Fashion may be self-expression, but it can also
be disguise. While the prosaic word “clothes” denotes
utilitarian garments to warm and protect the naked body, “fashion” connotes
costume, adornment, and a different kind of protection. Women
learn early that, in part, to dress well means to disguise superficial
flaws – the protruding stomach or fleshy thighs. Fashion
also pertains to hair color, hairstyle, and other similar concerns.
In literature, fashion has often been used to symbolize the material
while the casting off of such trappings symbolizes the reconstruction
of an authentic identity. Both Doris Lessing’s The
Summer Before the Dark and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow present middle-aged female protagonists who
have used fashion to create false identities that transcend social
barriers of
age, class, and race. The very fact that one writer is Caucasian
and British while the other is African American attests to the
widespread nature of these concerns. Lessing’s
Kate Brown enlists the aid of dress and hair color to pass for
a younger
woman,
while
Marshall’s Avey Johnson uses clothes not only to gain acceptance
in white society but also to attain upper middle class status.
In passing for what they are not, however, both characters become
trapped in what Simone de Beauvoir has termed the “elegance
of bondage” (Wilson 125).
Near the end of The Summer Before the Dark in a section entitled “Maureen’s
Flat,” Kate Brown – the forty-five year old wife
of a successful neurologist and mother of four – stops
in front of a mirror in a young woman’s apartment where
she’s renting a room:
She saw a thin monkey of a woman inside a “good” yellow dress, her
hair tied into a lump behind her head….She noted that she was in the grip
of
a need to do something for herself – get her hair done, buy a dress that
fitted; this was because of the girl with her healthy young flesh, and her fresh
clothes. She noted, too, that this impulse had something to do with her own daughter:
Maureen was about Eileen’s age. (Lessing 166-67)
As she continues to gaze at herself in the full length mirror, Kate’s realization
that she needs to do something with herself encapsulates the main conflict of
the novel: “She saw that the moment of returning to her own family was
going to be a dramatic one, whether by that time she had pulled herself together – in
other words, returned to their conception of her – or had decided not to” 167).
As
Jennifer Craik suggests in her book, The Face of Fashion,
fashion is a language or set of codes used not only to perform
social intercourse (9) but to “fabricate
our selves” (16). This “language” is precisely how Kate Brown
has created her middle class, suburban image to fit her roles as the comely middle-aged
wife of a successful doctor and mother of four grown children. Although by her
own admission she would prefer to go barefoot, dress in a sari, and wear her
hair straight and long, when we first meet Kate she is, instead, attired in a
white dress and pink scarf with matching white shoes with coiffed, wavy red hair.
It is against this stylish image that Kate ponders the choice of returning to
her family looking as she did then or looking as she does before the mirror – thinner,
older, and with hair no longer dyed and styled but unruly and bisected by a widening
streak of gray. The decision, spurred by the onset of middle age and the ensuing
inevitable comparison with a younger generation of women such as Maureen and
her daughter, Eileen, is no slight sartorial matter. For what is at stake is
Kate’s identity and authenticity.
Elizabeth Wilson points out in Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity that
appearance became entwined with identity in the nineteenth century (123) so that
in fashioning dress identity could also be formed: “It is this shift from
clothing as part of a social project to clothing as part of an identity that
really launches it into its most ‘modern’ manifestations” (218).
With this shift, however, to the “idea of the Self as a Work of Art” (123),
came the criticism that what was created was a false self as expressed by Simone
de Beauvoir in The Second Sex:
The least sophisticated of women, once she is “dressed,” does not
present herself to observation; she is, like the picture or statue, or the actor
on the stage, an agent through which is suggested someone not there – that
is, the character she represents, but is not. It is this identification with
something unreal, fixed, perfect…that gratifies her…. (125)
This perfect image of the successful doctor’s wife and mother has ostensibly
gratified Kate Brown – that is until this unsettling summer when she has
been left alone by her husband and grown children for the first time in twenty-five
years only to become acutely aware of impending age and the waning of her sexual
allure.
