the quilt as text

375 Pages·2006·9.28 MB·English

THE QUILT AS TEXT:
READING WOMEN’S CULTURE IN AMERICAN SHORT STORIES (1845-1988)

Elena Mª Calviño Riveira
Tese de doutoramento dirixida polo Dr. Don Constante González Groba

Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa
Facultade de Filoloxía
Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

2006

Vº e Pr.

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To Brian and my mother

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my advisor,
Professor Constante González Groba, whose professional advice has proven invaluable in
the composition of this study.
Professors Patricia Fra and Margarita Estévez provided insightful comments on an
earlier research project on quilts. Thank you for your suggestions.
I would also like to thank Professors Robert Allen from the University of North
Carolina and Jill Kuhnheim from the University of Kansas not only for their diligence in
doing the paperwork I needed to do research in the United States but also for their warm
welcome, their help in getting access to library resources, and their information on local
quilters.
Among the quilters I talked to, Monica Yungeberg, Barbara Bergin, and Kathi
Tichansky deserve special recognition. Thank you for taking the time to share with me
your quilt stories.
My family deserves my outmost gratitude. I would especially like to thank my
mother for a lifetime of sacrifice so that all of us could have a better future, and my sister
Lucía and her husband Ventura for technical and emotional support as well as for all the
trips to and from the airport.
My surrogate American families have made me feel at home in Kansas every time
I visited. Thank you, John, for hosting me. Thank you, Ann and Sean, for accepting me as
part of your family. Thank you, Barbara and Jim, for sharing your Thanksgiving meals
with me.
Above all, I would like to thank Brian for patiently settling my many doubts and
for comforting me when I felt overwhelmed. Thank you for understanding what this
dissertation meant for me and for surviving with a smile what it meant for us.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 6

1. SOME CONNECTIONS BETWEEN THE WRITTEN TEXT,
NEEDLEWORK, AND THE SHORT STORY 20

2. THE QUILT AS TEXT: A SOCIO-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE 50

2.1. ORIGINS: QUILTS INSIDE AND OUTSIDE AMERICA 51
2.2. THE COLONIAL PERIOD: SCARCITY AND ELITISM 58
2.3. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 63
2.3.1. Towards an American Quilt Tradition 63
2.3.2. Making a Quilt: From Individual Piecing to Communal Quilting 77
2.3.3. Using a Quilt: Beyond Bedcovering 85
2.3.4. The Quilters: The Influence of the Cult of True Womanhood 97
2.3.5. “Log Cabin” and “Crazy” Quilts: The Patterns That Defined the
Century 126
2.3.6. Quilting at a Crossroads: The Turn into the Twentieth Century 133
2.4. THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 136
2.4.1. Continuity, Commercialization, and (the Beginning of)
Artification: From 1900 to the Stock Market Crash 138
2.4.2. “Hard Times”: From the Great Depression to the 1960s 145
2.4.3. The Quilt as Art and as Metaphor: The Revival of the 1970s 149
2.4.4. Tradition and Innovation: From the 1980s to the Present 152

3. QUILTS IN FICTION: FROM ANNETTE’S “THE PATCHWORK
QUILT” (1845) TO PAULA KAY MARTIN’S “THE QUILT ADDICT”
(1988) 161

3.1. QUILTS AS WOMEN’S LIVES: MALE AND FEMALE PERSPECTIVES 163
3.2. THE FICTIONALIZATION OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS: QUILTS AS
LITERARY TEXTS 179
3.3. FEMALE COMMUNITIES: A STUDY OF WOMEN’S RELATIONSHIPS 255
3.4. CLAIMING WOMEN’S CULTURE: THE QUILT AS HERITAGE 297
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CONCLUSION 341

WORKS CITED 353

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INTRODUCTION

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INTRODUCTION

Some theoretical accounts of the genesis of writing have emphasized the
parallelisms that exist between the pen and the penis and interpreted literary production
following the model of Biblical Creation according to which both God and the writer
father their respective creations—universe, written text—using their phalli.1 Thus, “the
text’s author is a father, a progenitor, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of
generative power like his penis” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 6). This explanation
excludes women, who lack the phallic generator, from the production of written texts,
reducing their participation in literature to that of literary objects, a passive role which
they have always been allowed to play.
Theoretical issues aside, women’s access to the pen has been hindered by a series
of socio-economic and cultural barriers which men did not have to face. Virginia Woolf
wrote in A Room of One’s Own that, in order to create literature, it was essential for a
female to have a certain amount of money, which stood for “the power to contemplate,”
and a lock on the door, which represented “the power to think for oneself” (101). Woolf
wrote from the point of view of an affluent, white, upper-middle-class woman and, from
such a privileged position, took for granted, among several other things, that women
could write. This has not always been so. As I will explain in chapters one and three, poor

1 Also inspired by biological processes, the childbirth metaphor represents an alternative explanation. Used
by both men and women to explain their creative process, the childbirth metaphor differs from the above
theory in that it does validate women’s experience. Although very popular among French proponents of
l’écriture feminine, some feminist scholars have argued that body-linked images always exclude one sex
and that the childbirth metaphor in particular does not emphasize women’s intellectual potential because it
divides creation into male production (an activity of the mind) and female procreation (an activity of the
body) (Friedman, “Creativity” 74-75).

