Mildred’s White Dress Symbol Analysis

When Mildred visits the stokehole, she wears a white dress that symbolizes her extreme privilege. Despite the fact that the engineers urge her to wear something else, she insists that she has “plenty of white dresses.” As such, she doesn’t care if this one gets dirty when she rubs against greasy ladders on her way down to the “bowels” of the ship. However, this kind of privilege is so out of place in the stokehole that Yank isn’t even capable of identifying Mildred as a human when he first lays eyes on her, instead thinking that she’s a “white apparition.” Indeed, his inability to contextualize her presence in the engine room is a testament to how sorely out of place she is, an interloper in this world of grease, dirt, and coal dust. Using this dress as a way of emphasizing the harsh juxtaposition between Mildred and the stokers, O’Neill shows the audience just how unprepared Mildred is to see what it’s actually like to live in poverty, despite her desire to “see how the other half lives.” In turn, her dress represents her naivety when it comes to matters of class disparity and inequality.