One summer day long ago, when I was eleven months old, my seven-year-old brother was put in charge of me for a few hours. Skippy was very conscientious, but also active, and when his friends came calling, with an invitation to roller skate up on Wheeler Avenue, he wanted to go. He decided to take me along in my slat-sided wagon. Before leaving, Skippy carefully searched the house until he found a bonnet for me, a very snug and thickly woven wool hat that would have kept infant Eskimos toasty on the tundra. When my parents returned, I was safe and sound, invigorated, as red as a little lobster, and raining sweat.

Thus began my love affair with hats.

Hats for little girls were starting to pass out of fashion when I was growing up. Hairbows were the thing, thanks to that icon Shirley Temple. If I told you how big the bows were, you'd accuse me of exaggeration. My kindergarten chum, Janet Eshelmann, and I called them "airplanes." Skinny Janet was nearly blown aloft on windy days.

Fashionable or not, I remained enamored of hats. Though Mrs. Druggan was an excellent third-grade teacher, only two memories stand out from that year: her insistence that, when writing, I make the "tails" of the letter "y" straight and crisp, and her nonplussed look the day I showed up in a kelly green hat. Reflecting, I imagine this was the hat an Englishwoman might have worn when she went riding: a wide rolled brim, flat crown, grosgrain streamers down the back. In a rural New Jersey grade school, it was probably as exotic as a llama.

As the years went by, fewer and fewer hats were designed for young girls, and the hats for adult women were beneath my dignity. I maneuvered high school and college years bareheaded. The only headpiece I recall from graduate school was a colander I wore upside down when performing my Brunhilde interpretation. (Reshaped and strategically placed aluminum pie pans also figured in this bit of grand opera.)

When I received a mission call from the LDS church, I was told to bring a hat. Not easy to do by that time, but I found a soft, modified cloche number, the chief advantage of which was its foldability. I never wore it on my tour of duty: hats were really out by then. All the more reason (and there were several) why the rest of the mission staff and I were astonished by the arrival of a new missionary in a very large, very pink picture hat. Sister Hatt's first order of business was to inquire when the Paris fashion houses opened next morning. She was relieved of the responsibility for any further orders of business.

Sister Hatt's innocent gaffe is of more than passing interest to me. I find it insightful to consider why her showy, floppy bonnet was inappropriate.

Don't be fooled into thinking that hats are an after-thought, something we plop on our heads at the last minute in a burst of whimsy. What people wear on their heads is more encrusted with symbolism than any other item of clothing.

For example, today businessfolk and government officials around the globe pretty much resemble cookies stamped from the same cutter. You see the standard dark suit in Singapore, Sri Lanka, Stockholm, and Sante Fe. But head coverings often deliver the deeper message of identity. Brits hold on with both hands to their black bowlers; Sikhs from India firmly wrap snowy turbans around their heads; PLO leader Yassir Arafat would be unrecognizable without his signature headgear. Many Texas wheeler-dealers, thousands of miles away from the Rio Grande, still sport their Stetsons with pride. Because the head is the repository of the brain, which, since the eighteenth century, we have considered the source of our identity, what we wear on our heads signals who we are. Or at least who we think we are. Sister Hatt obviously had a misconception about who she was going to be on her mission.

If this premise is true, it may lead us to some useful conclusions about women, their hats, and their identity.

Let's begin with the post-war era. Even a cursory look at newsreels, magazines, and movies from about 1946 to the mid1960s makes the message of the headgear of that era unmistakable: women are frivolous and foolish, good for a brief laugh but hardly to be taken seriously. Before the advent of television, movie theaters showed weekly newsreels of major political and world events, always leavened by a clip or two from the lighter side. Each spring, without fail, the newsreels covered a fashion show displaying the season's female millinery. To call the hats ridiculous would be an understatement. They were towering or tiny, clownish or silly, jammed on women's heads off-center, atilt or askew. All sorts of foreign (irrelevant) objects might be found on a hat: kitchen gadgets, toys, household products, birds' nests. The narrator of the newsreel footage (always male) pretended to report the great event seriously, but of course the commentary dripped with mockery.

The basic assumption, the premise assuring this footage's success, year after year, was that women's hats were by nature and in principle trivial, laughable, and foolish.

