The New Dress (Criticism)

Criticism

Teresa Lyle

In the following essay, Lyle examines the changing social and cultural conditions in England following World War I and their influence on such Woolf short stories as “The New Dress.”

Virginia Woolf had seen the devastating effects of social unrest and war, but she also understood that small events in a single life had enormous consequences. A gesture or nod might radically change a person’s thoughts or course of action. In an essay published in Modern Fiction, therefore, she encouraged writers to “record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall . . . let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”

We see this attention to gesture in most of Woolf’s fiction, including her short stories. In “The New Dress,” published in 1927, Woolf traces Mabel Waring’s thoughts as she attends a party hosted by Clarissa Dalloway. A forty-year-old wife of a minor official and the mother of two, Mabel has a yellow dress made for the party. Far from being insignificant, Mabel’s dress prompts a series of reflections on her life. Its material and old-fashioned cut remind Mabel of her humble origins and low social status. Mabel’s acute self-consciousness leads her to despair and hopelessness. She sees herself moving through the Dalloway drawing room suffering immense tortures, as “if spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides.” This paranoia, however, is not without justification. The enemies may appear less tangible than those on the war front, but even without guns and tanks the guests exact colossal harm by their insincerity and inauthenticity. They become unyielding opponents, and trench warfare gives way to drawing-room campaigns; battles are fought through polite but insincere conversations.

Even though Mabel realizes the vacuousness of the party guests, she longs to be one of them. Rose Shaw, Charles Burt, and Mrs. Holman, in particular, represent the best and worst of the world Mabel envies. The ease with which Rose Shaw would have responded to insults, the delight with which Charles Burt had withheld his praise, and the ability with which Mrs. Holman had risen above the mundane are qualities Mabel desperately desires.

Instead, however, Mabel sees herself as a fly in a saucer. Although she tries to picture the other guests similarly, they appear as dragonflies, or butterflies, or “beautiful insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone dragged herself up out of the saucer.” Later in the evening, when one guest calls attention to Mabel’s new dress, she again refers to herself as “the poor fly [that] was absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer.” As Mabel moves from conversation to conversation, her distress increases as she imagines herself trapped in the saucer.

“The New Dress” thus supports Marjorie Brace’s claim that for Woolf the “unknowableness of people and the impossibilities of communion were . . . terrifying.” This belief is underscored each time Mabel tries to connect with the other guests. For example, when she turns to Rose Shaw for assurance about her dress, Rose responds, “It’s perfectly charming,” but Mabel watches her “looking her up and down with that little satirical pucker of the lips which she expected,” and this look belies all assurances. Mabel then turns to Robert Haydon and laments, “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old fly.” But Haydon’s polite response cannot fool Mabel, who recognizes that he is “quite insincere.” A final and particularly telling example occurs during her conversation with Mrs. Holman, a matronly figure who, according to Mabel, “could never get enough sympathy and snatched what little there was greedily, as if it were her right.” She cannot understand Mabel’s need, but what Mabel does not yet realize is that her self-absorption makes her equally unresponsive to Mrs. Holman’s needs. Thus, no real connection occurs between the women. As Mabel engages in a perfunctory conversation with the matron, her thoughts drift and wander to her past.

Mabel’s regret that she had not married an “empire builder” is clear here. Her description of her marriage to Hubert, “with his safe, permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts,” reveals her dissatisfaction. Yet she admits that in her life with Hubert she had had “divine moments” when she would say, “This is it. This has happened. This is it!” These epiphanies, or moments of insight, occur during ordinary moments and are inspired by nothing out of the ordinary. Her memory of them temporarily assuages Mabel’s stress and loneliness, and in a short-lived instant of hope she determines to escape from the saucer and her meaningless life.

