The game of dress up: male novelists/female characters

Angela Carter once wrote that she read novels when growing up for, among other things, insights into being a woman. She read the English writers of the period – a period when Leavis’s “Great Tradition” – and naturally she read D.H. Lawrence – the Leavisite candidate for the truly great English writer (Virginia Woolf being bashed for snobbishness and Joyce for being not sound). As Carter writes, “I smelled a rat in D.H. Lawrence pretty damn quick.”

This does not mean she dismissed Lawrence as an artist. But he was the kind of novelist she wanted to pit herself against, moving aside that stone on the English novel – up to and including my quasi Christian metaphor of the stone being moved aside, the kind of resurrectionary theme Lawrence was all about.

One of her insights into Lawrence involves, well, the same problems that I think about when writing fiction with female characters. 

It has to do with dress-up.

If you read Raymond Chandler, you will notice that, for all of Marlowe’s tough guy gestures, he has the heart of a clothier, a Hollywood costumer. Take this from The High Window:

‘She was wearing a brownish linen  coat and skirt, a broadbrimmed straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag.”

Her linen envelope bag! The fetishizing aura overflows – as auras tend to – when we reach that fashion accoutred bag. Freud isn’t in it, brother.  How many of us know what an envelope bag even is? On the other hand, Marlowe is a product of Hollywood, no bones about it, so that we read these heroic descriptions without wondering too much about this information, as why does Marlowe even know about an envelope bag?

Lawrence, as Carter notices, is also indefatigably fussy about women’s clothing. For all that he was after an encounter with the dark gods buried in Etruscan vases, he was always going on about what his women were wearing. Carter has some great remarks about Women in Love, his “most exuberantly clothed novel” which  “furthermore, is supposed to be an exegesis on my sex,

trusting, not the teller but the tale, to show to what extent D. H. Lawrence personated women

through simple externalities of dress; by doing so, managed to pull off one of the greatest con

tricks in the history of modern fiction; and revealed a more than womanly, indeed, pathologically

fetishistic, obsession with female apparel. Woman in Love is as full of clothes as Brown's, and

clothes of the same kind. D. H. Lawrence catalogues his heroine's wardrobes with the loving care

of a ladies' maid. It is not a simple case of needing to convince the reader the book has been

written by a woman; that is far from his intention. It is a device by which D. H. Lawrence

attempts to convince the reader that he D.H.L., has a hot line to a woman's heart by the

extraordinary sympathy he has for her deepest needs, that is, nice stockings, pretty dresses and

submission.

Yet Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl. If we do not trust the teller but the tale, then the

tale positively revels in lace and feathers, bags, beads, blouses and hats. It is always touching to

see a man quite as seduced by the cultural apparatus of femininity as Lawrence was, the whole

gamut, from feathers to self-abnegation. Even if, as Kate Millett suggests, he only wanted to be a

woman so that he could achieve the supreme if schizophrenic pleasure of fucking himself, since

nobody else was good enough for him. (The fantasy-achievement of this ambition is probably

what lends Lady Chatterley's Lover such an air of repletion.)”

I’m sure that my own games of dress up, as much as I research them and try to think of the clothing in terms of the choice of the wearer rather than the judgement of the observer, as much as I agonize over the style of the clothing and the styling it evidences, are cons as well.  On the other hand (he said, defensively)  the way my male characters dress is, as well, a bit of a con, in as much as these are fictions. Clothing is so helpful because it is, as well, a an attempt to fictionalize – wearing clothes might warm us, but it also shields us, helps us stagemanage our bodies, gives us a feeling of being ourselves as characters.  It is true, often, that there are breakdowns in the clothing game in fiction. To give a movie instance – I just rewatched  Terminator (yes, this lockdown is dragging) and the Schwarzenegger character successfully clothes himself in pants and shirt that come from a person maybe four sizes smaller than him, without ripping, while the human from the future – I forget his name – steals trousers from a drunk tramp without noticing once that these trousers are well pissed in. They even fit him, the human from the future, I mean.

This is supremely not having an eye for clothes, and it is unusual in a Hollywood film.

The clothing option doesn’t necessarily make the character. I can know and feel many of Dostoevsky’s characters without remembering his descriptions of their clothing, because they are perfunctory – unlike Tolstoy’s, or Lawrence’s. That is the deal with characters, male or female, and what they wear – wearing is meaningmaking. I think that we go from the clothing in when we make characters. I don’t think of my female characters, oddly enough, as naked. And that is perhaps a fault. God, as he made abundantly clear in Genesis, definitely meant us to be naked.

“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the LORD God. “Have you eaten of the tree from which I commanded you not to eat?”

And thus the Lord God learned that his characters do have their own lives.