Crafting Readers

Items

• Philomel / "The Book of the City of Ladies"
  My crafted object is a handsewn bag that depicts the instruments held by the allegorical characters Reason, Rectitude, and Justice as they guide Pizan through the construction of the City of Ladies and the corresponding deconstruction of the misogynistic teachings of male authorship. I first drew my design on standard printing paper, transferred it to a sheet of fabric, and spent many hours embroidering the symbols onto the bag. The mirror itself is crafted out of the shattered remains of a handheld cosmetic mirror that I clipped and embroidered into place. I then used a quill pen and pot of ink to hand-write the names of the 45 women who are raped or manipulated in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Written in 1353, it is a text that Pizan frequently cites in her work. This object thus highlights the importance of both deconstructing patriarchal conventions and recognizing the abuse of women in literary history. The term "Philomel" comes from Philomela, a female figure in Greek mythology who turned to handicrafts as a means of regaining her voice after it had been taken from her. Instead of being silenced after Tereus—her sister’s husband—raped her and removed her tongue so that she was unable to speak, Philomela weaved an intricate tapestry that depicted exactly what he had done to her. She delivered this tapestry to her sister, who then sought revenge for Philomela, which in turn resulted in Philomela being transformed into a nightingale, or a “Philomel,” as they are often referred to in literature and poetry. Philomela’s story is symbolic of women who have been, or still are, unable to tell their stories, and is representative of the significance of women’s voices and the many ways that their voices can be reclaimed—handicrafts being one such means. CARLY GOODMAN ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: In Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, the character Christine struggles with the conflict between the belief that “women [are] inclined to and full of every vice” (Pizan 5) and her lived experience as a woman. Appearing to her shortly after she has finished this lament, three allegorical figures recruit Christine in building the City of Ladies, a sanctuary for women where they will be defended from the criticisms of men. My final crafted object is a handsewn and embroidered pouch that depicts the instruments that Reason, Rectitude, and Justice hold in their right hands: a mirror, a ruler, and a chalice. Reason, the first of the ladies to both introduce herself to and instruct Christine, holds a mirror. She describes how her purpose is to “show both in thought and in deed to each man and woman his or her own special qualities and faults” (Pizan 9). Rectitude describes her instrument as “the straight ruler which separates right from wrong and shows the difference between good and evil” (13) and is embroidered subtly by the bottom right corner of Justice’s chalice. Justice describes her object as a “vessel of fine gold” through which she will “teach men and women of sound mind … to do to others what they wish to have done to themselves … to speak the truth … to reject all viciousness" (14). Spilling out from the bag is a sheet of brown wrapping paper on which I have written the names of the 45 women who are raped and/or manipulated in Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Written in 1353, The Decameron is a collection of 100 short stories that Boccaccio wrote to provide women with “distractions” (Boccaccio 29) from the difficult things that they might experience in their lives. Despite this claim to help and support women, 45/100 of Boccaccio’s stories depict assault in some manner. I’ve chosen to depict their names because Pizan frequently cites Bocaccio in her text, a decision that appears contradictory to her purpose given that The Book of the City of Ladies notably condemns both rape and the depiction of women that Boccaccio perpetuates. I speculate that Pizan’s decision to cite Boccaccio is due to the literary authority and acclaim that he possessed as a male writer, something that Pizan likely needed in order to add authority to her own voice as a female author. The physical process of embroidery was simultaneously gratifying and painful. I found satisfaction in the push and pull of the needle through the fabric and enjoyed the challenge of finding the right depth of stitches and colour of thread. Each element of the embroidery demanded attention and conscious thought, each choice that I made regarding its construction was deliberate yet a complete shot in the dark. I had never tried embroidery before, and this project demanded trial and error. The push and pull of the needle turned into forcing the needle backwards into the fabric to remove stitches that had gone wrong, agonizing over threading thick embroidery thread through the tiny allowance of the needle, and pricking my fingers on the raw edges of the mirror. The progress of this project was not linear, an aspect that reminded me in a roundabout way of Christine’s process of healing from and unlearning patriarchal conventions and harmful misogynistic stereotypes. Throughout the text, Christine asks the allegorical ladies questions about the stories they’ve told her, imploring them to explain how if one thing is so widely said about women, then how can what they’re telling her be true? She asks them to clarify and offer examples, her attempt at deconstructing her learned experience taking them back occasionally to things the ladies have previously explained. Her learning, in The Book of the City of Ladies, is not without struggle and effort. Embroidery and similar needlework practices are historically women-dominated handicrafts, and, during the early to late middle ages, when Pizan was alive, such handicrafts were a means