Red Dress
Red DressThe short story "Red Dress" by Alice Munro is about a young girl's first high school dance. Her home and school environment determined her attitude towards the dance.
This girl's home life was bad. She was constantly put down mentally by her mother, even in front of her friend Lonnie, to the point that the narrator envied Lonnie on account that her mother died and she lived alone with her father. "'I doubt if she appreciates it.' She enraged me, talking like this to Lonnie, as if Lonnie were grown up and I were still a child." Her mother was obscene in the house; the description that is given would make one sick. It is said that she did not take care of herself in the house, and exposed her lumpy veins to the in-house public. This probably made the narrator think that she is also ugly because she came from this disgusting creature. This makes her attitude towards the dance understandable. When Mason Williams comes to dance with her, she describes dancing with a 'nobody' like her was "as offensive to him as having to memorize Shakespeare."
The narrator's school life was just as bad if not worse. She would never be sure of...
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