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Wild Geese (1925), Examines the Corrosive, Yet Ultimately Redemptive, Relationships of a Family of Women Trapped by Abuse and Degradation

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Wild Geese (1925), Examines the Corrosive, Yet Ultimately Redemptive, Relationships of a Family of Women Trapped by Abuse and Degradation Disruptive Threads and Renegade Yarns: Domestic Textile Making in Selected Women’s Writing 1811-1925 By Emily Bruusgaard A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in English Language and Literature in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada July, 2016 Copyright © Emily Bruusgaard, 2016 Abstract Images of domestic textiles (items made at home for consumption within the household) and textile making form an important subtext to women’s writing, both during and after industrialization. Through a close reading of five novels from the period 1811-1925, this thesis will assert that a detailed understanding of textile work and its place in women’s daily lives is critical to a deeper understanding of social, sexual and political issues from a woman’s perspective. The first chapter will explore the history of the relationship between women and domestic textile making, and the changes wrought to the latter by the Industrial Revolution. The second chapter will examine the role of embroidery in the construction of “appropriate” feminine gentility in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). The third chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), will explore how the older female body became a repository for anxieties about class mobility and female power at the beginning of the Victorian era. The fourth chapter will compare Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Social Departure (1890) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) to consider how later Victorian women both internalized and refuted public narratives of domestic textile making in a quest for “self-ownership.” The last chapter, on Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese (1925), examines the corrosive, yet ultimately redemptive, relationships of a family of women trapped by abuse and degradation. For all five authors, images of textiles and textile making allow them to speak to issues that were usually only discussed within a community of women: sexuality, desire, aging, marriage, and motherhood. In all five works, textile making “talks back” to the power structures that marginalize women, and lends insight into the material and emotional circumstances of women’s lives. ii Acknowledgements A heartfelt thank you to my supervisor, Dr. Tracy Ware, and second reader, Dr. Shelley King, for their attentive readings and excellent suggestions. Thanks also to Dr. Margaret Steffler, Dr. Gwynn Dujardin, and Dr. Cathleen Hoeniger for a spirited and lively discussion and wonderful ideas for more research. Textile making is both an oral and written tradition, and much of my knowledge of spinning, weaving, knitting, crochet and embroidery has come to me through chance conversations, concentrated workshops and needlework circles. For this I must thank current and former staff, visiting curators and volunteers at the Textile Museum of Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the Textile Museum, Washington DC, particularly: Patricia Bentley, John Alexander, Peter Kaellgren, Roxane Shaughnessy, Sarah Quinton, Natalia Nekrassova, Ann Posen, Dorothea Cook, Anne Angus, Kate Hyde, Nancy Dillow, Krystyna Zdanowicz, Marijke Kerkhoven, Max Allen, Farooq Ikram, Dorothy Caldwell, Lynn Milgram, John Vollmer, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Adrienne Hood, Sarah Fee, and so many more. I must also thank the textile enthusiasts, historians and practitioners who have offered their friendship and knowledge with generosity, especially: Carla Quinn, Tara Kimura, Michelle Shirley, Maren Edgington, Helga Rudolph, Christine Shipley, Sonya Philip, Ellen Mason and Dr. Beverly Army Williams. A special thank you to Janet Reid for fifteen years of friendship and support through three degrees; another to my mother, Jennifer Davidson, for dropping everything to come to my rescue more than once. Finally, a huge thank you to Henrik, Lawrence and Markus Bruusgaard, who sustained me through this process, made me endless cups of tea, and willingly ate large quantities of pizza when I worked late into the night. This thesis is dedicated to you with love and gratitude. iii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents iv Chapter 1 Introduction: The Intimate Language of Domestic Textiles 1 Chapter 2 “The perfect model of a woman”: Embroidery, Appearance and Subterfuge in Mansfield Park 58 Chapter 3 Cranford: Knitting, Crochet and the Construction of the Middle Class Spinster 104 Chapter 4 Refusals and Refutations: The Making of a Different Femininity in A Social Departure and The Awakening 150 Chapter 5 Silk, Sewing and Female Community in Wild Geese 201 Chapter 6 Conclusion: Needlework, Middle-Class Femininity and Female Community 249 Works Cited and Consulted 254 iv Chapter 1 The Intimate Language of Domestic Textiles Her speechless lips could tell No tale of what was done. But there’s a fund Of talent in