In her beautiful work, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early
Modern England, Susan Frye writes about the instabilities of gender
constructions and how women in early modern England created much of
their own identity as they worked with textiles and with text. Some of
her book re-evaluates some of the misconceptions held by many today. She
writes,
“The first misconception is that only women were
associated with the needle and only men with the pen—a misconception held
despite repeated attempts to complicate this binary by scholars as well as by
early modern people themselves. The second misconception is that the needle was
only associated with drudgery, while the pen was only associated with
intellectual work. To a certain extent the needle represented women’s obedience
to a rigid insistence on sexual difference, but it is an unstable signifier
and, as an object, it is small but phallic, penetrating as well as penetrable,
conveying activity, even violence as well as creativity. The needle conveys the
potential for active, thinking feminine, without precluding women’s use of the
pen in paintings like Alice Barnham and her Sons Martin and Steven” (16).
She then discusses this remarkable painting and the stories it can tell
about women's agency with a pen as well as with the more traditionally
accepted needle, and it strikes me that this semester Linden and I are
sewing and creating work with our hands, but also writing. We get to use
these two expressions of feminized power together, to put on a play.
And tonight as I'm typing up quotations for a social history paper, all
this seems beautiful and serendipitous, and much like a gift.
For more on the painting: http://www.bergercollection.org/index.php?id=5&artwork_id=75
No comments:
Post a Comment