Intimate Apparel

“You can tell more about a man by where he shops, than his practiced conversation.” 

Mrs. Dickson is talking about Mr. Charles, but she is foreshadowing George. George arrives in a worn, poorly-fitted suit, an image that directly contradicts the poetry of his letters. The polished and practiced conversation in the letters turns out not to be his own, showing how easily attractive words can be manipulated to create a false impression.

“They say one day ships will pass from one ocean to the next. It is important work, we told. If importance be measured by how many men die, then this be real important work.” 

George is doing hard labor, digging the Panama Canal. On the most basic ground level, he is part of a massive feat of construction, engineering, and size. But the work was dangerous and there were enormous casualties. In an earlier attempt by the French to dig the canal, they lost 20,000 workers, many from exposure to tropical illnesses. When the US constructed the Panama Canal, they lost 5,609 of about 40,000 laborers due to illness and accidents. The canal, which links the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic Ocean, is a metaphor for connection across great distances, just as the connection flourishes between Esther and George through their letters.

“Talk and a nickel will buy you five cents worth of trouble.” 

When Mrs. Van Buren asks if Esther is a suffragette, Esther reassures her that she is not. Both women assert that they prefer to remain silent, as speaking out only brings difficulties. But their silence on their own lives is oppressive. They cannot speak out against their husbands because they are both afraid of being left alone, preferring the safety of an unhappy or abusive marriage to the stigma of divorce. 

“What I think is of little consequence.” 

Mrs. Van Buren responds to Esther’s question as to whether she believes that it is a problem for a woman to remain single. Mrs. Van Buren wishes that she could leave her husband but sees this as an impossible act. The stigma of divorce or spinsterhood is laid upon women by men. Therefore, her opinions as a woman are not the ones that have social weight. But what this means is that Mrs. Van Buren’s feelings and opinions about her own life are treated as inconsequential.

“He has lovely penmanship—that’s important. He isn’t careless with his stroke—that’s the mark of a thoughtful man. It’s a good thing, I believe.” 

Mrs. Van Buren looks at George’s letters and deduces that he is gentle, a deep thinker who will be caring and considerate as a partner. The irony is that while her analysis of the handwriting could potentially be accurate, the handwriting and prose belong to another man. Additionally, since Esther cannot read, Mrs. Van Buren assesses of his letters in a way that Esther is unable to access. 

“But when the great oceans meet and the gentlemen celebrate, will we colored men be given glasses to raise?”

In George’s letter, he points out the inequity between the workers and those who take credit for the Panama Canal. When the work is done, the workers will remain anonymous. Those who died will be considered a reasonable sacrifice. The workers who aren’t white won’t even be allowed to sit at the tables of the white men who celebrate the accomplishment. It is one of many instances in history when wealthy white men earned prestige on the backs of non-white laborers.

“I stood thigh deep in crimson blossoms, swathed in the sweet aroma of earth and wondered how a place so beautiful could become a morgue.” 

George writes from a tropical paradise. But he is surrounded by death, disease, and injury. Juxtaposing the sweet smell of flowers and the sweet smell of decomposition illustrates how easy it is to conflate two things that smell sweet. In his letters, George sounds sweet. He sounds romantic and thoughtful. In reality, George is nothing like the fantasy.

“It will be wasted on me.”

When Mr. Marks suggests that Esther buy the Japanese silk and make something for herself, Esther’s response betrays her self-consciousness and the way she thinks about herself as a woman. Esther doesn’t feel beautiful, and she doesn’t believe that she deserves beautiful things. She makes lovely intimate apparel for other women but does not imagine that any man will ever see her as attractive and sexy. In the second act, Esther finally makes herself a corset to surprise George, but he isn’t interested in her for anything but her money. However, Mr. Marks’s suggestion implies that he sees Esther as a beautiful woman who can wear fine silk.

“I can see from your hands that you are blessed with the needle and the thread, which means you’ll never be without warmth.” 

Unlike most of the people in her life, Mr. Marks recognizes Esther’s talent as a seamstress as an art and a great gift. He doesn’t see her for her money or her appearance but understands intimacy as warmth. She has the ability to turn the fabrics he loves into items of clothing that give warmth, and Mr. Marks understands and values this as much as Esther does.

“All the pawing and pulling. For a dollar they think they own you.” 

Mayme sells sex, but her statement describes the way men dehumanize her and what her customers fantasize that they are buying. The transaction of payment for sex ought to be a simple exchange. But the men who pay her imagine that they are buying her instead of paying for services. Since Mayme is a black woman in the United States, only forty years after the end of slavery, this also has implications in terms of white supremacy.

“My daddy gave me twelve lashes with a switch for playing this piece in our parlor. One for every year I studied the piano. He was too proper to like anything colored, and a syncopated beat was about the worst crime you could commit in his household.” 

Mayme says very little over the course of the play about her upbringing and background. But this story suggests that she grew up with some sort of financial privilege. Her father seems to have been very self-conscious of his and his family’s blackness, internalizing an understanding of white supremacy that frames black culture as low culture. It isn’t clear how Mayme came to be where she is, whether from rebellion or misfortune, but she asserts her blackness by playing ragtime music, a song that came from her own soul and creativity.

“She keep asking me what they be wearing up in the tenderloin. All that money and high breeding and she want what you are wearing.” 

Esther has made matching corsets for both Mrs. Van Buren and Mayme. The two women are polar opposites, but they are both longing for affection and intimacy and believe that they lack something the other has. Mrs. Van Buren has respectability, a marriage, and money, a man to take care of her and yet her husband will no longer touch her. Mayme has beauty and sex appeal, but every man touches her with aggression and violence rather than intimacy. Later, when George has Esther for a wife, he still seeks something else and pays Mayme for sex. In the end, Esther learns that she must look within herself for fulfillment.

