lynn nottage and intimate apparel and brown university

One feature of the continuing brilliance of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, held every year for about 8 months (end Feb.-end Oct.) in Ashland, OR, is that a handful or fewer of the Bard's plays are complemented by about eight or nine other plays which show for part or all of the season. The balance thus created gives purists, who want to see interesting "takes" on Shakespeare's classic works, and as well as those who might not have a stomach for Elizabethan language, a chance to see a selection of classic and contemporary dramas. One of the best of the modern crop, which has been shown widely this year, is Intimate Apparel, the 2002 blockbuster by Brown University graduate Lynn Nottage. In this drama, set in NYC in 1905, an African-American seamstress Esther Mills, an unmarried and "inexperienced" 35 year-old woman from North Carolina, makes intimate garments for both a high-society woman as well as a prostitute. Through the relationships spawned by her business (with the customers, with her supplier--the Jew Mr. Marks--, and with her landlady), we are brought into the various ways in which intimacy characterizes various forms of human relations. What these two essays will do is to hint at those layers of intimacy, with attention to how the plot develops as well as how the tension in the play is "resolved."

A Word on the Word

First, however, a word on the word "intimate." Interestingly enough, the word is pronounced differently based on whether it is a noun/adjective or verb, and the meaning of the noun/adjective differs from its meaning as a verb. We all know that "intimate" as a noun/adj. means "inmost" or "closely personal," and that as a verb means to "hint at" or "suggest," but how, if at all, are these two fields of meaning connected? I discovered that the verbal use precedes the noun/adj. use, and could mean two things in the 16th century: (1) to proclaim or declare or (2) to be closely known. An example of each with suffice. From 1548 we have: "he incontinente did proclaime and intimate open war." Then, from 1614 we have, "As one as the commynge of ye Mayre was intymate and knowen to the ryotous persones, they fledde." Indeed, the two meanings are nicely wed in a 1642 quotation: "The Lord intimated his heart with this thought." Thus, by the middle of the 17th century, when the noun/adj. first came into use, intimate as a verb could suggest either the act of making something known or the revelelation of the secrets of the heart. After the noun/adj. came into common use, with its emphasis on "interior" or "inmost" knowledge or relationship, however, the verb retreated a bit to the "make known" or "hint" signification. Thus, a verb which began with two distinct meanings ended up adopting only one of them, leaving the "new" noun to pick up the other meaning.

Thus, by the 17th century the noun/adj. "intimate" came to be used when one wanted to describe a close personal relationship. Only in the early 20th century, however, did the association of "intimate" and "garments" come together. The earliest reference attested by the OED to this phenomenon came as recently as 1904: "Clothes hung on lines in all directions, intimate linen flapped in the wind." I am not sure when the first attestation of "intimate apparel" was, but it probably was well after 1904. I would suppose that it emerged probably a decade before Macy's or Bloomingdales first had a department of "Intimate Apparel," though I don't know when that was. Anyone know? Thus, the title of the play is probably anachronistic, though this is less than a quibble with Ms. Nottage.

Levels of Intimacy in Intimate Apparel

Though it might appear that the obvious place to start is to consider how the apparel Esther sews is a metaphor for the intimate personal relationships she or her customers have with people, we should start our trajectory of intimacy not with face to face human interaction but with letters exchanged between people. While Esther is hard at work making corsets and other female undergarments, she receives an unsolicited letter from a certain Mr. George Armstrong, a Caribbean Black man working on the Panama Canal. The letter informs Esther that George found out about her from a deacon in her church who labored near him, and that he would be happy to carry on a correspondence with her.

Esther, though an exceedingly proper woman, is clearly taken by the bold but eloquent letter of Mr. Armstrong. After confessing her inability to read or write, she allows her high society client to compose and send off inviting, and increasingly seductive letters in response to Mr. Armstrong. Thus, a relationship develops, with a certain amount of intimacy, between two people who have never spoken a word to each other. We learn later that Mr. Armstrong also was illiterate, and one of his companions composed letters for him for $.10 per letter. Thus, we are encouraged to probe the nature of intimacy from the fact that the two leading lights of the play are, at first, two steps removed from what we consider the first step in human intimacy: face to face encounter. They write, rather than meet face to face, but the words themselves are not their own. Eventually, Mr. Armstrong proposes to her by a letter, and she accepts his offer for marriage.

Written correspondence is also the basis of another relationship that should lead to intimacy. Mr. Marks, an upright Romanian Jew, is Esther's supplier of fabric. He wears black, despite his dealing in gabardine, nainsook, silk and all kinds of alluring fabrics, because this simple color connects him to his ancestors and allows him, thereby, to honor God. But he is betrothed to a woman from the home country, a woman he has never met, in a marriage arranged according to the custom of his people. He has received missives informing him of this fact, but my mind is not fully clear as to how he tried to develop the relationship with his future wife by mail.

But both of these letter-oriented relationships will be strained or broken by the developments in Esther's life. The next essay briefly considers those, as well as other intimate relationships the play probes.

2022