Response to Virginia Woolf’s “A New Dress”

Much like in John Cheever’s The Swimmer, the part of Virginia Woolf’s A New Dress that I found most interesting is ability to maintain the pace of her story and to generate an emotional response in the reader.

Unlike in The Swimmer, where the pace was brisk and pulled the reader along, Mabel’s description of her preparation for and attendance at a fancy party drags the reader along grudgingly. The reader feels angst towards turning the page because he thinks (according to Mabel) that some evil or embarrassment is certainly coming with her attendance of the party. Even when she is at the party, and the worst sort of embarrassment has happened at the hands of Charles Burt, who announces that Mabel has a new dress to the entire party. I think the specific technique she uses to generate this feeling is frequent tone shifting. Woolf describes Mabel’s thoughts of how beautiful she looks in her dress and then immediately crushes Mabel’s spirit with thoughts like “And now the whole thing has vanished.”

Woolf keeps the reader attached enough to the story that they will continue reading, even though they feel uncomfortable about encountering the approaching storm of humiliation. This flow contributes to the reader’s ability to get into Mabel’s consciousness.

More important to this awareness of Mabel’s consciousness, however, is in the form of Woolf’s ability to express the frailness and jumpy nature of Mabel’s mind. Woolf does this by employing stream of consciousness techniques, which focus on recreating, in the reader’s mind, the feelings, observations, and thought processes that are going on inside the character’s mind. By using such techniques, she allows the reader to understand the anxiousness that Mabel experiences. The repeated description of the fly trying to escape the saucer is especially effective at this. By the end of the story, the reader almost feels as though they are awkwardly placed at the party and just want to go home.