In the story “Red Dress-1946” the narrator’s view of herself and the world around her changes during her school’s Christmas Dance, where she gains a new perspective on life. Before the dance she could be described as unhappy, unconfident and childish but by the ending of the story she emerges with a newfound confidence and self-assuredness. The main message this story conveys is that a person can gain a new perspective on the world if their current perspective makes them unhappy or if they want their reality to be (or at least seem) different.
At the start of the story the narrator has a bitter view on many aspects of her life. She sees her mother as rude, since she talks to Lonnie, the narrator’s friend, “as if Lonnie were grown up and …show more content…
She is asked to dance by Raymond Bolting, a boy from her class she had never talked to. She finds that she is able to effortlessly achieve the “grave absent-minded look of those who were chosen” that she previously had struggled so hard to have. When the dance ends, Raymond takes her home and kisses her briefly, and the narrator watches as her “rescuer” leaves, thinking “ he had brought me from Mary Fortune’s territory into the ordinary world.” The fact that the protagonist says she was “rescued” from Mary Fortune’s world implies that the narrator never really did become free of societal expectations, and that copying Mary Fortune’s worldview was just another way of becoming the girl she wanted to be before the dance. At the end of the story she returns home to her mother who is waiting for the narrator to tell her about the dance. The narrator then understands the “mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time.” The narrator is talking about how her mother always expect her to be happy, but the narrator would not fulfill this. The narrator also says her mother “would not know” about this, implying that the narrator is going to keep her social life hidden from her
At the start of the story the narrator has a bitter view on many aspects of her life. She sees her mother as rude, since she talks to Lonnie, the narrator’s friend, “as if Lonnie were grown up and …show more content…
She is asked to dance by Raymond Bolting, a boy from her class she had never talked to. She finds that she is able to effortlessly achieve the “grave absent-minded look of those who were chosen” that she previously had struggled so hard to have. When the dance ends, Raymond takes her home and kisses her briefly, and the narrator watches as her “rescuer” leaves, thinking “ he had brought me from Mary Fortune’s territory into the ordinary world.” The fact that the protagonist says she was “rescued” from Mary Fortune’s world implies that the narrator never really did become free of societal expectations, and that copying Mary Fortune’s worldview was just another way of becoming the girl she wanted to be before the dance. At the end of the story she returns home to her mother who is waiting for the narrator to tell her about the dance. The narrator then understands the “mysterious and oppressive obligation I had, to be happy, and how I had almost failed it, and would be likely to fail it, every time.” The narrator is talking about how her mother always expect her to be happy, but the narrator would not fulfill this. The narrator also says her mother “would not know” about this, implying that the narrator is going to keep her social life hidden from her