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This project explores how nineteenth-century authors use textile work—mending, knitting, embroidery—not only as symbolic markers of character and class, but as material metaphors for social repair and resistance to industrialization. By foregrounding the embodied knowledge embedded in domestic craft, the dissertation repositions needlework as a feminist-materialist heuristic, revealing how authors conceptualize alternative visions of community, political agency, and historical continuity through the logic of textile labor. Rather than evaluating the accuracy of their portrayals of class or the feasibility of their proposed solutions, the project traces how authors like Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot use the processes of textile work to model responses to industrial unrest.
In Shirley and Mary Barton, domestic craft patterns are scaled to social repair, with varying outcomes. Felix Holt and North and South shift the metaphor’s origin to economic critique, emphasizing incremental, embodied, and provisional solutions. Across these texts, women’s handiwork becomes a material politics of care—an alternative to the violent ruptures of industrial conflict. Through close readings of these Condition of England novels, the project argues that textile metaphors offer a powerful framework for imagining social cohesion, community resilience, and the transformative potential of women’s domestic labor in the face of modernity’s upheavals.
