1.

5 The New Dress

ICE BREAKERS
 (i) Write in Column ‘B’ the description of the clothes you would choose to
wear for the occasions given in Column ‘A’.

A B
A birthday party
A prize distribution ceremony at school
A picnic
An entertainment show

(ii) Discuss the criterion of the choice of your clothes with the help of the
following points:
(a) Occasion
(b) Society (people you may meet at the venue)
(c) Availability
(d) Fashion
(e) Your wish/whim
(f) A suggestion or advice by someone (mother, sister, friend etc.).
(g) Any other than the above mentioned reasons
 (i) Divide the class into groups. Discuss the role of costumes in enhancing
your personality.
(ii) State whether you agree or disagree with the following statements and
discuss the reasons.
(a) A simple dress makes one’s personality look dull.
(b) We should not judge ourselves from the comments we receive from others.
(c) A fashionable and costly dress makes you look rich, intelligent and
beautiful.
(d) We should choose a dress according to the fashion rather than our choice.

43
 Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941, London) was an English novelist
and essayist. She is considered a modernist writer of the 20th century
and pioneer of the ‘stream of consciousness’ as a narrative device.
The glimpses of early modern feminism can easily be traced in
her writing. ‘The Voyage Out’, ‘To the Lighthouse’, ‘Orlando’ and
‘Mrs. Dalloway’ are her remarkable novels. ‘A Haunted House’ is
her famous short story collection from which the present story ‘The
New Dress’ is adapted.
The present story is about a Mabel Waring, who is constantly
thinking about her new yellow dress in negative terms. She herself has
chosen the design, colour and pattern of the dress which she has decided to
wear for a party at Mrs Dalloway. However, at that party she keeps thinking that the dress
is old fashioned and everyone in the party is mocking at her dress. She thinks that she is a
fly at the edge of the saucer, drowning deep and deep, as she comes seriously under the spell
of her own negative mind and in a depression leaves the party. To show Mabel’s suppressed
desires, unfulfilled ambitions and meagre financial conditions of her childhood, Virginia Woolf
has employed the stream of consciousness technique very effectively.

The New Dress

Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something
was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs. Barnet, while
handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus
drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the
appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion,
clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the
suspicion - that it was not right, not quite right, which
RIGHT signifies
--------------------------------- growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at
her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she
misery : great physical and went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner
mental distress or where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not
discomfort RIGHT. And at once the misery which she always tried
to hide, the profound dissatisfaction - the sense she had
profound : deep or intense had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other
people - set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an
intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when
relentlessly: oppressively she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott;
constant
for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking-
“What’s Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What
a hideous new dress!”- their eyelids flickering as they
appalling : very bad or came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was
displeasing her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean,
water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the
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whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she
had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go,
seemed sordid, repulsive; and her own drawing-room so sordid : unpleasant( in this
shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as context)
she touched the letters on the hall table and said: “How repulsive : arousing intense
dull!” to show off - all this now seemed unutterably distaste or disgust
silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely
vanity : excessive pride in
destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into
or admiration of one’s own
Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room. appearance or achievements
What she had thought that evening when, sitting over
the teacups, Mrs. Dalloway’s invitation came, was that,
of course, she could not be fashionable. It was absurd to According to Mabel, fashion
pretend it even - fashion meant cut, meant style, meant means ................................
thirty guineas at least - but why not be original? Why not ............................................
be herself, anyhow? And, getting up, she had taken that
old fashion book of her mother’s, a Paris fashion book
of the time of the Empire, and had thought how much
prettier, more dignified, and more womanly they were
then, and so set herself - oh, it was foolish - trying to
be like them, pluming herself in fact, upon being modest
and old-fashioned, and very charming, giving herself up,
no doubt about it, to an orgy of self-love, which deserved
to be chastised, and so rigged herself out like this.
But she dared not look in the glass. She could not
face the whole horror - the pale yellow, idiotically old-
fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves She was afraid of looking in
and its waist and all the things that looked so charming mirror / glass because
in the fashion book, but not on her, not among all these .........................................
ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy .........................................
standing there, for young people to stick pins into.
“But, my dear, it’s perfectly charming!” Rose Shaw
said, looking her up and down with that little satirical satirical: sarcastic,
pucker of the lips which she expected - Rose herself humorously critical
pucker: a small fold
being dressed in the height of the fashion, precisely like
everybody else, always.
We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the
saucer, Mabel thought, and repeated the phrase as if she
were crossing herself, as if she were trying to find some
spell to annul this pain, to make this agony endurable. annul: reduce to nothing
Tags of Shakespeare, lines from books she had read ages
ago, suddenly came to her when she was in agony, and she
repeated them over and over again. “Flies trying to crawl,”

