The Dress - Julia Darling

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English essay, the dress: ”Give me back my clothes! I need them this weekend” are words often heard around my sister and I. For us these are just normal things that sisters yell but for the sisters in the short story ‘The Dress’ it was the last thing to drive them apart. The short story ‘The Dress’ by Julia Darling describes the complex and strained relationship between the sisters, Flora and Rachel. When Flora steals Rachel’s dress this relationship boils over leaving Flora alone with her mom as Rachel leaves to move in with her dad. The dress gets buried in the backyard to hide the stain Flora spilled and is eventually forgotten. The story opens up with Rachel exploding after realizing the dress she just bought for her mothers fortieth birthday is gone. Through the whole story Flora and Rachel’s mom is a passive bystander to their war. She tries desperately to get the girls to be friends but as we see in this story it doesn’t work. The mother wants everything in life to be quiet and calm. On line 103 it is mentioned that the mother “wanted life to be calm, a flat sea with no sudden breezes. She liked emotions to be explored in safe rooms, with a clock.” In other words the bickering and constant fighting between the girls are not what she wants in life. The girls are making life hard for her even on her birthday. She wants nothing more than to “relax and feel loved” (line 97). Not only are the girls making life difficult for her she’s is also thinking about leaving her job where she works as a bereavement counselor, someone who talks to mourning families. From where I see it the mother is having a midlife crisis; it’s her fortieth birthday, she is divorced, her daughters are fighting and her job is too sad. Instead of this life she wants a different one starting with her job, she wants to make jewelry. The girls are too busy arguing to really notice their

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