The Mystery of Knitting

Knitting is a kind of domestic magic. I first suspected this as a child when I watched my mother turn a one-dimensional substance—a long red woolen string—into two and finally three dimensions: a stocking cap for my doll, with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands, in fairy stories. And it wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The women who could perform this magic were, in everyday life, everyday humans; but when they picked up their wands they became practitioners of a secret art. The same thing happened in my books. In “The Six Swans,” from the Grimms’ Household Tales, for instance, six princes are changed into birds by their wicked stepmother. Their sister can break the spell by knitting magical shirts for them out of flowers; she does not quite finish in time, however, and the youngest brother returns to human shape with a swan’s wing instead of his left arm.

Of course, this folktale can be read as a kind of allegory. Women have attempted for hundreds of years to transform wild, free-ranging men into affectionate domestic creatures with the help of hand-made garments, and have sometimes succeeded. Popular culture and advertising have kept the idea alive. “He’ll love you more if you knit for him!” cried a yarn manufacturer in the 1950s, and Seventeen magazine, calling up a rather spooky image, twittered, “You can knit that man right out of your life or—better advice—you can knit one right in.”

My mother, like most of her friends, knew how to knit, but she preferred sewing, and made charming clothes for my and my sister’s dolls on her old Singer treadle sewing machine. When I was seven, she tried to teach me how to knit, but without success. Under her reluctant instruction I managed about twelve inches of a lumpy scarf in alternating wobbly stripes of ugly brown and canary-yellow wool. Then I gave up, and for several years refused to try again.

My mother was of Scottish descent, and always unwilling to waste anything. She took over the wool and created an afghan of alternating brown and yellow squares. It lasted a long time, and was loved by my younger sister and eventually by both her children and mine. For one of them it temporarily became a beloved and comforting “blankie,” or, as psychologists call it, a “transitional object.”

Eventually a friend of my mother’s managed to teach me to knit in the rapid European method, in which the yarn is held in the left hand and there is less movement of the arms. My first project was also a scarf, but this time a more successful one, in a soft blue wool.

Of the domestic handicrafts, knitting is both the most magical and the simplest. It is also probably very old. Few ancient examples have survived, though some socks from Egypt are believed to date from the eleventh century. Archaeologists have found many more woven than knitted textiles, but it seems likely that knitting and crocheting pre-date weaving. Weaving, after all, demands a settled environment and bulky equipment in the form of a loom. Knitting requires little in the way of equipment and can be carried about from place to place and combined with other tasks such as homework or watching small children. It does not demand strong light or a steady hand, and would therefore be well suited to nomadic people who followed the migrations of game or the seasonal ripening of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.

By the late Middle Ages knitting was well-established, and widespread. A fourteenth-century painting by Bertram von Minden shows the Virgin Mary finishing up what looks like a small pink short-sleeved top, presumably for her young son. Weavers and seamstresses worked sitting down, but it is possible to knit while standing, or even while walking. You can do it when it is too dark to sew, something that was especially important before the invention of electricity. Knitting wasn’t just a hobby, as it often is today, but an essential household craft. Either you made socks, scarves, and sweaters for yourselves and your family, or you went without. Shepherds and shepherdesses traditionally knit as they watched their flocks, and there are many seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century paintings of women in peasant dress knitting, often while standing up.

Since it did not demand physical strength, knitting was something you could do at any age, and to judge by the art of the period, the very young and the very old were frequent knitters. Some not only supplied their families but made goods for sale, including fine silk stockings for the rich. Young Knitter Asleep, by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, shows a little girl six or seven years old who has dozed off over this monotonous task.

Crochet, patterns for which first appeared in the early nineteenth century, was at first a very different kind of handicraft. It belonged to what was often called “fancywork,” which included tatting, tapestry, and embroidery. The important thing about fancywork was that it was both artistic and unnecessary. It was the leisure occupation of well-to-do women who did not have to create anything essential. Instead they demonstrated their taste and skill by making decorative objects: embroidered handkerchiefs and slippers, lace for edgings and trimmings, little net purses, doilies and runners for tables, and antimacassars for sofas and chairs. Knitting was practical and plebian; fancywork was prestigiously useless and ladylike.

In nineteenth-century fiction, very often, good women knit and bad women do fancywork. In Jane Austen’s Emma, the long-suffering good girl, Jane Fairfax, is a dedicated knitter, as is her aunt, Miss Bates. Emma herself does not knit. Hester in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a self-supporting single mother who knits and sews for a living. In Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s anti-heroine, Becky Sharp, practices fine “netting” in order to show off her long white fingers and catch her chosen fish, Josiah Smedley.

In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Levin’s loyal and lovable wife, Kitty, knits while she is in labor with her first child. Anna herself, on the other hand, crochets nervously as she confronts her love, Count Vronsky, who has just returned from a party:

 

“You don’t know what I have suffered waiting for you [she says]. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous. I believe you when you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so incomprehensible to me… .” She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzlingly white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff.