Mabel’s escape fails, however, when she leaves the party and tells Clarissa Dalloway, “I have enjoyed myself enormously.” Whatever flicker of inspiration those earlier moments had sparked is extinguished as Mabel finally recognizes her own complicity in the affair. She exclaims to herself: “Lies, lies, lies! . . . Right in the saucer!” In this instance, the reader realizes that although Mabel has always lived on the fringe, such a position ironically affords her a small degree of comfort. As she thanks Mrs. Barnet for “helping her and wrapped herself, round and round and round, in the Chinese cloak she had worn these twenty years,” we understand that Mabel has chosen this life, this marginal status, because she lacks the courage to change.

Selma Meyerowitz has commented that the female characters in Woolf’s short stories feel inferior and inadequate. They are dissatisfied with their existence and cannot achieve fulfillment because of the deceptive nature of the class-bound society in which they live. This scenario is seen in “The New Dress,” in which the reader witnesses Mabel’s alienation and detachment from the upper-class world of the party. Yet Mabel’s heightened self-consciousness and self-loathing arise as much from the banality of existence as from class inequality. Mabel’s ruminations are as much about boredom as impoverishment. When Mabel exclaims that “a party makes things either much more real, or much less real,” she may be referring either to class differences or the realization that we are all ultimately trapped in the saucer.

In “The New Dress,” Woolf presents the Dalloway party as a microcosm of English society. Mrs. Dalloway, the elusive but controlling presence of the party, represents the unseen but all-powerful forces that propel society forward; Rose Shaw, the charming and always appropriately dressed guest, represents the successful player of the game; Mrs. Holman, with an overwhelming sense of domestic responsibility, represents women of a past age. Similarly, Robert Haydon, the polite, old-fashioned man, is a throwback to an earlier time, whereas Charles Burt represents the witty, urbane young man of the postwar era. Mrs. Barnet, the servant who recognizes the guests’ status and rank, represents a threat to the class-conscious women who aspire to the affluence of the Dalloways. Finally, Mabel represents a group of alienated and estranged women so wrapped up in social conventions that she chooses the masquerade rather than exclusion, despite its enormous burden and sense of dissatisfaction. The story’s tragedy centers on Mabel’s complete self-absorption and incapacity for action, which make her as unauthentic as the other guests. Like them, she cannot comprehend a life outside; the rules of the game may not be those that she wants to follow, but she never works to change them. Social prestige and its trappings leave Mabel empty, and there is no hope of emotional fulfillment. Although Mabel questions the values of this society, she ultimately embraces them. Such scenarios occur in most of Woolf’s short fiction; “The New Dress” is the rule, not the exception.

In a diary entry from April 27, 1925, shortly before the publication of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wrote:

“[My] present reflection is that people have any number of states of consciousness: and I should like to investigate the party consciousness, the frock consciousness, etc. The fashion world of the Becks . . . is certainly one: where people secrete an envelope which connects them and protects them from others, like myself, who am outside the envelope, foreign bodies.”

Mabel’s source of anguish stems from her position in between. She can neither secure herself within an envelope nor remain outside of it: “Her odious, weak, vacillating character” prevents her from choosing a side, so she remains hopelessly suspended between two worlds — or, as she might imagine, she is a fly trapped in a saucer.

Source: Teresa Lyle, “Overview of ‘The New Dress’,” for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

Thomas March

In the following essay, March examines the insecurity and self-ridicule demonstrated by the protagonist of “The New Dress.” Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress” is often overshadowed by her more popular stories, such as “The Duchess and the Jeweler,” “The Mark on the Wall,” and “Kew Gardens.” Stella McNichol includes “The New Dress in Mrs Dalloway’s Party,” a volume of short stories by Woolf that centers around the experiences of guests at the party Mrs. Dalloway throws in Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. McNichol writes that “The New Dress” was written in 1924 when Virginia Woolf was revising Mrs Dalloway for publication.” Here, though, as in the other stories in that volume, Woolf gives us not Clarissa Dalloway’s experience of her own party but the experiences of other guests at that party. Mabel, the protagonist of “The New Dress” is one of those guests, and she feels out of place, insecure about her new dress, unable to see herself as anything but ridiculed, unable to take a compliment, yet critical of those that she receives. She cannot enjoy the party because she will not let herself enjoy the party. The party, for Mabel, is a self-inflicted torture — an exercise in masochism and, ironically, vanity, from the moment she receives the invitation.