of accessing power. While needlework was practiced by women across social classes, much historically significant embroidery was produced by nobility. Queens and noble women were expected to produce rich and detailed textiles for their husbands that would be presented to outside parties as symbols of allegiance and peace, or “generosity and piety” (Diener 2). The skill and detail of one of these gifts could make the difference between wartime and peacetime, and the gifts of one queen during this period served to assure “residents … that the days of bloodshed were in the past,” establishing a positive repertoire between the people and their new king (12). Similarly, there is evidence in Europe that many “important embroideries were made in convents” (Young 1), as higher class women who remained unmarried were often sent to live as nuns. These women would send textiles to monks and priests that served to both forge and bolster friendships between “religious foundations” (Diener 2). Each textile produced by either a noblewoman or a nun held “gravity” (3), and queens specifically often had groups of women within their households to assist them in the production of such textiles. Embroidery for women was also a means of establishing a social reputation and protecting themselves; during the 12th century, communities of women who relied on the support of “male monasteries to survive” (19) created spiritual friendships and allegiances through their handicrafts. However, in the 17th century, the mindset regarding embroidery shifted from understanding it as a tool of power to considering it a means of women’s oppression; women were told to “stick to thy lace,” “burn your pens … and purchase wool,” and “darn your stockings” (King 2) rather than engage in the art of writing, for example. In modern days, feminist activists and groups of women have used embroidery as a critique against the oppressive domestic sphere, using embroidery not as a means of female subjugation but as a “resistance to male domination” (Emery 1) and a way to honour the importance of handicrafts in women’s history. Pizan herself benefitted from a noble and privileged upbringing. Her father, Tommaso di Benvenuto da Pizzano, was a municipal counselor who advocated for her education and encouraged her interest in literature (Pizan xix). After the death of her father and her husband, Pizan turned to writing for financial support (Malcolmson 2) and often wrote under the sponsorship of patrons and patronesses, making her written work largely intended for noble audiences. Her manuscripts were often beautifully illuminated, the production of which Pizan oversaw herself, making her “one of the first vernacular authors who supervised the copying and illuminating of her own books” (Pizan xxi). In 1402, Pizan wrote and published “Le dit de la rose,” a direct response to Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris’s text Le Roman de la Rose—a medieval poem that Pizan criticized for depicting misogynistic stereotypes of women. Such a response was received within the literary discussion of the “querelle des femmes” or “the woman question” (Pizan xiii), a popular literary debate regarding the “nature and status of women” (Malcolmson 4). For some, this discussion represented the voice of literate women who felt oppressed by misogynistic culture but who “were empowered by it at the same time to speak out in their defense” (Kelly 2). Originally published in France in 1405, The Book of the City of Ladies responds to the woman question, likely making it a prominent manuscript within royal courts at the time, though Pizan’s writing has been largely overlooked when it comes to significant medieval literature. As a result, it is difficult to ascertain the extent to which her works were known and read in the 15th to 17th centuries (2); however, certain preserved manuscripts provide insight into the courtly significance of her Livre de la Cité des Dames. The Harley 4431 manuscript in the British Library was commissioned by Queen Isabeau de Baviere between 1410 and 1412 (Green, 1). This manuscript holds literary value because it likely “represents the ultimate form of the work as intended by Christine”; indeed, it is possible that she “corrected it in her own hand” (Pizan xliv-xlv). The manuscript is further proof of Pizan’s relationship to patrons and patronesses at the time and further solidifies her readership as members of the nobility and higher class. In making this crafted object, I felt connected to both historical and modern women in their endeavor to speak out against the oppressive patriarchal culture, whether they used embroidery as a means of sending hidden messages to other women—as men were seldom “educated in the complex language of needlework symbology” (Emery 7)—or writing an allegorical city for women to be protected within. Crafting this object has highlighted the significance and power that physical objects can hold, be it a work of writing of a piece of embroidery. In depicting the instruments held by Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, I want to highlight the effort that goes into both recognizing and working to unlearn misogynistic conventions. According to Reason, “no one can look into [her] mirror, no matter what kind of creature, without achieving clear self-knowledge” (Pizan 9). The physical mirror shards that I have embroidered into the frame of the mirror invite the viewer to see themselves in relation to both the history of these women and the current issues we are facing today; viewers are invited to consider how they may be upholding—and, in some cases, endorsing—such conventions. In writing the names of the women from The Decameron, I aim to bring attention to the treatment of women in literary history. In honour of these women—fictional or otherwise—"Philomel" has been crafted as their own metaphorical City of Ladies.
