“Moving Under My Dress”: C.D. Wright and Clothing

In Just Whistle (1993), Tremble (1996), and One Big Self (2003),1 C.D. Wright treats clothing as a liminal space or a semipermeable membrane between the self and the world. We all know already that clothing — the speaker's dress, the prison inmate's uniform, the photographic subject's costume — can be a way to perform gender, identity, selfhood. But for Wright, clothing provides a threshold between the body and the outside world, the self and the other. While clothing always has meaning on a large, communal scale (members of a shared culture know how to read a dress, a prison uniform, or an Easter bunny costume), Wright's treatment of clothes is far more intimate, constantly reminding us of the physical embodiment of the self and of the body's entanglement with and relations to specific sensory data: a lover's touch, wet grass underfoot, or the internally generated pains of childbirth. If, as Suzanne Wise argues, Wright's work is fundamentally about the "relational vision of an interdependent existence," clothing provides the space within which relationships grow and take root — for good or ill.2

This essay examines how Wright treats clothing as both protective covering and site of intimacy. In Just Whistle and Tremble, Wright explores clothing's potential to be part of the self, particularly though not exclusively in erotic contexts. One Big Self largely discards the erotic, instead using clothing to examine how imprisonment and freedom affect a person's understanding of the self/other divide. For Wright, clothing models the ways we change and are changed by the world, and demonstrates our vulnerability when the line between self and other becomes ambiguous.

Clothing is central to Just Whistle, in which the main point of view belongs to "the pantied body."3 This complex, dense book deliberately resists narrative and familiar structural devices — as Lynn Keller shows, it grows out of Wright's response to the experimental work of the Language poets.4 The book opens with a pair of lovers disagreeing about one's sexual availability to the other ("I wish you wouldn't wear your panties to bed").5 We learn about the pantied body's sexual and emotional history (previous partners, past pregnancies), and that a former partner of the pantied body committed suicide eleven years earlier. Late in the volume, the pantied body gives birth to its fifth child, in a traumatic birth involving dangerous amounts of blood loss. The birthing parent and child survive, however, and end the book sharing a bed with the other parent, "outspread, heaving / wracked / with tenderness."6

That summary may be misleading, however, because it suggests cause-and-effect storytelling, in which lovers have sex, get pregnant, and have a child. While those events happen in the book, and in that sequence, the poems' refusal of traditional characterization makes any narrative account unreliable and reductive. One of Just Whistle's most striking attributes is its avoidance of the trappings of narrative, including names and gendered pronouns: "pantied body" is all the identifier we get for the main point of view. (Even when the body is giving birth it is not explicitly assigned either a gender or sex.) Both significant bodies in the poem — the pantied body and the "slightly taller body" of the other partner — are referred to using the pronoun "it."7 As Stephanie Burt argues, "the bodies in Just Whistle . . . become not transparently knowable objects for a male gaze, but unstable experiences seeking ways to understand themselves."8 The panties, then, are not a marker of gender but an indicator of the pantied body's refusal to accommodate its lover. While the term "panties" for female-coded undergarments may ordinarily connote intimacy, vulnerability, and even frailty or wispiness (the "-ies" diminutive ending makes them sound insubstantial), in Just Whistle, they initially constitute a significant barrier between the self and the world, even between the self and an intimate partner.

Panties are not definitive information about either the body's sex or its gender, but it becomes clear long before the childbirth scene that the pantied body has a vagina, and the taller body a penis. These biological attributes and the lovers' gender expression are presented either indirectly or in novel phrasings, revised to render them unfamiliar. As Keller puts it, Just Whistle "attends to sexual difference while it highlights ways in which conventional thinking about gender exaggerates biological difference."9

Instead, throughout Just Whistle, we learn about the body with reference not to its biological sex or gender expression but to its state of consciousness and its underwear:

The sleeping body's return to self-awareness — and to awareness of the self as separate from the rest of the world — is first caused by its partner's "closed set of words": "I wish you wouldn't wear your panties to bed." This wish marks a self-other distinction, because it indicates a difference of desire between the two bodies (to wear panties / to have the other not wear panties), and because the panties themselves form a barrier between the bodies. The panties' status as self-other divide is the first step into consciousness in both the day and the book.