As soon as Mabel walks in the door of the Dalloway home, she has reservations about her dress. When Mrs. Barnet greets her in the foyer and helps her to arrange herself before entering the party, “Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention. . . to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing-table, confirmed the suspicion — that it was not right, not quite right.” But, as will become evident shortly, it is not Mrs. Barnet or her innocent actions here that have caused Mabel to be so self-conscious and insecure about her appearance. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Dalloway herself comes to greet Mabel. Mabel’s reaction is to reflect that “It was not right. And at once the misery which she had 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.” Thus it is clear that Mabel is insecure before she ever sets foot in the party. In short, she has a chip on her shoulder.

She goes on, as she is entering the party, to recall the arrival of Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation. She remembers that her reaction was that “she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to pretend it even — fashion meant cut, meant style, meant thirty guineas at least — but why not be original? . . . And . . . she had taken that old fashion book of her mother’s, a Paris fashion book of the time of the Empire . . . , and so set herself. . . trying to be like them . . . an orgy of self-love, which deserved to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.” It would seem, then, that Mabel is undaunted by her limited financial means and determined to make the best of them by procuring for herself a dress that is “original.” She busies herself with the determination of just what sort of dress it will be, raiding the fashions of the past in “an orgy of self-love.” This, she concludes, deserves “to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.” That is, the dress, which begins as a statement of originality and vanity — indicators of self-confidence — ends as the means by which she will bring ridicule on herself to punish herself for her vanity and frivolity. She cannot indulge herself without guilt.

Neither can she accept a compliment. Mabel’s entire stay at the party consists of her encountering other partygoers whose compliments she either dismisses as lies or whom she secretly chastises for failing to compliment her. The dress is convenient to her larger goal of allowing herself to be ridiculed. As she enters the party, “she dared not look in the glass,” an indicator of how truly insecure Mabel is. Furthermore, she “felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.” But the choice to wear such a dress is Mabel’s, and this response is not unexpected. Although Rose Shaw calls Mabel’s dress “perfectly charming,” Mabel is skeptical of the compliment and bitterly begins her metaphor of the flies: “We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer.” Just as she asserts this, however, she changes her mind abruptly and notes that “she could not see them like that, not other people. She saw herself like that.” So insecure is she that she ultimately turns even her criticism of others around on herself. In the following exchange, however, she tries to have someone compliment her and mean it. ” T 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. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went . . . ‘Lies, lies lies!’.” She has provoked the compliment, and once she has it, she cannot believe it. She will not believe it, perhaps because she has to provoke it. Whether provoked or unprovoked, however, the compliments Mabel receives are invariably rejected.

After the exchange with Haydon, Mabel turns to another flashback. She recalls the scene in Miss Milan’s shop as the dress was being made. “Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there — a beautiful woman. Just for a second (she had not dared look longer . . .), there looked at her. . ., a grey-white, mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender and true.” At the fitting, she sees herself as beautiful, the dress as wonderful, and she concludes that this assessment is the result not of “vanity” but of something else, which goes unnamed. Yet she only watches herself in the mirror “for a second,” indicating that she cannot sustain the illusion of her own beauty. She is fundamentally insecure and can believe the contrary only in brief and fleeting moments. When she returns her attention to the present again, to the party, “the whole thing had vanished.” It had vanished long before, however, if indeed the belief in her own beauty has ever been present.

