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 positive change across the community. However, while Tilly’s dresses transform some characters on the surface, many of these transformations are only temporary illusions that do not reveal, but instead disguise, those characters’ true natures. Through these contrasting examples, Ham suggests that changing one’s appearance isn’t enough to create genuine transformation; real change can only come from meaningful human connections.
Love and friendship have the power to transform people in the novel. Tilly returns to Dungatar to stay with her mother, Molly, who is mentally ill. When Tilly arrives, Molly is extremely sick. The townspeople ignore and ostracize Molly because she is unwell, and Molly’s house has fallen into disrepair. Tilly’s diligently remodels the house and cares for Molly, and Molly becomes much calmer and healthier. This suggests that Tilly’s power to transform others is the result of her hard work and caring spirit. Tilly’s arrival also affects the broader community and allows for genuine transformation among certain individuals. For example, Sergeant Farrat (the local policeman) is a cross-dresser who loves fashion and makes himself extravagant outfits in private. Sergeant Farrat hides his passion from the townspeople, however, because he fears he will be ostracized if his secret comes out. Through his friendship with Tilly, Sergeant Farrat gains confidence and learns not to care what the townspeople think. His transformation is demonstrated when, after Molly’s death, he wears a black gown to her funeral. This suggests that, through his connection with Tilly, Sergeant Farrat is genuinely able to change for the better. Tilly is also transformed through her relationship with Teddy McSwiney, a young man from the town. Although Teddy dies shortly after they confess their love for each other, Tilly’s connection with Teddy helps her to open-up and tell Molly about her past—Tilly lost a child before she returned to Dungatar. Confessing this to Molly brings the two women closer together and it suggests that love and connection have a transformative effect on people and can help them to heal old wounds.
However, not all the transformations in the novel last—most are only temporary illusions. When Gertrude Pratt (the daughter of Alvin Pratt, Dungatar’s grocer) gets engaged to William Beaumont (a young man from a prestigious Dungatar family), Gertrude asks Tilly to make her wedding gown. Although Gertrude is not beautiful and William does not really love her (he agrees to marry her because Gertrude pressures him), the gown that Tilly creates temporarily transforms Gertrude and makes William believe that he does love her and that his reluctance to marry her is just “nerves.” This demonstrates that people can be temporarily fooled by appearances. However, despite the success of the wedding (which is largely due to Gertrude’s dress), the illusion soon wears off and Gertrude’s true character—which is vain and manipulative—shows through in her marriage. Similarly, William’s temporary belief that he truly loves his wife also proves illusory, as he tearfully admits one night in the local pub. This supports the idea that although appearances can be powerful, they quickly lose their power if they do not reflect reality. Furthermore, Gertrude believes that her marriage to William will transform her into a refined and powerful person in Dungatar. The Beaumonts appear to be very wealthy, and Elsbeth Beaumont, William’s mother, is a snobbish woman who believes she is superior to everyone in Dungatar. However, Elsbeth’s pretentions of grandeur are discovered to be illusory when Gertrude finds out that the Beaumonts are, in fact, heavily in debt and almost bankrupt. Elsbeth tries to disguise her poverty beneath her haughty persona and through luxurious items of clothing like her fox fur—which, from a distance, appears expensive, but up close is ancient and moldering. This suggests that although illusions can be maintained for a time, if they are not based on reality they will eventually wear off and reveal what is really underneath.
Ham suggests that despite the power of illusions, the truth usually comes out. This is demonstrated by the play that the Dungatar residents put on (a version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth) to compete with their neighboring towns in a cultural event. Although the townspeople commission elaborate costumes for the play in order to show how sophisticated they are, the costumes are from the wrong time period and showcase the cast’s ignorance rather than their worldliness. This suggests that it is impossible to conceal things forever and that people’s unpleasant characteristics, or unkind motives, usually surface at some point. People’s illusions about life are also destroyed throughout the novel. For example, Tilly tries to believe that she can make a life for herself in Dungatar, even though the townspeople are cruel and unwilling to accept her. Tilly releases these illusions at the novel’s end and understands that there is no hope for Dungatar—it is rotten through and through—and so she burns it to the ground. This suggests that illusions about happy endings and idealistic escapes will usually turn out to be temporary and fleeting. When Tilly sets fire to the town, she transforms it one final time and reveals Dungatar’s true character, which is wicked and morally bankrupt. The rural, picturesque landscape is turned into a smoking ruin, which makes Dungatar’s internal reality match its external appearance. This suggests that illusions cannot hide the truth forever and that it is only through genuine connection with others that one can hope to grow and change in a meaningful way.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Transformation, Illusion, and Truth ThemeTracker
Transformation, Illusion, and Truth Quotes in The Dressmaker
Tilly Dunnage had maintained her industrious battle until the house was scrubbed and shiny and the cupboards bare, all the tinned food eaten, and now Molly sat in the dappled sunlight at the end of the veranda in her wheelchair, the wisteria behind her just beginning to bud.
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.
'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.'
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.
'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.'
'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.
They all started to cry, first slowly and quietly then increasing in volume. They groaned and rocked, bawled and howled, their faces red and screwed and their mouths agape, like terrified children lost in a crowd. They were homeless and heartbroken, gazing at the smouldering trail splayed like fingers on a black glove.
