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-