The remainder of Mabel’s experiences at the party consist of more rejection of compliments. Mabel lures Charles Burt to herself by exclaiming “It’s so old fashioned.” Mabel tries “to make herself think that she meant, that it was the picture and not her dress, that was old-fashioned.” Of course, she is hoping that Charles will think that she is referring to her dress and stop to contradict her. She thinks that “one word of praise, one word of affection from Charles would have made all the difference to her at the moment.” It is clear, though, from the way in which Mabel has reacted to previous compliments, that this is not true. She would only have accused him of lying, have said “Lies! Lies! Lies!” to herself once again. Mabel is, of course, unaware of what she is doing: “‘Why,’ she asked herself, ‘can’t I feel one thing always, feel quite sure that Miss Milan is right, and Charles wrong and stick to it’.” After her conversation with Mrs. Holman, Mabel assumes that “Mrs. Holman . . . [thought] her the most dried-up, unsympathetic twig she had ever met, absurdly dressed, too, and would tell everyone about Mabel’s fantastic appearance.” Yet Mrs. Holman has said no such thing.

The party, for Mabel, is a failure before she ever arrives or receives an invitation. In “Worshipping

Solid Objects: The Pagan World of Virginia Woolf,” Marjorie Brace writes that Mabel’s dress, “designed to be exotic, appears only laughably eccentric to her once she arrives at a party where she is doomed to be either snubbed or bored because — we grasp the point only too quickly — her own unreflecting egotism turns all dresses and parties drab.” However, Mabel is not an egotist. She does not have an exaggeratedly high opinion of herself; quite the opposite. She cannot believe in her own fantasies of her own beauty, and she cannot believe in others’ assertions, whether requested or spontaneous, of her beauty. In Virginia Woolf and Her Works, Jean Guiguet writes that “Mabel, having gone through the hell of her shame and loneliness, reaches the safe shore of happy memories, which reconcile her to herself and her life; she acquires new strength and resolution; but is it through having looked in the mirror, having once again encountered the same Mabel that the others see? She can merely mumble a conventional falsehood, and goes back to her own truth.” Her “own truth,” however, has not been left at the door upon her entering the party. It infects and affects every event of the party as Mabel experiences it. The “truth” of her being unattractive prevents her from enjoying the party, and she has created these circumstances herself, using the dress as punishment for a vanity that never truly existed. For Mabel, insecurity is primary and confidence is secondary and fleeting. Mabel tells Mrs Dalloway, as she is leaving, that she has “enjoyed” herself, and then thinks “‘Lies, lies, lies!’. . . and ‘Right in the saucer!” She has applied this phrase to others previously and now applies it to herself; they have “lied” about her appearance, and she has “lied” about having a good time. Or has she? After all, this is precisely the result that Mabel’s actions have encouraged — the result that, for whatever reason, Mabel has needed to punish herself, to verify her own insecurities. In Mabel’s world, everyone is a liar.

Source: Thomas March, “Overview of ‘The New Dress’,” in Short Stories for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, was published in 1925 and uses interior monologue from Dalloway’s point of view to describe the events leading up to her party.
• Dean R. Baldwin’s Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction (1989) traces three periods of Woolf short-story writing and provides an overview of all of Woolf’s short fiction. He uses a strong biographical focus to explore the stories, and the study contains a collection of critical essays on selected works.
• Avrom Fleishman’s essay “Forms of the Woolfian Short Story,” included in Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, considers the extent to which Woolf’s stories contribute to the development of the modernist short story.
• Stella McNichol’s edition of Mrs. Dalloway’s Party: A Short Story Sequence, published in 1973, offers a useful introduction to the seven Woolf short stories that are thematically related to Mrs. Dalloway.
• T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was published in 1923 by Hogarth Press, which was owned and operated by Woolf and her husband. It provides a useful social critique of postwar society and emphasizes the sense of despair and hopelessness of Mabel Waring’s generation.
• Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay is interesting for its depiction of postwar London’s bohemian district.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short stories collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) chronicle the values and behavior of the United States in the decade before the Great Depression.