by Alison Lurie
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.
Zippers
Zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night,
Zip! And I think that Schopenhauer was right …
Zip! I’m an intellectual.
—Lorenz Hart: “Zip!” from Pal Joey
The zipper is probably the only clothes fastener ever to have been the star of a Broadway show tune. When Pal Joey’s highbrow striptease artist, based on Gypsy Rose Lee, shed bits of her spangled costume, she demonstrated the zipper’s amazing properties, of which the most remarkable is speed.
The zipper revolutionized not only dressing, but undressing—and in the process changed relations between the sexes. For centuries, getting your clothes off and on was a slow and often an awkward process, and one that you could not always manage on your own. It was also precarious: hooks came undone, drawstrings and laces knotted or broke, pins made holes in you and in the fabric, buttons popped, and buttonholes tore.
For years getting dressed took most middle- and upper-class people a long time, while getting undressed could take so long that it might be dangerous. In the Middle Ages knights sometimes bled to death on the battlefield before they could be unbuckled and unhooked from their tin-can armor. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a lady’s formal gown might have twenty or thirty buttons, and underneath these gowns fashionable women were often laced into corsets that made it impossible for them to take a deep breath. They sometimes fainted from exertion, and might even suffer permanent damage before they were freed.
The creation of the zipper was a slow process. The original “clasp locker” exhibited by Whitcomb L. Judson at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was clumsy and bulky. Many inventors, some of them women, worked to improve it. Finally, in 1917, Gideon Sundback patented the device we know today. In World War I, his “hookless fasteners” appeared on life-vests and flying suits for the Army and Navy; and B. F. Goodrich, who gave the device its name, put it on galoshes in the 1920s. But it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that zippers were light and flexible enough to be used on fashionable clothing.
At first these zippers, always of metal, were usually concealed by flaps of fabric, though they were occasionally visible on military uniforms in World War II. But it was not until the 1960s that they really came out into the open. Suddenly bright-colored, often supersized zippers began to run up the front of stiff synthetic or cotton pique mini-dresses, and matching shiny boots, making women look as if they were wearing the covers of small kitchen appliances.
The other post-war apotheosis of the zipper was the biker look. Marlon Brando set the style in The Wild Ones, and even today black-leather motorcycle jackets still bristle with shiny, sharp-tabbed metal zippers that suggest not only secrecy (all those little pockets and pouches) but speed and violence—and also often sex.
But, as a film expert I know says, “When you’re talking about zippers, you’re already talking about sex.” A dress that fastens with a long row of little buttons is a romantic challenge. A man needs patience, dexterity, and persuasive charm to get you out of it. A visible zipper, especially if it is partially unfastened, is a sort of silent come-on, but the kind of sex it suggests is passionate and immediate rather than romantic and long-term. Peeling your girlfriend (or your boyfriend) like a banana appears to be, and sometimes actually is, the work of a moment.
Life After Fashion
Soon after I reached sixty, I was abandoned by Vogue magazine and all its clones. Like former lovers who drop you slowly and politely, because they once cared for you, they gradually stopped speaking to me. Without intending it, I had permanently alienated them, simply by becoming old. From their point of view, I was now a hopeless case. They were not going to show me any more pictures of clothes I might look good in, or give me useful advice about makeup or hair.
At first, my feelings were hurt. Hadn’t I loved Fashion and been faithful to her all these years? Just as one avoids the songs that recall a lost lover, I stopped reading her magazines, even in a doctor’s office. As a result, I felt first panic and then, with surprise, a rush of euphoria. I was abandoned and alone, yes, but I was also free: after nearly half a century, nobody was telling me what to wear.
Since Fashion no longer pursued and flattered and scolded me, I realized that I did not have to pursue her. I could go through my closet and get rid of all the stylish clothes I really didn’t like: the little fitted jackets, the cropped pants that left six inches of pale stubbled leg hanging out, the silk dress-for-success blouses with floppy bows and padded shoulders. I also gave away everything too obviously “sexy”— that is, shiny and low-cut and tight and uncomfortable. I hadn’t worn these outfits for years, essentially because I didn’t want to look as if I were hopelessly trying to inflame passion in members of the opposite sex.
What was even better was that I could revive clothes I had loved in the past and hadn’t been able to bear to throw away, though they had become completely out of date. The long patchwork hippie skirts and vests, the filmy scarves and big soft shawls, the loose cowl-neck sweaters, the floppy straw hats, some with feathers or artificial flowers. Some of these things were so far out of date that they looked new, and if they didn’t, I didn’t care.
