When I first watched Picnic at Hanging Rock I was 8 years old and I found it deeply unsettling. The thought of being separated from my parents, leaving a gaping hole where I used to exist, was terrifying to me as a child, and the haunting pan flute soundtrack only added to my feeling of deep discomfort. Jump a decade ahead, the movie played in the college rec room on cable tv, and I watched it with a more cynical eye.
What I noticed immediately was the repression and the stagnation that seem to permeate the patriarchal female-led institution of Appleyard College, very similar to the one I had studied at. In my school, girls were under a very strict code of conduct, and the institution itself, including the teachers and headmistress, gave off an air of being outdated, hanging to age-old notions of good female behaviour. The public co-ed that I had studied at before was no less strict, but here the restrictions here were particularly gendered, and I realized it only because I had something to compare it too. With only three males on the entire campus, the gardener, the accountant and the PT teacher, one would expect a girl’s school to have more freedom.
All the same, I felt some pride in belonging to an old institution. My school was 125 years old, belonging to a lost British era, and there seemed several overlaps to how Mrs. Applyard ran her school. We had all versions of these women within a position of authority in my school, and to think that these patterns persisted over a century, right up to a girl’s school in India, showed how strong the British educational institution, a factory for ‘caricaturable’ teachers, was.
A prime caricature in the story is Miss McGraw, the dowdy brainiac married to her subject. Mlle de Poitier, the young and pretty French teacher who couldn’t help letting her compassion override her logic. And of course the very severe and uptight Mrs. Appleyard herself, human corset and killer of all female delight in perpetual mourning attire, a leading example of self-denying womanhood.
Marianismo
Machismo, in brief, means aggressive masculine pride. In the 1970s, Evelyn P. Stevens examined the reverse phenomenon in the sphere of Latin American female relations, and coined the term ‘marianismo’. It refers to a system of values accorded to the behaviour and worth of females. Feminine values attributed to ‘good’ women and ‘female strength’ which are predictably chastity, compliance, and self-denial, has its basis in the Christian divine feminine. The phenomenon however, crosses all cultures and ethnicities.
Female-run patriarchal institutions contribute to the training of you girls when it comes to marianismo. All of my older female relatives are products of one and so was I. This points to the fact that marianismo is not just cultural, it is institutionalized, and it serves to produce generational clones long after the main influence is gone.
After a point, the rigidity is self-imposed. In Picnic, a lifetime of rigidity and adhering to social rules cannot help Mrs. Appleyard adapt to this new, unusual situation, whereas the people who are far more compassionate and adaptable, such as Minnie the maid and Mlle de Poitier, don’t allow the tragedy to rule their lives.
Mrs. Appleyard has a meltdown when things eventually unravel. The girls can't be found and their rich parents have to be informed, and the end of Appleyard College looms over her head. In the movie, poor Mademoiselle as to deal with her sudden out-of-character behaviour: the abrupt change into the low cut Victorian bodice, the slurred speech and the ranting after several glasses of brandy.
It’s too much even for the comparatively progressive French teacher. I suspected that the writer has her favourites, and the book itself a critique of girls schools of the time. The author uses her as an example of a femininity far morally superior and compassionate than Mrs. Appleyard. However, as a counterpoint to the same institution of marianismo, Mlle de Poitier is an example of someone who, in a bid to be loved by her students, is far too malleable. In a situation where she should have been more strict with the girls, she allowed them to do something dangerous in order to avoid conflict. Despite that, she is not scapegoated in any way for actions that were in the end rather foolish for a guardian. She is treated as someone who is naïve and delicate and blameless. In a way, she is infantilized, to her advantage, and not held accountable for her actions, whereas Mrs. Appleyard, who is far less likeable, is.
Youth and Beauty
As an eight-year-old watching the movie, the idea of female beauty being sold as a blonde angel really made an impression on me. Mlle de Poitier highlights Miranda's perfection when she calls her a Botticelli angel, right before her disappearance, emphasized with several slo-mo shots of the young actress's face. Halfway through their expedition to Hanging Rock, Miranda lays down and the other girls follow suit, flopping down on the rocks into a deep sleep, imitating her movements as if they had subconsciously chosen her as their leader.