45
 she repeated. If she could say that over often enough and
make herself see the flies, she would become numb, chill,
frozen, dumb. Now she could see flies crawling slowly out
of a saucer of milk with their wings stuck together; and
she strained and strained (standing in front of the looking-
glass, listening to Rose Shaw) to make herself see Rose
Shaw and all the other people there as flies, trying to hoist
What was Mabel’s themselves out of something, or into something, meagre,
imagination about flies? insignificant, toiling flies. But she could not see them like
that, not other people. She saw herself like that - she was
a fly, but the others were dragonflies, butterflies, beautiful
insects, dancing, fluttering, skimming, while she alone
dragged herself up out of the saucer. (Envy and spite, the
most detestable of the vices, were her chief faults.)
dowdy : (especially of a
woman) unfashionable and “I feel like some dowdy, decrepit, horribly dingy old
dull in appearance fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear
decrepit : elderly and her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing up a
infirm poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached
dingy : gloomy and drab
she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out
of anything. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered
something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw
through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went
(again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!” For a party
Miss Milan’s workroom
makes things either much more real, or much less real,
was ...............................
she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert
Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything. She saw
the truth. This was true, this drawing-room, this self, and
the other false. Miss Milan’s little workroom was really
Guess the meaning : terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage
• suffused
• wrinkles
cooking; and yet, when Miss Milan put the glass in her
hand, and she looked at herself with the dress on, finished,
an extraordinary bliss shot through her heart. Suffused
with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and
wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there-a
scrolloping : characterized
beautiful woman. Just for a second (she had not dared
by or possessing heavy,
floral ornament (a word look longer, Miss Milan wanted to know about the length
coined by Virginia Woolf) of the skirt), there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping
mahogany, a grey-white, mysteriously smiling, charming
girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not
vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good,
tender, and true. Miss Milan said that the skirt could not
well be longer; if anything the skirt, said Miss Milan,
puckering her forehead, considering with all her wits about
her, must be shorter; and she felt, suddenly, honestly, full
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of love for Miss Milan, much, much fonder of Miss Milan
than of any one in the whole world, and could have cried
for pity that she should be crawling on the floor with her
mouth full of pins, and her face red and her eyes bulging-
that one human being should be doing this for another, Mabel’s eyes were filled with
tears because ...................
and she saw them all as human beings merely, and herself ...........................................
going off to her party, and Miss Milan pulling the cover
over the canary’s cage, or letting him pick a hemp-seed
from between her lips, and the thought of it, of this side
of human nature and its patience and its endurance and
its being content with such miserable, scanty, sordid, little
pleasures filled her eyes with tears.
And now the whole thing had vanished. The dress,
the room, the love, the pity, the scrolloping looking-glass,
and the canary’s cage-all had vanished, and here she was
in a corner of Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room, suffering
tortures, woken wide awake to reality. Discuss different pessimistic
thoughts in Mabel’s mind.
But 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, not to be able to say as
other people did, “There’s Shakespeare! There’s death!
weevils : small beetles /
We’re all weevils in a captain’s biscuit” - or whatever it insects with an elongated
was that people did say. snout
She faced herself straight in the glass; she pecked
at her left shoulder; she issued out into the room, as if
spears were thrown at her yellow dress from all sides. But Boadicea : a queen of the
instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would British Celtic Iceni tribe
have done-Rose would have looked like Boadicea-she who led an uprising against
looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered like the occupying forces of the
Roman empire in AD 60 or
a schoolgirl and slouched across the room, positively
61
slinking, as if she were a beaten mongrel, and looked at a simpered: smiled in
picture, an engraving. As if one went to a party to look at an affectedly coy or
a picture! Everybody knew why she did it - it was from ingratiating manner
shame, from humiliation.
slouched : stood, moved
“Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, or sat in a lazy, drooping
“right in the middle, and can’t get out, and the milk,” way
she thought, rigidly staring at the picture, “is sticking its
wings together.” slinking : moving quietly
with gliding steps
“It’s so old-fashioned,” she said to Charles Burt,
making him stop (which by itself he hated) on his way to
talk to some one else.

