The New Dress

Mabel is the protagonist, and to a degree, she is the antagonist as well. She is 40 years old and married with two children. While “The New Dress” is technically written in the third person using free indirect discourse, the narrator’s perspective is so close to Mabel’s that they effectively merge into a first-person stream of consciousness through much of the story. Woolf's primary characterization device is Mabel’s thoughts about herself, which focus on her clothes, family, and social status. Mabel’s new dress is the story’s central focus and symbol, and it reveals Mabel’s primary character trait: an intense lack of self-acceptance and accompanying insecurity and dependence on the opinions of others. The narrator says of Mabel, “It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean water-sprinkled blood that depressed her” (Paragraph 1). Later, Mabel criticizes herself for this same lack of self-acceptance. The narrator says, “It was all so paltry, weak-blooded, and petty-minded to care so much at her age with two children, to be still so utterly dependent on people’s opinions and not have principles or convictions” (Paragraph 8). These spiraling feelings of inadequacy, and then further inadequacy for feeling inadequate, eventually cause Mabel to flee the party.

The image of blood in these passages suggests that Mabel believes her inadequacy is hereditary. The narrator says of Mabel’s siblings, “They were all the same poor water-veined creatures who did nothing” (Paragraph 18). Toward the end of the story, the narrator further develops Mabel’s feelings about her biological family:

But it was not her fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family of ten; never having money enough, always skimping and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and the linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little domestic tragedy after another […] there was no romance, nothing extreme about them all (Paragraph 17).

Mabel’s belief that she inherited her inadequacy relieves her of the burden of feeling responsible for it, but it also makes her passive and incapable of self-efficacy.

Although Mabel’s internal life is portrayed as a chaotic whirl of thoughts and feelings, she is a relatively static character. Her mental life circles around her sense of inadequacy and consistently brings her back to where she started. The story’s climax offers the promise that her character will evolve. She imagines becoming a nun dedicated to serving the poor. She will have purpose and commitment, and her uniform will relieve her of thinking about her clothes ever again. Yet her first action after this epiphany is to sink back into hypocrisy and insincerity fueled by her lack of self-image and self-acceptance. Woolf provides little reason to believe that Mabel will ever, to use a central symbol from the story, extricate herself from the saucer of milk in which she is submerged.