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Analysis Of The Dress By Marta Jara

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People resort to many things when they want to escape from something oppressive. Many will resort to fantasies to free themselves from the harshness of reality. Living in a false sense of reality ensures that a person does not have to face her own problems. In the short story, “The Dress” by Marta Jara, Jara develops the idea that a person’s will to escape may be driven by her isolation and imprisonment. When an individual is isolated and lonely she could become desperate and dominated by the thought and need for attention. She may become willing to go extreme lengths to be noticed and to ultimately escape.
The protagonist, Eloisa, is trapped and controlled to an extreme, to the point where the only part of the outside world she gets to see are the people she sees at church. Eloisa wants nothing more than to find a man who will see her for who she is, no matter what her mother thinks. When she invites the peddler’s wife inside so that she can buy a dress her mother stands at the door without moving, she blocked any access to the house, her despotic tone of voice containing a quality stronger than her presence there before the closed door. Her look was mocking” (Jara 216). This shows how restricting her mother is; how Eloisa is so isolated that her mother does not let her bring anyone into the house. After Eloisa is given the dress she is told “‘[not to] show it to [her] mother, don’t tell her a thing. She’s capable of ripping it up… [that she is] too old to be afraid of her mother’”(221). It is obvious that Eloisa is scared of what her mother thinks; that her mother is so overpowering that she is not allowed to make her own decisions and have her own thoughts.
When the peddler’s wife arrives selling clothes Eloisa find this as a perfect opportunity to be the person she wants to be. “ ‘Somebody, yes, somebody, will have to notice me, if only because of the dress’ “(217). The dress gives Eloisa a sense of completion and worth. Now that she has a blouse she can once and for all prove to her mother that she has what it takes to be a woman. At the end of the story “[Eloisa] was standing there, embracing the blouse as if it were a man”(221). It is mentioned multiple times in the story that Eloisa’s dream was to

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