Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary by Mary Jo Bona (review)

Women Writing Cloth is a well-focused study not only of the role that needlework and knitting have played in the lives of women but also of how women's handwork finds its way into the literature we read and teach. Mary Jo Bona's book gives us the tools we need to begin reading cloth itself as a text. Learning a new way of reading requires acquiring the appropriate vocabulary, and to read cloth, we need ways of speaking about elements such as stitches, patterns, and colors as well as the relationship among the artist, the art, and the audience. Bona establishes this new way of reading by first interrogating the history surrounding the art of sewing and knitting, exploring what art historians have said about handwork in relation to gender dynamics, and consulting relevant critical and historical studies. From there, she applies what she has learned to create an innovative and collaborative interpretation of texts, weaving other scholars' contributions into her own critical threads. This background work serves as the basis for her readings of four quite different novels, three of them by women writers.

Looking at both old and new texts, Bona analyzes Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850), Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), Sanda Cisneros's Caramelo (2002), and Adria Bernardi's Openwork (2007), paying attention to the fine details of women's work and art as they are described in these texts. Bona fashions her argument by seamlessly bringing together feminist theory, art history, and cultural studies scholarship. Her analysis does not get bogged down by jargon and moves smoothly from thesis through antithesis, coming together in a synthesis of new thinking about how to read these texts. Drawing on the work of other scholars and critics, her nuanced readings will enlighten readers about historical and contemporary cloth production and their relations to the positions and power of women in societies that have done their best to negate, if not eliminate, their presence.

In her preface and introduction, Bona sets up her main thesis that "women's cloth expressivity enabled different kinds of mobility, extending their art forms into new places" (xiii). She is interested in "how literary sewers negotiate their positions of immobility … and yet somehow manage to create art despite lack of access and positions of silence" (16). Her methodology is comparative in that it looks at novels from different eras that also come out of different ethno-racial traditions (Anglo-American, African American, Mexican American and Italian American) in an effort to paint a complex picture of women who learned to live within and to transcend traditional strictures while negotiating their relationships to their ancestral cultures.

Each chapter eloquently and exactingly seeks "to enlarge an understanding of the relationship between cloth-work and a novelist's critical and structural response to the challenges of a woman's creative design. Such responses reveal an authorial vision inflected by cultural choices that reaffirm an aesthetic based on women's work" (17). In the opening chapter, "Hester's Needle: Mending-New World Fragmentation in The Scarlet Letter," she gives us a new way of seeing the figure of Hester Prynne and explains how the character wriggled out of Hawthorne's control to assert her agency as a woman who learned how to wield power through her art. Bona writes: "Hester's identity as a single mother, a white widow, and an immigrant artisan in possession of a highly desired commodity—her cloth-work—emboldens her when she confronts civic and divine authorities, including both biological father and legal husband" (30). We see that in spite of the victimization she endures, Hester's skills as a seamstress enable her to go where, and to do what, other women cannot.

In chapter 2, "Sister's Choice and Celie's Quilted Eloquence in The Color Purple," Bona sees Walker's protagonist as "a direct descendent of Hester Prynne, their...