[In the following essay, Durham evaluates Cardinal's comparison between the art of embroidery and traditional feminine roles in male-dominated society, commenting that the protagonist's efforts in Le Passé empiété “ultimately justif[y] a theory of female realism in art.”]

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passé empiété in a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates. In particular, Cardinal explores the relationship between women's traditional domestic tasks and their artistic production, and she uses the specific qualities of embroidery to rethink common assumptions about literary influence and authority, the writing process, and the mythic tradition.

Marie Cardinal's determination to “write the discourse of knitting” (“Entretien avec Marie Cardinal” 18) responds in part to one of her own recurrent literary motifs, her recollection of her maternal grandmother's favorite saying, “If only knitting could talk … !” ([Autrement dit 162, hereafter abbreviated as AD], [Une Vie pour deux 25, hereafter abbreviated as VD]). But in Cardinal's most recent novel, Le Passé empiété (The Back Stitch), she extends her personal literary and cultural history to include that of women artists in general. By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her novel, Cardinal simultaneously complements Rozsika Parker's efforts to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel, “women's other major art form” (118), and overcomes Parker's residual concern that “embroiderers employed the needle, not the pen—they left no records of their attitudes toward their subject matter” (102).

Cardinal inherits from her maternal ancestor the secret knowledge that women are never less bound by the constraints of traditional female life, never more distant from home and family, than when they appear most fully engaged in daily household tasks. This creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women (AD 22), this female ability to unite apparently conflictual activities, also structures Parker's analysis. Women artists, limited to an aesthetic practice equated with a feminine ideal of submissiveness and selflessness, “have nevertheless sewn a subversive stitch—managed to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to inculcate self-effacement” (215). Cardinal's contemporary use of the novel to alter related cultural notions of embroidery and of femaleness encompasses a complex reevaluation not only of the female artist herself but of both the traditional and the feminist critical context within which she currently creates.

Since the publication of Le Passé empiété in 1983, critics have been puzzled by the heterogeneity of both its content and its structure: they read Cardinal's novel as three disparate and disconnected stories. At the risk of seeing those unfamiliar with the novel initially side with the reviewers, let me provide a brief and schematic outline. Le Passé empiété opens with the self-analysis of a guilty mother, tormented by her potential responsibility for the near death of her son and daughter in a motorcycle accident two years earlier. Blaming herself for the purchase of the motorcycle, bought with the income she earned as a successful embroiderer, the unnamed first-person narrator remains unable to work, despite the full recovery of both children. Turning her attention in part two of the novel from her own offspring to the father she has never known, the narrator seeks to recover both her past and her art by simultaneously creating her father's life in narrative and in embroidery. In a final shift of perspective from her paternal to her maternal heritage, the narrator lives the third section of the novel in the actualized presence of Clytemnestra as the two women attempt to collaborate on an embroidered reconstruction of the mythic past.

However abrupt, even incoherent, the novel's transitions may seem in summary, from the very beginning the narrator of Le Passé empiété positions both personal and artistic unity within art itself. Patterning her search for identity on the linguistic mode of psychoanalysis, she discovers in the term “embroidery” the primary sign of her personal history: “For a long time now I've been circling around this word and rejecting it. I consider it more responsible to juggle with ‘serious’ terms: God, the Essential, Death, Time … I didn't want to take my embroidery as a starting point, and yet that's the origin and the cause of everything. EMBROIDERY” (31). Moreover, the associative process immediately identifies the narrator's individual life as gender specific: “The word ‘woman’ surfaces, just as the word ‘embroidery’ did a moment ago, and the two combine naturally to form a couple” (36). Cardinal thus begins by embracing the traditional definition of embroidery as a female art form, recalling its valuable ability to establish the continuity of women's lives on both the individual and the cultural level and to connect women beyond the sociocultural barriers of class, age, or race (Parker). Yet, as her original introduction of embroidery into the category of metaphysics suggests, she simultaneously challenges other conventional associations.

