Knitting in literature
[6] Amy Wells comments that both Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, in her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple are presented as knitting, without precise detail of the objects being made.
Thus, Wells writes, Christie's "'I mean', said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, 'that ...'" in the 1932 short story "The Tuesday Night Club" allows the character to speak unthreateningly "framed within a feminized, acceptable activity.
"[7] Similarly, Austen's "Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion" show, Wells writes, that the knitting is taking place with others present, allowing her to observe the activities unobtrusively under cover of the craftwork.
"[7] [T]he iconology of the knitting woman, as outlined in fiction, can be understood as an allegory for femininity and the wiles of womanhood, through attributes such as innocuousness, diligence, thrift, handwork and storytelling.
[2]: 41 Learning to knit from one's mother also serves as a symbolic rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood in many works; in George Eliot's 1861 novel Silas Marner, a woman laments not having a daughter to teach in this way.
[8]: 1 The novelist Alison Lurie observed that knitting as a productive activity was used in literature to signify virtue of female characters like Jane Fairfax and Miss Bates in Jane Austen's Emma (1816), Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Lenin's wife Kitty in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878), while negatively portrayed characters were given more frivolous pastimes like fine netting or crochetting.
[9] He gives as instances the "ludicrous" ambassador Sir Sampson Courtenay in Evelyn Waugh's 1932 novel Black Mischief, and the "eccentric" Albus Dumbledore in J. K. Rowling's 1997–2007 Harry Potter book series.
[10] One example of such a malevolent knitter—according to Lurie, "the most famous and sinister knitter in literature"—is the character of Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens's 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities, who encodes the names of those she wishes to die by the guillotine during the French Revolution into her knitting;[1]: 181 Zeynab Warsame of The Believer magazine comments that this symbolic connection between yarn and death resembles that of the Fates in Greek mythology.
[2]: 41–42 [8]: 3.2 Kerr comments that while knitting can be sinister, as with Madame Defarge, it can often be comic, as with the "harmless, slightly ridiculous old spinster of no intellectual powers" that Miss Marple outwardly seems to be.
[14] Stevanato writes that in Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, the hopeful and restorative "female" act of knitting stands in opposition to the pessimistic and destructive "male" activities of war.
