The Hundred Dress, by Eleanor Estes - Realistic Fiction

I have reached the point in my life where I like to read books that leave deep messages and lessons within my mind and heart. These books are even more enjoyed by me when I can incorporate them into my classroom lessons to teach my students how to treat each other. The Hundred Dresses was an excellent book for this very reason. The main characters are young girls that are more on the popular side within the school and one who is desperately trying to fit into that crowd. One, Peggy, is well to do and has pretty much everything she wants, including a school full of friends who follow her lead in even the meanest of games. Peggy’s best friend is Maddie, who doesn’t come from a well to do family, but she fits in because she remakes Peggy’s old hand-me-downs into stylish clothes and follows Peggy’s lead in all things, even a mean-hearted game played on an immigrant girl from Poland that attends their school. Finally, we have that immigrant girl, Wanda Petronski. She has a difficult to pronounce last name, she is shy and doesn’t fit into the “popular” crowd very well, and she only wears the same blue dress everyday to school. To make matters worse, she lives in Boggins Heights, the cheap side of town, where the majority of the immigrants live. Thus, the game begins with Wanda one day telling Peggy that she has one hundred dresses with matching shoes all lined up in her closet, followed daily with Peggy goading and patronizing Wanda to talk about the dresses. Of course, nobody believes Wanda, because she is poor and only wears her blue dress day in and day out, but they enjoy tormenting her so much and laughing at her. I leaned from this book that the bullies may not know how far they are taking their tormenting games until it is to late. In this case, Wanda and her family completely moved away for good!

I had a very good discussion with my students on this book, when I choose a group of girls in my class to do a novel study with. Their assignment was to take post-it notes and mark areas that they would like to talk about in this book, things that they could connect to, character actions and motives that they didn’t agree with, feelings about which character they liked the most and which they liked the least, including putting themselves in certain character’s shoes. I was blown away by the conversation that these girls had. They took the understanding and the analysis of this book to a new level. I sat back and observed while they completely led the conversation sessions (there were two sessions because this is a short book) and they amazed me! The level of understanding that these third grade girls brought with them was outstanding. Every now and then I would want to insert my own thoughts (Maddie really was not a nice girl because she refused to stand up for what she realized was right and wrong about the way to treat people), but they could always back up their feelings with textual evidence! I loved it and so did they. For weeks after we finished the novel unit, they kept assigning other book characters in further stories with the characteristics of Maddie, Peggy, and Wanda. The majority of us felt sorry for Wanda and could identify someone in our own lives or our school who was a Wanda. We brainstormed ways to include this person or people into the group so that they would not feel left out and ultimately unwanted in our school environment. We talked about how we all have a little Maddie in all of us, because even when we know something is wrong, we often times bow down to peer pressure. Many ways to avoid peer pressure were discussed and talked through. I was proud!

For my own thoughts, I feel like the situations in The Hundred Dresses occurs everyday in every town, state, and country. Sure, it may not be a situation of a lonely, poor immigrant girl trying to fit in, but the lonely isolation for certain people is very evident. I can recall from my own childhood being around people that made me feel like I wasn’t like them and didn’t belong. It is not a good feeling. That is the Wanda coming out in me. I even remember creating elaborate, and untruthful, tales about how fabulous my summers were, so that I sounded very in control of my life when in reality, I was just as alone and self-conscious as Wanda. Still, of all the characters, I am very much a Maddie. I see wrongs daily and never speak out about them for fear of losing ground in whatever part of life that I am in. This is the characteristic within me that I must continuously fight, so that evils and wrongs do not go unpunished and flourish. I once heard it said, and I strong agree with, the saying, “All it takes is the truth to not speak up in this world to let evil win”.