In the close-knit community of Dungatar—a small town where the protagonist, Tilly Dunnage, grew up and which she returns to as an adult—“everybody knows everyone else’s business.” People in Dungatar go out of their way to learn each other’s secrets because they feel that this gives them power over others. However, because everyone in Dungatar has a secret, no one wants to reveal other people’s secrets in case they themselves are then gossiped about. This breeds an atmosphere of conformity and paranoia; Dungatar residents fear that if their secrets are exposed, they will be ostracized from the community because behavior outside of the norm is not openly accepted in Dungatar, even though almost everyone who lives there privately engages in behavior which would be considered abnormal by the conservative residents. This suggests that Dungatar is an unforgiving and intolerant place in which people cannot freely be themselves. By illuminating Dungatar’s conformist, judgmental tendencies while emphasizing that no one in the town actually meets Dungatar’s conservative standard of behavior, Ham suggests that such communities are inherently hypocritical and that people in them often look for excuses to persecute others to deflect attention away from themselves and their own unconventional behaviors.
Knowing people’s secrets gives people power over others in Dungatar because behavior outside of traditional, conservative values is not accepted or tolerated. Dungatar is full of people who love to snoop, gossip, and spy on others. Beula Harridene spends most of her time trying to catch people engaging in behaviors which she considers socially unacceptable and which she knows the conservative residents of Dungatar will also dislike. For example, Beula is determined to catch local women, Ruth Dimm and her lover, Nancy Pickett, together—she knows that if the community learns that Ruth and Nancy are lesbians, they will shun them. This suggests that Dungatar is an extremely conservative place in which diversity is not tolerated. However, although Beula runs a local gossip column, she also keeps as many secrets as she shares. Beula understands that if she keeps people’s secrets, she can blackmail them to stop these secrets getting out. This further implies that there are negative consequences for people who step outside of the norm in Dungatar, as everyone wants to avoid being blackmailed. Characters like Tilly, Molly, and the McSwineys—who are all considered outcasts by the community—are gossiped about and mistreated because they do not fit it. This demonstrates that in Dungatar, the risks of being ostracized are very real; if people’s secrets come out, they might end up like the town’s other outcasts.
The novel suggests that communities that only accept people based on conformity are predatory and hypocritical, and they often use people’s vulnerabilities against them. Although the townspeople judge those with secrets harshly, almost everyone in Dungatar has a secret of their own. This suggests that people in the town are hypocritical in their judgements of others. For example, it is implied that Purl, Fred Bundle’s wife, had an affair (and possibly a child) before she was married to Fred. Although this seems to be common knowledge in the town, Purl is protected from ostracization because her husband runs the local pub—something the Dungatar residents consider vital to their way of life. This suggests that people who are considered useful or powerful in the community are accepted, regardless of their behavior. In contrast, however, Molly is judged harshly because she had Tilly out of wedlock. Molly is cast out of Dungatar because she has no one to protect her and no influence in the community; the same people who accept Purl reject Molly because Molly is an easy target. This implies that people in small, insular communities often prey on vulnerable people, and gossip about their misfortunes and secrets, to avoid scrutiny themselves and deflect judgement about their own imperfect lifestyles. Molly and Tilly are actively persecuted by Evan Pettyman, a prominent political figure in Dungatar who everybody knows—but nobody will admit—is a sexual predator. This demonstrates the degree of hypocrisy people will tolerate from powerful figures in small towns. Not only is Evan cruel to Molly and Tilly (he unfairly blamed Tilly for his son Stewart’s death and had her sent away from her mother when she was a child), he is also secretly Tilly’s father—he uses Stewart’s accident as an excuse to remove Tilly from the town and hide his own guilt. Several Dungatar residents know this but do not speak up, which implies that often, people would rather conform and submit to powerful people than risk being ostracized themselves for defending others.
However, Ham suggests that standing out is not easy and that people often have good reason to fear ostracization from society. This is demonstrated through Molly, who has been cast out for so long that she has gone mad through isolation and loneliness. This demonstrates how ostracization is especially cruel because people desperately need acceptance and social connection to lead happy and fulfilling lives. In contrast to most of the Dungatar residents, Tilly is not afraid to stand out and will not reject people because they are outcasts. This is demonstrated when Tilly agrees to go to the horse races with Barney McSwiney, a young disabled man whom people ostracize because of his disability. Rather than reject Barney to try and fit in, Tilly feels that she and Barney are the same because people in Dungatar gang up on them both. This makes her even more sympathetic toward Barney and shows that it is worth standing out to help someone vulnerable, rather than following the crowd. Genuine acceptance is impossible, however, in societies which do not allow for diversity or deviation from the norm. As the Dungatar residents demonstrate, everyone has preferences and behavior which could be considered strange by others. Judgmental and conservative communities, which ostracize people based on these behaviors, are almost always hypocritical and prevent people from forming positive social connections and from freely being themselves.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Secrets, Hypocrisy, and Conformity ThemeTracker
Secrets, Hypocrisy, and Conformity Quotes in The Dressmaker
Mr. Almanac tended the townsfolk with the contents of his refrigerator, and only Mr. Almanac knew what you needed and why. (The nearest doctor was thirty miles away.)
‘You can't keep anything secret here,’ said the old woman. ‘Everybody knows everything about everyone but no one ever tittle-tattles because then someone else'll tell on them. But you don't matter—it's open slather on outcasts.’
‘Your husband's mighty slow these days. How did you manage that?’ Tilly placed an apologetic hand, lighter than pollen, on Mrs. Almanac's cold, stony shoulder. Irma smiled. 'Percival says God is responsible for everything.' She used to have a lot of falls, which left her with a black eye or a cut lip. Over the years, as her husband ground to a stiff and shuffling old man, her injuries ceased.
