24 pages • 48 minutes read
Elizabeth BishopExchanging Hats
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Universal Human Desire to Know
Bishop portrays humans as naturally inquisitive creatures throughout “Exchanging Hats.” Although the speaker and her peers look down on their relatives' jokes, they also share a desire to experience the other gender. Just seeing the hats “of the other sex / inspires us to experiment” (Lines 7-8). Bishop implies that humans are so curious that even something as simple as a hat can draw their attention.
Curiosity is so integral to human nature that people build it into bonding exercises and play. Bishop shows the instinct through the uncles' failed attempt to make their relatives laugh and the aunts swapping caps during a vacation.
Furthermore, human curiosity will triumph over the very societal rules humanity created. Hats do not occur in the wild. People make them. Hats only have gender because their makers wanted them to signify gender. Through the hats, Bishop shows gender roles as societally made and maintained. She also demonstrates that society strictly enforces the idea of the difference between men and women down to the smallest detail, such as a hat.
Despite these factors, people still possess a powerful desire to know. People want to try on the other gender because society frames women and men as different. Mysterious difference tantalizes people's interests. Of course, people will want to “experiment” (Line 8).
Bishop then segues from the desire to experience the other gender to large existential mysteries. The speaker wonders what the uncle and aunt see inside their hats. Bishop frames the speaker's questions with a shift to the past tense. In the beginning, the uncles' act is in the present tense [“who insist'] (Line 1). However, the speaker talks about their uncle in the past tense in the penultimate stanza. They state that he “wore a / hat too big” (Lines 25-26). At the same time, the speaker states their uncle currently wears a hat. They ask, “Are there any stars” (Lines 27-28) inside his hat. This contrast between past and present tense signals that the uncle has died, but his corpse wears his hat. The speaker wants to know about the uncle about the experience of death and what happens afterward.
Humanity's curiosity hides the species' anxiety around the unknown. The speaker does not get any answers at the poem's end. Instead, they are left to wonder about “what slow changes” the aunt experiences (Line 31). Even the aunt seems uncertain since the changes come after the uncle's death. After death, people are left to figure out how to move forward without clear answers.
Private vs. Public
Throughout her career, Bishop contradictorily expressed a distaste for publicizing the personal while maintaining interest in memory and the autobiographical.
Readers can see the tension between the public and the private throughout “Exchanging Hats.” In the poem, exterior actions obscure or hint at the subject's thoughts. The speaker makes the reader their confidant, using the pronoun “we” to create kinship and intimacy (Line 4). As a result, the reader sees both the speaker's exterior and interior reactions.
While the speaker outwardly cringes at the unfunny uncles' jokes, the speaker admits that they also want to cross-dress. The speaker even makes it sound exciting, describing it as an “experiment” (Line 8). This passion sharply contrasts with the speaker's earlier “embarrassment” at the uncles (Line 5).
The speaker hints that the relatives have other reasons for crossdressing beyond a lark. The speaker assumes their relatives desire a chance to try something new and that the uncles and their relatives share the desire to cross-dress. The lines “Costume and custom are complex. / The headgear of the other sex / inspires us to experiment” reads as the speaker explaining their interest in crossdressing (Line 6-8). Because the speaker equates their interest in crossdressing with their uncles and continues using first-person plural, the older relatives' motive seems like experimentation too.
Immediately after the confession, the speaker showcases the aunts' crossdressing. As a result, the aunt's crossdressing appears like a subconscious or covert attempt to sincerely transverse gender roles. Symbolically, the aunts' play also seems like an attempt to understand experiences they do not have access to as women since many middle- to upper-class women were left out of the working world.
Fittingly, the reader only witnesses the events through the speaker's eyes. Because the speaker indicates the reader shares their view about crossdressing, the speaker does not gain any new perspectives throughout the poem. The speaker remains self-consciously clueless about their aunt and uncle's outlook and experiences. The uncle, in fact, has transcended beyond any experience the speaker can verify in life. The uncle's death renders him completely private.
“Exchanging Hats” implies that people can guess each other's motives, but they will never have full access to another person's thoughts or a complete understanding of their unique experiences.
Death as Transgression
Bishop frames death as the ultimate transgression of human order and understanding within “Exchanging Hats.” Death defies the gender binary since it affects both men and women equally. Unlike hats, nature did not design different ending points dependent on the person's gender identity. The aunt and the uncle see something when their hats cover their eyes. Death shifts and expands their vision of the universe. However, only the dead have insight into death's reality. The speaker can only speculate if her uncle sees stars and about what changes the aunt sees. The speaker, being alive, does not wear the same hat since they do not have access to their experiences.
“Exchanging Hats” implies that society does not have the tools to capture or understand death. Earlier in the poem, the speaker parallels gender roles and religion as two social constructs. The speaker highlights religion's fragility when they wonder about a miter's value once people start second-guessing social norms.
The afterlife plays a big part in Christian theology. The Christian idea of heaven permeates Western culture. By implying that religion is as fallible as gender, Bishop demonstrates that society does not have the tools to comprehend death. Any attempts to categorize it are doomed to fail since it exists outside of humanity's control.
Related Titles
By Elizabeth Bishop
