Importance Of Clothing In Our Lady Of Paris

When reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, clothing is used as a literary tool by both the author and the narrator to give readers a better clarity of the personalities of the characters, and the implications that come with clothing and the ways it’s worn. There are several cases of this in the book but Mr. and Mrs. Harouni, in particular, are the few characters that make the importance of clothing be more acknowledged by the readers since their clothing is emphasized more so than the other characters’ clothing. In the short story, “Our Lady of Paris,” both characters are described as rich, privileged people. Mrs. Harouni is portrayed as charismatic, bold and extravagant in her taste for things, while Mr. Harouni is portrayed as “a smallish man with a little mustache, precisely …show more content…
Clothing, in both literature and reality, gives a person a form of identity. It doesn’t necessarily define someone’s character, but gives it more of a dimension or comprehensiveness: it creates a fast track for shorthanded perceptions of what a person might be like. (Just as the reader makes assumptions about Mrs. Harouni based on her first few appearances.) If Iqbal were dressed in another manner that is more relevant to Mano Majra, his character and his purpose in the story would have been altered entirely; his personality would have probably been drastically different as well. The same is true for Mr. and Mrs. Harouni. Clothing is never separated from their story — in fact, it acts towards the central theme of many of the short stories of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders and is a tool for giving the characters a genuineness, while also making them substantive to the reader. In general, however, clothing plays a major part in much of Pakistani literature, especially considering the fact that clothing outside of the literature is a major facet of sub-continental