elettaria

I've just finished reading Carol Shields' Happenstance, a novel written in 1980 which features a woman who is attending a quilting conference in Philadelphia during the course of the novel. During this conference, a psychology/art history lecturer who has obviously never picked up a needle in her life gives a Freudian interpretation of quilting which is even funnier than the Freudian analysis of Alice in Wonderland in Atwood's The Edible Woman. Apart from being hilarious, it does give a great example of what happens when academics get too far away from the reality of their topic.

For those of you reading this who don't sew (there are links to the patterns for such folks), I'd like to remind you of issues such as what size and shape fabric is lying around (many quilts can be made from leftovers, which are often strips of fabric), and the way that the order of sewing pieces dictates what can be done. For those of you are aren't lit theorists: it's a parody but yes, lit crit really can get this crazy (oh, that book I once read which decided that the Duke's re-entry into Vienna in Measure for Measure was a vaginal penetration - how would they stage that one?), though don't forget that this is also being filtered through second-wave feminism, bless it. Feel free to suggest better examples of the quilts, I'm having to guess which "fan quilt" is mean for instance.

Quilting Through the Freudian Looking Glass: A New Interpretation

Dr. O'Leary, a stack of note cards in hand, touches on the best known of traditional quilting patterns, naming them lightly, as though they were as familiar to her as the names of her children or her oldest friends. The lecture is accompanied by slides projected on an overhead screen. Slide one: the Star of Bethlehem clearly representing an orgasmic explosion, though it has also been viewed as an immense, quivering vulva. "Women in pioneer America suppressed their sexuality as society demanded, but ecstasy found a channel through circumscribed needlework."

Slide two: the well-loved Wedding Ring quilt, symbolising the enclosed nature of femaleness. Next: the Double Ring quilt, which, instead of breaking through that enclosure, merely amplified it. Then the traditional Fan quilt, quietly mocking male ontology - Brenda is not sure of the word ontology - with its dull, unrelenting repetitions; Dr. O'Leary sees this mockery as being subtle, punitive, and filled with pain. The Log Cabin quilt, the most telling, the most incriminating of quilting patterns, presents a seamless field of phallic symbols, so tightly bound together that there is no room at all for female genitalia. The multiple phallic images suggest penis envy on one hand and fantasies of gang rape on the other.

And finally, the ironically named Crazy Quilt, offering early American women a sanctioned release from social and sexual stereotyping, and, in the hands of the most daring, an expression of savage and primitive longings. Dr. O'Leary has made a detailed study of the shapes in these so-called crazy quilts; the presence of many triangles suggests irresolution, perhaps even androgyny. Breast shapes, interestingly, outnumber phalli, but Dr. O'Leary and her assistant are hesitant about drawing premature conclusions. It may be that women were defending and proclaiming their femininity; or, and this seems more likely, they may have been expressing infantile needs which had not been satisfied. As for the present-day revival in quiltmaking, Dr. O'Leary interprets it partly as apologia, partly as retreat from responsibility, and partly a continuum of what it has always been, a means of exercising control over a disorganised and hostile universe.

- Carol Shields, Happenstance: The Wife's Story, Flamingo: London 1994, pp.138-9.

Joking apart, I'd be interested to hear what other people think about textiles, gender and meaning. Working with fabric is a sensuous pleasure, and I've seen a few rather sexy quilts, though generally not the traditional geometric patterns discussed above, not to mention that quilts are practical things and often intended for general family use or for children. (My grandmother, on the other hand, made a number of weavings which are quite ridiculously vulval in shape.) I'm keeping an eye open for literature which discusses needlecraft, for example Atwood's Alias Grace which manages to combine quilting and murder, Susan Glaspell's short story "A Jury of her Peers" which combines the two even more strongly, or Donoghue's Slammerkin, this time about dressmaking and, er, murder. (And sex!) There's a lovely Carol Ann Duffy poem I've managed to dig out again (a former tutor ran off with my copy of the volume it's from, The World's Wife) on Penelope.

Penelope

At first, I looked along the road
hoping to see him saunter home
among the olive trees,
a whistle for the dog
who mourned him with his warm head on my knees.
Six months of this
and then I noticed that whole days had passed
without my noticing.
I sorted cloth and scissors, needle, thread,

thinking to amuse myself,
but found a lifetime’s industry instead.
I sewed a girl
under a single star – cross-stitch, silver silk –
running after childhood’s bouncing ball.
I chose between three greens for the grass;
a smoky pink, a shadow’s grey
to show a snapdragon gargling a bee.
I threaded walnut brown for a tree,

my thimble like an acorn
pushing up through umber soil.
Beneath the shade
I wrapped a maiden in a deep embrace
with heroism’s boy
and lost myself completely
in a wild embroidery of love, lust, loss, lessons learnt;
then watched him sail away
into the loose gold stitching of the sun.

And when the others came to take his place,
disturb my peace,
I played for time.
I wore a widow’s face, kept my head down,
did my work by day, at night unpicked it.
I knew which hour of the dark the moon
would start to fray,
I stitched it.
Grey threads and brown

pursued my needle’s leaping fish
to form a river that would never reach the sea.
I tricked it. I was picking out
the smile of a woman at the centre
of this world, self-contained, absorbed, content,
most certainly not waiting,
when I heard a far-too-late familiar tread outside the
door.
I licked my scarlet thread
and aimed it surely at the middle of the needle’s eye
once more.

I occasionally wonder how someone could have done what Penelope reputedly did: promised that she would remarry when she'd finished making a tapestry, sewed in the day, and unpicked her work at night. I can't think of anything more frustrating than constantly destroying your own work, never allowing it to progress - and tapestry is slow, slow work, you might cover a few squares inches in a day. Perhaps she would unpick a part of the tapestry, then sew something different in its place, so that the work was constantly shifting, motifs leading to first one thing then another? A lovely image for multivocality.

cross-posted to my journal,