Next I got rid of all my high-heeled shoes. I hadn’t worn them
very often since I slipped on an outdoor stairway covered with wet leaves and broke my leg. I had already understood that if I had been wearing flat shoes that day, I would have avoided a miserable week in the hospital and three months on crutches. Some of these shoes were beautiful in themselves, and giving them away was hard. But it was also a relief, because though fashion magazines don’t admit it, high heels always slow you down and hurt your feet. (Whenever you are in a restaurant, you can see that under the partial cover of the tablecloths at least half the women there have taken off their painful spike-heeled pumps and sandals, just as my friends and I used to do.) Fashion pretends to be a feminist, but she still makes it almost impossible for anyone under her spell to negotiate a subway grating or a rough gravel path, or run for a bus without turning her ankle.
After a while, since Fashion was no longer nagging me to color my hair, I stopped, and in a few weeks it was almost white. This led to a wonderful discovery. For over sixty years I had been a brownish blonde, first naturally and then artificially, and half the spectrum had been out of bounds. Yellow and orange and coral and pink made my hair seem dirty as well as “dirty-blonde”; purple and lavender made me look like an Easter-egg basket full of dried straw. Now all this was over. White and gray hair go well with every color, including white and gray. It is no coincidence that some feminists have adopted as a slogan the first line of a poem by Jenny Joseph: “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple.”
Already I had saved the two hours a month I had spent trying to turn my hair into a dull imitation of its original color and then cleaning up the mess in the sink afterwards. Next, with my husband’s encouragement, I saved more time by throwing away my makeup. Powder and foundation and eye-shadow tend to cake in wrinkles, and an aging woman with bright-red lipstick, especially when it has leaked into the little, otherwise invisible lines around her lips, can look like an elderly vampire, or worse. She can become the sort of terrifying figure that the Ancient Mariner saw on the death-ship:
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold …
The Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold …
Some of my friends made similar changes, all individual and all in defiance of Fashion. One gave away all her skirts and went into pants and jeans for the duration; another disobeyed the rule that dresses are now for formal occasions only and began sewing herself loose-cut casual smocks and muumuus in an unfashionable mid-calf length: she is a serious gardener, and points out that it is much easier to wash your knees than to wash a pair of slacks. Another friend decided that she would simplify her basic wardrobe to basic black, with accents of purple or green or scarlet.
All of us realized with joy that we could now wear whatever clothes we liked best. There was only one rule: we had to be reasonably neat. It may be true that, as the poet Robert Herrick put it, “a sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in youth a wantonness,” but in old age what it kindles is the suspicion that you are starting to lose your mind. Spiky, confused-looking hair of the sort that goes to fashionable clubs, ragged hems, torn-up jeans, and unraveling sweaters no longer look appealing. Realizing this, even the most charmingly untidy of my friends have now reformed. We do still see some unfortunate contemporaries who haven’t learned this rule—and also, alas, some who are still worshipping at the altar of Fashion, who has forever turned her back on them.
About the Author
Alison Lurie, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Foreign Affairs, has published ten books of fiction, four works of nonfiction, and three collections of tales for children. She is a professor emerita of English at Cornell University, and lives in upstate New York with her husband, the writer Edward Hower.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The essays in this book originally appeared in slightly different form: “Nobody Asked You to Write a Novel” and “Zippers” in the New York Times Book Review; “Their Harvard” in My Harvard, My Yale (Harvard University Press), “Life After Fashion” and “Breaking the Laws of Fashion” in The Guardian; “What Happened in Hamlet” in The New Review (London); “The Language of Deconstruction,” “Witches,” “Barbara Epstein,” “Edward Gorey,” “James Merrill,” “The Good Bad Boy: Pinocchio,” “The Royal Family of Elephants,” “Saying No to Narnia,” “Harry Potter Revisited,” and “Rapunzel: The Girl in the Tower” in the New York Review of Books; “My Name or Yours?” in the Observer (London); “A. R. Ammons” in The Bookpress (Ithaca, NY); “Bad Husbands” in American Scholar; “The Dark Side of Knitting” in The New Yorker.
Copyright © 2019 by Alison Lurie
Cover design by Greg Mortimer
978-1-5040-5561-1
Published in 2019 by Delphinium Books, Inc.
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ALISON LURIE
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