The Narrator's New Clothes

        I’m back with yet another Invisible Man blog post. Why have I not written on any other book? Not really sure. But, this is a topic that I’ve been wanting to do a blog post or essay about for a while now, because it was extremely noticeable and interesting for me, but never figured out how to turn into a coherent longer form argument.

I’m here to talk about clothes in Invisible Man, and their relation to the characters we see and the story overall. As stated in the documentary we watched, Ellison himself paid very close attention to his clothes, and dressed in a very particular, “Ivy” manner. That Ellison paid careful attention to formal clothing is quite apparent throughout Invisible Man, and Ellison repeatedly uses the narrator’s changes of clothes, as well as the clothes of those around him, to send messages about the character’s state and current role in society. 

The first mention of clothing in the novel comes during the Battle Royal scene, where the narrator notes that the town’s “leading white citizens” are there, dressed in their tuxedoes. That they are wearing tuxedoes is interesting and decently important, as, given the timeframe of the book and the narrator’s young age in this scene, it suggests strongly that no women are present (while it seems most of the book is set in the 30s or late 20s, this may be early enough that tuxedoes are still considered incorrect for wear in mixed company, at least in a conservative Southern town), something which is essentially confirmed by the presence of the exotic dancer and the general behavior of the “leading citizens”.

Our next interesting bit of clothing comes with Dr. Bledsoe, during the scene at the College chapel. Bledsoe is very explicit described as wearing full morning dress, a form of formal clothing now essentially extinct in the United States (with a couple interesting exceptions, such as lawyers appearing before the Supreme Court (or at least so I’ve heard)), but still fairly popular in England. Bledsoe is explicitly noted as being dressed the same as several of the Northern dignitaries, which is very interesting, because the ceremony is explicitly noted as taking place in the evening, for which full evening dress would normally be worn. This is, in my opinion, very clearly intentional on the part of Ellison, but I’m not really sure as to exactly what that intention is. While there is some tradition in Europe of not wearing black tie (tuxedo) to church, that is not at all the case with white tie. 

While that scene is mysterious, most of the others have a clearer meaning. Ellison next gives us a shockingly detailed description of the clothing of the residents of Men’s House, or, in any case, the clothing of some of their number. This description, shortly after the narrator returns from Liberty Paints, is deliberately contrasted quite sharply with a new awareness on the part of the narrator. For the first, but not the last time, the narrator, now highly disillusioned and wearing working overalls, believes himself to know something that the rest of society does not. The narrator sees the “pretenders” of Men’s House, who rigidly follow the dictates of fashion without any substance behind them. He mocks them, and their attitude of condescension towards him, as janitors and messengers desperately trying to become gentlemen, without the ability to do so. Ellison’s description is again extremely detailed, telling us from which company these men buy their suits (Brooks Brothers, not a surprising choice here, a classic if not exactly now fashion forward American suiting company), and giving us every detail of their outfits. Ellison’s choices of specific items helps the mocking attitude employed by the narrator quite a bit, especially the reference to spats (a sort of over-sock like thing? They’re fairly strange looking), an item which was beginning to fade from existence by the mid-1920s. 

Our narrator, when he receives his first paycheck from the Brotherhood, along with his new identity, after paying back Mary, and attempting desperately to get rid of the bank, ends up buying a new suit. Here, the narrator rededicates himself to a cause which he believes in, much like he believed prior to his time at Liberty Paints, and it is reflected in his clothing. 

And then what about the zoot-suiters? The men that the narrator meets on the train are also given an extensive, and once again very clear description. But unlike those the narrator earlier calls pretenders, the narrator displays much less condescension towards this new group, which he realizes he has never truly “seen” before. Instead, they make him begin to believe that Brother Jack is wrong. This comes shortly after the narrator purchases new shoes, the meaning of which we talked about a little in class. His new summer shoes, which he compares to sneakers, are those which he believes he will never have to run in, both literally and in the novel’s important sense of run. The new shoes come just before the discovery of Clifton, in another moment of rededication to Brotherhood and cause. By the end of the scene, and his new discoveries of people he has never seen before, his new shoes hurt to wear. The new shoes are also later implied to be spectator shoes, in the Rinehart scene, extremely loud and flashy shoes with pieces of different colors (white and black in the narrator’s case). 

Finally, the Rinehart scene is also interesting. The narrator puts on dark sunglasses, and immediately becomes a member of a completely different community, one with what the narrator explicitly notes as a uniform, but a slightly different one from all the others we see in the novel. Rinehart’s shoes, for instance, are given as a reason that the narrator cannot be Rinehart, or at least not Rinehart the Runner. 

In any case, the clothes of Invisible Man, and the clothes of the narrator, seem to have at least some deeper meaning throughout the novel, and the focus on them certainly does not seem to be an accident.