She eats birdseed and fruit and other things she has sent from the city. She gets things from overseas too, from places I've never heard of. She mixes things up—potions—says they're herbs, "remedial", and she pretends to be an arty type, so why would she want to stay here?
Couples stood aside and stared at Tilly, draped in a striking green gown that was sculpted, crafted about her svelte frame. It curved with her hips, stretched over her breasts and clung to her thighs. And the material—georgette, two-and-six a yard from the sale stand at Pratts. The girls in their short frocks with pinched waists, their hair stiff in neat circles, opened their pink lips wide and tugged self-consciously at their frothy skirts.
Every female seated in the War Memorial Hall that afternoon had listened hard, waited with bated breath for the name of a seamstress or dressmaker. She wasn't mentioned.
Gertrude stepped out of her wedding gown and hung it on a coat hanger. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror an unremarkable brunette with quiver-thighs and unbeautiful breasts. She let the tea-colored silk negligee slide over her chilly nipples and looked in the mirror again. 'I am Mrs. William Beaumont of Windswept Crest,' she said.
Winyerp sits smugly to the north of Dungatar in the middle of an undulating brown blanket of acres and acres of sorghum. The farms around Dungatar are golden seas of wheat, which are stripped, the header spewing the grain into semitrailers […] The wheat will become flour or perhaps it will sail to overseas lands. The famous Winyerp sorghum will become stock fodder. The town will be quiet again and the children will go back to the creek to play. The adults will wait for football season. The cycle was familiar to Tilly, a map.
'ln this town a man can covet his neighbor's wife and not get hurt, but to speak the truth can earn a bleeding nose.'
'They've grown airs, think they're classy. You're not doing them any good.'
'They think I'm not doing you any good.' Tilly handed Teddy her smoke. 'Everyone likes to have someone to hate,' she said.
'But you want them to like you,' said Molly. 'They're all liars, sinners and hypocrites.'
'lt's not that—it's what I've done. Sometimes I forget about it and just when I'm…it's guilt, and the evil inside me—I carry it around with me, in me, all the time. It's like a black thing—a weight…it makes itself invisible then creeps back when I feel safest…that boy is dead. And there's more.'
He wasn't able to offer any sense of anything from his own heart to them, no comfort, and he understood perfectly how Molly Dunnage and Marigold Pettyman could go mad and drown in the grief and disgust that hung like cob-webs between the streets and buildings in Dungatar when everywhere they looked they would see what they once had. See where someone they could no longer hold had walked and always be reminded that they had empty arms. And everywhere they looked, they could see that everyone saw them, knowing.
Then Sergeant Farrat left Tilly's side to stand and deliver a sermon of sorts. He spoke of love and hate and the power of both and he reminded them how much they loved Teddy McSwiney. He said that Teddy McSwiney was, by the natural order of the town, an outcast who lived by the tip. His good mother, Mae, did what was expected of her from the people of Dungatar, she kept to herself, raised her children with truth and her husband, Edward, worked hard and fixed people's pipes and trimmed their trees and delivered their waste to the rip. The McSwineys kept at a distance but tragedy includes everyone, and anyway, wasn't everyone else in the town different, yet included?
Sergeant Farrat said love was as strong as hate and that as much as they themselves could hate someone, they could also love an outcast. Teddy was an outcast until he proved himself an asset and he'd loved an outcast—little Myrtle Dunnage.
The people of Dungatar gravitated to each other. They shook their heads, held their jaws, sighed and talked in hateful tones. Sergeant Farrat moved amongst his flock, monitoring them, listening. They had salvaged nothing of his sermon, only their continuing hatred.
Tilly feared football defeat would send the people to her, that they would spill enraged and dripping from the gateway of the oval to stream up The Hill with clenched fists for revenge blood.
'Plays are such fun to put on. They bring out the best and worst in people, don't you think?'
'I realized I still had something here. I thought I could live back here, I thought that here I could do no more harm and so I would do good.' She looked at the flames. 'lt isn't fair.'
'Then when he couldn't have his son anymore, I couldn't have you.' Molly wiped tears from her eyes and looked directly at Tilly. 'I went mad with loneliness for you, I'd lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had, but over the years I came to hope you wouldn't come back to this awful place.' She looked at her hands in her lap. 'Sometimes things just don't seem fair.'
'Pain will no longer be our curse, Molly,' she said. 'It will be our revenge and our reason. I have made it my catalyst and my propeller. It seems only fair, don't you think?'
'Anyone can go, Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend, don't you think? Without Tilly's tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives—mine especially—would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak—well it's just plain ghoulish, isn't it?'
'Molly Dunnage came to Dungatar with a babe-in-arms to start a new life. She hoped to leave behind her troubles, but hers was a life lived with trouble travelling alongside and so Molly lived as discreetly as she possibly could in the full glare of scrutiny and torment. Her heart will rest easier knowing Myrtle again before she died.
‘l used to be sick, Evan, you used to make me sick, but Tilly Dunnage has cured me.’
Then her round soft babe was still and blue and wrapped in cotton-flannel and Molly, pained and cold in her rain-soaked coffin turned stiffly to her, and Teddy, sorghum-coated and gaping, clawing, a chocolate seed-dipped cadaver. Evan and Percival Almanac stood shaking their fingers at her and behind them the citizens of Dungatar crawled up The Hill in the dark, armed with firewood and flames, stakes and chains, but she just walked out to her veranda and smiled down at them and they turned and fled.
Trudy circled them, her seventeenth-century Baroque cast of the evil sixteenth-century Shakespeare play about murder and ambition. They queued on the tiny stage like extras from a Hollywood film waiting for their lunch at the studio canteen.