Embroidery's customary reduction to the sampler has informed its conception as a disciplined craft whose value depends on the skillful execution of the designs of others (Parker). Even as a child, Cardinal's narrator openly revolts against a standard of excellence based on the perfect regularity of both the imitation and the stitch. She races through her required figures, producing “a red scribble bearing a vague resemblance to letters and numbers” (32) (surely a metaphor for women's subversive writing) to arrive at the border, where she is free to create whatever shapes her imagination dictates and to alter the required stitches until she invents “a technique of my own that I constantly improved” (34). Although even as a child the embroiderer refuses to complete the seams and hems that would turn her artistic creations into usable household goods, only her later career fully reveals the profound irony in her proud family's view of her embroidery as “the proof that I would be a housewife” (34). Not simply content to explode this longstanding notion of embroidery as a domestic service, Cardinal redefines it as an activity openly and deliberately destructive of the traditional family. Even the initial triumph of a conventional female life potentially supports the dissociation of embroidery and domesticity, for Cardinal's narrator totally abandons her art during her years as a wife and mother; similarly, she initially blames the breakup of her marriage on her midlife return to embroidery. But gradually she learns to identify and accept her actual situation: forced into an unfair and unnecessary choice between her marriage and her art, she has consciously chosen the later. In a simultaneous inversion and repetition of the cultural model of Penelope (reminding us that the male absence for which her needlework offers compensation also provides creative freedom), Cardinal's embroiderer actively chases her husband and all that his denigration of her “ladies' fancy-work” (42) represents:

And I sent the men in my life packing!

Guilty of getting along without Jacques, of depriving my children of him! That's what I'm guilty of, not of buying a motorcycle, not of embroidering! No, guilty of not needing male protection. I didn't stay in my place, I broke out, I created disaster.

(47-48)

A pastime whose original merit lies in its ability to produce a product for others while still attending to their needs becomes in Cardinal's novel a demanding career whose success depends precisely upon the rejection of others. A female art that the child artist defines as marginal (freedom lies at the border) has become for the adult artist the equivalent of life itself: “I need to embroider, I only exist if I'm embroidering” (293). Moreover, the submissive embroiderer has evolved into a female destroyer who threatens the very “order of nature” (20), specifically denounced as a male construct. By elevating embroidery from craft to art and from an amateur to a professional activity, Cardinal transforms it from an endeavour long synonymous with femininity itself into one totally incompatible with traditional definitions of women. This process serves to expose the socio-aesthetic assumptions and prohibitions that continue to imprison the female artist and not, of course, to denigrate female culture.

Indeed, the contrary is true, since Cardinal's discourse of needlework situates the origin of female art in the material base of women's experience: female life and art become coextensive as Cardinal simultaneously turns aesthetic activity into a metaphor for women's traditional tasks and redefines artistic production as a traditional female task in and of itself. Such craftswomanship similarly informs Jane Marcus' recent attempt to define a feminist aesthetic. In direct opposition to Lawrence Lipking's “poetics of abandonment” (a critical act of considerable importance and perhaps even courage in the face of the curious eagerness with which many feminists have embraced a theory that not only celebrates female victimization but ignores fifteen years of feminist scholarship in the process), Marcus imagines “another aesthetic, call it Penelope's, which grew out of a female culture.” Based on her own weaving, Penelope's poetics, like that of Cardinal's embroiderer, celebrates the intimate connections between art and daily life and between art and the labor that produces it: “This model of art, with repetition and daliness at the heart of it, with the teaching of other women the patient craft of one's cultural heritage as the object of it, is a female poetic which women live and accept” (84).

One of the aspects of a male-defined “natural” order that has made it most difficult for women to create has been the existence of a specifically and uniquely male artistic tradition. Much recent feminist criticism has focused on the strategies developed by women artists to challenge and undermine the equating of literary authority with biological manhood, of textual generation with actual paternity (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman). In this context, Cardinal's focus on embroidery has particularly clear subversive potential. In opposition to the traditional dichotomy of the needle and the pen, relegating women and men to separate creative domains and defining the boundary between craft and art, Cardinal not only reestablishes embroidery as a valid artistic medium but restores its semantic unity. Far from being distinct from and subordinate to verbal artistry, Cardinal reminds us that embroidery rightfully functions as a metaphor for literature itself. To embroider, The American Heritage Dictionary tells us, is not only “to ornament (fabric) with needlework” but also “to embellish (a narrative, for example) with fictitious details or exaggerations.”

