The New Dress

“Why not be herself, anyhow?”

Mabel’s hopefulness at creating a dress that reflects her personal identity enters the story with the creation of a new dress after she is invited to the party. The reader sees the protagonist operate out of agency. This comes in contrast to the primary tone of the story, which suggests pervasive insecurity and passivity. The reader is exposed to the tension between identity and despair that continues throughout the narrative.

“But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror—the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these ordinary people.”

The dress becomes a metaphor for Mabel’s sense of self. The shift from feeling connected to her mother when she found the design to the sense that it was “idiotic” and “old-fashioned” shows how quickly Mabel’s own self-concept can shift based on what she thinks others are thinking. Her sense of self is determined by what she believes about the opinions of others, making her dependent not only on them but on her often fanciful beliefs about them.

“We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable.”

This is the introduction of Mabel’s extended simile about flies. Here, all the partygoers are compared to flies that are trapped into doing and saying certain things because they are socially expected. She suggests that everyone, not just her, is forced to live inauthentically because of overly restrictive social customs and norms.

“Now she could see flies crawling slowly out of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck together, and she strained and strained.”

Mabel takes the fly simile and continues to build strong imagery with the wings of the flies stuck together. The fixation shows her imagination at work. She extends the simile beyond the single image of flies crawling out of a saucer to imagine that the milk has made them unable to fly.

“She saw herself like that—she was a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.”

Mabel shifts the metaphor to make herself the ugly fly while the others are imagined as more beautiful insects. The shift in imagery shows Mabel’s insecurity and self-doubt. Whereas she initially pictured everyone at the party as a fly, she now retains the image only for herself.

“‘I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,’ she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing up a poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out of anything.”

One of only a few actual exchanges between Mabel and other partygoers reveals that even the interactions she has with others focus on her dress. Mabel’s inability to take comfort in Robert’s reassurance is notable. Her imaginary dialogues with the guests carry more weight than what they actually say to her.

“‘Lies, lies, lies!’ For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything.”

The reader sees the tension between what Mabel says out loud and what she thinks. The quote shows that even when Mabel communicates with others at the party, she does not sincerely connect with them. Her insecurity is so great that it renders impossible the kind of interpersonal connection that might reduce her insecurity.

“And now the whole thing had vanished. The dress, the room, the love, the pity, the scalloping looking-glass, and the canary’s cage—all had vanished, and here she was in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room, suffering tortures, woken wide awake to reality.”

The party has the power to rewrite Mabel’s former experiences in terms of tone and meaning. The shift shows the negative effects of the social experience on Mabel’s psyche. The positive experiences she had while making the dress cease to be sources of meaning or identity as they are swallowed by the intense self-doubt she feels at the party.

“But it was all so paltry, weak-blooded, and petty-minded to care so much at her age with two children, to be still so utterly dependent on people’s opinions and not have principles or convictions, not to be able to say as other people did, ‘There’s Shakespeare! There’s death! We’re all weevils in a captain’s biscuit’—or whatever it was that people did say.”

Mabel has moments of self-analysis where she can see that her obsession with other people’s opinions of her is unhealthy. She is able to pull herself out of her self-pity to see objectively at moments during the story, but this realization becomes only another topic for self-criticism, drawing her back into her solipsistic swirl.

“‘It’s so old-fashioned,’ she said to Charles Burt, making him stop (which by itself he hated) on his way to talk to someone else.”

Mabel’s second attempt to have a conversation with someone at the party again has to do with her dress. She’s looking to get positive feedback, constantly speaking of herself rather than trying to relate to others. Once again, she fails to get the affirmation she desperately craves, and her interactions with others only draw her back into herself.

“She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert—they were all the same poor water- veined creatures who did nothing.”

In the brief moments when Mabel is not focusing on her dress, her self-doubt about other topics takes its place. She critiques herself as a wife and mother and in all the social roles she’s held in addition to the inadequacy of her clothes.

“She would go to the London Library tomorrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she would become a new person.”

This passage reads like an epiphany, and the reader only determines that it is a Modernist anti-epiphany when, in the next paragraph, she slips back into her cycle of self-doubt. Her attempt to define herself independently of other people’s opinions is fanciful in that it relies on a book and public event that exist only in her imagination.

“‘I’m afraid I must,’ said Mabel Waring. ‘But,’ she added in her weak, wobbly voice which only sounded ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, ‘I have enjoyed myself enormously.’”

Directly after Mabel determines to change her ways and become her own person, she lies to her hostess that she enjoyed herself. The lie becomes the counterpoint to her epiphany, which had come moments earlier. Immediately after determining to break free from narrow social conventions, she finds herself being once again insincere and weak in the face of the pressure to conform.