47
 She meant, or she tried to make herself think that
she meant, that it was the picture and not her dress, that
was old-fashioned. And one word of praise, one word of
affection from Charles would have made all the difference
to her at the moment. If he had only said, “Mabel, you’re
looking charming tonight!” it would have changed her
life. But then she ought to have been truthful and direct.
Charles said nothing of the kind, of course. He was malice
itself. He always saw through one, especially if one were
feeling particularly mean, paltry, or feeble-minded.
Guess the meaning : “Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said, and the poor fly was
• shoved absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he
• veneer would like her to drown, she believed. He had no heart,
• ruffled no fundamental kindness, only a veneer of friendliness.
Miss Milan was much more real, much kinder. If only one
could feel that and stick to it, always. “Why,” she asked
herself-replying to Charles much too pertly, letting him
see that she was out of temper, or “ruffled” as he called it
(“Rather ruffled?” he said and went on to laugh at her with
some woman over there)-“Why,” she asked herself, “can’t
I feel one thing always, feel quite sure that Miss Milan is
odious: extremely right, and Charles wrong and stick to it, feel sure about the
unpleasant canary and pity and love and not be whipped all round in
a second by coming into a room full of people?” It was her
vacillating: wavering odious, weak, vacillating character again, always giving
between different at the critical moment and not being seriously interested
opinions or actions
in conchology, etymology, botany, archeology, cutting up
potatoes and watching them fructify like Mary Dennis,
like Violet Searle.
Then Mrs. Holman, seeing her standing there, bore
down upon her. Of course a thing like a dress was beneath
Guess the meaning : Mrs. Holman’s notice, with her family always tumbling
• scarlet fever downstairs or having the scarlet fever. Could Mabel tell
• self-loathing her if Elmthorpe was ever let for August and September?
Oh, it was a conversation that bored her unutterably!—
it made her furious to be treated like a house agent or
a messenger boy, to be made use of. Not to have value,
that was it, she thought, trying to grasp something hard,
something real, while she tried to answer sensibly about
the bathroom and the south aspect and the hot water to the
top of the house; and all the time she could see little bits
of her yellow dress in the round looking-glass which made
them all the size of boot-buttons or tadpoles; and it was
amazing to think how much humiliation and agony and
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self-loathing and effort and passionate ups and downs of
feeling were contained in a thing the size of a threepenny
bit. And what was still odder, this thing, this Mabel
Waring, was separate, quite disconnected; and though
Mrs. Holman (the black button) was leaning forward
and telling her how her eldest boy had strained his heart detached : aloof,
running, she could see her, too, quite detached in the having no interest or
looking-glass, and it was impossible that the black dot, involvement
gesticulating : using
leaning forward, gesticulating, should make the yellow
gestures, movement of
dot, sitting solitary, self-centred, feel what the black dot
parts of body, especially
was feeling, yet they pretended. hand or head
“So impossible to keep boys quiet”-that was the kind
of thing one said.
And Mrs. Holman, who could never get enough
sympathy and snatched what little there was greedily,
as if it were her right (but she deserved much more for
there was her little girl who had come down this morning
with a swollen knee-joint), took this miserable offering
and looked at it suspiciously, grudgingly, as if it were grudgingly : in a
a halfpenny when it ought to have been a pound and reluctant or resentful
put it away in her purse, must put up with it, mean and manner
miserly though it was, times being hard, so very hard; and creaking : making a
on she went, creaking, injured Mrs. Holman, about the harsh, high-pitched sound
girl with the swollen-joints. Ah, it was tragic, this greed,
this clamour of human beings, like a row of cormorants,
cormorants:
barking and flapping their wings for sympathy-it was large diving seabirds
tragic, could one have felt it and not merely pretended to
feel it!
But in her yellow dress to-night she could not wring
out one drop more; she wanted it all, all for herself. She
knew (she kept on looking into the glass, dipping into that
dreadfully showing-up blue pool) that she was condemned,
despised, left like this in a backwater, because of her despised : scorned, hated
being like this a feeble, vacillating creature; and it seemed
to her that the yellow dress was a penance which she had
deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw,
in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swansdown, she
would have deserved that; and she thought that there was skimping: expending
no escape for her-none what so ever. But it was not her very little or less than
fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family necessary
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

