Question

The cause of Miss Mabel’s disappointment is not only her poor background in the past but her too much bookishness also. Substantiate

Answer 1

From the second that Mabel arrives at the party, she obsesses over her dress and drives herself crazy thinking that everyone at the party is talking about her. Though her inferiority complex stems from the fact that she comes from a poor background, it cannot be denied that her bookishness, too, had a role to play in her disappointment. The first instance is when Mabel sleeps after reading Borrow or Scoot and wakes up at night battling with the intensity that people were commenting on the hideousness of her dress. We can also see, on multiple occasions, that Mabel keeps repeating tags and phrases from Shakespeare and lines from books that she had read long ago, to overcome the agony she feels due to her dowdy dress. Her “flies trying to get out of the saucer” theory is another way of escaping reality by imagining everyone as flies or insects. Whether it is imagining Rose Shaw as Boadicea or thinking that a party makes things much more real or much less real, her beliefs come from the books that she has read. Reading gives her pleasure and the moments that she spends reading are divine for her. Even at the end, when she decides to transform herself, she thinks of reading books to achieve that goal. Thus, it can be concluded that Mabel’s disappointment was not just the result of her poor background, but also her tendency to remain in the world of imagination, thereby making it difficult for her to come to terms with reality.