18 pages • 36 minutes read
Kim AddonizioWhat Do Women Want?
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Red Dress
The red dress doesn’t need a speaker; it tells a story all its own. In the absence of the red dress, the speaker in “What Do Women Want?” must conjure it in the reader’s imagination, and she gets right to the point. There is no ambiguity to a garment that is “too tight” (Line 3) and the color of blood. The red dress is up to something. It has an ulterior motive. The red dress does not concern itself with being liked. It is designed for one purpose, and that is to disrupt, to overwhelm with desire. The red dress is an unreliable narrator who can’t be trusted, yet always tells the truth. After all, “no one has to guess / what’s underneath” (Lines 6-7).
In film, a woman in a red dress is almost always scheming to trick a male character, through seduction, into giving her what she wants. Historically, the Lady in Red is a female ghost associated with old hotels and public spaces. In former mining towns in the American West, she is often depicted as the spirit of a dead sex worker or cast-off lover. In her haunting, she persists in making her presence and her violent history known. Addonizio’s speaker is more like the ghost than the femme fatale in that her red dress (theoretically) does more than offer a distraction: It sends a message.
The difference, of course, is that Addonizio’s speaker is very much alive. She envisions the red dress as a body-con banner, a flag, a wearable emblem announcing her sovereignty to herself. The poet recasts the trope of the red dress to feature a speaker who has nothing to hide. The red dress is not a weapon, but a warning: She will live her life, her way.
The Neighborhood Street
In “What Do Women Want?”, the neighborhood street becomes the catwalk, the promenade, the public space in which one is seen, admired, and judged. In broad daylight, during working hours, it seems an odd setting for a woman in a hot red dress. Clingy, “sleeveless and backless” (Line 5), it feels out of place among the presumed crowds running errands and plugging away at their day jobs. The dissonance of a woman in a red dress on the neighborhood street calls attention to the richness and vibrance of life, even at its most mundane.
The street is a conduit, an artery, and the woman in the red dress is its blood made visible. The “Guerra brothers / slinging pigs (Lines 11-12) are no doubt shiny with sweat; the metal of the “keys glittering in the window” (Line 9) are hot with the sun. The pork reminds the reader that death is the stuff of everyday, visible on the street, and sex is at the heart of it all, from “the birth-cries and the love-cries too” (Line 24). From the perspective of the speaker, the street and the world are one and the same.
The Body
The body enters the poem immediately, as a red dress is, after all, but something with which to drape the body. Although it isn’t yet named, the reader is aware of the speaker’s body when she declares, “I want it too tight” (Line 3). The tightness outlines and defines the body before “someone tears it off” the speaker (Line 4). At this point, the reader imagines the body as naked and not static. This body is engaged.
The “Guerra brothers / slinging pigs” (Lines 11-12) bring more bodies into the frame. The men are laboring. To sling a pig requires strength and suggests a certain grace of motion. Once, “the slick snouts” (Line 13) of the pigs rooted and lived, but now they’re dead, bodies to be borne by working men and later, perhaps, to be consumed by them.
Toward the end of the poem the dress is a body itself, capable of bearing the speaker “into this world” (Line 23). Ultimately, the body of the dress and the body of the speaker merge. The speaker will “wear it like bones, like skin” (Line 25), unto death.