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educational opportunities thwarted the ambitions of many American females, preventing
them from expressing themselves through the pen.
Furthermore, for most of the 1800s the prevailing ideology, the so-called ideology
of the separate spheres and the concomitant cult of True Womanhood, prescribed
compulsory submissiveness and domesticity for females. Since writing not only requires
some self-assertion on the part of the author but also implies a certain degree of public
exposure if the work is finally published, women who created literature in nineteenth-
century America openly challenged and undermined the basic principles on which the
prevalent definition of womanhood rested. As a consequence, nineteenth-century women
writers were made to perceive their literary ambitions as a denial of their femininity.
When women finally took the forbidden pen in considerable numbers, their literary
contributions were disparaged by the male rulers of a canon which favored the themes
male literature explored at the expense of silencing those of women’s works. Taking into
account these determinants, few nineteenth-century American women were able to
produce conventional, written texts.
It is my belief that those women who could not leave a penned record of their
lives used quilts as surrogate texts in which they explored their unique vision of the
world. Quilts are the texts that we would find if, following Alice Walker’s advice in her
celebrated essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” where she claims that women
have expressed themselves through their gardens and their quilts, we looked “low”
instead of “high” (46). In this dissertation I will not only explain that American women
resorted to actual quilts in order to express themselves but also, and more importantly, I
will show how in their fiction quilts figure prominently as a metaphor for a text through
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which it is possible to read different aspects of women’s culture. I will, in summary,
claim that American women authors have blurred the dividing line between text and
textile by using quilts as surrogate texts where they comment on the issues that concern
females most directly.
I will make an attempt to read women’s culture through fictional quilts, through
women’s own texts rather than through texts written about them. In literary criticism this
approach may be relatively innovative, but in fiction produced by females it is not. As
early as 1845, Annette devoted her short story “The Patchwork Quilt” to explaining her
own experiences as a female through the different scraps she had incorporated in her
quilt. In spite of this, quilts remained largely ignored as texts until quite recently, when
the feminist movement and the emergence of women’s studies departments started to
focus on unconventional ways to approach women’s lives.
For several reasons, the research done by feminist critics has proven essential for
this dissertation. On the one hand, without the efforts they made in order to recover
women’s texts that the process of canonization in American literature had sentenced to
oblivion, many of the works I have used would have been totally unavailable. On the
other hand, I am particularly indebted to those critics whose academic essays have
pointed out the relationship between the needle and the pen, between sewing and writing.
Articles such as Elaine Showalter’s “Piecing and Writing” and Elaine Hedges’ “The
Needle or the Pen: The Literary Rediscovery of Women’s Textile Work,” as well as Judy
Elsley’s book Quilts as Text(iles): The Semiotics of Quilting have proven invaluable in
helping me understand different critical viewpoints regarding women’s sewn artifacts.
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These works have decidedly been a source of inspiration for my own research but
I have not consciously tried to follow any of their individual approaches to needlework.
Unlike Showalter’s article, this dissertation has not been conceived to explore the
relationship between a particular variety of needlework and the various forms that
American women’s writing has adopted through the different historical periods. In fact, I
have chosen to concentrate exclusively on the short story. This dissertation also differs
significantly from “The Needle or the Pen.” Hedges’ article relies on both fiction and
non-fiction, whereas this study is limited to one genre. Also, while Hedges’ analysis
concentrates on problematic relationships between women writers and the needle, my
intention is neither to idealize the quilt as an empowering tool nor to portray it as a
symbol of women’s subordination in patriarchal society or as the antagonistic force that
female litterateurs had to defeat—or at least flee from—so as to demonstrate their
intellectual seriousness. Finally, Elsley’s book, whose title may deceptively induce one to
see similarities between her arguments and mine, is a structurally quilt-like study which
includes several chapters which do not revolve around quilts in literature. Furthermore, it
explores in detail a variety of contents—personal experiences with quilters, information
on renowned quilts and their specific political uses—which could only occupy a marginal
space in a study of quilts in fiction.
In my analysis, which concentrates on quilts in short stories, I particularly try to
demonstrate that the fictional quilt can be interpreted as a metaphor for the written text
and, therefore, offer invaluable information on women’s culture. It is my intention to
show that through fictional quilts it is not only possible to study the difficulties women
faced in order to create a text(ile) but also to analyze some of the topics that have most
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