Virginity at Hanging Rock

I read Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay as part of my general goal to read more women writers (having very few encounters, one of which was Winterson... who I disliked, probably a little too much). Joan Lindsay was related to the great print-maker Norman Lindsay from central Victoria, who despite doing some fine nudes and lovely prints, also drew a great many cartoons to promote the White Australia policy and a few other undesirable trends of the time. So, written and set at this time, it has the realist style - lots of description. Lindsay also mentions many of the fashions of the day, without irony, such as the tendency for women to be pretty useless. Reflecting only on the narrative, I'm not quite sure one is meant to get out of this book.

However ... : before reading the book, I had seen the film and discussed it with my father (who at some stage managed to be an English teacher... despite failing in Year 12 because he didn't like the teacher). Whereas I had seen the movie, thinking about whether it was a true story and getting caught up in the mystery, he drew my attention to a few of its subtler themes: specifically, that of sexuality.

The story, is of course set during a fairly conservative period in Australia's history. Girls were meant to be proper, deferring sex to their eventual marriages. So what seems like a fairly trivial outing to the Hanging Rock, is made more significant by the fact that these young girls will be leaving (temporarily) the confines of the school, interact with the male driver, and potentially even more males. So an important concern of the head mistress, once the strange event occurs, is whether these girls will come back "in tact". Abduction, rape and murder are scarcely considered as possibilities, and the town, to some extent seems to accept that the girls strangely disappeared, and isn't it a shame because a couple of them were quite pretty and now they won't become wives and if they come back their reputations won't be so hot anyway.

Tied to the importance of sex (and lack thereof) is the properness of the head mistress and her absurd lack of compassion for the girls in her school, focusing as she does on the potential reduction in numbers that might result from the rumours concerning the picnic at Hanging Rock - she drives a young girl, who likes drawing to suicide, because the girl doesn't fit her conception of a young, proper and pretty girl.

Also of note is perhaps the banality of the male hero, deciding that since the girl that missing was so pretty he must set out to find her - himself being terribly disappointed when a different, slightly less pretty girl does happen to turn up!

So although I remember the book as being reasonably dry, there is certainly plenty to take in, and it will always perhaps be an important book in Australia's - particularly Victoria's - history. I have never been quite able to articulate it properly, but the book reminds me a lot of The Virgin Suicides. These undercurrents of young, female sexuality seem to be present in both - with an eventual notion that no-one really does quite understand what it means to be a young girl (paraphrasing from the film). Both stories seem to focus on young girls and that imposed notion of "womanhood". The girls are not so caught up in challenging this notion, but rather seem to quietly continue outside it, shaking their heads in pity at the idiots who think they have any idea.