The New Dress

Literary Modernism was a late-19th- and early-20th-century movement that consciously broke with traditional forms of storytelling. Many writers of the time believed that the dramatic economic, social, and technological changes of the time called for new forms of literature. Many writers came to think of the human experience as not an objective mirror of reality but rather as a vast and sometimes contradictory universe of thoughts, emotions, and drives. Increasingly, writers such as Woolf sought to capture the detail and nuance of human subjectivity.

Woolf’s writing focuses on interiority and storytelling through the lens of one protagonist’s thoughts. The stream-of-consciousness style seeks to portray a character’s personal experience as it unfolds from one moment to the next. The focus is less on the plot and more on how the protagonist processes the world around them, trying to form a coherent picture of the self and the world by connecting the present to past narratives and experiences. Dorothy Richardson was one of the first writers to use this method. While she received little attention during her lifetime, her literary innovation influenced Woolf, as did her preoccupation with the inner lives of women. Richardson is often overlooked, but her combination of feminism and literary experimentation makes her an essential figure in the history of Modernism. Other Modernist writers famous for employing the stream-of-conscious technique include James Joyce and William Faulkner.

Woolf was born only a few days before Joyce and died only two months after him. They are arguably Modernism’s greatest novelists, and their works feature important similarities and differences. Joyce wrote internal monologues at length, including the half-thoughts, mental lapses, and associative thinking that sometimes seem like a direct and barely coherent transmission of a person’s inner world to the page. Woolf read Joyce and made similar moves toward stream-of-consciousness writing. But while she found much power in Joyce’s work, she was skeptical of how far he took inner monologue—to the point where it becomes nearly incomprehensible to the reader. She wrote critically of Ulysses, although she later referred to it as a work of genius. Critics have often compared Joyce and Woolf due to their shared interest in psychological realism and gender roles.

“The New Dress” employs another unique Modernist tool: the “anti-epiphany.” The protagonist experiences an epiphany, but it is quickly swallowed and extinguished by old patterns of thought and behavior. For example, Mabel has the epiphany that she can simply stop caring what people think about her clothing, but she is immediately caught up in lying about having a good time at the party and returning to her morbid thoughts about her appearance. Joyce is also known for his use of the anti-epiphany. Unlike Joyce and Faulkner, however, Woolf often focused on the interior lives of women. “The New Dress” illustrates Woolf’s interest in the effects of cultural expectations upon women during that period. Clothing in this story provides a helpful metaphor for how strict, patriarchal gender roles stifled and suffocated women.