Julia Darling - the dress

 Hej.

Jeg har lidt problemer med en engelsklærer, der bestemt ikke prøver at skjule hvor lidt han bryder sig om mig. Har lige fået et essay tilbage og er ikke tilfreds med karakteren. Derfor ville jeg høre, om der er nogle, som gider læse det og fortælle hvilken karakter de ville give for det.

Opgaven var en analyse og fortolkning af Julia Darlings The Dress.

Vi skulle komme ind på:

- Søstrenes forhold.

- Karakteristik af moderen.

- Hvordan teksten er bygget op.

- Om der er nogle symboler.

Her er mit essay.

The Dress
- by Julia Darling

Throughout the last decades lack of communication has developed into a way of living for many people. The post-modern society focuses on the individual and thereby breaks down important relations between families, friends and colleagues. This is a period that interferes with the traditional family structure and makes individuals lonely and materialistic, because identity is a fanciful concept that is hard to find.
The family in “The Dress” is a typical modern family. The parents are separated or divorced and the two daughters live with their mother.

The short story is told by a 3rd persons narrator and starts in medias res with one of the daughter’s search for a dress. Rachel has ironed and hung a dress ready to wear for her moms birthday the same evening. She is searching the whole house even though she knows that her sister has taken the dress. Rachel is very frustrated and is about to cry.
Within the first half-page of the short story we get the impression that Rachel hates her sister, Flora.

Flora did take the dress out for cocktails with an Italian friend. “It made her feel taller, braver, cleverer, and Rachel was all those things already.”

That evening Rachel and her mother arrived at the fancy and expensive restaurant, where they were about to celebrate the mothers birthday, together, Flora was late. The most of the evening the sisters did not talk to each other. And when Rachel confronts Flora about the dress they have a huge fight and Rachel ends up with packing a suitcase and going to her dads house. The mother gets very angry with Flora and says “everything is ruined. You are a thief”. She tells Flora to leave and she does. The way the mother reacts is very odd. Since she is a therapist she should have dealt with the confrontation in a more constructive way.

The mother is a therapist which makes it very ironic that she does not seem to have any control over her own life. She is incapable of communicating existential thoughts about her own life. When she celebrated her 40th birthday with her daughters “she felt sorry for herself... She wanted to feel loved.” Perhaps it has not been that long since she broke up with the father of her daughters and she is not over him, or maybe she just has not been able to keep a man in her life for more than a short period of time. Later on she talks to her daughters about leaving her job as a bereavement counsellor and become a jeweller instead. Obviously the mother has some kind of midlife crisis but none of the daughters realizes that, they are just obsessing about the dress and think of the mothers birthday as a duty instead of a nice family occasion.

When the daughters starts arguing in the restaurant the mother feels embarrassed. “She liked emotions to be explored in safe rooms, with a clock.” The mother wants the family to look perfect on the outside which it also does: they live in a rich district or the suburbs, they are eating at a very expensive restaurant and her daughter goes out to have cocktails with a friend. But when someone else are celebrating a birthday and starts to sing, “it made the mother feel belittled.” I think she feels belittled because the other table is happy to celebrate someone elses birthday and shows it by singing “happy birthday”, and there she is stuck with her two daughters who actually does not want to be there.

Flora, who I think is the younger sibling, took the dress because she wants to be like her sister, Rachel. The dress represents identity, so when Flora puts on the dress she puts on Rachels identity. Rachel is the more responsible one. She irons her dress and hang it ready to wear for the evening. “Rachel picked up the hanger and threw it onto the floor. She wanted to hurt someone.” We get the impression that Rachel is a methodical person and that she does not let her emotions carry her away when they are inappropriate. She is thinking that she wants to hurt somebody but she never does. Flora on the other hand is way more irresponsible. Her room is messy, she does not clean her dishes after she eats and she was late for her mothers birthday.

The fact that Rachel gets angry with her sister is probably not caused by the missing dress alone but the fact that Flora disturbs her plans. As the more responsible sister, Rachel may be used to dealing with a lot of problems, also in connection to the parents’ divorce.

Both Rachel and Flora has personal issues that they cannot talk about with each other, and therefore the problems are being projected into something concrete and and less personal - a dress. The dress symbolizes different things. As mentioned it symbolizes identity when Flora steals it and puts it on. But when she stains it she chooses to bury it instead of talking to her sister. The reason why is that the general lack of communication breaks down the simple understanding and forgiveness a family is supposed to have. So it seems easier for Flora to bury the dress and act like she does not know what happened to it, instead of communicating with her sister. “And the dress lay in the tired earth, smelling of dead birds in a porch in an empty house, and was forgotten.” The dress now symbolizes the different problems each woman have that they are unable to talk about and therefore they are lying in the dirt.

“Flora had taken the wet dress outside, and found a trowel. An icy wind blew the leaves from the trees. Weeping, she had dug a hole at the bottom of the garden, among the magnolia bushes. The earth has smelled of dead birds and empty houses. She had buried the dress, covering it with soil, then kicked dead leaves over the disturbed ground.” The disturbed ground symbolizes Flora’s facade as she tries to maintain to cover up her pain and her problems that she cannot talk to anyone about. This is exactly the important theme in this text: lack of communication, which is something that is very characteristic for the post-modern society and it destroys many relationships and families on the inside. Several places in the story the three women speak past each other and not one of them has a clue of what is going on in the minds of the other two.
The society is still recovering from the bad communication. I think it is because we all have a facade that we put on as soon as we leave our safe places such as home. It is hard to just relax and show our real self to the world because we will always be judged by every step we take.