Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Picnic at Hanging Rock, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Nature, Repression, and Colonialism
Mystery and the Unknown
Wealth and Class
Gossip and Scandal
Summary
Analysis
Over breakfast, Mrs. Fitzhubert tells her husband the Colonel what an “ideally suited” match Mike and Irma would be. The Colonel is more concerned with his overcooked ham, but Mrs. Fitzhubert snaps at him, ordering him to pay attention—Irma is joining them for lunch later on.
This brief glimpse into the Fitzhuberts’ private conversation shows that even in the midst of their great wealth, they’re still scheming as to how to advance their position in society through their nephew.
Themes
At one o’clock sharp, Irma hurries down to the house for lunch. She is surprised to find that Mike is not in the drawing room but joins Mrs. Fitzhubert happily all the same. As she makes polite but stilted conversation with the Fitzhuberts—conversation in which Irma must disguise her genuine worldliness from the self-important but narrow-minded couple—she wishes Mike would join them. As the group enters the dining room and lunch begins, the Colonel wishes aloud Mike would come, too. Privately, as he notices a large emerald bracelet on Irma’s wrist, he thinks to himself that Mike is squandering an opportunity to “land” Irma.
Irma must endure an unenjoyable lunch with the Fitzhuberts—a tepid and somehow crass pair who privately think of Irma only as an object which might advance their own social standing.
Themes
Irma walks along the lake back to her room, narrowly avoiding the deluge of a summer storm. Mrs. Cutler brings her a letter from Mike, which she hungrily takes and rips open as the storm, outdoors, intensifies, then passes as quickly as it came. Irma reads Michael’s rather impersonal letter, in which he apologizes for missing lunch due to a meeting with a banker—and then reveals that as winter is coming and Lake View will be closed for the season, he won’t see Irma to say goodbye. He tells her he’s planning on traveling around the country for the next several months, beginning in Northern Queensland.
Irma’s love for Mike is profound but unrequited. He can’t even make a little time for her before departing on his own journey—a fact that shows just how little he prioritizes his friendship with Irma.
Themes
That night, Irma sleeps fitfully—and, the narrator reveals, so do many other characters. Mrs. Appleyard is “bloated and blotched by evil vapours,” while Sara dreams happily of Miranda, her only escape from the slights she faces at school during the day. Mike dreams of meeting Irma on a crowded train, but in the dream, he pushes her away with his umbrella. At dawn, Irma wakes. She thinks back to the day of the picnic. One of her only memories from that day is spotting Mike across the creek and realizing instantly that he was her “beloved.”
This passage shows just how many people have been affected by the events of the last few weeks—and how intensely Hanging Rock has cast a shadow over each aspect of their lives. Irma, in particular, is struggling to make sense of her life and her desires in the wake of the incident—she must live with the knowledge that while she believed their twinned involvement in the tragedy would bring her and Mike together, it has not.
Themes
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