The New Dress

Written by theblume

“The New Dress” by Virginia Woolf (in “The Seagull Reader) painfully captures the ridiculous extremes
we humans will go to in order to feel we are as good (or better) than those around us. As someone who
grew up very poor, and often felt beneath my peers, I can fully relate to Mabel’s (the main character)
emotions.

After being invited to a Clarrissa Dolloway’s, Mabel has a special dress fashioned out of an old patterned
yellow silk. Thinking she has created something beautiful and vintage, she arrives at the party and
instantly has a change of heart. After seeing the other women she begins to have an internal dialogue
that rips her self esteem apart. She begins imagining that the people around her are having secret
conversations saying: “Whats Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!”
(page 493). This continues until she decides to leave so that she may find a way to become better than
all those at the party.

Mabel’s story sheds light on something I think we all do, but know I do all the time. Often in new crowds
of people or when I’m somewhere I don’t belong, I start to talk myself into something untrue.
Throughout the story Mabel is convincing herself in her head that the other guests are laughing at her
new dress behind her back, and that she does not belong. As she most famously puts it, “No! it was not
right” (page 492).

As I read her story I couldn’t help being reminded of something that happened to me, when we (English
and Digital Humanities students that is) were all together for the orientation weekend. We were at the
library and the baby was hungry, but I had no real convenient place to go. I ended up having to feed her
in this single wooden chair that was in the ladies restroom. Just as I was thinking “O thank heavens no
one is in here” a woman walked in. The entire time she was in the stall I was thinking things like my,
“she probably think this is so weird I hope she isn’t one of those people that gawk at women
breastfeeding openly.” When she was washer her hands I was trying to avoid eye contact until she
finished and said to me: ” you are a beautiful momma, I hope I look half as good as you when I have a
little one!” Needless to say, my day was made. From just a little thing I learned a valuable lesson. To
Mabel she may have thought 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” but most
likely the others weren’t thinking that at all (498).

The overall theme of the story seemed to be about insecurity. Many aspects of our culture these days,
especially fashion, drive us to constantly compare ourselves to others. We have always been a people
scared of being different. For some unknown reason it is considered better to go with the crowd and not
stand out. Sure one stupid man sounded hurtful about Mabel’s dress, but most likely the others were
not talking about her at all. Yet, when we are in that state of insecurity its like we create and entirely
imaginary world within our heads. If only we could always have the mindset she discovers in the end
when she waves her hand to Charles and Rose “to show them she did not depend on them one scrap”
(page 499).
The Yellow Dress – Henri Matisse (1869-1954)

The New Dress – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories Virginia Woolf wrote which feature guests at a party given by Clarissa
Dalloway at her home in Westminster, London. The stories are miniature studies featuring states of
uncertain consciousness, failures of communication, instances of egoism, and just occasionally moments
of positive epiphany.

Mabel Waring is a study in the fragility of the individual ego. She is socially insecure, and is mixing with
people in a class above that to which she belongs. Moreover she is measuring herself against a social
code to which she looks up but cannot aspire.

All her notions of self worth are based on the fashionability (or otherwise) of her dress. She has chosen
it from an old fashion magazine, and suddenly realises that although she has gone to great trouble and
expense, she is unable to buy her way into genuine social acceptability. As a result she feels a crushing
sense of inadequacy:

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

She comforts herself with romantic notions of changing her life and ridding herself of the need to
conform to the mores of fashionable society:

She would be absolutely transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be called Sister Somebody;
she would never give a thought to clothes again.

But she knows that such fantasies are false, and as she exits Mrs Dalloway’s party saying how much she
has enjoyed herself, she sums up the whole experience to herself with the words ‘Lies, lies, lies!’

It is worth noting that this incident is viewed quite differently in one of the other stories from the Mrs
Dalloway’s Party sequence. George Carslake, the central figure in A Simple Melody sees Mabel leaving
the party and notes her discomfort.

Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. She looked
agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated.

We know that Mabel Waring feels her new yellow dress is a fashion choice disaster which she feels has
resulted in her social humiliation. Yet Carslake sees the dress as ‘pretty’ – which confirms that her
agitation is a self-induced sense of insecurity. It also introduces an element of literary relativism in which
the same incident is seen from different points of view.

It is interesting that Woolf focuses this negative experience on the issue of clothing. She herself had an
ambiguous attitude to the subject. She often dressed in a shabby unfashionable manner herself, and
was the subject of much teasing by her friends. And yet especially in her later life she was photographed
wearing very elegant outfits, she wrote articles for Vogue magazine, and was once taken shopping by its
fashion editor.

In her story Ancestors (also located at Mrs Dalloway’s party) the guest Mrs Vallance is irritated by
complimentary remarks made by a young man Jack Renshaw to a younger woman wearing fashionable
clothes. She sees it as a mark of his triviality.

Principal characters

Mrs Clarissa Dalloway

an upper-class society hostess

Mabel Waring

an insecure middle-class woman (40)

Rose Shaw

a fashionable upper-class woman

The New Dress – story synopsis

Mabel Waring, a middle-aged and lower middle-class woman, arrives at a party given by Mrs Clarissa
Dalloway in Westminster, London. She is wearing a new yellow dress made specially for the occasion,
and she feels intensely that it s neither fashionable nor successful. She has selected the design from an
old fashion book and now feels she has made a huge mistake. She feels inferior to the other guests and
thinks of herself as a fly unsuccessfully trying to climb out of a saucer of milk.

She has been quite happy in anticipation of the event when having the dress made by the seamstress
Miss Milan, but now she feels socially inadequate when surrounded by other people, all of whom she
sees as critical of her or insincere in their remarks. When other guests speak to her she feels that they
are clamouring selfishly for attention.

She feels she has been condemned to her unglamorous life because of her poor family background. She
recognises that her life has provided moments of happiness, but she feels that having reached middle
age they might become less frequent. She has fleeting romantic thoughts of transforming her own life so
that she will not feel so inadequate. This gives her the impetus to leave the party, which she does by
telling Mrs Dalloway how much she has enjoyed herself – which she knows to be a lie.