2019 non-fiction. A history of sewing and embroidery, trying to
recover the stories of the people who did it.
This is another Book of the Week condensation, and one that
suffers a great deal thereby. If there's a thesis or through line in
Hunter's book, it's lost here, in favour of a fuzzy notion that
textile art should be taken seriously. So please bear in mind that I'm
only reviewing a fragment here.
There's a profound bias towards the Anglosphere: discussion of
prisoners' and soldiers' embroidery during WWII, while fascinating, is
entirely on the Allied side, there's significant time given to the
theory (speculative at best) that the Bayeux Tapestry was embroidered
by captured Saxons, and overall I see no sign that sources in
languages other than English were ever considered.
Further, Hunter has clearly reached positions for which she writes no
defence: The Dinner
Party is Good because
it's about women and it includes textile art by women (though the
painted china is much the more important part), and anyone who objects
to the depiction of the most significant thing about women being their
genitalia (except for the one black woman who is unsexed by
comparison) is just a prude. In another chapter, Mary Queen of Scots
was Good, therefore anyone who opposed her was Bad.
In spite of that, when it deals with recovered historical artefacts,
the book can be fascinating: for example, that the small patches left
with babies at the Foundling Hospitals – in the usually-vain hope that
some day the mother might be able to reclaim them and could prove the
relationship by a matching garment – now form the largest surviving
record of 18th-century cloth, or the way in which the interned
civilian women in Singapore during WWII kept up their morale by making
blankets and other cloth things to be sent to their
separately-interned menfolk.
There are many interesting things here, but it's mostly terribly
shallow, and I think it would be more useful as a guide to things to
read about than as a source of information in itself. The book could
have benefited from an editor, too: the chapter on the Bayeux Tapestry
keeps talking about King Alfred, and the one on the Foundling Hospital
mentions Hunter being there "350 years later" (the book being examined
is from 1760). There's a lot of gushing about "feeling" the emotions
of the people who made the things that Hunter goes to see, which must
be more speculation than anything else.
I feel no particular urge to read the actual book, though I find the
subject distinctly interesting.
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