Some thoughts on
The Dressmaker’s Child
What
happens? Cahul drives a Spanish couple
to see the statue once thought to shed tears, and have the power to pardon
penitents. The couple have heart about
it and Cahul does not tell them that the alleged powers have long since been
discredited, because he wants to make money by charging them for the trip. He deceives them and his father, and takes a
longer way round. He’s attracted by
the woman and wishes he had her instead of his girlfriend. After having to change a tyre, he drives the
couple back when they’ve spent enough time at the statue. While they’re kissing in the back of the car
he goes past the Dressmaker’s house, and her daughter runs out at the car and
there’s a bump. He doesn’t stop but sees
her nightdress on the road in his rearview mirror. He is anxious about repercussions, having
been seen, and so on, although the girl has a reputation for running at cars
and surviving. However there’s no news
for several days, when he hears that she’s been found in a quarry some distance
from where he hit her, and he seems not to be in the frame. The mother, a single mother, drinker and
prostitute, is accused. She stares at
him in a café, and then later, when he’s walking to where he meets his
girlfriend Minnie very late at night, he is accosted by the mother who wants
him to go home with her. She lets him
know she knows what happened, although it was she who moved the body and so
deceived the police. He resists her
pleas to go home with him. She tells
him Minnie is not good for him, and indeed she marries someone else about a
year later. This is partly, we assume,
because the incident has affected Cahul and made him more withdrawn. He sees that the mother of the dead girl has
changed. She doesn’t drink or whore now,
and is doing up her cottage with many beautiful flowers. And Cahul too finds himself going to
confession, and even goes up to the statue
and tastes the ‘tears’. Something has changed in both of them and
eventually, Cahul, knows he will go to her.
But
how does all this gell? Perhaps we need
to look also at the imagery. The statue
is debunked as superstition, and placed against the very realistic world of the
motor mechanic’s spanners and oil. The
stories about the statue are matched by stories about the Dressmaker. Cahul becomes confused about what really happened that night? About his feelings for the Dressmaker in
spite of his rational self. He ‘knows’
that the statue doesn’t really shed
tears, but he tastes them even so. The
girl who runs at cars is a spirit-like figure, but her bodied by the barbed
wire physical enough. There’s uncertainty about what the Spanish
couple mean when they speak, why they want to go to the statue (Do they have
something to repent?). The feelings that
overtake Cahul, fear but not only fear,
are not quite rational. Is
Trevor, then, saying something about the meaning of superstition? The emotional
need people may feel to get the Madonna’s
blessing is something spiritual and not actually connected to the facts about her status. Cahul’s calculation, his deception, his boorish way of comparing Minnie to the
Spanish woman, to the singer Madonna, on the basis of he physical only - these are in
some way challenged and undermined by his experience with the child. Even though, as he says, it’s not his fault
she ran out at the car, he feels guilty,
and his guilt seems to go on after there’s
a danger of him being arrested for not stopping. And gradually he’s drawn to the
Dressmaker, who is now filling her garden with flowers just for him. It’s as if the child has been sacrificed to
release both he and the Dressmaker from the styles of life they are living. She too, being mental ill and rushing out at
cars, exemplifies the irrational as does
the faith people have in the irrational statue of the Virgin. The complete lack of sympathy, or expression
of grief by her mother, for the child makes her seem more like a spirit, even
an angel, perhaps an angel of death?, or else a lost spirit continually trying to
get herself killed to return ‘home’ to where she came from.
This,
then, seems very much a religious story,
about denial of the miraculous, and about marriage and guilt, perhaps the kind of guilt which Christians
feel we are born with, a guilt associated with forbidden knowledge and carnal
love.
I’m
not at all sure of any of this!!
JH