Of course, the implicit association of women and imaginative flights of fantasy may initially seem of ambiguous value. Recalling Freud's hypothesis that hysteria originates in the daydreams “to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone,” Dianne Hunter draws the logical conclusion: “That is, people left to embroidery are bound to embroider fantasies” (94), a conviction the reviewers of Le Passé empiété would no doubt warmly embrace. On the other hand, after noting the obvious fact that “how women have lived influences how they write,” producing in particular the frequent domestic metaphors (e.g. embroidery, weaving, kneading, nourishing) they use to describe the writing process, Irma Garcia makes an important point that is valid both for feminist criticism in general and Cardinal's work in particular: “It's not a question of returning to out-of-date values, … but rather of showing how the woman manages to transport her values into the domain of writing and how she succeeds in redefining and transforming them” (II:23). In Cardinal's case, as we will see, the introduction of female values into the context of writing questions and alters the conventions of the latter at least as much as those of the former. Moreover, her insistence on the link between literary activity and women's traditional domestic tasks also intersects interestingly with modern narrative theory. Walter Benjamin uses the image of the woman embroiderer to figure the profoundly artisanal nature of early storytelling (107-8); and, at the opposite end of the narrative spectrum, Alain Robbe-Grillet finally makes sense of Flaubert's odd claim to identity with Emma Bovary by reading the description of embroidery he attributes to her as “the metaphor of the work of a modern novelist” (213).¹

Following her practice of “opening women's so-called secondary activities” (AD 162), Cardinal too discovers that embroidery contains the theory of the novel; she specifically devotes her first series of “embroideries” to the question of literary ancestry. Several feminist critics have recently described reparenting as a strategy common to the twentieth-century woman who seeks rebirth as an artist (DuPlessis 94). In contrast to the customary search for the mother, Cardinal's heroine initially focusses on the father she has scarcely known and of whom she knows almost nothing beyond the defining context of her mother's all-consuming hatred. The embroiderer's desire to reconstitute herself “whole,” in the specific hope that it will revitalize her art, once again both duplicates and questions common assumptions about literary influence and authority.

For example, Cardinal's transposition of the man who engendered her into her own original creation both imitates the male practice of authoring female lives that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Madwoman) place at the core of the Western literary tradition and simultaneously exposes by its own genetic reversal the curious distortions that the confusion of biological reproduction and textual production can lead to. In an explicit rejection of both “History” and the actual facts of her father's own story, Cardinal's narrator asserts that her “real father” is “the one I invent” (120). Moreover, in another key inversion of conventional patterns, she transforms her own female life into the controlling model for the male's. Not only does she turn events she alone has lived into episodes of her father's biography, but she alters the meaning of the standard male life by enclosing it within the context of traditional female values. Thus, her narrative of work, sports, and military action changes the feats of daring, courage, and individual prowess we expect into a sustained thematic elaboration on male friendship and solidarity. Similarly, the narrator's actual childhood memories of her father consistently situate him within the time and space of everyday, domestic life. Cardinal's narrator also transforms her father into her own artistic muse and her own literary precursor: he is a storyteller, a diary keeper, a collector of realistic art objects, a connoisseur of exotic wood; most importantly, he is a constructor, a skilled manual laborer, an artisan.

This final transformation of paternity from a metaphor of authority and legitimacy (Brooks 63) into one of creative parity leads to the embroiderer's unsuccessful attempt to cooperate with her father in a feminist “poetics of affiliation” (DuPlessis 225), marked by the temporary fusion of their narrative voices: “I must be my father in order to express him. I must be him. ‘I’ is him and me. … I'm a twelve-year-old boy …” (80-81). Her eventual admission of defeat may be a playful salute to the critical tradition that denies women writers the ability to create convincing male characters, an irony curiously reinforced by the reviewers' insistent preference for this section of the novel over those that focus on women. The daughter's effort to speak as a man who turns out to be the rapist of her mother and the murderer of her sister no doubt constitutes an important attempt to understand a male world view from within, but it also leads directly to the authentication of her mother's original narrative. Thus, the daughter consecrates her mother as her true literary ancestor, the first creator of the father, and reduces his stature to that of a conventional character in a female-authored text.

