The New Dress

Narrated through the lens of Mabel Waring’s anxiety-riddled mind, “The New Dress” illustrates Modernism’s interest both in the nuances of human subjectivity and in the stifling impact of patriarchal cultural expectations upon women. The story reflects the isolation that such expectations produce, even amid a group of people, and the importance of psychology in Modernist storytelling.

The plot of the story is unremarkable. A woman gets an invitation to a party, is concerned about what to wear, has a dress made, and then attends the party while worrying that she doesn’t look good enough. The amount of time spent on the protagonist’s thoughts reflects the story’s focus on the inner world (Mabel’s psychology) rather than on external events.

From Woolf and Joyce to Faulkner, the stream-of-consciousness technique became an increasingly powerful tool to explore the world from the inside out. External events become nearly insignificant as authors explore the effects of even the most seemingly small events on their character’s psychology. The narrative technique highlights that while Mabel seems merely to be attending a party, turmoil is raging in her mind. This discrepancy between what is happening in the external world and what is happening in the protagonist’s mind is also a Modernist device used to show, in this case, the hypocrisy most women of Mabel’s era and class must endure.