But the panties are not simply a barrier: they are almost, but not quite, part of the self. They take on some of the physical properties and even substance of the body that wears them:

The panties' absorption of "piss" is part of their overall assimilation into the body of their wearer.  The panties are not exactly clothes, but rather something absorbed by and absorbing the body. Later in the book, this effect is heightened, as "The flesh had begun to grow over the elastic in its panties like bark over fencing."12 Far more clothing-like than the actual underwear is the "unmistakable run in the heretofore seamless nights": time itself behaves like a pair of cheap nylons, appearing unified but suddenly acquiring a speedily-spreading hole when the slightly taller body objects to the panties. If panties separate the pantied and pantiless bodies, the "heretofore seamless nights" are a unity, one which the request to remove them spoils. Where the taller body sees the garment as an undesirable barrier, the pantied body sees it as almost (though not quite) part of itself. The panties even seem to be compatible with vaginal intercourse ("not removing the panties even in situ").13 At the same time, panties make the body more anonymous, generic, and juvenile ("neotenous"); they are part of the body's identity and a form of concealment at the same time.

The panties occupy a uniquely liminal position: when "the body takes off its jeans in the barn," the jeans are not coextensive with the body.14 The body's former lover who "worked for the highway department" had "yellow glo-paint coating its hands"; "coating" implies an external covering rather than something that has become one with the body. External clothing is just that, external, and we see a contrast between the covering and what lies beneath it: "the time-honored tool ever alert under its suit" suggests not simply a penis but a symbolically fraught and almost conscious phallus which is imperfectly hidden by, not coextensive with, the clothing that covers it.15 The coverings of the vagina, however, are more ambiguous: "the long-maligned tube manufacturing trouble under its folds" may refer to the "folds" of a skirt, but it may also be the labia — context suggests the former, phrasing the latter. The vulva, then, shares the liminal condition of panties: while the "time-honored tool" of the penis is clearly different from the suit that covers it, the vulva and panties are both integral to the "pantied body." The panties, like the labia, come between the vagina and the external world, but these coverings can be figuratively and literally penetrated.

Perhaps this penetrability is why the pantied body appears to consider the request to remove the panties not just presumptuous but absurd. When, during a sexual encounter, the taller body says "In the first place, the panties have to go ere it is too late," the pantied body has a nonsensical fantasy based on the "tiger, goat, and grass" puzzle model:16

Treating panties and cigars as things that can't be left alone together in the way a tiger can't be left alone with a goat is absurd, but also hints at the dangers that threaten when the panties really are off. The panties' essential role seems to be containing the body, maintaining the life-sustaining boundary between self and non-self. Just Whistle's opening, in which the taller body objects to the panties, suggests the panties' psychological role in maintaining the smaller body's physical autonomy. But their removal coincides with a breakdown of the self/other divide not simply during sexual intercourse (in which such a breakdown is temporary and potentially pleasurable) but in more threatening or life-changing circumstances. At the book's climax, the panties are finally removed while the body that wears them is giving birth, an event which turns into a near-death experience as the body loses too much blood. The panties' removal coincides with events which are both potentially catastrophic (death by hemorrhage) and transcendent, as the "little god," the new baby, is born and begins the long process of individuation and separation from the parent who loves it. Panties — unlike outerwear — are not simply about privacy or sexuality in Just Whistle; they become about survival as a discrete individual, one able to experience "consciousness" and maintain bodily integrity.

The stakes of clothing in Tremble are not so high: Tremble's liminal spaces are more systematically limited to the erotic, rather than constituting a threat to life or autonomy. As in Just Whistle, however, Tremble's clothing suggests that the line between self and nonself is blurry. The removal of clothing is intimate not just because it provides access to hidden bodily sites, but because it sharpens and clarifies the distinction between body and non-body, self and non-self. In "Approximately Forever," for example: "She would take her clothes off / for the camera // she said in plain english / but she wasn't holding that snake."18 "She" is willing to be visually exposed — "take her clothes off for the camera" — but "holding that snake" brings another, alien body into direct contact with her own.

