Weaving the Word

by Kathryn Sullivan Kruger

In Weaving the Word Kathryn Sullivan Kruger examines the link between written texts and woven textiles. Encoded by pattern, symbol, and dye, textiles offer an important form of communication heretofore ignored. Kruger asserts that before written texts could record and preserve the stories of a culture, cloth was one of the primary modes for transmitting social beliefs and messages.

Moreover, when reestablishing the connection between the written text and the textile, Kruger concedes that a significant relationship exists between women, who wove textiles, and textual production. By recuperating a textile history and including it in our awareness of literary history, we will recover a large community of female authorship and perspective.

Through an analysis of specific weaving stories, the difference between a text and a textile becomes blurred. Such stories portray women weavers transforming their domestic activity of making textiles into one of making texts by inscribing their cloth with both personal and political messages.

Kruger draws from various disciplines to show how textiles constitute another form of literature. Her engaging and provocative inquiry raises important issues for any reader interested in literature, communication, and the power of the word.

For a more complete understanding of how texts as textiles are produced and then released into the world of language and symbols, Kruger makes extensive use of Julia Kristeva's early theories on the literal relationship of the body to signification. Kristeva's work in semiotics and psychoanalysis provides a metaphoric lens for understanding the relationship between the textile-body and its text.

The first chapter deals with the contribution women have made to the creation of culture--its history and its stories--through weaving. Here, Kruger takes a closer look at the relationship between semiotics and textiles by giving examples from different cultures of how cloth conveys meaning, and how in some societies cloth itself becomes a metaphor for language. In the second chapter, she employs Julia Kristeva's early theory of signification as a model for this text/textile relationship. The third chapter explores the stories of four ancient Greek weavers: Arachne, Philomela, Penelope, and Helen of Troy. In chapter four Kruger examines the relationship between weaving and linguistic performance in William Blake's "The Four Zoas." In the fifth chapter she focuses on the relationships between Lord Alfred Tennyson's poem, "The Lady of Shalott," and six different pre-Raphaelite paintings depicting her, a dialogue unique in the history of art. Chapter six synthesizes the ideas developed in the previous chapters, and introduces the concepts of fate, sacredness, and time in textile production.