The Ruined Maid

’Melia’s spectacular outfit is designed to grab attention, as it certainly does when she runs into her old friend. Clothing in most societies symbolizes social status and often economic status too. The fact that ’Melia decks herself out in the finest fashion is a symbol of how far she has traveled, from country maid to sophisticated and presumably much-desired woman in the city. It symbolizes in her mind a certain superiority and even snobbery, as her final remark reveals, when she speaks of her friend as a “raw country girl” (Line 23). ’Melia has reinvented herself and risen in the social order (at least in her own mind), and now closely identifies with her new status as symbolized by her ostentatious clothing. Not content with one feather in her hat, she has to have three, and of course they are all “bright” (Line 7).