The New Dress

Mabel is the protagonist, and to a degree, she is the antagonist as well. She is 40 years old and married with two children. While “The New Dress” is technically written in the third person using free indirect discourse, the narrator’s perspective is so close to Mabel’s that they effectively merge into a first-person stream of consciousness through much of the story. Woolf's primary characterization device is Mabel’s thoughts about herself, which focus on her clothes, family, and social status. Mabel’s new dress is the story’s central focus and symbol, and it reveals Mabel’s primary character trait: an intense lack of self-acceptance and accompanying insecurity and dependence on the opinions of others. The narrator says of Mabel, “It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean water-sprinkled blood that depressed her” (Paragraph 1). Later, Mabel criticizes herself for this same lack of self-acceptance. The narrator says, “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” (Paragraph 8).