Stitched from Memory: The Fashioning of the Self

“Young Girls” by Marcel Proust and “What I wanted, What I got” by Rachel Kushner are gentle reflections of childhood centered around societal acceptance, and the ultimate arrival at self-actualization. In both accounts, the speaker longs for acceptance from peers, and this is tied heavily to the way they look. While fashion should mostly be about self-expression, throughout history it has primarily served as a social identifier. Thus, leading to the adverse effect of conformity rather than embracing what is meant to be a deeply individualized practice. Recounting these childhood experiences from adulthood, the speakers have come to value this individualized approach and use memory as a framework to understand how desire shapes identity.

Early memories of exclusion can illuminate how societal pressure and socio-economic structures influence childhood development, more specifically, self-esteem and identity formation. Although most parents desire to rear well-rounded children, circumstances may shift the intention to a degree of consequence. In Kushner’s retelling of her childhood, she shares that as a child, her mother would regularly return the brand-new clothes her paternal grandmother sent from New York and use the money to buy food for the family. Highlighting the impact of her family’s poverty, she writes, “…the story of my mother exchanging those gifts for cash is itself special. Deprivations of various kinds were my sentimental education” (20). For Kushner, these early memories of deprivation colored who she was as a child, and who she would grow up to be. The memory of her mother exchanging clothes becomes more than an anecdote of her family’s lifestyle; it becomes a lesson in how desire, poverty, and identity intertwine. More importantly, returning to this memory emphasizes Kushner’s recognition of fashion’s transformative nature and an awareness of its insignificance in the face of necessity.

Similar themes of desire and longing that oppose parenting appear in Proust’s piece “Young Girls.” While at the beach, the speaker sees two young girls and takes an interest in them. The girls were part of the aristocracy, a world that the speaker and others local to the beach community did not have access to. He describes the girls as having “a certain grace, elegance, and agility, a disdainful pride that made them seem of a completely different species from the girls in [his] world” (2). The speaker longed “for them to form a high opinion of [him]” for their assumed superiority and representation as an elite class, despite his mother’s indifference towards them (2). Proust makes an interesting point that could be an interjection of the moral that emerged from this memory saying, “Mama, on the contrary, paid no attention to them and was surprised, as, by the way, most intelligent people are, that anyone would waste his time thinking about people he didn’t know and questioning whether or not they were polite” (2). So, like Kushner, Proust’s return to the memory emphasizes a similar notion of what is truly valuable and significant.

In addition to memory being the vehicle through which both writers call to past versions of themselves to shape the present and future, part of the memory is held within the actual items. When examining these works, it’s impossible to gloss over what these items represented to the speaker throughout their childhoods. From the brand-new with tags clothes that smelled of formaldehyde, Kushner never got to wear, to the yellow Farrah Fawcett t-shirt she got at the county fair that embodied the 1970s standard for beauty and femininity, and the extraordinary way the noble girls dressed in Proust’s small beach town, memory gave emotional weight to these material objects. Kushner reminds us of the way material objects engage our senses and encapsulate every detail to tie us to a particular moment, person, or place, almost like ghosts. The hand-me-downs she received from her brother’s friend, Sarah Summers, that were “permeated with a middle-class laundry fragrance, a smell of another world, better than [her] own,” not only signified socio-economic disparity, but even made her “feel like ‘Sarah Summers’” (20). This is an interesting addition that highlights how engaging with these material memory ghosts affects identity development and self-esteem. Although Kushner has no tangible memories of Sarah Summers, wearing Summers’ old clothes entices her to assume the identity of a person who belongs to that other, better world.

The bulk of the speaker’s desire in Proust also hinges on this idea of material access to another, perhaps better world, however in a less ghostly way. To impress the girls in “Young Girls,” the speaker tailors his appearance to what he believes are their tastes. When he notices the girls out on the beach, he runs home to comb his hair, put on a pink tie, powder a pimple, and grab his mother’s jade-handled parasol. He then seeks the company of Monsieur T, a solicitor, who is formally acquainted with the girl’s father, in hopes that being seen with him will get the girls to notice him. The parasol, gifted from his grandmother, seemed to [him] to signal opulence” because his mother insisted it was “much too beautiful for her, much too luxurious for [their] situation” (3,5). After meeting the girls, though they only spared him a glance, he felt legitimized, stating that finally “[he] had an identity for them, [he] was the boy with the parasol…” (5). Just as Kushner’s hand-me-down memories transform into vessels of a new, even borrowed identity, Proust’s speaker transforms the parasol into a marker of a new, idealized identity.