Women's hat jokes were a standard in any comic's repertoire. As late as the 1960s, I saw, at a meeting in Provo, Utah, a man in lipstick and a woman's hat, sitting in the back of the auditorium. I was startled, but finally realized he was part of the program. His entire routine was a put-down of women's clothing and makeup, performed before an exclusively female audience, who tittered and blushed. And applauded.

At any given time, the media image of hats corresponds to the general view of women then current. In the 1930s and early 1940s, many movie characters were costumed in attractive and romantic hats that identified the women beneath them as interesting, substantial human beings. But that image soon changed, and changed radically. Perhaps the last truly respectable, truly serious movie chapeau was Ingrid Bergman's famous picture hat in Casablanca, perfectly framing her tear-fringed eyes in the airport close-up. After Casablanca (1942), it was downhill. True, there were many showy chapeaux during the New Look 1950s, but the hats were clearly objects, not integrated parts of a woman's self-image. The women below the 1950s hats were mannequins, not real women to be reckoned with. As fashion conscious as Jackie Kennedy was with her little pink pillbox, she was no more allowed to be a real human being than hatless Marilyn Monroe.

There was, of course, a reason for the downhill slide of women's hats. In the late 1940s the millions of women who had replaced men in the factories and the fields during the war were given a clear message: go back to your kitchens. The female empowerment of those war years was a threat in peacetime. Men needed their jobs back, and their status. Women could not be allowed to take themselves that seriously any more.

The hats of the late 1940s and 1950s spelled out the message of disproportion, of how silly a woman could look if she got too big for her bonnet, or vice versa. The chapeaux were either grossly and ridiculously outsized, peaking in Carmen Miranda's towering fruit-salad jokes (Miranda's autobiography makes clear how much she hated this trivialization), or they were ridiculously undersized, tiny, and demeaning. Designers clearly mimicked Swift in Gulliver's Travels, knowingly or not, with their petty Lilliputian or gross Brobdingnagian dimensions. A movie character might be a bustling newspaper editor or an executive in a cosmetic company, but the minute she put on her hat, the world got the real message. The bitsy pillboxes on Ann Sheridan, the smashed pancakes precariously perched on Roz Russell's head, the bits of feather attached like trapped birds in Myrna Loy's hair—these told movie-goers that the women were harmless at best, no threat to any man, and foolish at worst.

After the 1940s a good deal of time had to pass before a signature hat appeared on the American scene. Bella Abzug's hats symbolized a great deal. Because hats were still a bit unusual in the early 1970s when the Women's Movement was gathering force for its second wave, Bella's large, colorful, inevitable hats said:

"Look at me! I'm here! I am something to be reckoned with. I'm a large New York woman with a loud, husky voice, and, though I don't take myself more seriously than I should, I have something to say, and you will hear it."

I suppose it was Bella's omnipresent hats that gave me permission to return to hats myself. One day I saw a lavender number that fit, that looked okay—and I bought it. Shortly thereafter I went to an interview with Jerry Johnston of the Deseret News in Salt Lake City. (Hard up for copy apparently, Jerry was writing a feature about me.) I was wearing my new hat but started to take it off when Jerry's photographer came by for a picture. "No! No! Leave it on!" Jerry insisted. The picture appeared in the paper, a very large picture. Comparisons were made with Bella. From then on, people would often greet me with the question, "Where's your hat?" Now I not only had permission to wear hats, I had what began to be an expectation. I loved it. The point is that the hats were about more than clothing; they were about identity.

A few years later I bought a green corduroy cap, sporty, jaunty—I loved it. I wore it on a summer study program in Cambridge, England. In Cambridge I noticed that people were responding a little differently to me, more friendly—both the other Americans in the study program and the English themselves.

A friend, also enrolled in the study program, said, "It's the hat, Elouise. The hat gives a signal, says that you are more accessible, that you are likely to be an interesting person to talk to, that you are unlikely to reject an offer to chat." Well, that may seem a powerful lot of communication for a simple corduroy cap, but I'm convinced that she, as usual, was right on target.

When, back in the States, I left the cap in a favorite diner and returned to find it gone, I grieved much more than had I lost, oh, a pair of gloves, a scarf, or even a coat or boots. The hat was linked to my identity in a way other clothing could not be. I recently found and bought a very similar cap; I keep close track of this one.

Currently I have a hat dilemma.

