Every once in a while, a piece of clothing jumps out of one culture and into another. I spent three months in Thailand in 1975 as a student, and I vividly remember seeing a gang of motorcycle toughs roaring through the streets of Chiang Mai in the rain, wearing shower caps. Several of those caps were decorated with flowers and other beacons of feminine adornment. I was amazed, but nobody else was. My cultural associations didn’t apply. The shower cap had been born again somewhere else with a totally different signification.
While it is true that certain individuals are fixed on an idea that rigidly determines them — whether it be “1 do not care about clothes at all” or “I am a sex goddess”—most of us have or have had over time many different dreams. I own a black dress that reminds me of Audrey Hepburn. I do not suffer from the delusion that I look like Audrey Hepburn in that dress, but her exquisite form wrapped in Givenchy has bewitched it nevertheless, and her magic is part of my pleasure in wearing it. Movies and books are strong drugs to clothes lovers. Katharine Hepburn striding along in trousers, Lana Turner in a towel, Claudette Colbert in a man’s pajama top, Marilyn Monroe in anything. Tolstoy lavished his attention on the details of women’s clothes and bodies, on Natasha at her first ball and Ellen’s white shoulders above her low-cut gown. Jane Eyre’s plain dress is a tonic against the frippery of the silly females who visit Rochester. And all these images are taken from moments in larger stories that captivate us, stories about people who are living out their lives and their romantic entanglements, both comic and tragic.
My daughter dresses up. She is a rich woman, then a poor one, starving in the streets. She is an old peasant woman selling apples. She is on the phone saying, “Let’s have lunch,” in an English accent. She sashays down the stairs snapping her gum and practicing her Brooklyn voice. She is wearing my shoes and singing “Adelaide’s Lament.” She is always somebody else. My husband says I have two personas at least, the stooped four-eyed scholar and the elegant lady. One lives more at home. The other goes out. Thinking collapses my body, and 1 forget what I look like anyway. In a good dress, I stand up straight and never slump. I live up to the dress I know I am wearing even though 1 do not see myself wearing it. Others see me more often than I see myself. My family knows what I look like better than I do. I offer the mirror a placid face like an inanimate statue, and from time to time that frozen image may frighten me. But I also laugh a lot and smile. I wrinkle my face in concern, and I wave my hands when I talk, and this I never see.
In the end, wearing clothes is an act of the imagination, an invention of self, a fiction. Several years ago, I was sitting in the Carlyle Hotel with my husband having a drink. I was wearing a beautiful dress. I remember that he looked across the table at me with pleasure and said, “When you were a little girl growing up in the sticks of Minnesota, did you ever imagine you would be sitting in this elegant hotel wearing that extraordinary dress?”
And I said, “Yes.” Because of course, I did.
1996
Being a Man
IN MY WAKING LIFE I’M A WOMAN, BUT SOMETIMES IN MY dreams I’m a man. My masculinity is rarely a question of simple anatomy. I don’t discover that I’ve sprouted a penis and am growing a beard, but rather I realize that I’m a man in the same moment I am troubled by the vague memory that I was once a woman. My sex becomes important in the dream only when it’s called into doubt. It is doubt, not certainty, that produces first the question of my sexual identity and second the need to be one thing or the other, man or woman. Although it is now fashionable to dismiss dreams as meaningless neurological chatter, I’ve discovered too much in my own sleep to believe that. It is obvious that my dreams of manliness, which turn on a moment of confusion, illuminate recesses of my own muddled psyche, but I also think they can be used as a key to understanding the larger cultural terrain where the boundary between femininity and masculinity is articulated.
Most of us accept the biological realities of our sex and live with them more or less comfortably, but there are times when the body feels like a limitation. For a woman it may come when she hears a note of condescension in a man’s voice and she must confront the fact that it isn’t what she has said that has produced this tone; it’s her sex. Of course, such a moment isn’t easy to analyze because every social encounter is laden with the unsaid and the unseen. Two people inevitably create a third realm between them in which sex is only one of the myriad forces at work, and yet, like envy, resentment, class snobbery, or racism, sexual prejudice can be detected like an odor in the room, and if the smell gets too strong, it prompts a fantasy of escape: What would he have said if he had seen me as a man? I’m sure that my dreams of maleness are at least partly about escaping the cultural expectations that burden femininity, but I also think they are something more complex, that the dreams recognize a truth that there is a man in me as well as a woman and that this duality is in fact part of being human, but not one that is always easy to reconcile.
In my dreams, my real body doesn’t restrain me. I fly and have powers of telekinesis. I’ve grown fur, suffered gaping wounds, lost my teeth, and shed enough blood to drown in. When I write fiction, I also leave my real body behind and become someone else, another woman or a man if I wish. For me, making art has always been a kind of conscious dreaming. The material for a story comes not from what I know but from what I don’t know, from impulses and images that often seem to happen without my directives, a strange process altogether and one that is put in play when I become another person in my work. And yet the act of writing consists of one thing only — putting words on a page to be read by someone else. In the end, the words are everything and, strictly speaking, they are sexless. In English, unlike many other languages, our nouns don’t even have gender, but it’s interesting to ask whether a text can be male or female and what would make it one or the other.
Every parent and anyone who’s spent time with young children knows that sexual identity takes a while to fix itself and that toddlers rarely know if they are boys or girls. When my daughter was three, she asked my husband whether she would get a penis when she grew up. She posed this question during a period in her life I call the tutu-party-shoe phase, an era of glitter and gold, rhinestone tiaras and plastic high heels. While the little boys were puffing out their chests and playing superheroes, my daughter was tripping around the house like a mad, rather smudged version of Titania. At the same age, the daughter of a friend of mine donned a platinum Marilyn Monroe wig and refused to take it off. She ate, played, went to the park, the toilet, and bed under the increasingly ratty white peruke, which, according to her mother, made her look more like Rumplestiltskin than a blond bombshell. However comic they may look to adults, children play hard at finding out what they are — boys or girls — and they live the difference through an often furious imaginary drama of sex roles. Despite the optimism of some researchers, where biology ends and culture begins is probably a question beyond science. Even infants, whose borderless existence makes the question of sexual identity seem absurd from the inside, have been born into a world in which the boy/girl question is crucial from the outside, is the first question asked after birth: “Is it a boy or a girl?” In other words, before they know, we know. And what we know is part of a vast symbolic landscape in which the lines are drawn between one thing and another in the linguistic act of naming. Once children feel sure of themselves as either boys or girls, the Zorro capes, Superman outfits, crowns, and princess costumes are replaced by more androgynous clothing. The external trappings of femininity and masculinity can be discarded at the moment the knowledge of sexual identity becomes internal, and part of that inner certainty happens in language. A six-year-old can usually state with confidence that he or she is a boy or girl, will grow up to be a man or a woman, and, barring an operation, will not change sex along the way. At the same time, the wider meanings of femininity and masculinity are far more ambiguous. Male and female are words that carry associations so dense, so old, so public, but also so private, that drawing a clear line between the two is riddled with difficulty. It must be said, however, that the categories male and female are very much alive in the language and are laden with our own deep cultural and personal histories that continue to evolve and change and that it is wildly naïve to suppose that dropping chairman for chairperson, for example, will purge language of its sexual connotations.