Writing our stories with hooks and needles: literary women's voices in textiles

Abstract

ABSTRACT From medieval romances to twenty-first century popular novels, weaving, sewing, embroidery, and knitting have been a framework for female voices otherwise marginalized by the culture depicted in the text or by the genre itself. The habitus connecting women and textiles is strong enough that, even as textile production has become almost wholly industrialized, the association remains powerful in contemporary popular culture. This article offers a comparative look at the textiles produced by women in Laura Esquivel's novel Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, Mexico, 1989) and Völsungasaga (The Saga of the Volsungs, Iceland, late 13th century). Although separated by almost a millennium, in these literary texts, Tita and Brunhild each use their skill at textile production to express the things they cannot say out loud. The close readings performed here are part of a larger work examining the varied means by which women in patriarchal societies enact agency through their reproductive labour, particularly women's communication of narrative through production of both texts and textiles.