White Dress Symbol Analysis

In Solaris, the white dress in which the replicas of Rheya first appear symbolizes the inability of human scientists to understand alien life—and, perhaps, vice versa. After scientist Kelvin falls asleep on the research station on the exoplanet Solaris, he wakes to discover his ex-lover Rheya, who died by suicide 10 years prior, in his cabin. She is wearing what appears to be an ordinary “white beach dress.” Kelvin is terrified: the replica of Rheya hints that Solaris’s ocean, a living and possibly sentient alien entity, has somehow accessed Kelvin’s memories and produced a copy of a human being indistinguishable from the dead original. Horrorstruck Kelvin immediately hatches a plan to trick Rheya into a space shuttle and launch her into orbit far from him and to do so, he tells her that they’ll both put on flight suits. When Rheya tries to take off her dress, they both realize the “extraordinary fact” that the dress’s buttons are “merely decorative”—and the dress has no zipper, buttons, or other closures. Kelvin has to cut Rheya out of the dress for her to change. The dress is a clue that the novel does not interpret: Does its visual normalcy and underlying oddity represent the replicas, which themselves appear completely human but aren’t? Does the dress show that the ocean, which produced the replicas, doesn’t understand human clothing or human culture? Or, on the other hand, did the ocean make the dress subtly bizarre to unsettle and even threaten the human scientists whose research team has been bombarding the ocean with X-rays?

When the dress appears again, on a second replica of Rheya after Kelvin has shot the first replica into space, he is “filled” with “horror” at the “two identical dresses,” a reaction that only deepens the confusion surrounding the ocean’s knowledge and motives. Does the ocean intend to horrify Kelvin by producing subtly bizarre identical dresses—and identical women? Or is the ocean’s behavior somehow unconscious, reflexive, or otherwise automatic in its repetitiveness? Thus, the white dress comes to symbolize the inability of Kelvin—or any other human scientist—to definitively answer questions about Solaris’s ocean and alien life more generally.