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
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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
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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
She fears for the lives of her children and worries that harm will come to them. This also represents an aspect of the parent-child relationship. No matter how old children get, their parents still worry about the things they do and the choices they
problem and agrees to take in one of the boys and to raise him as her
The complexity of Rachel’s character differs within the play. On the one hand, Rachel is portrayed in a male disguise showing she has independence as she has taken matters into her own hands, her successful manipulation through disguise perhaps demonstrating her intelligence and how easily women can dupe men. This could also suggest that she is not acting according to the social ‘norms’ for women in the 60s demonstrating that she doesn’t fear people’s views of her although she is a woman. She demonstrates her strength and independence as she takes matters into her own hands ‘I’ll take two hundred in cash’ and acts in a violent way ‘Rachel slaps Francis’, portraying the growing power of women. On the other hand, Bean could have done this to project the message that women cannot hold any power without the help of a man. Although she has decided to solve her problem herself, she has had to dress up as a man to do so, thus showing that women’s roles are often tokenistic. The motive behind her plan was also for a man illustrating the length a women will go for a man. Had Rachel not dressed up as a man maybe she would not have gotten so far, her success in doing so
Although Rachel is very emotional, in the only dialogue between her and Mrs. Pierce she sounds very shy, unsure of herself, not ready to confront and timid.
On the next meeting, farther into their lives, Roberta actually calls out to Twyla in a grocery checkout line. When they begin to talk, Roberta asks if her Twyla’s mother is sick as well, meaning that what she said last time they met isn’t correct, that she was still sick. They begin to reminisce, remembering how Roberta’s mother had the cross like two telephone poles, a much less elegant description of how Twyla originally stated earlier, realizing it wasn’t necessarily salvation for her. As the conversation continues, she asks again about her mother, asking if she got well, which she never did, a nice way of saying she passed away. Later on, during the picketing and everything, Twyla notices Roberta picketing with a sign larger than her mother’s cross. Insinuating that she’s becoming her mother, if not more, and falling into a sickness herself that could destroy their friendship. They begin arguing over whether or not when the bow legged servant Maggie fell whether or not they kicked her. This spurs off into a war of words. To insult her Twyla makes a sign saying “How would
Rachel is obsessed with the idea of being perfect and needing to uphold an image of perfection, however she has finally realized this is not attainable. Living in the Congo is an
Beyond racial divide, Kingsolver portrays how Rachel’s self-obsession leaves no room for her family in order
This inner defiance gives evidence to Rachel’s determination and individuality. The sweater now represents a sort of barrier and if she submits herself to it, she fears the world of ages and maturity.
One of the events in this book was the Boston Tea Party. The Boston Tea Party was the dumping of 342 chests of tea into the Boston Harbor. Rachel and Debby, Sarah’s older sister, believed that Paul was one of the people who dumped the tea, but Paul denied it. Sarah and Debby, Sarah’s older sister, started talking about Rachel. They said that Rachel is really worried for Paul because he could get hurt or even killed. Rachel had already been worried about Paul but she was more worried when he started doing more stuff. This made Rachel unhappy because she doesn’t want anything to happen to
Knowing that she and her family are able to survive such distressing situations without having to jeopardize their views allows her to have faith in her family's future and gives
There is no outward display of affection. She “was not a mother/woman.” The children take care of themselves with some help from a nurse.
This further impacted the children Rachel and Leah, being the oldest daughters in the family. Rachel was a daughter that loved her father and she at first felt that he was the best person in the world. She would always follow him around and be his little princess, that was until she started to see the bad things that he started doing in the dark, mysterious place they were living in. She started to see how arrogant and defensive he became throughout the community and how he threw hissy fits. She realized that enough was enough and she needed to grow accustomed to this new place by herself, just like the narrator did in the poem. This is because she knew that her dad was just going insane and he wanted too much power. She now felt bad for her mom and what he had done to her, and wanted to side with her mom to get out of the community that they were in because they had enough of it. Another thing that happened in the Congo while she was there was something absurd and scarring to say the least. Her sister had started to hunt with the men for meat and Rachel saw what they did when they killed the poor animals lives. Rachel was so startled and appalled that she had to become a vegetarian for a short time while they were there. This just shows that she had to adapt to a new lifestyle because she could not think of eating a poor animal that had an innocent life, but her sister Leach could have cared
“ Dr. Flint, a physician in the neighborhood, had married the sister of my mistress, and I was now the property of their little daughter” So after Linda’s mistress die, she goes to live with this new family. She relate, when she got to this new home as “ When we entered our new home we encountered cold looks, cold words, and cold treatment”, meaning, she could feel, that things are not going to be as they were before with her last mistress, and that she had nobody “I felt so desolate and alone”. When her father die, she didn't have the opportunity of say a proper goodbye to his body, instead she was ordered to go for flowers for her mistress’s house might be decorated for an evening party. “ I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them
Throughout the book, Rachel had the most character progression. Initially, Rachel was too scared to go against her father than to defend her friend. She tells Drummond about a recurring dream she had, "But I was more scared of him [her father] than falling (Pg. 55)." Ultimately, Rachel apologizes to Cates after the case and finally forms a stance of her own on
signify some repressed anger toward her parents. The lack of love from both parents, has left