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.

ABOUT WRITER

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 effective. 

 1-5 ) 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 

growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at 

her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she 

went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner 

where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not 

RIGHT. And at once the misery ( great physical and 

mental distress or discomfort) which she always tried 

to hide, the profound ( deep or intense) had, ever since she was a child,

 of being inferior to other 

people - set upon her, relentlessly (oppressively constant), remorselessly, with an 

intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when 

she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; 

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 

came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was 

her own appalling ( very bad or displeasing ) 

water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the 

        whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she 

had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, 

seemed sordid, (unpleasant( in this  context)) repulsive (arousing intense 

distaste or disgust) ; and her own drawing-room so 

shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity (excessive pride in 

or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements) as 

she touched the letters on the hall table and said: “How 

dull!” to show off - all this now seemed unutterably 

silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely 

destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into 

Mrs. Dalloway’s drawing-room.

        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 

pretend it even - fashion meant cut, meant style, meant 

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 

and its waist and all the things that looked so charming 

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 (sarcastic, humorously critical)

pucker (a small fold)  of the lips which she expected - Rose herself 

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 (reduce to nothing )  this pain, to make this agony endurable. 

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,

         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 

themselves out of something, or into something, meagre, 

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.)

        “I feel like some dowdy, ( (especially of a woman) unfashionable and 

dull in appearance)   decrepit, (elderly and infirm) horribly 

dingy  ( gloomy and drab)  fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear 

her say that, just to reassure herself by furbishing up a 

poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached 

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 

makes things either much more real, or much less real, 

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 

terribly hot, stuffy, sordid. It smelt of clothes and cabbage 

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 

beautiful woman. Just for a second (she had not dared 

look longer, Miss Milan wanted to know about the length 

of the skirt), there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping  (characterized 

by or possessing heavy, floral ornament (a word coined by Virginia Woolf ) 

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 What was Mabel’s 

imagination about flies?

  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, 

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.

        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! 

We’re all weevils  (small beetles / insects with an elongated snout) 

in a captain’s biscuit” - or whatever it was that people did say.

        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 

instead of looking fierce or tragic, as Rose Shaw would 

have done-Rose would have looked like Boadicea  (a queen of the 

British Celtic Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the occupying forces

 of the Roman empire in AD 60 or 61) 

-

she looked foolish and self-conscious, and simpered  (smiled in an affectedly coy or 

ingratiating manner)  like a schoolgirl and slouched  (stood, moved 

or sat in a lazy, drooping way) across the room, positively 

slinking, (: moving quietly )  as if she were a beaten mongrel, and looked at a 

picture, an engraving. As if one went to a party to look at 

a picture! Everybody knew why she did it - it was from 

shame, from humiliation.

        “Now the fly’s in the saucer,” she said to herself, 

“right in the middle, and can’t get out, and the milk,” 

she thought, rigidly staring at the picture, “is sticking its 

wings together.”

        “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.

    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.

        

    “Mabel’s got a new dress!” he said, and the poor fly was 

absolutely shoved into the middle of the saucer. Really, he 

would like her to drown, she believed. He had no heart, 

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 

right, and Charles wrong and stick to it, feel sure about the 

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 

odious, (extremely unpleasant)  weak, 

vacillating  (wavering between different opinions or actions)

 character again, always giving 

at the critical moment and not being seriously interested 

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 

Mrs. Holman’s notice, with her family always tumbling 

downstairs or having the scarlet fever. Could Mabel tell 

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 

        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 

running, she could see her, too, quite detached (aloof, having no interest or involvement)

 in the looking-glass, and it was impossible that the black dot, 

leaning forward, gesticulating, (using gestures, movement of 

parts of body, especially hand or head)  should make the yellow 

dot, sitting solitary, self-centred, feel what the black dot 

was feeling, yet they pretended.

    “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, ( in a reluctant or resentful manner) 

as if it were a halfpenny when it ought to have been a pound and 

put it away in her purse, must put up with it, mean and 

miserly though it was, times being hard, so very hard; and 

on she went, creaking, (making a harsh, high-pitched sound  )

injured Mrs. Holman, about the girl with the swollen-joints.

 Ah, it was tragic, this greed, 

this clamour of human beings, like a row of cormorants, (large diving seabirds) 

barking and flapping their wings for sympathy-it was 

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, ( scorned, hated) 

left like this in a backwater, because of her 

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 

no escape for her-none what so ever. But it was not her 

fault altogether, after all. It was being one of a family 

of ten; never having money enough, always 

skimping(expending very little or less than necessary ) 

and paring; and her mother carrying great cans, and the 

linoleum worn on the stair edges, and one sordid little

    domestic tragedy after another-nothing 

catastrophic, (involving or causing sudden great damage or suffering) 

the sheep farm failing, but not utterly; her eldest brother 

marrying beneath him but not very much - there was no 

romance, nothing extreme about them all. 

They petered out   (diminished or came to an end gradually) 

respectably in seaside resorts; every watering-place 

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 

like Sir Henry Lawrence,   (Brigadier-General Sir 

Henry Lawrence was a British military officer, surveyor, administrator 

and statesman in British India.)    some empire builder (still the 

sight of a native in a turban filled her with romance), she 

had failed utterly. She had married Hubert, with his safe, 

permanent underling’s job in the Law Courts, and they 

managed tolerably in a smallish house, without proper 

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 

Charles Burt and Rose Shaw, chattering 

like magpies (a very long tailed black and white bird ) 

and perhaps laughing at her by the fireplace - now and 

then, there did come to her delicious moments, reading 

catastrophic: involving 

or causing sudden great 

damage or suffering

petered out: diminished 

or came to an end 

gradually

Sir Henry Lawrence:

Brigadier-General Sir 

Henry Lawrence was a 

British military officer, 

surveyor, administrator 

and statesman in British 

India.

magpies : a very long 

tailed black and white 

bird 

the other night in bed, for instance, or down by the sea on 

the sand in the sun, at Easter  ( the most important festival of 

the Christian Church celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ) - 

let her recall it - a great tuft of pale sand-grass standing all twisted like a shock 

of spears against the sky, which was blue like a smooth 

china egg, so firm, so hard, and then the melody of the 

waves -“Hush, hush,” they said, and the children’s shouts 

paddling - yes, it was a divine moment, and there she lay, 

she felt, in the hand of the Goddess who was the world; 

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, 

crawling life, suddenly she was on the 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? - 

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!

        She would go to the London Library  

( an independent lending library in London established in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle.) 

tomorrow. She would find some wonderful, helpful, astonishing book, 

quite by chance, a book by a clergyman, by an American 

no one had ever heard of; or she would walk down the 

Strand  (narrow street at the edge of the sea, lake or large river) 

and drop, accidentally, into a hall where a miner 

was telling about the life in the pit, and suddenly she 

would become a new person. She would be absolutely 

         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.

        “I’m afraid I must,” said Mabel Waring. “But,” she 

added in her weak, wobbly   (SHAKY , unsteady) voice which only sounded 

ridiculous when she tried to strengthen it, “I have enjoyed myself enormously.”

    ‘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 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.(iv) The cause of Miss Mabel’s disappointment is not only her poor background 

in the past but her too much 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. (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

(d) We should choose a dress according to the fashion rather than our choice.