In the erotic discourse of Tremble, the liminal space of clothing provides opportunities for experimentation, as we see in "Crescent":

"A new way of moving under my dress" treats the "I" as separate from the garment—until the prose poem puts that separation in parallel with the water. Like the "silver skin" of the water, which appears still, the garment covers a "fluidity" (the speaker's motion) that is both part of and separate from what covers it. Or to put it another way, "a new way of moving under my dress" requires the dress. A similar liquid fusion of body and garment occurs in "Lake Echo, Dear": "Is the man walking in the soft rain / naked or is it the rain / that makes his shirt transparent."20 At the same time, cloth can be a meaningful protective barrier, as in "Because Fulfillment Awaits": the "man" ( "I hate being a man," he says) putting out a box of poison (presumably to rid the house of rodents) is offered a handkerchief to protect himself: "Cover yourself," says the (implicitly female) other speaker. This covering serves the pragmatic function of defending the man against poisonous fumes, but it is not only protective: it also enables experimentation, this time by the onlooker, who perceives the handkerchief as an opportunity to imagine something new behind it:

Tremble's clothing, then, is erotic not just in its concealment or revelation of the body, but in its creative potential, the way it allows the characters opportunities for experimentation and novelty. While both books treat clothing as potentially providing protective barriers between the self and the world, Tremble's garments, unlike the grown-in panties of Just Whistle, let their wearers create new ways to be or to perceive the human.

Clothes are similarly ambiguous in their relationship to the wearer in One Big Self. Claire Grandy argues that One Big Self rejects self/other as a binary, in favor of a "mediated and contextual" understanding of relationships;22 Birte Christ argues that "One Big Self . . . places the reader into a position that calls for her active engagement with the gap that separates inside and outside, being one and not being one."23 The text's clothes help us understand the nature of those mediations and gaps, both among the people represented in the text and between author and audience. In the introduction to One Big Self, Wright attempts to situate herself in terms of clothing:

Wright invokes the clothes that framed her body as part of the framing of the text itself, and then moves beneath those clothes to the "skin" that responds to Luster's "aluminum portraits." Clothes, like the "books I was teaching," may mediate her perceptions, just as "how tall was my boy then" may affect her response to inmates' accounts of their children; they also affect the skin-level response of intense emotion when she sees Luster's work-in-progress. The clothing that frames and conditions our experiences is also necessary to experience the world at all, even if skin is what really responds to the work of art.

In principle, a prisoner is not protected but constrained by their uniform, which is both "uniform" in the sense that it strips its wearers of their individuality, and particular, as each inmate is identified by a number. But in keeping with Burt's reading of the book as an "anti-panopticon, with many views of many people, but no center,"25 this uniformity gives way to variety, as uniforms' colors distinguish prisoners by their work assignments ("Orange is field line; Sky Blue is custom sewing").26 These color-coded suits sit alongside familiar uses of colored ribbons as awareness-raising ("The red ribbon is for AIDS counseling / Pink for breast cancer counseling"), subdividing prisoners into groups of shared labor and shared response to physical suffering. This division still categorizes people along broad lines, but these categories reflect inmates' individuated experiences and interests. Even an undecorated uniform can become truly distinctive: "When the champion of the prison rodeo had a heart attack in the fields, a riderless horse led the final procession. The celebrated inmate's uniform was "retired" to the prison museum."27 The "champion's" retired "uniform" is no longer really uniform in the sense of a de-individuating garment, as the rodeo rider's extraordinary talent replaces the dehumanization of prison garments with the special status of the star baseball player's numbered jersey.

Prison uniforms are not the only clothing to at least temporarily disguise individuality:

Easter offers an opportunity to look one's best — the women go to the beauty shop and get "dressed up" — but this, too, results in eclipsed identities and even disguise: the "starched, flouncy dresses" and "white jackets and black, clip-on bow ties" put the children, too, in a kind of uniform, and the "someone" in the bunny suit is unidentifiable. This uniformity is heightened by the fact that "identifiable pictures of children would have to be excluded from publication"; there are limits on the individuality that Wright and Luster can access and publicize. But individuality persists in the "keepsakes" that "people" (prisoners and visitors alike) want; Easter finery at the prison may be a performance and a costume, but it also seems to enable the inmates to make rare meaningful contact with free-worlders.

