The Green Dress Symbol Analysis

The green dress that Golden Gray uses to cover Wild in Jazz comes to represent various character’s desires for care—and their pain at feeling abandoned. The dress originates with the wealthy, white slaveholder Vera Louise, who wears it throughout her affair with Henry Lestory. Golden then inherits the dress from his mother, and he initially uses to cover Wild because he does not want the injured woman’s blood to dirty his coat. This callous (and racist) thought process upsets the novel’s unnamed narrator, who sees it as the ultimate evidence of Golden’s inability to think beyond himself. Years later, the dress takes on yet another meaning. When Joe Trace searches for Wild, whom he believes to be his mother, he stumbles upon the cave where she hides out, and he learns that Wild has held on to this green dress, alongside the doll and some other luxury items Golden gave to her. Later still, when the narrator reflects on the absence of love in her own life, she finds comfort in imagining Wild’s cave, in touching the green dress that might signal some incomplete form of care.

Because the dress appears in multiple settings and is often discussed in fragmentary, almost poetic language, its meaning is a source of debate among scholars; some experts argue that the dress also symbolizes history and memory, while others see it as a testament to the complex and painful legacies of slavery.