59 pages • 1 hour read
Jennifer RyanThe Wedding Dress Sewing Circle: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Wedding Dress
Content Warning: This section of the guide features descriptions of war, including bombings and post-traumatic experiences.
The central wedding dress of the novel—the one Grace’s mother wore and that the women discover previously belonged to Violet and Hugh’s mother—becomes a symbol of hope, community, and the discovery of one’s true self. From the very beginning of the novel, the dress reveals the power of clothing to transform; when Grace tries it on, she feels herself stand straight and reflect “a new energy, as if she [is] someone special after all” (8). Cressida later explains this power to Grace, telling her that clothing can “make you into someone else” and help one realize that they can be whoever they want to be (78). The dress reflects Grace’s growing hope that she might be someone else and pursue the life she wants. It also spreads hope through the sewing circle’s Wedding Dress Exchange, allowing women to participate in the tradition of having a white wedding dress even amid rationing and deprivation.
The dress—and wedding dresses more broadly—represents hope alongside the power of community during hard times. Grace says of the dress:
[W]e rejuvenated it, made it into something better than any new dress could ever be, a symbol of our unity in this time of war. It became the first gown in the Wedding Dress Exchange, our way to show that we might be losing our homes, our families, and our normal way of life, but there are some traditions that live on in spite of the Nazis—that romance and hope and love can flourish, no matter what our enemies do. It is a reminder that the most important part of us—our hearts—will always be free (399).
Wedding dresses bring the women of the novel together, and as Grace’s speech illustrates, a community event like the Wedding Dress Exchange has the power to bring wider communities together in their pursuit of hope in dark times and defiance of oppressors. Grace shares her own wedding dress among her friends, but the dress also inspires her community to spread joy as far as they can to help others find moments of relief from pain and grief. The dress connects women both to their past and to their present community, providing an anchor and essential bonding during difficult times.
Social Class Divides
Even before World War II, class divides in England were experiencing pushback. As more non-titled people built fortunes, and aristocrats sought money to save their estates, growing numbers of aristocrats married “beneath” their traditional social class, but inter-class marriages remained the norm. However, during World War II, classes began mixing more often, and women were thrust into new work because of the male labor shortage. More people married outside of their own class than ever before, upsetting those wishing to cling to the old ways.
Although Grace and Cressida both end up marrying outside of their social class, Violet is the primary focus of this motif in The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle. While observing Lord Flynn flirting with Lottie Kettlewell, a village girl, Violet feels her annoyance grow and thinks of how “[s]he’d heard friends complain that the war was breaking down social barriers, but this [is] ridiculous” (91). She dwells on this social dilemma and its impact on her own marital prospects for much of the novel, clinging to her father’s ideals of marrying only within their sphere. She continues to think she is above those of lower classes, but those ideas are challenged as she enters military driver training. On her first night, she begins sobbing in despair and homesickness, and many women join her, holding one another and creating “a little huddle of young women, a varied collection of rich and poor, upper class and lower, each of them crying and comforting each other as best as they could” (115). The camaraderie of training breaks down some of Violet’s walls, and the humiliations she endures help her see the world from a new perspective. Not only does she see her brother’s marriage to Grace as preferable to his original engagement to the high-class Astrid, but she also marries Lieutenant MacCauley, an American with no title. In the end, Violet understands the value of people rather than titles.
Fear and Loss in Wartime Life
During World War II, Nazis bombed London and surrounding areas in attempts to both cow the British population and destroy essential infrastructure, both military and civilian. Against this wartime backdrop, the motif of fear and loss intersects with each protagonist’s narrative arc, illustrating the theme of Resilience in the Face of Great Difficulty.
Cressida spent the interwar years suppressing her feelings about Jack, the fiancé she lost during World War I, but she only succeeds in creating a life of loneliness. She achieves great success, but she uses grief as an excuse to throw herself into work without building real relationships with those around her. Ben helps her recognize that suppression only gives grief greater life and prevents one from fully living. He suggests, “[Memory is] the only way to truly come to terms with death. With every time we think or talk about [Jack], we chip at the hard granite of sadness, and through the cracks we begin to see how much light he brought to the world” (179). Cressida finally comes to terms with the loss of her fiancé and the loneliness of her life in London and seizes her opportunity for life and love with Ben.
Fear is also a motif that shapes the narrative arcs of Grace and Violet, who must learn how to be brave and take control of their lives and their desires. Grace has lived in fear even before the war, limiting herself because of her fear of being alone and her obsession with living the same life as her mother after her early death. Violet also lives by fear, although her fear is that of not following the expectations of her upper-class life. Her panic increases with every failed high-class marital prospect, but she learns the value of life and community, which helps her open her eyes to the non-titled man in front of her.
