The Blue Dress

760 Words4 Pages
Molly Kellogg Dr. Neary English 150 2/16/15 The poem, “The Blue Dress,” by Sharon Olds, tells the story of a young lady who appears to venerate her father but is terribly disillusioned when she realizes he is not the man she had envisioned. On her fourteenth birthday, she receives a lovely, perfectly fitting, blue dress from Hink’s, an upscale store featuring attractive women’s clothing and lingerie. She is thrilled, believing the dress has been a gift from her father. A year later, however, when her mother divulges that her father “had not picked out the dress” at all, she is crushed. In search of love and approval from her father, the speaker remembers choosing to live in a world of fantasy rather than accept her father’s lie and the reality that she was unloved. Through her use of descriptive language and simile in the poem, Olds reveals the speaker’s deep desire for her father’s love as she tries to convince herself of its reality. Olds takes nine lines of her poem to describe, “Hink’s, the dark department store with a balcony and/ mahogany rail around the balcony,” where you “could stare down into the rows and rows of camisoles/ petticoats, bras, as of looking down/ into the lives of women”. The sexual imagery, used in this section of the poem, creates a vivid illusion of her father’s affection for her as the speaker compares his “braving that place for me” to “the way he had entered my mother once to get me out”. The simile depicts, what the speaker believes, are demonstrative acts of love, with her own conception in her mother’s womb as the most genuine. She convinces herself that these two actions by her father must certainly prove his love for her. When the young woman learns that her father has lied to her about the dress, she continues the illusion she has created, even though there are many indications in the poem that her father, in
Open Document