Sewing Identities: Rosalie Ham's The Dressmaker

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202612038

Keywords:

Australian literature, material culture, performativity, postcolonialism, postmemory

Abstract

This article analyses Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker (2000) through performativity, postmemory and postcolonialism. The main character, Tilly Dunnage, returns to the fictional town of Dungatar in rural 1950s Australia to confront a traumatic past and take care of her mother. In doing so, she uses fashion as a means of shaping her identity, challenging the Australian outback status quo, and voicing her traumatic past. Her haute couture creations make the townspeople visible, but they do not mend the deep emotional wounds. Clothing in The Dressmaker serves both as material memory and as a theatrical element that reveals the instability of fixed identities. Ultimately, the article underlines that Tilly’s destruction of the town represents both the failure of superficial transformation and the radical potential of (un)dressing as a feminist and postcolonial act.

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Author Biography

  • Alejandra Moreno Álvarez, University of Oviedo

    Alejandra Moreno Álvarez es Profesora Titular en el área de Filología Inglesa de la Universidad de Oviedo. Doctora en Filología Inglesa por esta misma universidad, donde recibió el Premio Extraordinario de Doctorado, desarrolla su labor docente en el Grado en Estudios Ingleses y en los programas de máster en Género y Diversidad y GEMMA (Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies).

    Sus líneas de investigación se centran en la literatura escrita por mujeres en lengua inglesa, los estudios culturales y de género, y las literaturas poscoloniales, con un enfoque interseccional y transnacional. Ha realizado estancias de investigación en centros internacionales como la University of British Columbia, la University of Leeds, la University of York y Rutgers University.

    Forma parte del Grupo de Investigación TransLit (Literatura, Identidad y Traducción Cultural) y de diversos proyectos I+D+i, en los que analiza discursos sobre el cuerpo, la identidad, el vestido y el afecto en narrativas literarias contemporáneas. Ha publicado monografías como Lenguajes comestibles (2009) y El lenguaje transgresor de las Ciborgs Literarias (2011), así como numerosos capítulos y artículos sobre escrituras feministas y representaciones poscoloniales.

    Además de su labor investigadora, ha participado activamente en asociaciones académicas como AEDEAN, AEII, AUDEM, ESSE, EASA y SELICUP . Actualmente desarrolla un proyecto sobre el papel del vestido en la construcción de identidades literarias en autoras como Alice Munro y Kai Cheng Thom.

     

References

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HAM, Rosalie. (2000) 2015. The Dressmaker. Serpent’s Tail.

HIRSCH, Marianne. 2012. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Columbia U.P. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7312/hirs15652

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LLANO BUSTA, Andrea. 2025. “‘Across the Shadowy Landscape of Memory’: A Relational Reading of Liminal Traumas in Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?” International Journal of English Studies 25 (1): 171-183.

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MOORHOUSE, Jocelyn. 2015. The Dressmaker. Screen Australia.

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Published

2026-06-24

Issue

Vol. 73 (2026)

Section

ARTICLES: Literature, film and cultural studies

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Alejandra Moreno Álvarez

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Moreno Álvarez, A. (2026). Sewing Identities: Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 73, 209-224. https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.202612038