While uniforms do not always serve their intended purpose of rendering prisoners indistinguishable by all but number, prison still requires more clothing — more covering up of the self, both literally and figuratively — than freedom does:

Solitary's "padded dress" contrasts with the "barefooted" safety of freedom: the barefoot walker is unthreatened ("there's no glass") and able to make contact with her loved ones ("If you want to kiss your kid you can"). Free-worlders, especially wealthier ones, have the choice to be "barefooted," to choose a "perfume- and dye-free shirt."30 In an imagined prisoner's "recurrent dream of freedom... You will never need gloves again."31

But the physical exposure freedom enables leaves us vulnerable, and, in keeping with Wright's wariness about romanticizing the prisoners, the outside world is full of threats, too:

The missing girl is all the more endangered by her state of comparative undress; giving the K-9 unit her pillowcase and prom gloves suggests the intimacy of her bed and a similar code of formality and innocence as the Easter party. The swimsuit is insufficient protection, too small and flimsy to provide cover. The "long white prom gloves" suggest the girl's adolescence: although she is fully grown ("5'7", 127 lbs"), she is only starting her development as an adult and a sexual being. Her disappearance, which carries a presumption of sexual assault, suggests we should read the gloves both as a tragically empty container and an ironically pristine yonic image. We have been assured that the choices available to the free are safe (there is "no glass"), but that assurance is not convincing; Molly (presumably the swimsuit girl) is still missing after "forty-five days" — in contrast with escaped prisoners, none of whom are able to evade the dogs.33

If freedom allows us to risk exposure, prison requires systematic coverings. The "padded dress" in solitary is a burden, but also a blanket and protection against the crawling insects on the floor. Young prisoners must be kept separate from the general population "Until they get a face on them";34 in this usage, a "face" — an appearance of prison-hardened toughness — is acquired and worn like a garment.35 Like the prison uniform, "a face" eclipses the prisoner's identity, but still allows us to see the individual's history through scars and aging.

Only one person's face is truly covered: we see "the executioner's corduroy hood // hung on an ice hook / in the tool shed / away from the kids."36 "Executioner" (unlike, say prison rodeo star) is not a stable identity assigned to a named individual; instead, it is an eclipse of self behind thick fabric, which also eclipses others. The role of executioner is embodied in the hood, a ritualized garment which effaces the individuality and personhood of both killer and killed, and itself becomes the executioner's "face" in the prison's sense of the term. No wonder it must be hidden from "the kids" visiting for Easter; it is the opposite of the Easter bunny disguise, hiding death instead of celebrating rebirth.

As the "corduroy" texture of the executioner's hood suggests, the barrier between the safety of freedom and the danger of prison, between barefoot walking and the padded dress, is a thin and tactile one — "about the thickness of a pair of panties, Your Honor," a line which first appears, unexplained, early in the book. The phrase reappears in "Lines of Defense Including Proceedings from the State of Louisiane vs. The Convergence of the Ur-real and the Unreal":

As in Just Whistle, these "panties" are actually part of the body. While in Just Whistle the panties' protective role was metaphorical — they do not really prevent blood loss — here the "flesh wound" is real, and the thin fabric of panties becomes a measurement of lost skin. What was once a garment, nominally external to the self, becomes a measurement of damage, and Just Whistle's metaphor becomes literal. The aura of intimacy remains, but now it is the intimacy of violence, and the panties' role as protection is continuous with that of the skin.

Clothing in Just Whistle, Tremble, and One Big Self serves different functions: the erotic potential of a dress is very different from the playful disguise of a bunny suit or the menace of the executioner's hood. But the partial, permeable separation from the world that clothing provides becomes a consistent metaphor for the ways that our selves find communion with and come under threat from others, resisting eclipse, dissolution, and damage without foreclosing the possibility of contact. These garments together suggest Wright's interest in the peculiar liminal space surrounding our skins, a space which is neither strictly part of us nor entirely public. They show us on the personal scale the same pattern of interconnections Wright traces among communities in Rising, Falling, Hovering or across ecosystems in Casting Deep Shade. For Wright, the distinction between self and other, for good or ill, is permeable and subject to change.

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Rachel Trousdale (Bluesky: @rvtrousdale; Twitter: @rvtrousdale) is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her latest scholarly book is Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her book of poems, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, won Wesleyan University Press's Cardinal Poetry Prize. 

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