• A Mother's Grief / "Hamnet"
  My project features two hands, and it symbolizes the connection between Agnes and her son. Inspired by a drawing I created while reading the book, the design explores the themes of connection, loss, and transcendence that Maggie O’Farrell weaves throughout the novel. The hands reflect the bond that forms between mother and child and is a key element of Agnes’s journey as she grapples with the feelings that are upon her in the aftermath of the death of her son. While stitching the project together, I found myself thinking about how readers resonate with the themes of grief and resilience. Creating this artwork, I was able to look deeper into the meaning of loss, and it showed me how it manifests differently for everyone and still remains universally impactful. Transforming this interpretation into an artistic piece helped enrich the themes and emotions to me when it comes to the human experience. MACKENZIE LARKIN ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet richly explores themes of grief, love, connection and creativity. O’Farrell looks at the impacts of the devastation that comes with the loss of a child and how the family navigates the effects and the aftermath of this profound grief. Protagonist Agnes’s love for her children and her husband is explored, and it is obvious the sacrifices that she makes for their happiness and survival. The theme of family dynamics is a central part of O’Farrell’s novel, and it is these dynamics that highlight how individuals shape their relationships and the legacies that can be inherited. Another key theme of Hamnet is the connection between human life and the natural world; Agnes is an example of this when she finds the rhythms of nature and finds the interconnectedness of all living things. One could further consider themes in the novel’s portrayal of the plague, which acts as both a personal tragedy and the reminder that life has a fragility to it, and each individual experiences it differently. This novel examines the essence of storytelling and the means it provides to preserve one’s memory in an attempt to transcend mortality and death. Embroidery in relation to Maggie O’Farrell’s novel can be seen as a powerful symbol that intertwines themes of memory and grief. Through the character creation of Agnes throughout the book, readers can start to form an understanding as to how embroidery may help O’Farrell in representing the traditional role of domestic crafts and the ideas of care, expression, and resistance. Agnes is a natural healer and has a very profound connection with the natural world. Her intuitive understanding of people helps her channel her own emotions, which can be linked to the emotions that can be portrayed by embroidery projects. With every stitch, there is a symbolized connection to Agnes’s desire to weave together her life fragments and bring together her life, memories, and relationships each holding their own significance. Embroidery also helps to mirror the novel’s exploration of the fragile connections between Agnes’s past and present and the ideas of life and death. The connection between embroidery and the death of Hamnet can be seen as a way for her to process the grief she is struggling with. The repetitive, meditative nature of stitching reflects Agnes’s attempts to create order within the chaos that is her mourning in a tactile way that allows her to hold onto what she has lost, “Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.” (O’Farrell, 8). Creating something through embroidery parallels the novel’s narrative, helps create a way of preserving memory, and transforms the pain felt by tragedy into something that can be admired by others. Just as O’Farrell investigates the dynamics of creation and legacy, embroidery represents the different but equally profound forms of artistry created by people. Using embroidery as a motif resonates with Hamnet and emphasizes the interconnectedness of life and the way that love and loss can be woven seamlessly into the human experience, as the narrator observes: “She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be” (O’Farrell, 58). O’Farrell highlights the enduring power of creativity as is an act of remembrance and as a way to mend the fractured pieces of the heart. Throughout the process of creating my embroidery project, I had to learn patience and the importance of both creativity and the feeling of satisfaction from creating something by hand. Although embroidery can appear quite simple, I quickly realized that it is a very intricate art form requiring focus and care. I was taught that each stitch has to be made with intention and that you have to learn that accepting imperfection gets the job done. As I worked through my project, something else I learned was that it is actually important to slow down and appreciate the process rather than rushing through it just to get it done because when you rush, you are more likely to make mistakes and miss the meaning behind the design you create. Selecting colours and patterns helped me engage with the creativity that I thought I had lost in the most unexpected ways and helped reteach me that even when I think the smallest details don’t matter, they actually make all the difference to cohesion. The process reminded me that art is just as much about discipline as it is about inspiration and that looking beyond technical skills offers feelings that are meditative and calming. The rhythm that comes from stitching provides a sense of calm and focus and offers a welcome escape from the chaos of everyday life. I think my biggest lesson is that it is important to value even