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.
Themes
The Transformative Power of Community and Friendship
Content Warning: This section of the guide features descriptions of war, including bombings and post-traumatic experiences.
The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle reveals how community and friendship can transform and sustain those who lean into community relationships, especially during hardship and tragedy. The Sewing Circle women provide the core community for the three main characters, but each woman also discovers and rebuilds community strength outside of the Sewing Circle.
At the beginning of the novel, Grace, Cressida, and Violet each experience different forms of isolation, leading to shared consequences of loneliness, disconnection, and incomplete self-images. Grace is the most involved in her community, but her involvement keeps her separate from those she serves and from her own sense of self by positioning her as a perpetual helper. Self-sacrificial parish work and community service have become a crutch for her ever since she had to take over the duties on her father’s behalf after her mother died. Those duties make her feel as if she is being useful, but she does not accept help from others, preventing her from being fully integrated into her community. Violet, on the other hand, purposefully keeps herself apart. Her father taught her that the Wescotts are better than the commoners of the village, and he instilled in her the idea that her value comes from marrying a titled man and being a frivolous distraction for her husband. She is merely annoyed by the war, and she acts only as a figurehead of the sewing circle rather than actually leading it. Cressida has also kept herself apart from others but for different reasons than Violet. Having lost her fiancé in the last war and been rejected by her brother for her decisions, Cressida has spent her adult life distancing herself from others by using her work as a distraction. She protects her heart, but in doing so, she has created a lonely life for herself in London. The city seems safe to her because it enables her isolation. It is a place “where she [can] retain her independence and privacy. A place where no one [asks] questions, no one [makes] judgments about single women living on their own” (43). Removed from community support, the three women initially choose loneliness over the vulnerability required to embrace true friendship.
As Grace, Cressida, and Violet slowly come to both rely on and serve their communities, they find themselves emotionally transformed by their newfound social bonds. Cressida challenges Grace to listen to her own desires and to lean on others for support. Cressida learns a similar lesson about trusting others rather than keeping herself at a distance, but she also learns how helping others can affect one’s own well-being. Despite her original belief in the value of having no one looking over her shoulder in London, she realizes that lending a hand to her community is good for the spirit. For Violet, the difficulties of training to be a driver for the military help her bond with women of lower classes and see people’s value no matter their class. The humbling experiences of training open Violet’s eyes, and she spends the rest of the novel learning to build true friendships and challenge the beliefs her father instilled in her.
For each of these women, community is one of the most essential elements of their transformation into their best selves. Grace identifies the power of community in the wedding toast that ends the novel:
There are times in everyone’s life when we need support, we need to be part of something bigger, to feel those threads between us pulling us together […] our friends provide more than just company. They form an invisible net that is so strong and wide that it can catch any of us if we fall (399).
The friendships Grace, Violet, and Cressida build help them challenge their old assumptions, whether about themselves or about others. Their friends in the Sewing Circle and beyond encourage them and provide the support needed to make frightening decisions about life. Through the Sewing Circle and their community’s war efforts, each becomes part of something greater than themselves. The women’s growth by the end of the novel—marked by Grace’s confidence, Violet’s humility, and Cressida’s vulnerability—is defined by lessons learned amid their community, underscoring how friendship and community bonds instigate personal transformation.
Resilience in the Face of Great Difficulty
The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle illustrates resilience exhibited in the face of war and other difficulties. During World War II, Britain suffered the loss of soldiers as well as bombings and shortages of food, fabric, and other materials. Amid grief and fear, life was made more difficult when citizens had to ration their food and learn how to become creative with clothing repairs. Faced with these difficulties, the characters in the novel reveal their resilience through camaraderie, bravery, and emotional strength.
