Quotes for the Dressmaker Flashcards
Myrtle (Tilly) Dunnage
“My name is Tilly…everyone will know soon enough”
Tilly’s homecoming demonstrates a ‘nerve’
Molly Dunnage’s ‘bastard girl’
“it’s what I’ve done…it’s guilt, and the evil inside me—I carry it around with me…all the time. It’s like a a weight…it makes itself invisible then creeps back when I feel safest.”
“Tilly knew she must stay in Dungatar for a kind of penance”
“Pain will no longer be our curse, Molly… It is our revenge and our reason.” - Tilly
‘She made him jump. She murdered him. She is cursed. She gets it from her mother’
Teddy McSwiney
‘Dungatar’s highly valued full forward’
Tilly believed that she found ‘something golden’ with him
‘They think I’m not doing you any good.’ Tilly handed Teddy her smoke. ‘Everyone likes to have someone to hate,’ she said.
‘Teddy McSwiney was, by the natural order of the town, an outcast who lived by the tip’
‘He could sell seawater to a sailor’
Molly Dunnage
‘a shadow in a sad place’
‘mad with loneliness’
“I went mad with loneliness for you, I’d lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had”
“over the years I came to hope you wouldn’t come back to this awful place.”
‘But you want them to like you,’ said Molly. ‘They’re all liars, sinners and hypocrites.’
‘You can’t keep anything secret here,’
“But you don’t matter—it’s open slather on outcasts.”
Sergeant Farrat
“Im beyond caring what these people think or say anymore. Im sure everyone’s seen what’s on my clothes line over the years”
‘But in Dungatar he only wore them inside the house.’
Gertrude (Trudy) Pratt
“You’ve been had - and it doesn’t take too much imagination to work out how” (USING HER SEXUALITY AS BAIT)
“I thought you loved me. What about my reputation?” (EMOTIONAL BLACKMAIL)
The store she worked at was a ‘gold mine’
Evan Pettyman
‘Then when he couldn’t have his son anymore, I couldn’t have you.’ (MOLLY)
‘l used to be sick, Evan, you used to make me sick, but Tilly Dunnage has cured me.’ (MOLLY)
‘He was a good councillor who got things done. He also knew how every man earned his keep’
‘Dungatar’s richest man’
‘wasn’t very successful at anything, but told everyone he was’
doses his wife with ‘tonic’
She insists that without his intervention; ‘Myrtle and I could have had some sort of life’ (MOLLY)
‘He wasn’t able to offer any sense of anything from his own heart to them, no comfort, and he understood perfectly how Molly and Marigold could go mad and drown in the grief’
Marigold
“shirll, whippet like women with a startled bearing and a nervous rash on her neck”
“she had been a shy, innocent little thing when Evan came to Dungatar”
“my pet” , “beddie-byes” (EVAN)
“Tilly, your daughter, murdered your son…the bully… who elbowed me when he passed, spied on me in the shower and assaulted little girls”
Beula Harridene
described as having “bloodshot beige eyes… and rabbit sized buck teeth”
She is linked to a snake as she “hissed” her “venomous” lies about the townspeople.
“face pressed to the window squinting”
“Full of hate and accusations”
She is also harshly judgemental of the appearance of other women such as Faith O’Brien who she believes wears “too much makeup” and looks “brassy”
Her surname is a pun on the word ‘harridan’, meaning a bitter, grumpy old woman.
