Blue Jeans and Blue Gowns

Blue Jeans and Blue Gowns

Some years back, I completed a PhD in the subject of semiotics, specifically in multi-modal communication and I’ve always had a fascination with how people communicate and how changes in our lifestyle can prompt changes in the way we interact with the world. In the last few days, the words of another semiotician (Umberto Eco’s Faith in Fakes, 1986), have been playing in a continuous loop at the forefront of my mind.

In that book, Eco descriptively and entertainingly explained in semiotic terms how wearing a pair of jeans had immediately altered his demeanour and how that one, simple outward change of clothes imposed on him a change in his attitudes, thoughts and behaviour. In the last few days, I’ve had a similar experience, one which I’m committing to paper underneath:

A few days ago, I underwent a short spell in hospital. I had what’s known as a TIA (Transient Ischaemic Attack). Although these can be quite serious incidents, they’re temporary and I’ve had two before so I recognised the symptoms straight away. I lost vision in one eye for around 15 minutes or so and after about half an hour the episode passed and I went back to feeling as I usually do, not ill or weak or physically compromised in any way, not even psychologically concerned about a repeat attack, just the usual me. That means, I share with Eco what he was pleased to call ‘the internal life’, an on-going internal dialogue on somewhat lofty and philosophical subject matters, a dialogue brimming with theory comparisons, semiotic analyses, critiques, and so on. And for me this dialogue is my most defining feature, it assures me I’m still me and it determines how I interpret the world - though not how the world interprets me.

But, during my sight loss episode, to be ‘on the safe side’ I called NHS 24 to ask their advice. Before I knew it, an ambulance arrived to transport me to hospital. I sat with the paramedics in the ambulance explaining what happened while they tested me for various health benchmarks like blood pressure, insulin score, etc. At this point I was fully clothed, but I felt cold so they covered me with a blanket. This made a difference because being conscious of an ambulance blanket around me suddenly shifted my perception of me from citizen to ‘patient’.

The move from ambulance to A&E was done by wheelchair (for safety reasons) so my transformation to patient was moved up a gear. I spent quite a few hours in A&E where I saw a succession of nurses, doctors and support staff and I instinctively knew as a patient, my language from here on in would need to be more considered and respectful and my internal dialogue would now be too busy observing these changes to pursue anything more intellectual.

One nurse suggested I change into a hospital gown and get onto the A&E couch. The gown did it. Donning that notoriously absurd apparel completed my transformation. The person I usually think of as me, a fiercely independent woman with a wealth of rich experience and knowledge, someone active in the world, someone with an internal life of incisive, continual semiotic analyses, to the person reflected back to me by the speech and actions of all those around me - a vulnerable, sick, old woman - and it was that pesky blue gown wot done it.

Just as Eco’s jeans had imposed on him an unfamiliar, somewhat artificial and alien demeanour, and exchanged his internal life for a completely external one (albeit a more carefree one), my hospital gown had become the medium that non verbally but loudly and definitively conveyed to me and everyone around me this message: ‘here you are a patient, one of many, to everyone you meet here, everything that identifies you is recorded on that bedside chart, that is who you are now’. The gown also instructed me to remember my place, to be grateful at all times, (even a bit of fawning might not be out of place); ask only relevant questions, and above all, don’t get annoyed when they call you ‘dear, pet, love’ so on, that’s what the gown demands. And I obeyed. I adopted the new persona my begowned self insisted on.

Over 2-3 days, someone interacted with a host of medical and non medical staff, but it wasn’t me, I was back at my flat probably watching Netflix and thinking about my next move into Nurture Community Politics. This was a surrogate me, one whose life and habits now gave way to instructions, rules and money-saving compromises that everything around me confirmed loud and clear: The infamous rubber mattress, the cornflakes breakfast, the torture of being wakened at half-hour intervals the whole night. It was all happening to her, the old dear in the gown that had a TIA. Nurture Politics? No time or cerebral space for such mental meanderings now, the gown (like Eco’s jeans) obliged me to concentrate solely on aspects of my external life, and right now that was to negotiate a trip to the loo while hooked up to a dozen bleeping devices.

As Eco himself commented, semioticians know that clothes are semiotic devices, and they know like language, clothes can provide a syntactic structure that can alter presentations and interpretations of events and indeed of people. We know the medium is the message. We know all this because we have libraries of books and theories that tell us so. But again, like Eco, sometimes its just fun to live through and then document a personal example of these theories that prove just how right they are.

June Maxwell
Glasgow, 2017