Suturing a Wounded Body—Wounded Mind in Red Silk on White Linen: Embodied and Hand(Y) Knowledge of Trauma

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Published: May 31, 2012
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/v10318-012-0016-4
Keywords:
feminism rhetoric material culture

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Maureen Daly Goggin
Arizona State University, U.S.A.

Abstract

In 1830, Elizabeth Parker, daughter of a day laborer and of a teacher in Ashburnham, East Sussex, England, cross-stitched in red silk thread an extraordinarily complex text that participates in several genres, including a memoir of her then brief life of some seventeen years, a confession, a suicide note, and a prayer. These various genres cohere around one momentous event in Parker’s young life: the sexual violation and physical abuse at the hands of her employer, Lt. G. After suturing 46 lines, 1,722 words, and 6,699 characters, she stops mid-line and mid-way down her cloth with the powerful plea, “What will become of my soul[?]” This paper argues that Parker’s sampler was a robust site in which Parker was able to grapple with her wounded body and mind. To justify the claim that a woman’s stitching can be interpreted as an epistemic activity, the proposed paper turns to two key concepts “situated knowledges” and “embodied knowledge”- both of which have been posited by feminists as a way to destabilize the dominant validation of disembodied, abstract thinking where the eye serves as the mind’s tool of investigation. (Haraway; Knappett; Frank; Driver)

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How to Cite
Goggin, M. D. “Suturing a Wounded Body—Wounded Mind in Red Silk on White Linen: Embodied and Hand(Y) Knowledge of Trauma”. Linguaculture, vol. 3, no. 1, May 2012, pp. 27-46, doi:10.2478/v10318-012-0016-4.
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Vol. 3 No. 1 (2012)
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Articles
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Maureen Daly Goggin, Arizona State University, U.S.A.

Maureen Daly Goggin, Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Department of English at Arizona State University in the US, is the author of Authoring a Discipline: The Post- World War II Emergence of Rhetoric and Composition (2000), co-author with Richard Bullock of The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings (2006; 2nd ed. 2009; 3rd ed. 2013), editor of Inventing a Discipline (2000), co-editor of Racialized Politics of Desire in Personal Ads (2008), and co-editor of three edited collections with Beth Fowkes Tobin on women and material culture: Women and Things, 1750–1950 (2009), Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950 (2009), and Material Women, 1750–1950 (2009). Her latest co-edited collection with Andrea Freeser and Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Materiality of Color, was published by Ashgate in November 2012. She has also written extensively about history in the fields of rhetoric, visual rhetoric, gender and race, and material culture.

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