What Does The New Dress Mean

The New Dress: Come With Me Mabel Waring, an insecure and painfully self conscious girl, is consumed with feelings of inadequacy and inferiority when she enters a party wearing a dress that she feels is not quite appropriate for the occasion. She torments herself with obsessive thoughts of her foolishness and poor quality appearance in Virginia Woolf’s short story, The New Dress. Woolf uses the character Mabel Waring to underscore the discomfort that shy or socially unskilled individuals would feel in social situations. This is similar to the way Robert Bly also explores inside the mind in his poem "Come With Me." He acts as a guide, imploring the reader to follow him into the depths of secret knowledge about human existence. He describes inanimate objects as if they have human properties that can bring out feelings of grief. Although completely different story lines and styles of writing, Woolf’s short story The New Dress and Bly’s Poem "Come With Me" both share common views of alienation, loneliness, and the human condition. Woolf uses a stream of consciousness narrative in The New Dress where the thoughts and feelings of Mabel Waring are essential to the narrative. "The narrator knows the inner thoughts of the protagonist and takes advantage of the privilege of omniscience by preventing Mabel's feelings as
"The party functions as a microcosm of the larger society from which Mabel is alienated" ("The New Dress"). Mabel is isolating herself from the other guests at the party, just as some do with the rest of the world. "Mabel's sense of alienation also exists because her insecurity makes her self-centered and unable to respond to others" (Meyerowitz). She is to focused on herself to really get to know others. Mabel alienates herself from the rest of the world with thoughts of