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Theme Of The Dress

Decent Essays

The dress
Interpretation and analysis

Flora and Rachel are sisters. And just like any other siblings they fight a lot. This time it’s about a dress Rachel bought to the occasion that it’s their mothers fortieth birthday and they are going out on a fine restaurant. But Flora took it when Rachel wasn’t home and spilled a drink and buried it.

The story starts in media res with Rachel screaming her sister’s name. The reader gets thrown in the middle of the plot. This has a great effect on the story as we, the readers, realize there is a conflict going on. It’s an omniscient narrator that switches point of view between all three characters so we through the whole story know all their thoughts, motives and feelings. We start with Rachel’s point …show more content…

And we get the sense that they’ve got a lot of conflicts or that when they do they rarely come to a solution. It seems like the mother is trying to hold their little family together but without luck the way they don’t apologise, don’t forgive or at least trying to come to a solution none of them really talk.
Flora and Rachel’s mother is a divorced woman who works as a bereavement counsellor. In the story their mother is caught in Rachel and Flora’s argument. It is her birthday and all day she has been listening to people in grief and at the restaurant she just wanted to have a lovely time with her daughters as seen in the following quote (l. 96) “I'm forty," said the mother. She felt sorry for herself. All day she had sat with tearful needy people. It was her birthday, and she wanted to relax. She wanted to feel loved.”
It is as if she wants pity from her girls. At the same time she wants them to forget their internal conflict and celebrate her …show more content…

Flora is happy with how she is looking in the dress because it makes her look more like Rachel.
Rachel is used to her sisters bad behaviour. So to prevent problems she locks the door to her room (l. 38) “Usually Rachel locked her room and guarded her things carefully, so when Flora had found the dress hanging in the kitchen, available, her eyes had widened with pleasure”.
Flora just couldn’t resist the temptation. And where Flora saw it as borrowing, Rachel saw it as stealing (l. 27) “..And Rachel knew that she would have to be pleasant, to forget about her stolen dress..”
The atmosphere between the two sisters is so tense you could cut through it with a knife. Flora does not understand what all the fuss is about because it is just a dress. In the end I do not think that it is the argument about the dress itself that makes Rachel move out to her dad, but it was the last straw. A dress is a materialistic thing. But for both of the sisters the dress seams much more than that. It is a symbol of intelligence and bravery. That’s why Flora in the end realizes the she cannot pay her sister back. The dress was just the last

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