After two attempts to distract herself from this awareness, first through a summer
job as a translator and then through a brief affair with a younger man in Spain,
Kate suffers an illness that foregrounds her spiritual crisis. This crisis is
set in even higher relief when she returns to England and rents a flat from a
young woman named Maureen, who serves as a foil to show Kate’s lost youth
and lost sense of self. It is in this emotional miasma that Kate finds herself
as she studies her reflection in the mirror, wondering whether she should dye
her hair and buy a dress that fits before returning home to her family or stay
as she is now, no longer caring about her style and image. Kate finally resolves
her dilemma when she returns home on her own terms, her newly authentic identity
made manifest in her refusal to dye her hair: “The clothes, hair style,
manners, posture, voice of Mrs. Brown…had been a reproduction the slightest
deviation from which had caused her…much discomfort….But now she
was saying no: no, no, no, NO: a statement which would be concentrated into her
hair” (Lessing 244).
Kate Brown’s conflict between becoming her authentic self or returning
to her conventional role at the end of the summer is one that is revisited a
decade later and complicated by issues of race and class in Praisesong for
the Widow. Kate struggled against societal mandates that equate female
power
with youth, beauty, and the ability to attract the male gaze. The sixty-four
year
old widow, Avatara Johnson, has made peace with middle age. But Marshall’s
African American protagonist must contend with societal norms that seek to inscribe
the culture with dominant white values that include upward mobility. Greatly
influenced by these values, Avey and Jay, her husband, struggled for over twenty
years to leave their five-floor, walkup apartment in Brooklyn on Halsey Street
and purchase a home in the suburb of North White Plains. The only problem is
that in forging a new middle class identity to fit in with their white neighbors,
they lose both their roots and themselves in a Faustian bargain to gain status.
It is only after Jerome’s death, the stern workaholic who came to replace
Jay, that Avey embarks on a cruise that turns out to be a journey towards her
true identity. Connecting with her roots on the Caribbean island of Carriacou,
she can finally, like her African ancestors the Ibos, walk away from her enslavement
to money and possessions and reclaim her name, “Avatara,” and therefore
herself.
When we first meet Avey on the luxurious liner, the Bianca Pride, the struggle
has just begun against her Western capitalistic values as she packs in the middle
of the night, feeling the bewildering need to abandon ship mid-cruise after a
disorienting dream about her great-aunt Cuney. The excess she has been straining
under for years is symbolized by the “marathon packing” of six suitcases,
a shoe caddy, and a hatbox. “But why six, Mother? Why would anyone in their
right mind need to take this much stuff just to go away for a couple of weeks,” Marion,
Avey’s youngest child, had asked when she drove her mother to the pier
on her first cruise, three years earlier (Marshall 13). By the time morning dawns
and the necessity of facing her two cabin mates arises, Avey Johnson has controlled
her panic and confusion and reassembled her image as a staid, respectable upper
middle-class widow in her “dressy two-piece ensemble,” “conservative
pumps,” and “mesh summer gloves with a single crystal button at the
wrist” (20).
While her cabin mates think that Avey has “lost her mind” (24) to
forfeit the fifteen hundred dollars she paid for the cruise only to incur more
expense by flying home, ironically, Avey is just beginning to repossess her mind
and soul. The dream Avey experienced on board, in which she and her great-aunt
Cuney had a tug of war, recalls for Avey the values she grew up with when staying
every summer on Tatem Island on the South Carolina Tidewater. It was from her
great-aunt that she learned of her African ancestors, the Ibos, who were brought
to South Carolina as slaves, took one look into the future, then turned around,
and walked on water all the way back to Africa.
In Avey’s dream, her great-aunt Cuney once more wants Avey to walk with
her through the rugged terrain to the spot known as the Landing from where the
Ibos departed. But Avey is hampered by her clothes in her dream as she is when
we first meet her trying to leave ship burdened with six suitcases to be repacked:
Did she really expect her to go walking over to the Landing dressed as she was?