Beauty is important female currency in patriarchy, and everyone, consciously or unconsciously, advocates for it. Lesser students highly regard any girl who fits into conventional beauty standards in a girl’s school. The attributes of beauty, likability, and leadership can quickly get you elevated to a top spot like a head girl. Also, it demands a contradictory balance between beauty and chaste conduct, athleticism and modesty and demureness and leadership, which Miranda embodies. The girls who can straddle this contradiction win the patriarchal prize, at least for a while.
To add to that, Miranda is upper class. (To quote Mrs. Applyard “Why couldn’t it have been Edith who had disappeared, or that little nobody Blanche, or Sara Waybourne?”) In fact, Miranda is practically elevated to sainthood by everyone, including Michael, who has visions of her long after she has gone.
Beauty and innocence and its loss are recurring themes in literature, but in Picnic we have a static representation of innocence in Miranda’s loss and assumed death, with her sole visual represented in the newspapers as if the other girls never existed.
The only survivor, Irma, her memory erased of the incident, is of no use to anyone, and continues her life like any normal teenager, her first love her rescuer (her first heartbreak as well). Her life continues with a return to civilization, surrounded by wealth and generosity, with an advantageous marriage in store for her future.
Western Civilization vs. the Wilderness
After Irma's rescue, the maid notices her corset is missing, which was a major scandal back in the day and would be even now. The climb itself seems to reflect Miranda, Marion and Irma’s leap to freedom. They take off their corsets and boots, rejecting civility, and climb further into unknown territory. They undo their programming with these few actions, except for poor Edith, who can’t quite keep up and also, she doesn’t really gel with nature like the other girls. The girls’ philosophical observations of the tiny folk below and the nature of life prods at the underlying notion that they have entered some sort of parallel dimension where time is an experiment, the adventure into unknown territory its own psychedelic.
Picnic works in the supernatural nature of the girl’s disappearance with the mysterious pull of the Rock “[…] she simply turned her back and began walking away up the rise, the other two following a little way behind. Well, hardly walking–sliding over the stones on their bare feet as if they were on a drawing-room carpet, Edith thought, instead of those nasty old stones.”
When Irma is found, her feet are bare but squeaky clean. In the movie, their watches stop working at 12 noon. However, the mystery surrounding the Rock isn't explored in the context of its spiritual aboriginal significance; in fact, there’s barely any mention of it.
There is, however, an overwhelming theme of western civilization clashing with untamed wilderness. It begins with the ludicrous presence of the Appleyard College mansion itself in the middle of nowhere and continues with the failed search for the girls. The film emphasizes this with the scenes of outdoor picnics which are so beautifully composed that they reminded me of several impressionist paintings of picnic parties.
But it all seems stylized. The incongruence of the Western musical orchestra on ancient, untamed land is a revealing depiction of European colonizers who didn’t change their eating habits or their clothing to suit the change in climate or location, isolating purely out of a sense of superiority. The writer observes, “Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.”
The movie is so close to the time of publication of the book that finding out that Joan Lindsay worked closely with Peter Weir, who eventually made some other brilliant movies, was unsurprising. In fact, nothing progressed without her tacit approval, and the result, including the casting, is an excellent representation of the book.
To me, the movie is more than a mystery-thriller. It’s horror. It’s subtle and gets underneath your skin. Mrs Applyard’s cold oppressive nature, the girls swarming around Irma, demanding to know where the others are, Mlle De Poitier’s pronouncement that Miranda is a Botticelli angel, sets us up for the vanishing of all that is good and innocent. Evil is exposed (Mrs. Appleyard, the Lumleys), innocence is sacrificed (Sara), love is rewarded (Mlle de Poitier, Minnie) and persistence tempers the soul (Michael, Albert). The entire incident spins the lives of everyone connected to either their doom or salvation. And above it all is the writer, playing God with reward and retribution.
Very perceptively written. A real pleasure to read such incisive erudition.