Cardinal's metaphoric representation of the female artist's relationship to the cultural and artistic past she inherits is closely tied to the particular qualities of embroidery as art form and to the specific stitch Cardinal's embroiderer prefers. Dictionaries and encyclopedias consistently define embroidery by the characteristic that distinguishes it from lacemaking: its superimposition on a preexisting background. As such, embroidery offers a particularly apt metaphor of the situation of the female artist who creates against the backdrop of the dominant culture. In contrast to the embroiderer's own aesthetic that focuses on the stitch itself, the muted culture of the female artist, Cardinal insists that women see beyond their own situation to the full complexity of their cultural context.²

Although knitting books describe the “passé empiété” as a highly decorative stitch whose beauty depends on its “perfect regularity,” Cardinal singles it out for exclusive use because of the liberty and variety it allows (249). Notably, only the consistency of the background material potentially limits the embroiderer's freedom, even though her particular talent lies precisely in “her feel for the material” (249). If Cardinal first defines the back stitch straightforwardly in terms clearly analogous to the novel's structure as a whole—“you encroach on the past in order to propel yourself into the future” (249)—her depiction of the difficult struggle engaged with a fabric of irregular and treacherous weave—“I don't see how to appropriate it, I don't see how to prevent it from controlling my rhythms” (311)—reveals her parallel dependence on the figurative meaning of “empiéter” (to appropriate a share of the position occupied by another, to assume rights one doesn't have) that identifies women's challenge to dominant culture. Thus embroidery embodies the palimpsestic nature of female artistic and cultural forms, the superimposition of the muted on the dominant, the female on the male, the subversive on the conformist: “I organize my volumes as I please my embroidering over my first work, sometimes repeatedly. In this way I obtain forms and values in which the memory remains—a kind of echo, barely perceptible, but indispensable in my view—of the first conquest, of the first encounter with the material” (250).

This image of the material density of female art, which figures the constant dialogue women maintain among their own past, present, and future selves and with the dominant literary and cultural tradition, also functions more specifically as a metaphor for intertexuality. In opposition to a current tendency, particularly prevalent in France among male theoreticians (e.g. Derrida and Deleuze) to view intertexuality as a quilting process in which one work is composed of fragments of others, Roger Fowler joins Cardinal in its conceptualization as “metaphorically like a palimpsest, a re-used parchment with the half-erased traces of the previous text showing through the lines of new writing” (124; cf. Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman XX). I am well aware that some feminist critics also find writing, and especially that of women, formally analogous to the female arts of quilting and patchwork. Elaine Showalter, for example, speculates that “piecing” is a “kind of female bricolage” that women writers of the nineteenth-century carried over into their “assemblage of literary materials” (NEH). Moreover, certain contemporary novels, notably the work of Black and working class women writers—Pat Barker's Union Street, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Sheba—juxtapose the lives of different women on the pattern of the quilt. I certainly do not wish to set up a hierarchy of female art as textual metaphor, particularly since Cardinal's own structures often recall the process of quilting as well. Still, the doubly palimpsestic nature of her embroidery metaphor—multiple repetitions upon an already existent background—does serve usefully to connect female texts and female lives, on the one hand, and literary and cultural traditions, both muted and dominant, on the other, by emphasizing the individual writer's dependence on the multiple influences that inform the life and work of all human beings within a given culture.

Twentieth-century women artists, as Gilbert and Gubar point out, inherit not only a male cultural past but descend for the first time from an established female tradition as well (“Tradition”). As the narrator of Le Passé empiété emerges from her fusion with her father to find herself once again unable to create, she becomes increasingly obsessed with four women of the past: her mother and sister, and their mythic counterparts, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia: “In essence, they are mirrors in which I see my reflection. What a bore it is! Always the same old story! What a tedious spectacle! Me as mother, me as daughter, me as wife, me as woman, as woman, as woman, as woman!” (258). This quadruple replication of selfhood and womanhood, this repeated insistence that the embroiderer is above all woman-identified and identified as a woman, takes a more concentrated form in the single figure of Clytemnestra who literally reappears to share the narrator's life and apartment on the day she fully embraces her newly embroidered fantasies.