49
catastrophic: involving domestic tragedy after another-nothing catastrophic,
or causing sudden great the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her eldest brother
damage or suffering marrying beneath him but not very much - there was no
petered out: diminished romance, nothing extreme about them all. They petered
or came to an end out respectably in seaside resorts; every watering-place
gradually
had one of her aunts even now asleep in some lodging
with the front windows not quite facing the sea. That was
so like them-they had to squint at things always. And
she had done the same-she was just like her aunts. For
all her dreams of living in India, married to some hero
Sir Henry Lawrence:
Brigadier-General Sir like Sir Henry Lawrence, some empire builder (still the
Henry Lawrence was a sight of a native in a turban filled her with romance), she
British military officer, had failed utterly. She had married Hubert, with his safe,
surveyor, administrator permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts, and they
and statesman in British managed tolerably in a smallish house, without proper
India. maids, and hash when she was alone or just bread and
butter, but now and then Mrs Holman was off, thinking
her the most dried-up, unsympathetic twig she had ever
met, absurdly dressed, too, and would tell every one about
Mabel’s fantastic appearance - now and then, thought
Mabel Waring, left alone on the blue sofa, punching the
cushion in order to look occupied, for she would not join
magpies : a very long
tailed black and white Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering like magpies
bird and perhaps laughing at her by the fireplace - now and
then, there did come to her delicious moments, reading

50
the other night in bed, for instance, or down by the sea on
the sand in the sun, at Easter - let her recall it - a great
tuft of pale sand-grass standing all twisted like a shock Easter : the most
of spears against the sky, which was blue like a smooth important festival of
china egg, so firm, so hard, and then the melody of the the Christian Church
waves -“Hush, hush,” they said, and the children’s shouts celebrating the
paddling - yes, it was a divine moment, and there she lay, resurrection of Jesus
she felt, in the hand of the Goddess who was the world; Christ
rather a hard-hearted, but very beautiful Goddess, a little
lamb laid on the altar (one did think these silly things,
and it didn’t matter so long as one never said them). And
also with Hubert sometimes she had quite unexpectedly
- carving the mutton for Sunday lunch, for no reason,
opening a letter, coming into a room - divine moments,
when she said to herself (for she would never say this
to anybody else), “This is it. This has happened. This is
it!” And the other way about it was equally surprising -
that is, when everything was arranged - music, weather,
holidays, every reason for happiness was there - then
nothing happened at all. One wasn’t happy. It was flat,
just flat, that was all.
Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always
been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a wobbly wife,
lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing
very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another,
like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert
- they were all the same poor water-veined creatures
who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping,
Find the meaning :
crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave.
• crest of a wave
That wretched fly - where had she read the story that
kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer? - • by degrees
struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that
she was forty, they might come more and more seldom.
By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But
that was deplorable! That was not to be endured! That
made her feel ashamed of herself!
London Library : an
She would go to the London Library tomorrow. She independent lending library
would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, in London established in
quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American 1841 by Thomas Carlyle.
no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the
Strand : narrow street at the
Strand and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner edge of the sea, lake or large
was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she river
would become a new person. She would be absolutely

51
 transformed. She would wear a uniform; she would be
called Sister Somebody; she would never give a thought
to clothes again. And for ever after she would be perfectly
clear about Charles Burt and Miss Milan and this room and
that room; and it would be always, day after day, as if she
were lying in the sun or carving the mutton. It would be it!
So she got up from the blue sofa, and the yellow button
in the looking-glass got up too, and she waved her hand
to Charles and Rose to show them she did not depend on
them one scrap, and the yellow button moved out of the
looking-glass, and all the spears were gathered into her
breast as she walked towards Mrs. Dalloway and said
“Good night.”
“But it’s too early to go,” said Mrs. Dalloway, who
was always so charming.
wobbly : unsteady, shaky
“I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she
added in her weak, wobbly voice which only sounded
ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I have enjoyed
What does the last sentence myself enormously.”
suggest?
‘I have enjoyed myself,” she said to Mr. Dalloway,
whom she met on the stairs.
“Lies, lies, lies!” she said to herself, going downstairs,
and “Right in the saucer!” she said to herself as she
thanked Mrs. Barnet for helping her and wrapped herself,
round and round and round, in the Chinese cloak she had
worn these twenty years.
- Virginia Woolf