 

American domestic history took place to the accompaniment of the steady clicking of thousands of needles and crochet hooks: wood, bone, steel, and plastic. Pioneer women report knitting by firelight and on the swaying seats of covered wagons, and knitters still often carry their work with them: even today you will see them at work on long plane or train journeys. From the Colonial period on, directions for knitting projects in newspapers and magazines followed current trends. The practical shawls and heavy wool socks of the early settlers and Western pioneers were supplemented in the Victorian era by fluffy, light-weight wraps and lacy scarves with names like “The Cloud” and “The Fascinator.”

In the 1920s, daring flappers made themselves little cloche hats and “hug-me-tight” sweaters; during the Depression and World War II, there was a fashion for dark knitted wool dresses and suits which resembled a kind of protective armor against the (often literally) cold world. After the war, knitting became softer and lighter again, and directions for clothing the baby boom were everywhere: it was now possible, and fashionable, to knit a complete layette, plus sweaters with Scandinavian designs, for your husband and older children. In the counterculture 60s and 70s, knitting became a quick, cheap way to look cool and young: directions for creating big loose-fringed shawls and multicolored vests and afghans in flower patterns were everywhere: I and my friends made many of them.

Whenever there was a war, though, knitting became virtuous and practical as well as, or instead of, decorative. At intervals over the last three hundred years, thousands of American women attached themselves to balls of navy-blue, gray, and khaki yarn, and as the New York Times put it, “Armies Marched on Hand-Knit Socks.” In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, both Jo and Beth knit for the troops. Beth knits happily and uncomplainingly, though when her father’s letter from camp is read aloud, she becomes weepy and pauses. But then “she wiped away her tears with the long blue army sock, and began to knit again with all her might.” Jo’s reaction is different.

 

“It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway [she says], when I like boy’s games and work and manners. I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. and I can only stay home and knit, like a poky old woman!” And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.

 

The tradition of patriotic knitting continued for years. During World War I, President Wilson marched down Fifth Avenue ahead of a six-mile-long procession of Red Cross workers, some of them beating on tin buckets with knitting needles, and others carrying poles adorned with hand-knit military socks, now khaki instead of blue. In the last years of World War II, when I and my friends were in college, we were recruited as knitters, and met weekly in a Unitarian Church in Cambridge. I still remember the hanks of heavy, slightly oily khaki yarn we were issued, and the blurred greenish mimeographed patterns for scarves and socks. The more expert knitters among us were also able to produce thick gloves, and mud-colored khaki helmets that covered the entire head and neck except for eye- and mouth-holes, a style now seen mostly on skiers and people who hold up drugstores. When I arrived on my first day as a volunteer and was met by a figure wearing one of these death’s-heads, I was for a moment terrified.

In fact, this apparition should have been no surprise; the association between knitting and death is a persistent one. Readers of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will remember the two women, one young and one old, who sit silently knitting black wool in the office of the company that is about to send his hero Marlowe to the Congo. As Marlowe looks at the older of the two, he tells us:

 

An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing continually to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool, Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.

 

The most famous and sinister wartime knitter in literature, of course, is Dickens’s Madame Defarge in A Tale of Two Cities, set in Paris at the time of the French Revolution. Madame Defarge, whose husband keeps a wine shop, is a tall, handsome, black-haired woman in her forties. Her father, brother, and sister have died as the result of the cruelties of an aristocrat, and she seeks revenge on him and his family. As she waits for them to be condemned to the guillotine, she goes every day to watch the executions, knitting the names of victims into her work. Dickens did not wholly invent this story; scholars tells us that revolutionary women would often knit as they stood watching public executions.

The best-known knitter in twentieth-century fiction is also closely associated with violent death, though as a benevolent rather than a malevolent character. This is Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple, an elderly lady and amateur detective who lives in a tiny English village, where she solves one crime after another. Anyone who has spent time in such a village, or cast even the most passing glance at statistics, cannot help but be surprised at the number of murders that take place in or near St. Mary Mead. Can it be that Miss Marple‘s hobby somehow draws victims there? After all, there has always been an uncanny aspect to knitting, sometimes good, as with my mother‘s afghan, and sometimes not. A steel needle can be a weapon, especially if the point has been quietly sharpened. There are several instances of murder by knitting needle in detective fiction, but as far as I know, no character has ever been killed with a crochet hook.

Even in real life, many knitters are aware of the supernatural side of their craft. What is widely known among us as “the sweater curse“ is recognized as a superstition, but it is one which some personal accounts support. Essentially it says that if you start knitting a sweater for any man in whom you have a serious romantic interest, you will break up before it is finished. One knitter I know claims that it also happens with scarves.

The rational explanation for the curse is that a handmade sweater is typically thick, elastic, and clingy; it suggests to a man that the woman who is knitting it wants to surround and enclose him. To be presented with such a garment is a signal that its maker has serious plans for his future. If he is not ready for this, the gift may embarrass him and frighten him away. (The same phenomenon, according to some informants, has been observed in a relationship between two women.) It has been claimed that knitting a deliberate mistake into the sweater will break the curse, but my friends say that this doesn‘t always work. As a result, knitters are usually advised to wait until after the wedding to start any such project—especially since many also believe that a sweater made for a husband both keeps him safe and warm at home and wards off other women.