While in Hungary several years ago, I went to an open market with two dear, warm Hungarian friends. On one of the vendors' blankets, spread beneath the trees in the park, I saw a white fur hat. We could call it a Russian-style hat, though the Hungarians would forsake paprika forever before they would call it "Russian." Such hats are very popular in central and eastern Europe during the frigid winter months. This one was beautiful, sleek, looked right on my head. Laszlo, my friend, leaped into the language breech and began bargaining with the vendor. Several times I tried to ask Laszlo about the fur. Was it real? He brushed my question aside, settled on a wonderful bargain price, and told me proudly to buy it now—"Was okay." I bought it. I wore it through that winter. Then I returned home and have not worn the fur since.

I have apologized more than once to the little spirit that gave its all for my hat. The memory of Laszlo's beaming pride, and of all the hat reminds me of, won't let me part with it. But if I wore that beautiful creature's pelt, though I might like the way I looked, I couldn't accept the message I'd give, or the way I'd feel. So the white fur hat sits on the shelf, beside my flat-tipped, felt cowboy hat, beside the fool's cap, complete with bells, bought at a hat house in Oregon. I haven't worn that hat yet, but I will. Oh yes: that one is definitely appropriate.

Here's a riddle: a television series aimed at a mass audience has, among others, two male characters. R is tall, dark, and handsome, conventionally masculine yet unconventionally sensitive and egalitarian. D is neither tall nor handsome, but rather strange in appearance, cast in the nerd mold, and emotionless. Now, which do you think would be the more interesting? One would think so, but that's not the case.

On reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Commander Will Riker fits every standard for mass media heroes. He is brave and forthright, frequently giving a forceful tug to his uniform tunic to prove his readiness for action (or possibly to keep the blasted thing from riding up over his manly midriff). Lt. Commander Data, by contrast, is an android, a machine, who looks like a human being except for a chalk-white face. He is a supercomputer, able to perform all sorts of computations with blazing speed, able to listen to and understand seven pieces of music at once, able to duplicate on the violin the exact style of play of any great violinist, etc. He is programmed to be completely free of human emotion—fear, anger, anxiety, love, you name it. And yet, Data is the most interesting and engrossing character of the whole rather large cast. What s the key to the riddle?

Aristotle claimed that a person is his or her desire. Janet Burroway, in her book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, tells her readers that a character, to be interesting, must want and want intensely. Commander Data wants, and what he wants is to be human, or as human as possible. Therein lies his attraction as a character.

Now, I have puzzled over whether wanting or desiring is itself an emotion and thereby a plot inconsistency as far as Data is concerned. On the other hand, his desire could be driven by curiosity, a function of the mind rather than of the heart. For the sake of argument, let s accept the android s desire as a given.

If you haven t seen much of Star Trek, you may wonder at my wasting time in a discussion of a science fiction serial. Actually, over the months and years, this program focused less and less on the intergalactic skirmishes, high-tech hardware, and bizarre life forms, and more and more on rather complex psychological and societal issues. Data is a case in point. His positronic skills were dazzling, but as time went by, they were featured less and less. Data became, in fact, a vehicle for exploring one of the species s most intriguing questions: "What does it mean to be human?" Commercial mass-media production or not, the exploration on The Next Generation was thoughtful and artistic.

Various episodes focused on Data confronting the conundrum of human nature. In one story he tries to conduct a romance by the book. Worried because a young lieutenant, a good friend, has broken off her involvement with another officer and is sad as a result, he courts her with the hope of lifting her spirits and of discovering what human courtship is like. He does everything right: flowers, gifts, compliments, candlelight dinners, music. And predictably he ends up without a sweetheart, very nearly without a friendship as well. In the closing frame he sits in his room with his cat, on his face an expression that is neither depressed nor sad nor regretful, nor even lonely, just blank. Intelligent, but emotionally empty.

In another episode Data explores humor, learns to tell jokes, even conjures up a holographic audience for his stand-up comedy routine. But an audience programmed to laugh is even less satisfactory than a laugh track. When Riker tries to comfort him by saying that humor is not the most important thing about being human, Data replies, "Yes, but it seems to be the quality most uniquely human."

This character is interesting, in other words, because he is busily and intelligently engaged in a quest nearly all of us pursue, whether consciously or otherwise: the quest to become more fully human.