Fashion oftentimes highlights the differences between the authentic and idealized self. Societal pressures and social structures drive us to shop for the trendiest pieces, even when our personal style is timeless and classic. We buy items that satisfy our desire to fit in, while simultaneously standing out. It’s a strange juxtaposition between conformity and uniqueness, driven by a human need and desire for acceptance and adoration. In both texts, the differences between the “real” and the idealized self intersect at multiple points but don’t necessarily conflict. This is shaped by memory, and the fact that both works are recollections of a time past, written with hindsight and a more present and confident knowledge of the self. It again points to memory as a vehicle for growth and development, being able to reflect on the past as a different version of the self whose predecessor lacks its current wisdom and experience. Kushner expounds on this idea of memory-work development by “search[ing] for that feeling of alignment… a sensation of rightness between inner life and outer” (24). She arrived at this feeling in middle school when she decided to buy a leather jacket that aligned with her sense of self, rather than buying the dress her grandmother wanted her to buy. Although at the time of writing, she finds wearing a leather jacket (a biker jacket specifically) when not on a motorcycle seems silly, at the time, purchasing that leather jacket was an alignment, a convergence of an authentic and idealized self. Not conflict, but harmony. The memory of the leather jacket set the precedent for how Kushner would continue to live her life, in her “zone of rightness” (24). In considering how else memory evokes the yearning and romanticization of an idealized self, Kushner writes, “our nostalgia, after all, is for some version of the past that did not occur” (24). Nostalgia is often watered down to simply remembering or missing something from the past, but Kushner’s view unearths its deeper meaning and its connection to memory. According to Webster’s, in addition to being a “sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists,” nostalgia is also “a wistful or sentimental yearning for a return to or the return of some real or romanticized past period or some irrecoverable past condition or setting.” This sentimental yearning or desire is what Kushner is referring to. Underneath the childhood version of herself that longed for brand-new, trendy clothes was the growing version of herself that was longing for fashion autonomy, something she never quite had growing up. Thus, we see how her earliest memories foster the environment for both versions of the self to align and thrive.

However, Proust’s speaker arrived at this merger of authentic and idealized self less defiantly, and perhaps less confidently. After receiving recognition from the girls, Monsieur T introduces him to the Viscount, whose daughter was the girl he was most interested in knowing. At last, she introduced herself to him and mentioned that she “see[s] him sometimes in C” (5).  The following day, she passes by in a car and waves to him, but he doesn’t have time to return the gesture. The idealized version of himself wanted to be known by the girls despite their rudeness and superiority complex, and now the authentic version aligns with it. However, where Kushner rejects conformity and the societal pressures to do so, Proust’s speaker conforms, even if he’ll never be legitimate in their eyes. Nonetheless, Proust, as the author, “reflecting” on these memories, seems to have values that align with the idea of growth and development. When discussing the impoliteness of the wealthy, he mentions that “they came from a world that believed itself brilliant but wasn’t at all,” which is not a philosophy the speaker subscribes to (2). So, he doesn’t appear to seek the same level of validation that the speaker does. It can be argued that the closing line, “…and made a little gesture of greeting with her hand, to which I didn’t have time to respond,” is actually the speaker showing indifference; however, the previous lines, “I had barely had time to recognize the large group piled into the car…,” suggest that the car was just moving too fast to allow him to respond (5). So, while Proust writes from hindsight can apply his wisdom and acquired knowledge to this memory, it still acts in the same way as it does for Kushner’s as an encompassing version of the past and present self.

Ultimately, Marcel Proust’s “Young Girls” and Rachel Kushner’s “What I wanted, What I got” reveal a deeper conversation about memory, identity, and the connection to fashion. In both narratives, the writers reveal a desire to be seen and validated by peers, but also what those desires and the memory of them can tell us about ourselves. By revisiting these formative memories in their adulthood, both writers connect the authentic and idealized self, either through conformity or a “zone of rightness,” proving memory and reflection to be the key to truly mastering oneself.

 

 

 

​