As the Sewing Circle women and others are forced to sacrifice good food, new clothing, and other basic items to support the efforts of their soldiers abroad, they learn to embrace small comforts, no matter how unconventional. They discover space for humor and creativity within wartime confines, from the Utility Clothing fashion show to Lottie’s inventive use of gravy in place of stockings. They also learn to appreciate small comforts in the place of their sacrifices. For example, after losing her home and fashion house, Cressida realizes that despite only leaving home in her nightgown and coat, she managed to slip on one of her favorite pairs of shoes: “A chic pair of shoes [is] a silly comfort, but sometimes it’s the small things that make all the difference” (43). As Violet’s character arc reveals, this embrace of sacrifice and small comforts is not effortless but rather indicates the Sewing Circle’s intentional resiliency. Initially, Violet views war’s superficial difficulties as inconveniences to her, looking down on those who engage in the war effort. After learning the value of hard work in her military support training, she begins to value rationing’s inconveniences as ways for British citizens to support the soldiers fighting to maintain freedom. The women of The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle continually discover and share their small comforts, whether in new styles of clothing to accommodate rationing or kindness from a stranger in the aftermath of devastating bombings.
Beyond the practical challenges of wartime life, characters like Cressida face complex grief and trauma in the aftermath of bombings and personal losses, revealing that acknowledging emotional pain enables growth and healing. Cressida has spent over 20 years pushing her grief over the loss of her fiancé to the back of her mind to make it possible to keep going. Ben helps her realize that by ignoring her grief, she has “only been preserving it. How many people—how much life—[she has] passed by to spare herself the agony of thinking of [Jack]” (180). Cressida learns how to live for the present and face her sorrow; by doing so, she builds a deeper inner strength to withstand the difficulties of the war.
Willing sacrifices are not the only ways the women of the novel exhibit resilience. The Wedding Dress Exchange is their way of making sure women around the country can maintain some normalcy and cultural tradition in the face of upheaval. As Mrs. Todd points out, “[The Exchange] shows the Nazis that no matter what they do to us, they’ll never break our spirit. We’ll always find a way to carry on doing things our own way” (346). Traditions and extravagances like wedding dresses may seem, to some, unimportant in the face of war, deprivation, and death, but the women of the Sewing Circle illustrate the power of such traditions to help build morale and cultural resilience.
Pursuing Happiness and Throwing Off Expectations
Grace and Violet’s journeys illustrate the importance of pursuing one’s own happiness despite societal or familial expectations. Social upheaval was a prominent issue during World War II. Women had to take over many male-oriented jobs when men went away to war, and social classes began to mix more often. As an outsider, Cressida serves as a model and guide for the younger women, identifying the social constraints that they take for granted. Cressida highlights the difficulty of defying expectations, explaining, “It’s hard to forget something that’s been drilled into you all your life. It takes a great deal of bravery to defy the label people try to give you, forge ahead on a different path, become something new” (292). Despite the newly reshuffled social order and Cressida’s support, Grace and Violet both struggle, in different ways, to cope with the changes and choose their own paths forward.
Grace’s character arc illustrates the challenges of overcoming internalized expectations. Although Grace’s father does not pressure her to conform to societal expectations, she seeks to emulate her late mother’s life, including her marriage to a vicar. Grace’s lack of self-confidence acts as another internalized expectation as she assumes she is an undesirable partner and therefore accepts the first proposal she gets rather than waiting for someone she loves or choosing to be alone instead of settling. She feels apprehensive about her marriage to Lawrence, but she insists that she values the practicality and respectability of their union. It is Cressida who points out that “[s]ometimes you need to step outside the way your life has been mapped out, find your own path, your own place in the world” (69). Over the course of the novel, Grace learns how to live her own life and pursue what makes her happy—fashion design and independence, whether in a relationship or out. Her pursuit of happiness is made possible only by her newfound confidence, suggesting the limiting power of internalized expectations buttressed by low self-esteem.
Violet’s journey is marked by embracing of her unique identity and desires rather than clinging to upper-class expectations and biases. Like Grace, she makes assumptions about her future based on her experiences and social standards. She insists for much of the novel that she can only marry a titled man, and she disparages the war effort. In the end, though, she learns the value of community support, the importance of exercising one’s own skills, and the meaninglessness of class distinctions. Her true journey toward happiness begins when she chooses to use her innate cleverness and succeed in her training courses. Leaning into her skills and finding satisfaction in her work helps her discover humility and see the value of the people around her. With her eyes opened, she develops a friendship and then a romantic relationship with Lieutenant MacCauley, with whom she finds happiness despite the social expectations of each of their traditional roles and classes. By learning to value her own strengths and look beyond her biases, Violet is able to shed societal expectations and achieve happiness through romantic and professional fulfillment.