BRAINSTORMING

(A1) (i) Narrate in your words the picture imagined by Mabel as she thinks of
herself in the party as a fly at the edge of the saucer.
(ii) There are a few other characters mentioned in the story. Discuss the way
their reactions help us to understand the inferiority complex of Mabel.
(A2) (i) Pick out the sentences from the story which describe the ambience of the
party at Mrs. Dalloway’s place.
(ii) Mabel is thinking too much of her dress.
Propose five sentences supporting the above statement.
(iii) Critically analyze Mabel’s weak economic conditions in the past as one of
the reasons that led her to choose the old-fashioned dress.
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 (iv) The cause of Miss Mabel’s disappointment is not only her poor background
in the past but her excessive bookishness also. Substantiate.
(v) Do you appreciate Mabel’s tendency of deciding her own value from the
comments given by others? Explain your views.
(A3) (i) Write the synonyms for the word ‘dress’ by filling appropriate letters in
the blanks. One is done for you.
(a) a t t i r e (b) _ _ r_ _
(c) _ _ _ t _ _ e (d) _ _ r _ _ _ t
(e) _ _ t _ _ t (f) _ _ _ a _ _ l
(ii) Conchology means the scientific study or collection of mollusc shells.
Refer to the dictionary and find out the meanings of -
• Etymology • Archaeology
(A4) (i) Use the correct tense form of the verbs given in the brackets and rewrite
the sentences.
(a) She (take/takes/took/had taken) that old fashion book of
her mother a few months back.
(b) She (pecking/ pecks/ pecked) at her left shoulder for quite
some time.
(c) One human should (done /doing/be doing) this for another
always.
(d) All this (will be/ is / have been) destroyed in a few years.
(e) She (feels/felt/will be feeling) like a dressmaker’s dummy
standing there.
(ii) Do as directed.
(a) Lata will sing tonight. (Make it less certain.)
(b) You should wear your uniform. (Show ability.)
(c) Sandeep may study to clear the examination. (Make it obligatory/
compulsory.)
(d) I can do it. (Make a sentence seeking permission.)
(iii) (a) Frame three rules for the students of your college.
(b) Frame three sentences giving advice to your younger brother.
(iv) Fill in the blanks with appropriate modal auxiliaries according to the
situation given in the following sentences.
(a) Take an umbrella. It rain later.
(b) People walk on the grass.

53
 (c) I ask you a question?
(d) The signal has turned red. You wait.
(e) I am going to the library. I find my friend there.
(A5) (i) Read the sentence ‘we are all like flies….’. The paragraph describes the
dejected thoughts that Miss Mabel carries in her mind. All the earlier
paragraphs are in a continuity of a story line. The next paragraph begins
with, ‘I feel like….’ again resumes to a story. The author has moved in
the mind of the character and out of it very smoothly without any
intimation or change in the language or tense. Similarly, she has moved
in the past years of Miss Mabel’s life. This is called ‘stream of consciousness’
technique.
(ii) Read the sentence from the text - What a hideous new dress!
This is an exclamation. It can be written as a simple sentence ‘The new dress
is very hideous’.
Find out few more exclamatory sentences from the story and transform them
into assertive sentences.
(iii) Virginia Woolf has created many characters other than Miss Mabel with
great skill. Write a character sketch of any one of them.
(iv) ‘Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.’ Expand the idea in
your own words.
(A6) Go to library and read the following books:
(a) ‘A Haunted House’ by Virginia Woolf
(b) ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf
(A7) Find out information about career opportunities in the following fields:
(a) Fashion designing
(b) Dress designing
(c) Textile industry
(d) Garment industry
(e) Image consultancy
(f) Psychology and Psychiatry

qqq

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