distress, and misery Learns cunning. On a clumsy native loom She wove a clever fabric, working words In red on a white ground to tell the tale Ovid, Metamorphoses Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band Sits heavily on Aunt Jennifer’s hand Adrienne Rich “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” Most contemporary readers, when pressed to think of examples of needlework and textile making in the literature they have read, can name at least several: the weaver Silas Marner in George Eliot’s 1861 novel of the same name or Madame Defarge’s vengeful and blood-thirsty knitting in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859) often come to mind. Some might mention the quilting of Grace Marks in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) or Hester Prynne’s embroidered red “A” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850). A few more will remember the books they read as children and will recollect the dress of brown gloria that Mrs. Lynde makes Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables (1908), or that the widowed Mrs. Pepper must take in sewing at home in order to feed her children in Margaret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (1881). For the most part, however, images of sewing, embroidery, weaving and knitting operate in the background of literature. Whether written by male or female authors, hands, particularly women’s hands, are often busy and almost always full of textiles, primarily 1 in the literature written prior to the Second World War, whether socks, embroidery, children’s clothing or items for charity. Yet whether that textile making is described in detail or referred to only as “work,” very few readers notice or remember it, unless perhaps it offers forward momentum to the plot, as when Anne Shirley finally gets her fashionable dress with puffed sleeves, or if the maker’s hands appear in extraordinary or unusual circumstances, as when Madame Defarge encodes into her knitting the names of those to be executed during the French Revolution. In most cases textile work does not register as anything more than background detail because textile goods are so intrinsically woven into day-to day life and the making of them has disappeared from modern, post- industrial lives. The two quotes above, however, speak to two deeply intertwined narratives about the making of textiles. In the first place, textiles tell stories. Anthropologists argue that the role of textiles in any society is both general (common to all humans) and specific (important to that particular society) (J. Harris 11). On the one hand, textiles fulfill our everyday need for warmth, shade, shelter and protection from the elements. On the other, textiles also function as a means to distinguish individuals and groups of individuals in terms of social class, gender, occupation, stage of life and financial status. In ancient Rome, for example, robes dyed purple with an indigenous sea snail called murex were reserved for emperors and other high-ranking noblemen and their wives (Sandberg 20- 23). The exclusivity of the colour purple acted both as a marker of status and a visual reinforcement of the economic and social power of the Roman nobility. This is because textiles, as Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider insist, have always had an intrinsic role in the organization of social and political life, for the “broad possibilities of construction, 2 color, and patterning give cloth an almost limitless potential for communication” (1). Moreover, because for thousands of years until the industrial era textiles were made laboriously by hand by workers of both genders with production techniques that remained unchanged over the centuries, textiles connected people both physically and metaphorically. Cloth goods played a vital role in all social, economic and religious aspects of the life-cycle, and the making, decorating and use of these textiles were often given complex spiritual meanings in a traditional society (Weiner and Schneider 2-13). In traditional Merina and Betsileo culture in Madagascar, for example, families continue to honour their ancestors every few years by gathering together the living clan, exhuming the bodies of their dead, wrapping them in locally woven silk textiles and reburying them. This establishes the authority of the ancestor and helps to cement the relationships among the living kin (Feeley-Harnik 74). In this way, textiles contain a symbolic value to individual social groups with significations that will be pertinent only to that social group: cloth needs to be read and understood by the group’s members in order to interpret the meanings hidden within a textile’s origins, construction, colour and decoration. In other words, in all cultures and all periods, textiles tell stories, but the most important elements of those stories are only available to insiders who can “read” what lies behind the cloth. In Ovid’s version of the Greek myth of the sisters Procne and Philomela, the hidden details within Philomela’s woven tapestry help to save her life. Procne is married to Tereus of Thrace, but is lonely without her sister, and persuades Tereus to bring Philomela to visit.
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