From the beginning the narrator openly seeks to engage Clytemnestra in a renewed effort at artistic collaboration. She readily agrees with her that the embroideries of her father are superficial: “I wasn't capable of entering his life … I couldn't live in his body” (273). But against Clytemnestra's conviction that “the body is the body” (173), she argues for the specificity of the female body that will allow her through an other who is woman to experience the identification and separation necessary to artistic creation. Notably, her inability to imagine a small boy's relationship to his body constitutes the first obstacle to her creation of her father (70); and the onesidedness of the physical metamorphosis that inaugurates their narrative fusion foreshadows its subsequent failure: “Let my breasts disappear, let my vagina close, let my clitoris lengthen, swell, rise up, become the phallus of the man who created me” (80).

Yet, should we be tempted to read this focus on the gender specificity of the body as either a celebration of biological difference à la Cixous or of the woman transvestite posing her pen as “a metaphorical penis” (Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman 7), it is important to note the crucial cultural reversal that establishes its context.³ Whereas Cardinal carefully imposes personal and particular biographical limits on the male narrative, deliberately rejecting “History” for “story,” she selects as hero of her female narrative the very embodiment of History and Literature, of the artistic and cultural heritage of the West. Not only does she thus invert the usual references of the female artist's double inheritance, whereby male predecessors embody the dominant tradition within which female predecessors are lost, absent, or relegated to the margins; but Cardinal's strategy links her closely to a double female tradition, embodied in the history of both embroidery and the female Kunstlerroman. In embroiderers' efforts to give their own interpretation and emphasis to the dominant cultural interests of their times, Parker notes the historic popularity of the representation of heroic acts by women with, in addition, a decided preference for those who committed planned acts of violence. Grace Stewart centers her study of the female Kunstlerroman on the innovations women writers bring to the generically central relationship between the artist and the mythic tradition; and much recent feminist scholarship, notably that of Rachel DuPlessis and Alicia Ostriker, focusses on the “revisionary mythopoesis” of twentieth-century women writers.

Both DuPlessis and Ostriker identify two primary strategies used by women artists to rethink myth. DuPlessis, for example, distinguishes between “narrative displacement,” which gives voice to the silenced woman of the past without challenging either the overall structure or the specific events of the inherited story, and “narrative delegitimation,” which substitutes a new and different story for the old (Ch. X). Like most women writers, Cardinal combines the two strategies and, indeed, supports Ostriker's hypothesis that they always operate simultaneously. More specifically, and in keeping with the metaphorical structure of Le Passé empiété, Cardinal's revision of myth constitutes a “reprise”—in French, the term not only combines the repetition and the retaliation for injury of the English words “reprise” and “reprisal” (of common etymology) but further identifies the traditional female task of darning (thus duplicating the linguistic complexity of “empiêter”). Cardinal's embroiderer must now fill in the holes, the missing gaps of her-story, that have appeared in the dominant cultural background of his-story.

Cardinal uses a double tactic to respond to the traditional artistic dichotomy that reserves “great” literature, including most genres and certainly tragedy and epic, for the male artist and leaves the domestic novel to the woman writer. Her comments during the composition of Le Passé empiété point to both the dilemma and its resolution: “I am neither a poet nor a philosopher unfortunately—or fortunately, I don't know which; my book will therefore not pass by the summits of these arts. Like all my other books, it will pass by the daily, the banal, the material; there lies the source of my strength” [Au Pays de mes racines 95, hereafter abbreviated as PR]. In fact, Cardinal simultaneously authors a complex metaphysical work and rewrites epic and tragedy as domestic drama by relocating broad philosophical and political meaning within the private sphere. The passage in which Clytemnestra uses a dinner conversation to characterize Agamemnon and their relationship offers a succinct example. Clearly one innovation Cardinal claims in her rewriting of myth is the right to laugh; indeed it seems probable that her recently expressed desire to write a comic novel (“Entretien” 18) began to take shape during the composition of Le Passé empiété. Her disrespect for the seriousness of our mythic and tragic past often takes the form of a rigorous modernization that serves both to trivialize the supposedly sacred and to historicize the supposedly intemporal.

