The New Dress

Narrated through the lens of Mabel Waring’s anxiety-riddled mind, “The New Dress” illustrates Modernism’s interest both in the nuances of human subjectivity and in the stifling impact of patriarchal cultural expectations upon women. The story reflects the isolation that such expectations produce, even amid a group of people, and the importance of psychology in Modernist storytelling.

The plot of the story is unremarkable. A woman gets an invitation to a party, is concerned about what to wear, has a dress made, and then attends the party while worrying that she doesn’t look good enough. The amount of time spent on the protagonist’s thoughts reflects the story’s focus on the inner world (Mabel’s psychology) rather than on external events.

From Woolf and Joyce to Faulkner, the stream-of-consciousness technique became an increasingly powerful tool to explore the world from the inside out. External events become nearly insignificant as authors explore the effects of even the most seemingly small events on their character’s psychology. The narrative technique highlights that while Mabel seems merely to be attending a party, turmoil is raging in her mind. This discrepancy between what is happening in the external world and what is happening in the protagonist’s mind is also a Modernist device used to show, in this case, the hypocrisy most women of Mabel’s era and class must endure.

While Mabel glimpses that she could gain some autonomy and peace by ceasing to obsess over what she imagines other people think of her clothes, the text doesn’t offer hope for long. This epiphany becomes more of an anti-epiphany, a Modernist tool used to resist the tradition of a “happy ending.” Mabel realizes that she could identify with other things beyond her appearance—or what she believes others think of her appearance. She decides to go to the library and never think about clothes again. She sees a way out of caring so much about how she looks, a way to get outside cultural expectations. Still, she slips back to feeling like a fly trapped in a saucer. Even as she exits the party, she focuses on the fact that her cloak is 20 years old. Try as she might to escape the mental programming of what a woman should be and dress like, Mabel keeps getting sucked back into the cycle of doing things she doesn’t want to do and saying everything other than what she is thinking.

The story’s use of stream of consciousness and the anti-epiphany centers around an extended metaphor about a fly to show the plight of a woman seeking connection in contemporary society. The narrative shows a woman amidst a group of people with whom she cannot connect and has nothing to talk about, and among whom she has more dialogue with herself than anyone else. The story reflects an interest in isolation amid a whirl of parties and socializing. Mabel introduces the reader to the image of the fly early on when she imagines herself as one of the insects trying to get out of a saucer. In contrast, she sees the people around her as more beautiful insects. Mabel’s sense of worth is centered on her clothes. Mabel imagines the fly not just struggling to exit the cup but having its wings glued together.

The metaphor of the fly relates to Mabel’s clothing and her inability to communicate truthfully to the people around her. As she leaves the party, she tells Mrs. Dalloway that she enjoyed the party and immediately realizes that she lied and returns to the fly metaphor: “Right in the saucer!” (Paragraph 24). As soon as she decides to find more integrity in her way of living and not focus on appearances, she loses the epiphany in lying to Mrs. Dalloway to keep up appearances. This inability to find integrity leads to her isolation.