Crafting Readers

Items

• Would this get me a husband worth £10,000 a year? / "Pride and Prejudice"
  This object is a hand-embroidered peacock feather. The peacock symbolizes pride, which is evidently a prominent theme in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I have stitched 61 barbs for this feather—one for each chapter in the novel. Each chapter has an additional forest green-coloured marker for every time the novel explores women’s labour and women’s value in the marriage market. While creating my piece, I discovered how important tension was to the embroidering process. Tension was both helpful and destructive to the process; tension is also present throughout the novel. While embroidering, the embroidery hoop provided good tension as the hoop kept the fabric taut, allowing my stitches to be quick and seamless. Alternatively, that was caused by the thread tangling together made the process more difficult. In the novel, tension allows the characters to challenge their own thoughts, feelings, and the society they exist within. SIMRIT GREWAL ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: The opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) encapsulates the themes that Austen intends to explore in her novel. Austen’s narrator wittily informs the reader that “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” (Austen 1). Critics interpret this line as ironic: a well-off man does not actually want a wife, but his society needs him to want one. Austen’s novel explores the different facets that make up her society, such as familial reputation, gender, marriage, and money. Austen establishes that income and subsequent social status determine a man’s desirability in the marriage market. Alternatively, a woman’s desirability in the marriage market is determined primarily by her family’s social status. The women in the novel have “marriage [as] the goal of [her] life, and if a woman plays the courtship game right… she stands a good chance of having a rather pleasant life” (Scheuermann 199). Women’s livelihood depends on both their family’s fortune and the skills they acquire through a proper education in society. Miss Bingley explains that “a woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages” (Austen 79). Women are indeed expected to be skilled homemakers and craftswomen and to demonstrate elegance and propriety to be desirable in the marriage market. Needlework was deemed the most important craft among the many skills women were expected to master (Schaffer 28). While both men and women performed the craft in aristocratic societies, when Austen’s novel takes place, in the early nineteenth century, the “handicraft became coded as a woman’s hobby specifically, and it was increasingly identified with … domestic management” (Schaffer 33). The ability to run and manage a household was an important skill for a woman to have, and women who excelled in the skill were deemed more valuable in the marriage market. Income was fixed, and women felt the constraints of the fixed income, often relying on “their fathers’ income and wealth during their upbringing” or their husbands’ wealth “after their fathers’ death” (Herman 207). Women were forced to be savvy in the marriage market because “it was the only provision for well-educated women of small fortune” (Austen 255). While knowledge of embroidery, the world, and the arts was considered necessary for a woman to be well-educated, her education often failed to directly equate to a greater income. Instead, women leveraged these skills to bolster their desirability in the marriage market. Marrying a wealthy suitor was the only way for a young woman to guarantee financial security. While Austen does not prominently feature needlework throughout the novel, the ease with which “Elizabeth took up some needlework” demonstrates how pervasive and mundane the craft was in their society (Austen 93). Elizabeth takes on the craft outside her home, signifying to the reader that needlework was an easily accessible, everyday pastime. Needlework allows for multitasking. Elizabeth can productively create something while simultaneously engaging in the social environment. Elizabeth is likely creating a design she found out of a pattern book, which was “specifically intended to provide models for embroidery and lace” (Watt). Schaffer states that patterns at the time were often focused on bringing the natural world into the home and making the natural appear “cleaner … than it would have been in its original condition” (Schaffer 32). Elizabeth’s design likely incorporates some natural elements, such as flowers. I chose to embroider a peacock feather, partially to emulate the designs inspired by nature that Elizabeth would be creating. I also chose to embroider a peacock feather because the peacock symbolizes pride, and the imagery was present in the book’s art from even the early days of publication. Pride and Prejudice was originally published anonymously in three hardcover volumes (Todd 51). Although the first edition does not obviously feature peacock feathers, the first edition’s deep green cover art visually reflects the peacock’s aesthetic. Further, the first edition’s spine has gold banding that mimics the classic peacock feather (Jankowski). The novel received mostly good reviews and was popular from its initial publication, as evidenced by the second editions being published later that same year (Todd 54). Amongst pleasant reviews, Austen also received criticism. Charlotte Brontë later classified the novel as a disappointment with “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers” (Southam 139). Brontë and others condemned Austen’s work for being too frivolous, clean-cut, and thus unrealistic. Austen’s writing, they complained, removes tragedy and instead emphasizes life ultimately working out. Austen’s narrative style makes her writing appear to lack tragedy. She uses free indirect discourse to provide readers with insight into her characters’ internal dialogue, in addition to their interactions with each other. Free indirect discourse allows Austen to highlight internal conflicts, specifically how tension affects Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationships with each other. The novel’s title identifies both characters’ vices: Darcy is prideful, and Elizabeth is prejudiced. Darcy’s pride becomes apparent when he rejects Bingley’s attempts at getting him to dance with Elizabeth. He evaluates her as “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt [him]” (Austen 23). Darcy insults Elizabeth, leading her to believe that he is uninterested in her; however, Darcy’s internal dialogue informs the reader otherwise. After becoming better acquainted with Elizabeth, Darcy “really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections, he should be in some danger” (Austen 104). Darcy experiences tension as he attempts to reconcile his growing feelings for Elizabeth. Elizabeth also feels tension. She must reconcile her prejudice towards Darcy with newfound information that counters her characterization of him. When Darcy’s maid describes him as “good-natured,” Elizabeth “almost stared at her” in disbelief (Austen 508). Although readers are privy to both Darcy and Elizabeth’s inner conflicts, the two characters present themselves as unaffected by the other. Tension was crucial for my embroidery. When fabric is too tough or rigid, pulling the needle through it becomes incredibly difficult. Fabrics like denim made my hands hurt when I embroidered too long. For this project, the cotton fabric was easy to work with, but the design’s intricacies combined with my lack of skill made the embroidery floss tangle together on the back. At times, I was weaving the needle and thread through knotted clumps of embroidery floss. Pushing through the extra layers created unwanted and unnecessary tension. While tension can present challenges, the pressure was also beneficial. While embroidering the peacock feather, I quickly realized that the tension provided by the embroidery hoop was tremendously helpful for creating clean stitches. When the fabric was stretched taut on the hoop, I was able to make multiple chain stitches in quick succession. The needle weaved through the fabric faster, and I often had to pull on the excess fabric to create more tension as I completed the project. Although the tension that came from trying to weave the needle through the tangled embroidery floss tested my patience, the tension was overall both helpful and necessary to successfully complete my project. Growing to appreciate tension through embroidering the peacock feather illuminated how important tension was for Darcy and Elizabeth’s reconciliation. Darcy admits how important Elizabeth’s rejection was for him because she “taught [him] a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous” (Austen 766). Darcy’s initial proposal was both pretentious and presumptuous; he assumed that Elizabeth would have to accept his proposal out of necessity. In Darcy’s mind, he was only doing Elizabeth a service by asking her to marry him. He confesses that after the rejection, his goal became to “obtain [Elizabeth’s] forgiveness … by letting [her] see that [her] reproofs have been attended to” (Austen 767). The contradiction between the acceptance Darcy expected to receive from his proposal and the reprimand that Elizabeth gave him forced him to be introspective. His successful introspection leads to positive character development that dissipates Elizabeth’s prejudice towards him. She convinces her father of the “gradual change which her estimation of him had undergone” (Austen 782). The embroidery process provided insight into how important tension is for the novel’s plot development. Without good tension, the embroidery process is frustrating and painstakingly slow. Similarly, the productive tension between Elizabeth and Darcy caused them to eventually develop respect for each other, respect that would become the basis for their romance.