Word Count: 1721 Kristen Boggs 12/3/13 Women in Literature Red Dress: A Young Girl’s Journey to Finding her Own Definition of Womanhood “Red Dress” by Alice Munro is a short story detailing of the journey of one young lady from girlhood to adolescence. The story focuses on the temptations that can define her womanhood and her eventual decisions. The ideals of femininity are defined in “Red Dress” as being either sexually attractive or chosen or sexually unattractive or chosen against. There are fours sets of characters that define what it means to be feminine to the narrator and what this femininity means as a whole. The narrator is a young lady that does not believe that she is much to begin with, and as she enters this phase in her life her insecurities are ten fold. The narrator is unsure in her own skin as well as her relation to her mother, her friends and boys. The red dress and her trying on the red dress symbolize the narrator’s attempt to try on several different roles within the new world that high school and womanhood bring. The narrator and her internal battle with herself are identified in her fear of rejection and thoughts of herself as an outcast to society. It is not entirely clear why the narrator is so certain that she will fail. “There was something mysterious the matter with me, something that could not be put right like bad breath or overlooked like pimples, and everybody knew it, and I knew it; I had known it all along (Munro, 155) 1 ” 1 All quotation from Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, are taken from the 2 nd Canadian paperback, ed. (Toronto:McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2000), pp.146- 160, and will be indicated by Munro followed by a specific page number quoted