In the new spring suit she had just put on to wear to the annual luncheon at
the Statler given by Jerome Johnson’s lodge?…With her
hat and gloves on? And her fur stole draped over her arm? Avey Johnson could
have laughed, the idea was so ridiculous. (Marshall 40)
Her great-aunt Cuney, who named Avey “Avatara” after her own grandmother
and charged her with a mission Avey only vaguely understood, does not give up
in the dream, though, as the two grapple in a prolonged tug of war. It is no
surprise that the strongly rooted older woman wins, wresting Avey’s fur
stole from her arm, the symbol of her class status and success. As I quoted earlier
from Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the “dressed” woman is “an
agent through which is suggested someone not there – that is, the character
she represents, but is not” (125). In this sense, the false self that Avey
has created is as disembodied by her grounded, authentic self as the fur stole
is by a once vigorously living animal. It is precisely this eviscerated perfect
image of the upper class matron, this “Marion Anderson poise and reserve” that
had gratified Avey Johnson and assured her that “she would never be sent
to eat in the kitchen when company came!” This striving for middle class
respectability is only reinforced by other aspiring African Americans. When she
recounts to her doctor the disturbing fact that she often no longer recognizes
herself in a mirror, all he can do is laugh and respond, “a sure sign…of
money in the bank” (49).
Because Avey has felt that her clothes and money protect her from the social
slights suffered by many African Americans in a racist culture, only after she
leaves the Bianca (White) Pride can she summon the courage to confront her past.
Finally in a hotel room on the island of Grenada waiting for a plane to New York
the next day, she imagines how Jerome would have sided with her cabin mates,
castigating her loss of fifteen hundred dollars and warning her that she “must
want to wind up back where we started” (88). Yet, it is Jerome who has
ultimately paid the price according to critic, Paulette Brown-Hinds, “Jerome
Johnson’s western/class based desire to achieve material wealth and success
is not without consequence. As their life grows materially, it becomes void spiritually” (111).
But Jay wasn’t the only one who lost himself as Avey dimly grasps when
she comes to terms with her husband’s death for the first time in her hotel
room. In an outpouring of grief frequently punctuated by the expression, “Too
much!” (Marshall 138), Avey laments “both the too much which the
couple had lost and also the too much which they had acquired, and which smothered
them” (Rogers 6). This awakening of Avey’s is once again symbolized
by her clothes – “the trappings of her middle-class excesses” (Lederer
71):
Avey Johnson shucked the gloves off her hands with such violence the fingers
turned inside out. The hat slanted to one side on her head found itself being
hurled into the nether darkness of a corner. The plush carpeting failed to completely
muffle the thud of the shoes she flung down one after the other. With the last
of her strength she reached under her dress and, fumbling, unhooked the long-line
girdle. (Her hair shirt Marion insisted on calling it.) That was all she could
manage before collapsing onto the bed.
“Too much! Too much! Too much!” Raging as she slept. (Marshall 144-45)
This is but the start of a purging of excess that is completed in the second
half of the novel. Leaving her mainly white, exclusive tourist hotel the next
morning to walk along the beach, Avey wears flats, a crumpled linen shirtdress
and foregoes perfectly coiffed hair, make-up, and even her watch. It is “stripped
of her middle-class, fashionably-attired façade” (Wells 50) that
Avey, since leaving the Bianca Pride, can become vulnerable enough to pour out
her painful story to the rum shop keeper, Lebert Joseph, in whose hut she finds
shelter from the searing heat. Like great-aunt Cuney, Lebert Joseph is grounded
by ancestral links unlike Avey who when asked by Lebert who her ancestors are
is unable to answer. In listening to her story, Lebert diagnoses Avey’s
soul sickness and alienation and convinces her to accompany him and the other
islanders to the smaller island of Carricou to take part in the Big Drum or Nation
Dance where the elderly pay homage to their tribal ancestors.
