“You Knit to Save Your Life”: Trauma and Textile in Ann Hood’s The Knitting Circle (2006)

Abstract

This paper includes a hermeneutic revision of Ann Hood’s novel The Knitting Circle (2006), a text that has been scarcely approached from the perspective of literary theory and criticism. In order to carry out this analysis, particularly focused on its protagonist, the presuppositions of trauma studies are employed, especially the considerations of Laurie Vickroy, as well as the semiotics of the textile in terms of its discursive and collective potential. Through the prism of close reading, it is proposed that the textile activity (and, by extension, the community that is generated around it) fosters a process of psychological recovery that depends not only on the articulation of the traumatic event, but also on the forms of social experiencing established around that episode.

Keywords

• Ann Hood
• trauma
• community
• grief
• knitting studies