The Dressmaker Notes

Overview
Originally told in Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker, I decided to transform the event of Tilly Dunnage returning to Dungatar, where Ham conveyed Tilly’s struggle to care for her mother, Molly, who had been neglected and gone mad in her absence. Contrastingly, as Molly, I created an alarming letter addressed to Dungatar’s Sergeant Farrat expressing great fear of Tilly. Although my text referred to the same incident as presented by Ham, Molly’s perspective emphasised her extreme feelings of terror and anger towards the woman ‘invading her home’. This made Molly a vulnerable character, rather than positioning her in an ugly light as conveyed in Ham’s novel.

Purpose
The opening half of The Dressmaker highlighted Tilly’s struggles to care

In The Dressmaker, Ham used gothic and descriptive language to describe Molly as an ugly character because not only did her “mouth gape like a charcoal hole” (pg. 8), she also “yelled and thrashed about” (pg. 10) like a mad woman. Contrastingly, my text provided reasoning for Molly’s behaviour by arguing that she was driven by fear. In her opening, Molly voiced that Tilly had been “[her] warden in this imposed prison cell!”, which implied that Molly was genuinely fearful of her metaphorical “warden”, Tilly. This was reinforced through alliteration, when Molly wrote to Sergeant Farrat that he would soon be “dragging [HER] dead and dismembered body” from the house. By emphasising the phrase “dead and dismembered” with alliteration, the letter proved Molly’s genuine concern. This was demonstrated when Molly recalled her efforts to “get [Tilly] out” by listing that she “hit her, burned her, screamed, punched, and kicked [at her]”, which revealed Molly’s terror and desperation and hence indicated that her actions were reasonable. The letter was also an expression of Molly’s anger and resentment toward Dungatar, which was established through the hyperbole where Dungatar was regarded to as a “dump of a town”. Employing symbolism, Molly epitomised herself as “the black sheep of [Dungatar]”, which conveyed her hostile attitude toward the town