OVERVIEW To create a transformative text, I decided to expose Mae McSwiney’s perspective on her son’s death. By using a diary entry, I was able to provide a personal account of Mae’s emotions not exposed within Rosalie Ham’s novel, The Dressmaker. This unexplored perspective revealed Mae’s grief and her emotional struggle to accept his passing but her discovery of a box with letters and diary entries caused a transition in Mae’s sorrow. To effectively convey Mae’s feelings, language techniques such as first-person narration, metaphors, and similes were employed. PURPOSE After Teddy’s death in Chapter 18, Ham exposed the grief of the Mcswiney family with them leaving Dungatar. They were “like sad rag dolls leaning” [pg199], on each other before …show more content…
My tears are choking me, haunting me, as if the dreaded curse of depression has been cast. I cannot keep up this calm and collected façade, as the fear of drowning in this turbulent ocean of emotion is too much. Oh diary, he’s really gone. I can’t believe it. My oldest, torn from life as a page from a book. How is this fair? He was a good man, looking out for everyone, a true diamond amongst the rocks of this town. How is his father meant to cope without him? Ten siblings lost without a leader. I thought that I had restrained the grief but when Edward suggested we should leave, they suddenly reappeared, like Jack jumping out of its box. Going through Teddy’s things was painful, and as his life was remembered and removed with each item, my shadow of grief grew greater. The strange discovery of a thin box hidden behind his bed unnerved me as Teddy never kept a secret. I didn’t want to open it, but I gave in to my curiosity. What if he had wanted me to find it? The little cardboard box was very damaged, so I handled it like spun glass, but when I opened it, its contents were so precious. Letters, letters written by Teddy but never sent, and a diary just like mine. His handwritten words tumbled out like the dominos we used to