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
As the four Appleyard girls take in the full sight of Hanging Rock, they are stunned and awed into silence by its hugeness. Marion says the peaks must be a million years old. Edith, who can’t imagine a million of anything, urges her to be quiet. Edith asks if they can sit down and look at the mount from their current position, but Marion says the three senior girls are pushing ahead—and Edith must too, since she begged to come along with them. Irma comforts Edith by assuring her they’ll all be back at the picnic grounds soon for some cake and tea.
The other girls enjoy toying with Edith, messing with her sense of perception by talking about the almost incomprehensibly ancient history of the rock. Edith’s fear of the rock’s indeterminate age suggests her larger fear of the unseen and the unknown.
Themes
Though Miranda warns Marion that they should turn back soon, Irma suggests they head up to the first rise. The girls are all struggling with the terrain in their boots and dresses, but soon they make it to a small rise from which they can look down on the picnic grounds below. The girls stop to rest. They take off their boots and sit in the shade gossiping. Soon, Edith says she isn’t feeling very well. She asks if any of the other girls noticed the handsome young man in breeches down by the creek. Marion tells Edith to shut up, and Edith begins crying. Miranda strokes her cheek. Irma, overcome with feeling and tenderness at Miranda’s kind gesture, gets up and begins dancing, imagining herself a ballerina performing onstage in London.
As the girls climb higher and higher up the mountain, they divest themselves of their constricting clothes and shoes and begin to feel lighthearted, giddy, and freer in their bodies and minds. The rock is a place that’s dangerous and mysterious—but it is the most remote natural wonder the girls have ever seen, and being around it frees them, just a little, from their sense of repression.
Themes
Irma’s reverie is interrupted when Edith gets her attention and points out that Miranda and Marion are headed barefoot up the rock. Irma, to Edith’s horror, picks up her boots and stockings and follows them. Soon, the girls arrive at the next even plateau. As they look down, Marion remarks that the people below them have begun to look small and purposeless as ants. The girls stop again to rest and soon fall asleep in the shelter of a large stone. A lizard curls itself in the crook of Marion’s arm, while a group of beetles crawl over Miranda’s ankle.
As the girls climb higher and higher onto the rock—and deeper into nature—they lose their attachment, it seems, to the world below. Wary just hours ago of being in nature, they now let insects and animals crawl on their bare flesh. The rock seems to have put the girls in a kind of trance—or transported them into a world in which the freedom of nature liberates them from their sense of social repression.
Themes
Edith wakes from her nap with a start. She calls out to Miranda, asking when they can all go back. As she looks up, she sees the three senior girls standing around her, looking at her strangely. Without answering Edith, the three of them turn and head further up the trail. Edith notices that they are hardly even walking—they seem to be gliding. Edith calls for the girls to stop and come back, but soon they are all out of sight. Edith, overcome by horror, begins screaming as she runs down the mountain.
The mystery thickens as the senior girls appear to be transported by a supernatural force, carried higher and higher up the mountain. How or why Edith is immune to this force is unclear—but what is certain is that she marks it immediately as a sinister threat.
Themes
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