By way of footnote, it s revealing to compare Data with Mr. Spock from the original Star Trek series. Spock was half-Vulcan, half-human, the Vulcan tradition being one that scorned emotion, indeed feeling no emotion, but valuing logic and reason exclusively. Spock favored his Vulcan heritage and had no interest in becoming human. He was satisfied being what he was. And for that reason, I submit, he was a far less interesting character than Data, who is not satisfied. And before you whip out your phasers, Trekkies, let me make clear that I deeply respect Leonard Nimoy, who acted the part of Spock. I just think he deserved a fuller role.

Let's introduce another character to our musing: Stevens, the butler from the book and film Remains of the Day. A rich book, an opulent movie about an emotionally impoverished man. As I interpret the book, it raises the same question: what does it mean to be human? Stevens and Data are alike in many ways. Stevens is the almost-superhuman butler, the automaton in a tuxedo. He works diligently to efface any personal emotion. Like Data, Stevens worries about humor, for the new master of Darlington Hall is given to "bantering" with his butler, who initially is at a loss how to respond but who, at book's end, is making plans to "study" bantering so that he may better serve his employer. We cannot believe he will be any more successful at studying jokes than Data.

But unlike Data, Stevens is striving to become less. His ideal is to efface himself as a person. He observes that his earlier employer, Lord Darlington, claimed he was more truly alone when Stevens was in the room than otherwise. Stevens literally loses himself in service. In fact, he creates for himself a cocoon, a gilded retreat, from which he does not emerge into the larger world. He mentions (proudly, not grudgingly) how rarely he leaves the mansion itself, even to stroll on the grounds let alone leave the grounds.

What is of greatest interest to Stevens is dignity. He sees that quality as the essence of the truly great butlers. And how does he define dignity? In essence, as the absence of emotion, except when one is totally alone. How successful he has been at separating his emotion from the rest of himself is shown in the scene treating his father's death. Stevens is serving at a major function and allows himself only the briefest moment to visit his dying father upstairs. Back downstairs Stevens goes on serving, and only the concerned questions of others bring him to realize that he is crying.

Being fully human seems to require full consciousness. And the word "conscious" implies "knowing with." To be conscious is to share knowledge of oneself with another and with one's Self. So Stevens's goal, to "let down" only when he is totally alone, spells dead end. With that limitation, his capacity for growth is barricaded.

Perfection without risk, or risk with consequent fallibility? One of the central puzzles of human nature. Within his chosen territory Stevens can be virtually perfect. Lord Darlington, on the other hand, ventures beyond his boundaries, gets in way over his head in attempting to help negotiate a "gentlemen's peace" with the Germans. Darlington's risk ends in disaster and disgrace and shortens his life. Likewise Stevens's counterpart, the housekeeper Miss Kenton, ultimately takes a risk. She first takes a considerable risk when trying to ignite a spark of romance in the frozen butler. Then, when Darlington insists upon firing two Jewish house-maids simply because they are Jewish, Kenton threatens to resign but does not do so and thereafter admits that cowardice betrayed her principles, that she was afraid to leave the security of the position. Later, however, she does leave, and in the larger world her risks, while not as disastrous as Darlington's, exact a price. Her marriage is far from satisfactory and her life full of lows with precious few bright spots.

A minor motif in Remains of the Day is the question of democracy. On one occasion Darlington's drunken cronies taunt Stevens by questioning him on international affairs, about which, he admits, with dignity, he "couldn t say." The cronies' point is made: one cannot leave great affairs in the hands of the common voter. Later Stevens encounters a fiery working man who insists that the right to have one's say is the essence of democracy and of England. The worker, in reality, knows little more than Stevens about the issues, but he is determined to have his say anyway. It's an old question. Those who challenged Thomas Jefferson's conviction that democracy would work in America knew the dangers of an uninformed electorate. Democracy was, and is, risky.

Perfection, or at least order and dignity, without risk, without pain, without emotions, without loss; or loss, tears, pain, mistakes, sacrifice of dignity in exchange for something less than perfection? Maybe, as often happens, the answer can be found in the folds of a paradox: that "something less" turns out to be "something more"; that both Darlington and Miss Kenton, misguided and weak as they are, emerge as heroic because they were trying to push the boundaries; and that Stevens, unwilling to make the soul journey at all, has sold his soul for a mess of polished silver.