“I reckon I’d pay someone good money to be treated like a lady. It would be worth two, three days on my back. Yes, it would.”

Part of the fantasy of Esther’s salon is that women of color would be treated with respect there, regardless of their class or station in life. Mayme, who is constantly treated like she is less than a woman, longs to be treated like a respectable person. In the end, what draws her to George is that he doesn’t treat her like an object or a commodity. 

“Yes, he here in my pocket in a cambric walking suit. He has a heliotrope handkerchief stuffed in his pocket and a sweet way about him. He so far away, I can carry him in my pocket like a feather.” 

Esther has built George up in her imagination, and her fantasy revolves around the fabric and clothing he wears. Mayme teases her for treating the correspondence as if it is a courtship and insists that George isn’t real because he isn’t physically present. Ironically, as Esther jokes that she can carry him in her pocket, the George she loves only exists in the letters. So in a sense, she can actually carry him in her pocket and he isn’t real.

“I crave a gentlewoman’s touch, even if it only be to turn down my collar or brush away the dirt in the evenings. Indeed, I’d like to meet you as a gentleman.” 

George’s letter describes a type of intimacy that is different from sex. He refers to local girls who are selling their bodies, but although they are pretty and young, George’s letter claims to be searching for the love and familiarity of two people who care for and take care of each other. This creates a stark contrast to their first time alone together after the wedding, when George demands sex with little consideration of romance or intimacy, regardless of whether Esther is ready.

“It is a thousand years of history and struggle behind the answer to that question.”

Mr. Marks responds to Esther’s question about whether marrying a stranger is one of the ways that he proves his faith. Her question is very forward, but Mr. Marks isn’t offended. In Orthodox Judaism, interfaith marriage has always been taboo. A Jewish person is born into the faith, based on their mother’s religion. Arranged marriages were a way of propagating the religion, keeping it alive through centuries of oppression. Were Mr. Marks to marry a woman outside of his faith, their children would not be Jewish unless she converted. The anxieties about interfaith marriage stem from a fear of eradication. The question is complicated, because it highlights the divide between Mr. Marks’s responsibility to his faith and his personal desires.

“By the way, I bled this morning, and when I delivered the news to Harry, he spat at me. This civilized creature of society. We all bleed, Esther. And yet I actually felt guilt, as though a young girl again apologizing for becoming a woman.” 

Mrs. Van Buren describes her husband’s cruelty when she menstruates and determines that she is, yet again, not pregnant. Throughout human history and in many different cultures, menstruation has been treated as shameful and unclean. Women have been isolated and abused for it. To her husband, Mrs. Van Buren’s worth has been reduced to her ability to procreate. Of course, there is no reason to believe that their failure to conceive is due to any issue with Mrs. Van Buren’s fertility. But Mr. Van Buren treats her menstruation as if it is a deliberate affront, calling up the shame that young girls are taught to feel about their periods.

“People do a lot of things that they don’t ever speak of.” 

Esther is thinking of the secret way that she touched Mr. Marks’s collar, flouting religious and social laws for the tiniest bit of intimacy. For Mrs. Van Buren, her friendship with Esther and the familiarity of her letters to George are things that her wealthy friends would mock and find scandalous. But these secrets come down to the idea of intimacy. People maintain certain appearances in public, but in the privacy of their homes and bedrooms, they are very different people.

“But you have godly fingers and a means, and you deserve a gentleman. Why gamble it all away for a common laborer?” 

Mrs. Dickson is watching Esther pack as she prepares to marry George. She sees through the illusion of the laborer-poet, knowing that Esther’s eagerness for love will make her vulnerable to a man who might see her as an opportunity to take advantage. She tries to protect Esther, even grilling George with questions about his lack of employment after they are married, but Esther must learn for herself.

“He’d lost his tongue during a nasty fight over a chicken when I was a baby, so I never heard him speak: no complaints, no praise, no gentle words, no good-bye. He was… silent. Broken really.” 

Desperate to make a personal connection before they have sex, Esther tells George about her family. Her father was a slave who had trouble adjusting to a life of freedom. Losing his ability to speak is symbolic. His life, his experience, his stories from his own perspective are lost forever to history because he couldn’t pass them down to his children. 

“We do what we must, no? We are ridiculous creatures sometimes.”

Mrs. Van Buren responds to Esther’s guilt over maintaining the lie to her husband that she is literate. Mrs. Van Buren, who has been commissioning lingerie from Esther, both in hopes of regaining her husband’s interest and in order to develop a friendship with Esther, understands the strange things people will do to get what they need. The characters in the play do all sorts of things that go against their own desires in order to try to obtain what they need.

“I pity your heart. You are the worst sort of scavenger.” 

Esther has just learned that George has been giving Mayme the intimacy that she has been begging him to give to her. Although Mayme doesn’t know that the man that she’s seeing is Esther’s husband, Esther takes Mayme’s disregard for the wife’s feelings very personally, which perplexes Mayme. Esther recognizes that Mayme is so starved for real affection that she scavenges the scraps of what was promised to other women. Her comment is scathing, but also pitying. Mayme may be beautiful, but she is as loveless as Esther.

“Let him go. He ain’t real, he a duppy, a spirit. We be chasing him forever.” 

George is knocking on the door and Mayme is desperate to let him in, afraid that he will leave her alone. But Esther finally understands that the George they both fell in love with is a fantasy. He is a duppy, or a malevolent spirit. George hasn’t left Esther because he fell in love with Mayme, he has simply taken everything she has and is moving on to the next target. Esther realizes, and tries to force Mayme to realize, that they aren’t the ones who are lacking. George is simply a liar and a scam artist.