24 pages • 48 minutes read
The New Dress
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Themes
The Damage of Social Expectations on Female Identity
Virginia Woolf’s work often focuses on the complicated roles of women in modern society. Woolf suggests that many traditional views about women’s roles persisted even through the radical social changes of the early 20th century. Many Modernist writers were interested in challenging traditional expectations around gender and class. They looked at institutions that no longer served human (particularly female) interests and sought to reconfigure and challenge them. Many of Woolf’s works focused on the prejudice that women should be defined by their appearance and their relationships with men. Woolf’s development of Mabel as a protagonist who can’t enjoy one minute of a party because she is preoccupied with her dress reveals the plight, however quiet, of many women in Woolf’s time.
Modernist writers like Woolf sought to explore women as subjects rather than objects. Clothing is a central subject because it exemplifies women as objects—passive figures to be looked at and judged by their beauty rather than by their power to do things in the public sphere. A dress, then, becomes a symbol of how objectification can be oppressive. Mabel’s focus on whether her dress is acceptable is so overpowering that it paralyzes her. She is unable to take decisive action or even have a genuine conversation with any of the guests.
Mabel’s few interactions at the party focus on herself and her insecurity about her dress. Her preoccupation with her appearance takes center stage, and her anxiety prevents her from connecting with her peers. Instead of interacting with others at the party, Mabel becomes obsessed with images of flies, which begin to stand in for her sense of being trapped. Her feelings are, to some extent, highly personal. She doesn’t appear to represent women in general because the other women in the story are symbolized as butterflies, dragonflies, and other beautiful insects—seemingly unpreoccupied with their own appearance, but then again, beautiful themselves and still insects. Yet her sense of being trapped seems connected to the lack of options she sees for herself as a woman. At the end of the narrative, when she tells the hostess that she enjoyed the party, she goes back to the image of flies. Mabel’s stream of consciousness reveals the tensions between what she thinks and feels and how a woman is supposed to appear and act in public.
Isolation in Modern Society
“The New Dress” highlights how even large gatherings can make individuals feel lonely. The story takes place at a party, but the only point of view the reader can access is that of the protagonist, who is deeply caught up in herself. The reader gets little sense of the other characters in the story. Woolf draws attention not just to the socially enforced female concern about appearance, but also to the sense of isolation that emerges from such demands. Mabel mentions other characters at the party, but their descriptions are less developed than those of her inanimate dress. In this way, the loneliness of modern living, especially for women, becomes highlighted. Concern over whether she meets society’s expectations about her appearance prevents her from forming genuine connections, even when surrounded by other people.
Mabel’s fixation on the extended metaphor of the flies illustrates her sense of being trapped. Every time Mabel communicates with others at the party, she thinks about flies in various states of entrapment. At first, the metaphor operates to show that Mabel feels like a disgusting fly while she sees the other partygoers as beautiful insects. Mabel believes that she belongs in a completely different and lesser category. This sense of otherness shows how isolated she feels even in a large group of people.
Mabel continues to focus on flies drowning in saucers of milk or being trapped and unable to get where they need to go. By the end of “The New Dress,” the reader knows very little about any of the other people at the party. The characters’ comments about Mabel’s dress are mentioned, but otherwise, they remain unexplored and undeveloped. Instead, the reader is offered Mabel’s history, her daydreams, her memories about the making of her dress, and her previous insecurities and relationships. Mabel is not mentally present at the party, and the reader experiences this through the hyperfocus of the narrative on Mabel’s distraction from the actions taking place around her. Mabel’s isolation is shown in her preoccupation and inability to connect with the people or actions happening around her.
The Disparity Between Internal Thought and External Communication
Modernism’s shift from plot-driven stories to psychologically driven stories sought to highlight the disparity between what happens in the external world and what happens in people’s subjective experiences. A sense of alienation pervaded Modernist texts in part because some authors felt uncomfortable or inauthentic in complying with traditional institutions and social expectations. Many writers felt that one could not offer one’s real thoughts in the limited terms that were deemed socially acceptable. Traditional social expectations (especially regarding gender roles) made authenticity impossible, in this view, because polite society required its members to wear socially acceptable masks rather than to reveal their true selves. “The New Dress” takes the analysis one step further, suggesting that Mabel lacks a sense of her true self. The narrator refers to Mabel’s “odious, weak, vacillating character […] always giving in at the critical moment” (Paragraph 13). Mabel’s effort to fulfill narrow social expectations seems to have hindered the formation of a coherent self.
The disparity between what Mabel thinks and says illustrates this characteristically Modernist sense of alienation. In these narratives, characters are not isolated by space but rather by restrictive social conventions: One cannot say what one is thinking but only what is expected. While Mabel’s focus on her dress illustrates the pressures of appearances on women, the discord between what she thinks and feels illustrates a second form of social pressure—to say only what is conventionally acceptable.
Mabel wants to express her feelings to others, but she can’t. This is illustrated when, as she leaves the party, Mabel tells Mrs. Dalloway that she enjoyed herself. She then immediately thinks of herself as a fly trapped in a saucer. The fly metaphor shows Mabel’s disgust with her appearance and her dress, but it also shows that she feels trapped because she can’t express her true feelings and thoughts. Mabel is surrounded by acquaintances but cannot connect with them. She can only fixate on her dress. Mabel experiences the difficulty of not only feeling judged but also being unable to think about herself or others outside of that judgment.
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By Virginia Woolf
