What is Petrona’s White Dress?

The dress that Mama finds and alters for Petrona to wear at her Confirmation and First Communion functions, on one level, as a symbol of Mama's compassion for, and connection with, Petrona. While the narrative never explicitly defines what is at the motivating core of Mama's feelings, there is a sense that because Mama was born and raised in the same sort of slum-like environment in which Petrona is living, there is a sense of empathy, perhaps of pity, that motivates her (Mama) to try and help Petrona to make her life better. On another level, because the dress is second-hand and substantially altered, there is a sense that it also represents how Petrona, in the circumstances in which she wears it, living something of a second hand life. Finally, late in the narrative the dress reappears, again altered and again called into service for a religious event in Petrona's life - her wedding, or "re-wedding," to Garrion. Here again, it carries with it the symbolic implication of living an artificial or second-hand sort of life: she knows that this re-marriage is based on a falsehood, in the same way as she goes along with the Confirmation and First Communion, which are also falsehoods of a sort. Both sets of events and circumstances help her and her family believe that their lives can, will, and are, getting better.