Picnic at Hanging Rock

Mrs. Appleyard, the austere headmistress of Appleyard College, initially functions as a symbol of aristocratic female proprietary and decorum. She is “precisely what the parents expected of an English headmistress” (3). She believes in austerity, manners, modesty, and repression of unsightly behaviors and emotions. She is completely preoccupied with the status of her school, even at the expense of her students’ well-being.

Mrs. Appleyard is a dynamic character who changes through the course of the novel. Just her “rigidly controlled” bosom symbolizes her power and control at the beginning of the novel, her degraded appearance toward the end of the novel charts her increasing anxiety, panic, and impotence. As she sneaks into Sara and Miranda’s room looking for clues of Sara’s whereabouts, she is depicted as “an old woman with head bowed under a forest of curling pins, with pendulous breasts and sagging stomach beneath a flannel dressing-gown” (179). Her unrestrained body illustrates her loss of control over her life more broadly.

It is symbolically important that Mrs. Appleyard goes to Hanging Rock to die, as this is the original source of her problems, as well as the epitome of wildness and freedom.