On this final leg of her journey, Avey completes the purgation begun in her hotel
room with the flinging off of her restrictive, class conscious clothes. Unlike
the six suitcases she packed for her cruise, Avey boards the small schooner for
Carricou with only her smallest suitcase carrying necessities. Becoming violently
seasick, she vomits repeatedly, symbolizing the cleansing of years of excess.
Immediately preceding this violent purging, Avey’s mind had gone back to
a childhood memory of a pastor preaching an Easter Sunday sermon in which Judas
was decried for betraying Jesus for mere money, and the congregation was upbraided
for “the shameful stone of false values, of gimme gimme gimme and more
more more…” (Marshall 201). Like Judas, Avey and Jerome betrayed
each other for the money that would allow them to pass as upper middle-class
in a white world. But they also betrayed themselves.
It is for this betrayal of her ancestors, her husband, and herself that Avey
must make amends in the final section of the novel when she joins in the dance,
the Carricou Tramp, and finally reconnects to her ancestral roots. Through the
intense cleansing of middle-class self-indulgence made visible in not only her
seasickness but the shedding of five suitcases stuffed with clothes, Avey is
reborn and unshackles herself from the false identity which had fettered her
as strongly as the chains of her ancestors during the middle passage. Feeling
alive again as she dances, “moving suddenly with a vigor and passion she
hadn’t felt in years” (249), Avey decides to sell her affluent but
empty home in North White Plains to recreate her life around a new set of values.
Vowing to bring her grandchildren to the Landing every summer in Tatum and to
tell them – and all who will listen – the story of the Ibos, Avey
finally embraces the mission her great-aunt had entrusted to her and reclaims
her true name, Avatara.
By the end of each novel, both Kate Brown and Avatara Johnson refuse to pass
for mere chimeras of themselves. Kate’s choice to no longer dye her hair
and dress in such a way as to please her family also extends to men in general.
After having returned to England to stay in Maureen’s flat, Kate experiments
with her power to attract the male gaze after being angered by her invisibility
as she passes a group of construction workers. She deliberately sheds her jacket
to reveal a form fitting sheath and elicits whistles and catcalls when she passes
a second time. Kate chooses, however, to let herself go in an act of defiance
of cultural norms that mandate women’s attractiveness to men by passing
as younger versions of themselves. Avey also eschews passing as an upper middle
class matron by casting off the shackles of a false identity costumed in costly
dress that gained her entry into a wealthy, white world. Using fashion to buy
social class had only deadened her spirit like her thighs that “had grown
thick and inert from years of the long-line girdle” (Marshall 223).
Both women, then, make choices about their lives that come to be reflected in
their appearance. In casting off what de Beauvoir called the “bondage of
elegance” (Wilson 125), Kate Brown and Avatara Johnson discard disguise
in favor of the authentic, the natural, the real. In the quintessential ironic
twist, the very trappings they had used to transcend barriers of age, class,
and race actually bound them, yet, once those trappings are stripped away, Kate
and Avatara overcome societal expectations to find their true selves, the ultimate
transcendence.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage, 1952.
Brown-Hinds, Paulette. “In the Spirit: Dance as Healing Ritual in Paule
Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Religion and Literature 27
(1995): 107-17.
Craik, Jennifer. The Face of Fashion. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Lederer, Mary. “The Passage Back: Cultural Appropriation and Incorporation
in
Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Ufahamu: Journal of the
African
Activist Association 21 (1993): 66-79.
Lessing, Doris. The Summer Before the Dark. New York: Vintage, 1973.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1983.
Rogers, Susan. “Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow.” African American Review 34 (2000): 77-94.
Wells, Linda. “’What Shall I Give My Children?’ The Role of
Mentor in Gloria
Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow.” Explorations in Ethnic Studies: The Journal of the National
Association for Ethnic Studies 13 (1990): 41-57.
Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2003.