the smallest imperfections in my work, no matter how frustrating they are. The reason for this is that accepting the imperfections is evidence of effort and growth rather than a flaw. Overall, I think that choosing to work on this embroidery project helped me to find a new hobby that taught me not only technical skills but also helped nurture my creativity and offered me a personal insight that I hope to hold onto for the future. Spending the last couple of weeks working on the embroidery project helped to enrich the initial interpretation I had of Hamnet. It allowed me to find a connection between embroidery and the novel’s themes of memory, grief, and creativity on a more personal and tactile level. When I first engaged with embroidery in class, it held my interest and attention, and then getting to do it again for my final project as well as in my personal time offered me several different outlooks on Agnes and her quiet strength and resilience. Threading each colour of string through the needle and stitching together the embroidery pattern brought the novel’s exploration of loss and people’s processing of loss to the forefront and inspired me to look at how loss can influence finding meaning in creation. Each stitch is a symbol of the threads that bind individuals to one another, which looks at how interconnected relationships especially inside the pages of the novel are and how the bond between Agnes and her child, in particular her son has remained preserved. Just as Agnes preserves the memory of her son and channels her grief, embroidery becomes a metaphor for life’s fragility as well as its inherent beauty. As the narrator notes, her son’s memory and her grief “will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life” (O’Farrell, 9). The imperfections of the stitching mirror the imperfections of love in the novel; this parallel reminded me of how O’Farrell integrates ideas of strength and vulnerability in her characters. My own project allowed me to understand that O’Farrell was telling a story about enduring love, memory, and creativity and that stitching together the fragments of my embroidery project created a connection to Agnes trying to stitch back together the broken fragments of her life after her son's life ended.
• 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.
• “A Mass of Lightning in One Clap of Thunder” / Les Misérables
  This craft object is an exploration of perspective and location in the fourth part of Les Misérables. In my reading of the novel, I focused on the impressive number of locative details that Hugo includes in each character’s exploration of Paris. I traced the details of an 1834 map of Paris onto fabric and then embroidered the paths of each character, with each colour representing a different perspective. Areas with dense embroidery are places that attract the most attention in this section.  My intention for this piece was for the line of perspective to be traceable from the beginning of the narrative to the end, but due to overlapping threads, that’s no longer possible. However, this piece still emphasizes which characters and locations are the most significant in this section and also provides an interesting spatial representation of the novel. ELIZABETH DUCHESNE ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: For this project, I worked with the text Les Misérables and used the crafting medium of embroidery. Les Misérables is a deeply detailed novel in terms of location, with the last three parts taking place primarily in Paris. I wanted to explore place in conjunction with perspective within the text and how these aspects of the text might be depicted in a physical medium. As part of my making, I employed both drawing and embroidery, as I needed a base layer of map that could be clearly differentiated from the embroidery. I created an embroidery that displays both location and perspective for all of the characters, as well as the places mentioned within narration (in light purple) and digressions (in dark purple). For this piece, I aimed to combine the aesthetic elements of embroidery with data visualization and mapping. For depicting the different ways characters inhabit locations, I employed a few different techniques. For digressions, which did not include a particular perspective or place, I used a chain stitch (one stitch per page). For places where characters spent several pages, I used petal stitches to depict the number of pages they spent there. For journeys and for pages that discussed going to more than one place, I used a French knot as a marker for when the page changed. When working with ‘narrator’ sections where no specific character was focalized, I noticed that these scenes often worked as montage sequences, with at times ten or fifteen places mentioned per page. This increased frequency of location shifts produced the effect of the city being alive with activity. The most intense pages were those describing the insurrection, where Hugo would mention 10-20 different locations on each page. Through embroidery, I think I captured the intensity of this sort of urban wildfire, particularly in the sense in which Hugo describes it: “The insurrection had made of the centre of Paris a sort of inextricable, tortuous, colossal citadel” (Hugo 915). Hugo’s most evocative description compares the innumerable uprisings springing up to “a mass of tongues of lightning in one clap of thunder” (914). I think the intensity of the overlapping threads conveys this imagery well. I started this project by going through my chosen section of the novel (Part 4) and typing out the various perspectives and locations within