[Vwoolf] Slater's pins

Mon Nov 18 15:38:28 EST 2013

There is a famous painting by Vanessa which shows Virginia knitting at Asheham; as I recall she also worked Vanessa/Duncan/Omega Workshop designs in needlepoint or cross stitch. Off the top of my head, the dialogue between Peter's penknife and Clarissa's needle slipping through the lovely (green, was it?) silk was pointedly hottt. I would like to point out here the danger of trying to recuperate Woolf's reputation as frigid (wasn't this Queenie Leavis et al?) by the lubricious and strangely frivolous imputation of sex to Woolf's much, much larger universe.

Still I have to point out first that needlework has enormous therapeutic benefits which, as the national health service is cut back and the poor in America are deprived of all medical care, is being more and more fully explored with the beginnings of clinical research. It is used for recovery from stroke, alcohol detox, stress, and chronic pain management.
http://v-scheiner.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/1988/1/BJOTNEEDLEWORK.pdf
http://www.stitchlinks.com/

These therapeutic benefits would have been well known to Virginia Woolf, whose efforts at prophylaxis for her mental health included typing manuscripts out for -- Lytton, was it? Roger? -- during her 1915-18 nervous breakdowns, and taking up the setting of type for the Hogarth Press. Such a person would be intimately connected to and aware of the faults of mechanical tools, such as Slater's/Pater's pins, she used to save her life. The Bell painting of Woolf knitting was painted at Asheham, where Woolf undertook recovery from her nervous breakdowns of 1914. This suggests, if only circumstantially, that needlework was part of Woolf's own regime which included typing and typesetting.
http://mathomhouse.typepad.com/photos/about_the_banner/vwoolfbybell.jpg

Second, needlework has a long and intimate and amazingly interesting history in the formation of the feminine -- both for ladies and working class women. As a feminist and a socialist, I have no doubt V. Woolf would have been aware of this, not least through Roger Fry and his championship of folk loric decoration (socialist) through the Omega Workshops. Woolf goes to the 1917 Club every day and makes fun of the cropheads' revolutionary and folkloric clothes. How needlework forms the feminine is most instructively delineated in Roszcika Parker's seditious classic, The Subversive Stitch.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Subversive-Stitch-Embroidery-Feminine/dp/1848852835

While I have nothing but respect and real interest in theory and queer theory, I feel strongly the need to point out here that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Take care
Jeannette Smyth

On Nov 18, 2013, at 2:12 AM, Jeremy Hawthorn wrote:

> Thanks for this! But as Woolf used Clara Pater's comment about Barker's pins, which from what I have discovered did exist, how relevant is the link to the (real) Herbert M Slater company?
> 
> It does open for the possibility that Woolf felt that to avoid libel she needed to change the name, but then (deliberately or, more likely unconsciously)  chose the name of another real company that made pins. The present-day company, according to the website, manufactures needles, so it is absolutely possible that at some time it also made pins. Incidentally, although your link worked, none of the links on Slater's webpage to specific products seem to work. Slater's links have no points!
> 
> If Herbert M Slater & Co made pins in 1927 they might well have been somewhat ticked off by Woolf's story ... but they don't seem to have insisted on Woolf's changing the name.
> 
> Jeremy H
> 
> Den 18.11.2013 09:52, skrev William Bain:
>> Very interesting questions. All I can offer is a
>> tiny bit of quick research on the www. The link
>> below gives some information on products made
>> by Herbert M. Slater. Apparently all far from blunt,
>> though of course the text is a kind of advertisment
>> from the company itself, I believe. Best wishes, WB (link >>>
>> 
>> http://ukmade.wordpress.com/tag/herbert-m-slater-1853-ltd/
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Monday, November 18, 2013 9:14 AM, Jeremy Hawthorn <jeremy.hawthorn at ntnu.no> wrote:
>> I have long wondered whether Slater's pins really were blunter than the average. We know that Woolf used a comment made about (the real) Barker's pins by Clara Pater. If one browses critical comments on the story all move straight into symbol and metaphor and sexual politics; I have not found one that asks whether it is possible that Clara                     Pater really did mean that Barker's pins had no point, or whether she was right. It's not that the symbolic /metaphorical extensions are wrong (they are I think right), but I wonder whether they are based upon some truth in the non-literary world. In contrast, when readers and critics come across this passage in Conrad, no-one asks what it symbolises: the nails are nails:
>> 
>> "At the bottom the nails lay in a layer several inches thick. It was ghastly. Every nail in the world, not driven in firmly somewhere, seemed to have found its way into that carpenter’s shop. There they were, of all kinds, the remnants of stores from seven voyages. Tin-tacks, copper tacks (sharp as needles), pump nails, with big heads, like tiny iron mushrooms; nails without any heads (horrible); French nails polished and slim. They lay in a solid mass more inabordable than a hedgehog. We hesitated yearning for a shovel, while Jimmy below us yelled as though he had been flayed. Groaning, we dug our fingers in, and very much hurt, shook our hands, scattering nails and drops of blood. We passed up our hats full of assorted nails to the boatswain, who, as if performing a mysterious and appeasing rite, cast them wide upon a raging sea."
>> 
>> Part of this is reader expectation. We expect descriptions of physical objects aboard ship in a Conrad fiction to evoke the physical; we expect descriptions of physical objects in a Woolf fiction to lead on to matters social and experiential.
>> 
>> Thinking about this, I recalled that I had once had a very pleasant visit to a museum of needles and pins in the English midlands, so I wrote and asked them if they had any information about Barker's pins. Alas, they did not. A Google search for Barker's pins threw up hardly any hits, but one did suggest that Barker's supplied the medical profession with pins - which does not suggest that they produced low-quality goods.
>> 
>> So: has anyone ever found out anything about Barker's pins that might confirm that they did actually have no point? And do we assume that it is Clara Pater who was talking in code to Virginia, or that while she had no hidden meaning it is Woolf herself who takes the comment and gives it a double meaning in the story?
>> 
>> Incidentally, for anyone with a taste for odd museums (I speak as one who has visited the sadly now-closed Liberace museum in Las Vegas), here is the web address for the needle and pin museum. 
>> 
>> http://www.forgemill.org.uk/
>> 
>> Jeremy H
>> -- 
>> Jeremy Hawthorn
>> Emeritus professor
>> Department of Language and Literature
>> NTNU
>> 7491 Trondheim
>> Norway
>> 
>> (00 47) 73596787 (NTNU)
>> (00 47) 72887602 (home
>> (00 47) 90181427 (cellphone)
>> 
>> See details of my forthcoming book at:
>> https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Hawthorn%20Reader.html 
>> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> Jeremy Hawthorn
> Emeritus professor
> Department of Language and Literature
> NTNU
> 7491 Trondheim
> Norway
> 
> (00 47) 73596787 (NTNU)
> (00 47) 72887602 (home
> (00 47) 90181427 (cellphone)
> 
> See details of my forthcoming book at:
> https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Book%20Pages/Hawthorn%20Reader.html 
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