The Clothed Body

Introduction
An image in Marguerite Duras’ novel L’amant is particularly striking in
that it manages to convey the ability of a garment or an accessory to transform
both a body and an identity, to challenge nature, as it were. The
image is that of the adolescent heroine who dons a man’s hat of ‘rosecoloured
felt with a flat brim and a wide black band’. The hat acts upon
her as a veritable instrument of change, a bridge between herself and the
world:
I tried on that hat, just for a laugh; I looked at myself in the shop mirror and
saw, under that man’s hat, the awkward skinniness of my frame, defect of my
age, become something else. It ceased to be a crude and fatal fact of nature and
became the opposite, a choice running counter to nature, a choice of the spirit. I
see myself as another, as another would see me, from the outside, available to all,
exposed to everyone’s gaze, let loose in a circuit of cities, streets and pleasures. I
buy the hat. I shall wear it always. Now that I own a hat that completely transforms
me, I’ll never abandon it. (Duras, 1985: 18–19)
The hat is the opposite of nature: it modifies artificially her slender
frame, which the heroine sees as a defect of her age. The hat is a choice of
the spirit, a conscious sign, even though donned casually at first, almost as
a joke, as part of the narcissistic and carnivalesque enjoyment all teenagers
feel when they put on strange garments and parade them in front of the
mirror. This pleasurable sensation prompts the young girl to make the hat
her inseparable companion; it becomes an emblem of her transformation
into something other than what she felt herself to be before, a sort of initiatory
fetish towards a new identity. She likes the fact that wearing the hat
exposes her to the gaze of others, a gaze which immediately turns her into
another, as if she were looking at herself from the outside, as if the imperfect
beauty with which the hat endows her has laid open her body to a kind
of metamorphosis.
This image of an adolescent girl in Indo-China may be taken as a
metaphor for that particular synergy of signs and senses which the practice
of dressing has always produced. A garment exposes the body to a
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