it. For better clarity with locations and paths, as well as for the map to base my craft on, I referenced “Visualizing Les Misérables,” a website that exists as part of a research project conducted by Michal P. Ginsberg at Northwestern University. The novel’s major locations within Paris were marked within the project’s maps, as well as a few of the paths of the characters in the fourth part. I then made a digital mock-up for my embroidery using a drawing program. For many of the places listed by the narrator, I had to search through either Google maps or the French language Wikipedia (if the street no longer existed). I then cross-referenced that information with the 1834 map used by the Ginsberg project to locate the street itself. Some locations I was unable to find at all, and so I had to skip over them. This practice allowed me to consider how landmarks persisted or were destroyed over time in Paris since the setting of the novel. The novel itself was written thirty years after the book is set, so many of the places within the novel no longer existed at that point. The most notable landmark in this section is the elephant monument, which was situated at the Place de la Bastille and demolished sixteen years before the novel was published. Part of this novel’s purpose, then, was Hugo’s attempt to remember and preserve the Paris of his youth. Les Misérables’ original French publication was incredibly successful: shortly after its publication, the Daily News in the UK reported that “[w]ithin two days […] five thousand copies were sold; two editions were exhausted in one week, and a third, of 7000 copies, is announced” (“Literature”). Another British newspaper described how in Paris “[t]he booksellers’ shops were literally besieged as long as a copy remained unsold, and by four o’clock there was not one to be had” (“Foreign Intelligence”). Isabel Hapgood’s English translation also received great praise when published in 1887 in the US. Her edition was originally sold for the price of “$7.50” for five volumes bound in cloth, “15.00” for five volumes bound in leather, and in a “[p]opular edition in one volume” that cost a more affordable “$1.50” (“Multiple Classified Advertisements” 2). The Boston Daily Advertiser pronounced that Hapgood had accomplished the task of translating “with more than her accustomed skill” and furthermore declared that “Miss Hapgood ought to be congratulated on her success” (“Books and Authors”). When embroidering the piece, I found it easier to differentiate the threads as compared to the lines on the digital mock-up because threads had a feature of layering, which would show what came first or later. However, the multiplicity of the threads eventually culminated in viewers’ inability to follow the chronological order (particularly notable when the light purple thread crossed the middle section of the piece). I had originally intended for the path to be traceable, but this intention turned out to be difficult to achieve with the amount of overlap in the center of the piece. For future crafting exploration, I think I would recommend choosing a story with fewer overlapping locations. The piece still maintains its value in terms of representing the networks of the plot as a whole, as well as the significance of certain places (based on how many pages the characters stayed there). I think the value of the piece lies in expressing the frequency of location, the closeness of the places (for example, I had no idea that Marius’s house was only a few blocks away from the prison), and the frequency of characters’ perspectives within the plot. Eponine, for example, only has around nine pages where her perspective is at the forefront. The other difficulty I found with the actual embroidery was the inability to be exact in terms of location. Since I had to trace the map onto fabric, inevitably the fabric shifted, and some of the road placements were moved closer or farther apart. The locations of the major places are correct, but for the one-off locations mentioned in the narrator-montage sequences, the roads were often too small to draw in, so I had to approximate based on landmarks. The other difficulty I found was that when transferring the digital lines into embroidered stitches for the insurrection sequence, it was very difficult to tell the lines apart, and I got lost. I eventually made my way to the end of the sequence, but it was a bit more approximate than I intended. My methods were unable to capture everything, nor was I realistically able to do so. Embroidery has been used across cultures and centuries, but I feel that the form that I was most inspired by for this object was Victorian embroidery. In “Fancywork and Bourgeois Culture,” Nancy Bercaw argues that by “consciously endowing each object with a message, fancywork makers created a bond between the object and the self” (Bercaw 243). Victorian women used their embroidery as carriers of self-expression and self-encoding. By creating embroidery, as the maker, I am implicitly adding something of myself to the object. However, just as crafting is able to encode messages about the person making it, so too is it useful for encoding other information. By combining aesthetic techniques with data, one can make meaning in ways that actively engage the viewer more than plain text would. As Talia Schaffer notes, Victorian crafting was conceived as “improv[ing] on nature by preserving, cleansing, arranging, and fixing the materials that nature had left in chaos” (Schaffer 32). By crafting, materiality is made into meaning—and, for this project, materiality is made into a unique understanding of Les Misérables.