What Do Women Want?

In a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud famously asked, “What does a woman want?” (Jones, Ernest. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2. Basic Books, 1955. p. 421). The speaker of the poem immediately provides the reader with a direct and specific answer, although the speaker answers from a singular point of view, rather than with the plural “we.” The speaker says, “I want a red dress” (Line 1). She is not speaking on behalf of all women; the red dress is her personal wish.

“I want it flimsy and cheap” (Line 2) the speaker says. The dress of the speaker’s dreams is not fancy, nor is it a status symbol. It is “too tight” (Line 3). It is like a red flag waved in front of a bull, a blazing provocation, to be ripped from the body at the height of passion. The speaker tells the reader she wants the dress to be “sleeveless and backless” (Line 5)—all the more impactful for being less of a dress and for revealing as much of the body as possible. The suggestion that nobody will have “to guess / what’s underneath (Lines 6-7) indicates a lack of undergarments. The body is barely contained, and unrestricted.

The next lines indicate that the time of day is not night, or even evening—when one might expect a red dress to make an appearance—but the middle of a working day. The speaker wants to walk that dress past “Thrifty’s” (Line 8), past the café where “Mr. and Mrs. Wong” (Line 10) hawk yesterday’s pastries. The “keys glittering in the window” (Line 9) of the “hardware store” (Line 8), suggest doors and thresholds to open and cross in the brightness of sunlight, rather than in shadow.

The speaker wants to walk “past the Guerra brothers” (Line 11) in her red dress as they toil at their physically demanding job, loading meat. Here, the body of the speaker makes room for other bodies. The laborers need muscle to sling those “pigs from the truck” (Line 12). The animals themselves, though dead, have “slick snouts” (Line 13)—they are yet viscous and slippery. Before butchery and in the laborer’s embrace, they appear as they were in life, as whole animals, full of juice.

The speaker’s desire is to stroll down that workaday street like she is “[t]he only / woman on earth” (Lines 14-15). The world is her oyster. She “can have [her] pick” (Line 15) of any sexual partner she chooses. However, the dress is a dream; the speaker doesn’t yet possess it, but she “want[s] that dress bad” (Line 16). At this point in the poem, the speaker turns her focus from wanting to be desired to her own desire. Heretofore, the speaker’s dress affected those around her; it transformed the speaker, in their vision, into a sexually irresistible object of desire.

The speaker gives the dress another role: to represent her life force as well as her character. It will “confirm / your worst fears about me” (Lines 17-18). The fear, perhaps, is that the speaker is not submissive, or that she prioritizes her own desire over the desires of others. She is independent and not subject to oppression or coercion. She is her own woman. The red dress says, be forewarned.

In the last section of the poem, the dress changes once again. The “flimsy” (Line 2) garment, when the speaker procures it, nonetheless will be strong enough “to carry [her] into this world” (Line 23). It will be the vessel that births the speaker into her true existence and supports her through the struggles and the ecstasies of a full and passionate life. The speaker pulls “that garment / from its hanger” (Lines 21-22) like she’s “choosing a body” (Line 22). The speaker thus emends her own birth by imposing her own agency on how she enters the world. All the choices are her own, free from the constraints and consequences of tradition.

The speaker says, “I’ll wear it like bones, like skin” (Line 25), erasing the barrier between the symbol and the symbolized. The dress is the woman, and the woman is the dress—a fierce declaration of life lived on one’s own terms, right up to death. The speaker reverts to the affectionate insult of the second line—when she demands the dress be “cheap” (Line 2)—by referring to this transformational article of clothing at the end of the poem as “the goddamned / dress” (Lines 26-27). The dress was never a fantasy of wealth or beauty or grace. It is not a dress for a good and pious woman. It is the manifesto of a secular goddess who desires no spiritual guide other than her passion. What’s more, she’ll wear that attitude to the grave.