The New Dress

Simone de Beauvoir's excerpt from The Second Sex, questions the importance the myth of woman plays in literature and in daily life and in reply must relate this myth to reality. "This one, the myth of the woman, sublimating an immutable aspect of the human condition--namely, the 'division' of humanity into two classes of individuals--is a static myth. It projects into the realm of Platonic ideas a reality that is directly experienced or is conceptualized on a basis of experience; in place of fact, value, significance, knowledge, empirical law, it substitutes a transcendental Idea, timeless unchangeable, necessary. " ..."Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is contradicted by the behaviour of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women concerned are not feminine."

In Virginia Woolf's The New Dress, Mabel Waring seemed to hate the fact that she was resigned to a predefined role in life and to go along with expectations. Though she was a grown woman, she had little self esteem and depended on others to build her character. She thought of herself as she did most of siblings being "...poor water-veined creatures who did nothing. " She kept referring to herself as a fly and her struggle to get out of the saucer of milk. "She knew that she was condemned, despised, left like this in a backwater, because of her being like this a feeble, vacillating creature: and it seemed to to her that the yellow dress was a penance which she had deserved, and if she had been dressed like Rose Shaw, in lovely, clinging green with a ruffle of swansdown, she would have deserved that; and she thought that there was no escape for her--none whatever. But it was not her fault altogether, after all. "

I think deBeauvoir supports Mabel's existence in stating that " Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their abuse. Men need not bother themselves with alleviating the pains and the burdens that physiologically are women's lot, since these are intended by Nature:..." Mabel refused to drown in that saucer of milk. She would escape to London and lose herself in the library there and transform herself into who she wanted to be. She is looking for her own identity, not what 'Nature' had dictated she must be strictly because of the gender she was born.