a dozen universities. My clothes improved; I am not friendless, but dull and illiterate, and all through the shaping destiny of dress.
This paragraph in my history yields me this much of philosophy as regards the influence of clothes on the social relations. My dress, so long as it be not conspicuous for disorder, disruption, or display, has much less effect on others than on myself. But as for myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained of fate that I be forever subdued to what I wear, I shall never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed, be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the level gaze of conscious equality which alone gains friendship. No woman was ever so proud as not to cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so happy as not to be made unhappy by her clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to the breezes,—there is no exaltation like that of knowing one’s costume stylish, becoming, and, if possible, expensive. Only by recognizing our limitations may we women successfully cope with them; one’s own respect is surest guarantee of other people’s; for women self-respect is soonest secured by clothes: therefore, O women, dress!
I have digressed from the contemplation of my girlhood, but I have not exhausted that time, for I have not touched upon second-hand clothes or long dresses. As a girl I was perpetually made over. I came to regard fresh material as something almost sacrilegious. Of all gift-horses, clothes are the most difficult not to criticise, and especially old clothes. My prosperous cousins did not possess my complexion, my tastes, or my figure, and yet I inevitably succeeded to their clothes, so that I came to watch their expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were severely strained by “a lively sense of favors yet to come.” In such circumstances it is well to have in the family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all in one, for only such a combination of inspiration and devotion could have kept my head up in those days when I was always second-hand.
To be honest, am I anything else now? What else is it to be fashionable? With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other people’s clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker’s brain, but what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn. What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman? Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,—dear me, how second-hand we women are!
The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman’s life when dress becomes an ecstasy—as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but the working of natural laws; in the spring do not the very trees prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming? Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my cheeks,—Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at last,—it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen’s. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. ‘The princess is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor—“I am all dressed for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!”
But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way. The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world, so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end.
What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keep-ing our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air,—what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who wears uniform; that it is otherwise with human beings is due, I suppose, to some freakish bit of chivalry on the part of the autocrat Evolution, the ring-master who puts the entire menagerie through their tricks. No, I would not be a fowl; let me not repine; let me at this business of dressing, pluckily.
Women are nobler than men; it is because we are purified in the fires of more severe temptation. Man does not encounter the demoralizing influence of the dressmaker, that creature with mouth of pins and suave words. To what degrading subterfuge are we not reduced to get our own way with the dressmaker, seeing with what delight and dexterity she lifts her spurning foot against our desires! Do we presume to know what we want to wear?—alternately she sporteth and scorneth—and yet we lift not against her her proper scissors. She practices dark arts; she runs an hypnotic finger along the seam, and the wrinkle is no more seen—until the dress comes home. Lies are about her head. Her promises are vanity, and her bills elastic as a fluted flounce. Counter-mendacity alone can move her; the gown must be sent home, for we attend a wedding in twenty minutes; even now the caterer “hath paced into the hall;” or we leave for California in an hour, and even now our sleeper paws the track. By the ways of unrighteousness alone may we be clothed, and yet so signal is female virtue that after centuries of dressmakers we are still unscathed in our integrity, and are still the church-goers of the species.
There is something stirring to contemplate in woman’s devotion to dress,—to see how we lay down health and comfort, and clamber up and frizzle for a lifetime on the altar of the esthetic. That is what our dressing is to us,—an art and an aspiration. If our sex doffed its radiance, and did on “blacks,” what loss to popular culture! What of the universal hunger for color and form if so many curiosities of craft, so many animated works of art no longer whisked about the streets of the world?
For another reason, also, we are preoccupied of our costume,—our invincible frankness; for we would have our clothes the expression of our souls. With what fondness we cling to the frock that suits us! Such a bundle of subtleties is woman that words are too gross—a black coat and trousers an insincerity—for the hundred shades of shifting color and form that we are inside. Though it take half our life, let us be true to our clothes, our clothes to us; let the dress be the lady, and the lady a symphony of soul and silk.
Verily, “my soul on its lone way” has traveled far from the days of babyhood, kicking against all wrappings, to the days of womanhood, when personality exists not, separate from frocks and hats and gloves and shoes, and both the inner layer of individuality and the outer layer of costume have become cosy and comfortable, so that by no means do I wish to lay them aside.
What next? Some day I shall be given into the hands of those who
“fashion the birth-robes for them
Who are just born, being dead.”
Shall I be again enfolded in garments all ready for me, of skyey tissues and opalescent tints? Shall I squirm and struggle again, and again be slowly subdued to the clothing and conventions of another world?
Or when I pop up the lid of this uphol-stered bone-box, my body, shall my soul be then and there set free,—escaped, volatile, elemental, as wind or moonshine, having cast from it—one by one as a garment—age, sex, race, creed, and culture? But what if in this off-shedding I strip from me my personality, myself? This involuted wrapping in which I am duly done up and ticketed and passed about among my acquaintance, what if to rend this were to leave me in the shivering nakedness of the impersonal?