The Red Thing: Fabrics and Fetishism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Abstract

“Words,” Freud once said, “are, so to speak, the clothes of ideas” (Freud, 1988 [1909], p. 154). As a literary scholar, I find this image appealing, almost whimsical; I envision an idea slipping in or out of its attire, mindful of dress codes, adjusting uneven hems. Like any metaphor, it is not a perfect analogy: where skin may be entirely divested of material, an idea cannot be seen at all until draped by the material—particularly language—provided by its cultural context. But the concept that ideas wear language to mediate meaning may be a useful starting point for a meditation on the fetishization of clothing, the skin it imperfectly covers and the drama that plays out in a novel about one woman’s endeavors to clothe her “yellow satin” skin. Freud’s analogy of words to clothes suggests the extent to which the drives and desires of the mind are grounded in language. Language is the dressing that permits our thoughts to be seen in public, as it were; at the same time, the work of dressing up an idea partially obscures it, draws a modest or mysterious screen between it and the subjects who would perceive it, so that the labors of both literary scholarship and psychoanalysis sometimes resemble the work of trying to peek beneath a curtain to access “real” meaning.