The Dressmaker Themes

Rosalie Ham’s novel The Dressmaker is set in Dungatar, a remote Australian town, in the 1950s. The residents of Dungatar undergo a variety of transformations throughout the story. These transformations begin when Tilly Dunnage, a young woman who left the town as a child after she was wrongly accused of murdering a classmate, returns and sets up a dressmaking business. Her fashionable creations cause a stir in Dungatar, and her caring presence causes genuine…

In Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker, Tilly Dunnage returns to her childhood home, a small town called Dungatar. However, the townspeople have always ostracized Tilly (they wrongly believe she is responsible for a local boy’s death) and they continue to do so on her return. Eventually, their cruel treatment pushes Tilly to take revenge upon them by burning Dungatar to the ground and making off with the town’s insurance money. Ham thus suggests that suffering…

Many of The Dressmaker’s characters are haunted by or romanticize the past throughout the novel, which is set in the small, rural town of Dungatar—a place where the townspeople dislike change and feel that social progress threatens their conservative ways of life. While some characters mourn specific things that they have lost, others more generally fear progress and are threatened by social change. However, their memories cannot always be trusted, and their beliefs about…

Different types of medicine are used throughout The Dressmaker. The protagonist, Tilly Dunnage (a young women who grew up in Dungatar and returns as an adult to set up her dressmaking business) often uses herbal remedies when traditional medicine is not available. However, while medicine is most often thought of as something used to heal people, Ham suggests that medicine can also be used to silence, punish, and control others. Overall, the novel implies…