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Virginia Woolf Short Story Analysis

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"- that it was not quite right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs at her with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, "(1) Mabel felt anxious by the time she stepped into the Mrs Dalloway 's party. She took off her cloak, took a look at the mirror and her anxious thoughts started to flow like a river. For the whole time, she was at the party she tried to get confirmed by others about her appearance. Some confirmed some did not. In the end, she got tired of her efforts and anxious thoughts she left the party. What she does not know she bears the anxiety of being alienated and discordant like most of the modernist fiction characters. Virginia Woolf as being a modernist author serves the theme of anxiety many of …show more content…

What Woolf does in the story is to use the dress as a representation of the hierarchical status to reinforce Mabel 's alienation in terms of fashion. In the short story, Mabel affiliates to the middle class with her children and husband who does not have a high ranked job unlike Mrs Dalloway and her guests, yet Mabel participates in Mrs Dalloway 's party. Even though she is aware that she is not one of them, the need and the wish in her to be one of them makes her participate the party and gain their approval. Since in the Modern Era, hierarchical classes are mingled and engaged more than before Mabel could participate the party and build relationships with the aristocracy. Such relations made Mabel perplexed about her hierarchical status because of altering the consciousness hence on the surface the hierarchy seemed to redefined. Fashion is one of the areas that diminished between upper and middle classes as a distinction and caused complications in Mabel and brought her in a state of unconformity. The yellow dress which Mabel wears is, in her thoughts, old-fashioned unlike other women 's dresses in the party which makes her assume she would not be accepted by others because of it. After all "fashion meant cut, meant style, meant thirty guineas at least,-". This is the situation causes the protagonist to feel discordant in a society she actually does not belong, through her dress which she cannot

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