The New Dress

“And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction—the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people—set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off […] ‘What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!’”

Immediately, the reader is exposed to Mabel’s panic about her dress. This sentence shows that rather than talking to other people, Mabel creates a dialogue in her mind. This discord between reality and her psychology shows her deep self-doubt and the isolation that can occur when under pressure.

“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.