Patterns, Puzzles, and the Feminine Mind

                In this day of gender equality, why do so many writers fall back upon feminine crafts as occupations for their female detectives? Does the creative nature of a craft indicate an intuitive aspect of a woman’s mind? Does the repetition of craft work free a woman’s mind to solve puzzles?  Do the nimble fingers of women manipulate needles better than the male brain surgeons wield scalpels? Or can women really multitask, crocheting a comforter or cooking a quiche while corralling a crook?

                Notice how many women cozy writers segue from one craft to another without any noticeable change in literary skills.  Some dash from one form of craft work to another subgenre of the same form—from knitting to crocheting or from cookie-making to cake decorating or quilting to applique.  More adventurous ones are equally deft at jumping time periods or delving into entirely unrelated settings.  Some have two or three different series going on at the same time featuring different crafts.  Talk about Superwomen.

                Amanda Lee (aka Gayle Trent) has two series going currently—Daphne Martin is a cake-decorating business owner and Marcy Singer runs an embroidery shop, the Seven Year Stitch.  Notice Marcy’s significant last name—Singer—certainly a name well known to sewers as a major work-saving device.  Even if the technologically knowledgeable Marcy does know how to sew a fine seam with or without a sewing machine, the author needs her to be an expert in the fine art of embroidery for several reasons.  The author lets her heroine Marcy use three important patterns.

                The most important of these in Thread Upon Arrival is the lattice pattern on the Faberge egg that Marcy is making for her mother for Easter.  Having “uploaded the image into my cross stitch software,” Marcy analyzes the pattern “pale green background with baby pink roses and golden branches, sporting darker green leaves.  The trellis was silver and inlaid with tiny diamonds.”  She sees that she can recreate the effect of the crossed trellis work with silver ribbon and the roses with pink ribbon but knows that the photographic copy on her computer software is too complicated to translate into a workable counted cross stitch pattern of an embroidered egg.  So Marcy simplifies the pattern to fit the egg shape.  This, in part, describes the author’s writing style itself—factual, direct, and unencumbered by lengthy descriptions—which allows the image of the trellis or lattice work to serve as an observable pattern.

                This pattern, where one thread crosses over another, creates a cross or a “pick” or jointure.  If the threads are twisted onto the bias, the effect makes a diamond-shaped design.  Within each “diamond” space each clue is isolated just as the pink roses are centered in the egg’s lattice work.  The highlighting of these clues causes the detective to figure out the final solution just as the final embellishment of the cross-stitched egg finishes the craft piece.  The author lets each clue takes its rightful place in the heroine’s “diamond.”

Lee’s novel involves a second pattern appearing in an antique tapestry/treasure map.  The tapestry itself is “dark brown wools [which] were often indicative of textiles from the Civil War era.”  In literary studies, most plays have one physical object that represents the major theme; for example, Othello would not have the impact it does without Desdemona’s loss of the handkerchief Othello gave her.  In this novel, the tapestry serves this function.  The tapestry causes disharmony within a family and eventually causes some greedy people to murder for the map.  The restoration of the tapestry to itself rightful owner, along with the promise that its “treasure” might be made from a TV production of its history rather than in its retrieval of riches from the ocean, makes the tapestry an important item.

To the embroiderer, however, researching the nature of tapestry causes her to recognize the skill of the weaver.  Marcy exclaims at the woman’s making a “pattern called a mise en carte, and then…transcribing the colors and contours prior to weaving.  To imagine someone doing all that and then hand weaving a treasure map for her children…was simply mind-boggling.”  The two patterns come together when the villainess is in Marcy’s shop and compliments Marcy’s unfinished egg.  “There wasn’t even enough of the pattern developed yet that anyone could tell what it was going to be but she told me it was pretty.”  The villainess then steers the conversation back to the whereabouts of the tapestry and the treasure map. 

The third pattern is that of the value of a sewing circle.  The reader learns at the end of the novel that all the clues have been foreshadowed or planted within the members of the embroidery class offered for abused women.  One of the organizers admits that “victims find it’s easier to open up and talk with the other members of the group if their hands are busy and they aren’t looking at the other’s faces.”  The members of the embroidery group are reduced to the level of the heroine of the early romance novel who starts out as an isolated loner with no relatives, no support group of friends, little money or marketable skills with which to make her way in the world.

The convention of a female support group is standard in cozy mysteries where the town acts as a character in the action. The nature of cozy mysteries, of course, involves a restricted and genial landscape of a small town with a restricted set of local eccentrics, best friends, stable employment, and a never-ending influx of suspicious characters that may or may not be killers.  An outsider coming to a small town becomes the irritant in the oyster which (or more properly, who) must be surrounded and nourished by the town’s inhabitants until her rough edges are smoothed off and she becomes “one of us,” surely a pearl of great price. 

These three patterns mimic the action of the human brain cells answering a question or solving a problem.  Where ideas meet, cross, or conflict, new ideas are spawned. Those ideas beget newer ideas until patterns become recognizable.  In essence, the patterns resemble puzzles which cannot be completed until the last piece is in place.  So also with Lee’s use of the lattice, the tapestry, and the craft circle of women, the interaction of the three patterns allows the heroine-detective to solve the puzzle.  But then most crafters know how to follow patterns or directions or recipes, don’t they?  Surely this is a human trait, rather than just a feminine phenomenon.

                                                                                               

Anne K. Kaler  aka  QuiltHunter