Engelsk B - The dress

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The short story “The Dress” is written by Julia Darling in 2006, and deals with the strained relationship between the two sisters Rachel and Flora, and their relationship with their mother, who’s not able to handle her daughters as good as she handles her job. The plot is taking place on their mother’s birthday; the conflict is about a certain silk dress which ends up causing serious consequences in the story and has a decisive role in their relationship.
The story takes place in a rich district or in the suburbs. You can tell since they are able to afford expensive restaurant visits and drinking cocktails with friends. The girls are young where Rachel is the tidy and pretty one with the good table manners, and Flora being the childish and messy one who’s jealous of her sister’s beauty and cleverness. The story starts in medias res, where Rachel is searching for her dress which has been taken by Flora. We follow the events chronologically as the story continues in the restaurant where there’s a cold distance between the sisters and then home again where Rachel confronts Flora, and discover that Flora has ruined her dress. The initial situation where the conflict starts is at home then moves to the restaurant where the story develops, and then home again to the final situation, where the consequences of Flora taking the dress accelerates and overpowers the mother. The ending is open, leaving us to decide whether the mother will learn how to handle her daughters and bring them back home to her, or she’ll stay alone; never being capable of solving this out at home. The ending was rather unexpected, since you don’t imagine they will things that far about Flora stealing her sister’s dress. The narrator is in third person and omniscient about how they’re thinking and feeling and describing the characters directly to us. The point of view in the story changes from starting with Rachel’s, then in the restaurant switching to the mother’s and then in the final situation switch to all three of them. This gives the readers a slightly different picture of the whole story and a better understanding of the reasons behind their behavior.
The mother is a 40-year old divorced woman who works as a bereavement counselor and living with her two daughters. She fails in solving the conflict between her daughters with the same professionalism she handles her clients’ issues in her job. She deals with her daughters the same way she deals with her clients: handing them the box of tissues. She’s having a hard time distancing herself from her job when she’s home. The mother has a need for calming and relaxing moments when she’s off from work, because it is tiring for her to deal with people’s issues and problems all day and then come home and find her own daughters fighting, and since it’s her birthday she desires an evening with no conflicts at all. Instead of trying to figure things out, she starts feeling sorry for herself because she wants some attention and to be celebrated, rather than coping with the daughters everlasting fights. In line 76: “She wanted the meal to be over. She wanted her daughters to make an effort”, and line 68: “She wanted to turn and see what it was that Larry was doing, but felt glued to her silent daughters.”. Here you can clearly tell how interested she is in solving out the problem, she wants the daughters to let it all go and do an effort for her sake. The only reason she’s trying of thawing things up is because she feels she’s obligated to since she’s their mother, and because she wants order in her family life.
Rachel and Flora’s relationship is characterized by constant jealousy and quarrels. Flora fights for the attention of the mother and the feeling of being submissive to Rachel and living in the shadow of her sister, since the mother tends to take Rachel’s side. Rachel is the neat one with the demand of tidiness, which can’t be found in Flora; it can be seen when Rachel enters Flora’s room: “wading through disordered heaps of crumpled discarded clothes, empty cigarette packets, broken lighters, dried-out mascara brushes and lidless lipsticks.” They’re two opposite human beings. When it gets too much for Rachel she decides to move out, to once more try to get the attention of the mother, but the mother gives up as she doesn’t try to stop her and instead throws Flora out too.
The use of symbols in the story helps to underline the atmosphere and the feelings in the moment. An example given could be the scene in the restaurant where Rachel is wearing a black dress with red earrings instead of the blue silk dress she was planning to wear before Flora took it, to show her anger and hate towards her sister, as red symbolizes furiousness and anger, and black symbolize death or hate.
The themes of this short story deals with the jealousy between siblings, their rivalry and their constant cries for attention from the parents, especially when it is separated mothers with careers, who works hard both in their jobs and domestically with their children, to be able to make it all work out. It could also be about giving up and be tired of your constant daily life routine, where in this case, the mother is working daily with sad and depressing people and becoming tired of the sorrow and gloominess in her work atmosphere. She just wishes it would all stop so she could leave it behind and do something else for a change which would be opening a jeweler shop.
 

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