Although Clytemnestra herself outlines Agamemnon's “main preoccupations” with all due respect—“He has his worries, his problems. … He has to reflect on the subtlety of his diplomacy and the dialectic of his affairs … He must remain a master and either stand up to the other masters or negotiate with them, outside” (290), his own words expose him as a petty domestic tyrant:

The hell with it, Clytemnestra, can't you manage any better? Can't you change butchers? Yours cheats you every time. Granted, the other one's further and won't deliver, but so what? You don't do a damn thing with your time! You spend all day in the garden. Do you really think that flowers and weeds and lettuce are what maintain a house, a family, a country?

(291)

But the counterpart to the devalorization of the male within the domestic world is the valorization of this world itself. Clytemnestra uses the frequent image of the garden to try to show Agamemnon that his dichotomous and hierarchical view of separate private and public, natural and cultural spheres distorts his understanding of the world, including, in particular, the domains of philosophy and politics he considers uniquely his:

I think he really doesn't know what a garden is. In my eyes this refusal to see what goes on there weakens him; it limits his understanding. I'm not talking about the beauty of the plants. … I'm talking about how they are born, live, and die. I'm talking about this are or that peace. … Of strength or weakness. Of glory and decline. Of the will or the refusal to live, because of what he calls a trifle: because of a stone, a ray of sunshine, a shadow. A trifle that isn't a trifle for me. A trifle that is exactly the same thing as what he calls Politics. This comparison makes him laugh so hard he cries.

(290-91)

Importantly, Clytemnestra's version of the political and metaphysical order of the world is the only one articulated in Cardinal's rewriting of the myth. Although Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia functions significantly in Clytemnestra's revenge, there are no references to the Trojan War or to Agamemnon as conquering hero. Stripped of the context that provides its legendary necessity, justification, and retribution, the father's murder of his daughter stands bare in its stark and inexplicable horror. Moreover, Cardinal exposes the myth that war and heroism excuse violence against women as the specifically male myth it is by displacing it to the story of the narrator's father. The doctors who must finally reveal to the embroiderer's mother that her infant daughter has died of tuberculosis, contaminated by a man who preferred infecting his own child to admitting he contracted during the war a disease that he now finds incompatible with his manhood, fall back on the justification that lies at the origin of Western culture: “apparently he's a courageous man. … Ah, the war did us a lot of harm … We're not through paying for it … and the heroism of our soldiers … On which front was M. Saintjean gassed? I was the sawbones for the 25th …” (241) The mother's spontaneous rejection of this male-gendered and engendered fable as foreign to female reality foreshadows its erasure from Clytemnestra's memory of the past: “She couldn't care less what the ‘sawbones’ has to say about his war and these endless male stories” (242). At the same time, the refusal to acknowledge any consequence of war other than the avoidable death of an innocent child fuses heroism with cowardice and denounces war as a justification of murder in the name of male virility. In addition, the parallel substitution of the narrator's past for that of her culture transforms the personal life of an individual woman, often limited and controlled by the defining stories of our literary canon, into the very model for their reconceputalization.

In the presence of a female collaborator, Cardinal no longer limits artistic creation to the act of appropriation figured by “le passé empiété.” By literally restoring Clytemnestra to life, she allows her the chance to author her own story and to collaborate in is reproduction in visual form. In this sense, Clytemnestra offers both a duplicate and an alternative image of the woman artist. Her name, which first attracts the embroiderer (258), links her to the female art of needlework. In one French etymological tradition. “Clytemnestra” derives from the verb “tramer” (Suffret 73), whose double meaning of “to weave” and “to plot” supports the image of needlework as subversive, indeed destructive of men—Clytemnestra both plots Agamemnon's death and weaves the net that immobilizes him—and again establishes needlework and literary creativity as synonymous activities.

But Cardinal uses Clytemnestra primarily to explore the female artist as actress, an image as traditional and as ambivalent as that of the embroiderer. In keeping with the frequent association in female writing of women and the oral tradition (see Didier 17), the actress represents for Cardinal the potential power of the female voice, authorized to speak aloud and be heard. But the ambiguous status of the actress as creator also requires her transformation from the translator of another's text into the author and narrator of her own. Clytemnestra's initial rejection of the narrator's plan to “interpret” her story in embroidery—“I've had enough of interpretations” (273)—linguistically encodes the parallel rejection of imposed meaning and of her own passive execution of it.

Cardinal characterizes the birth of the female artist as hurtful and difficult. The single story Clytemnestra succeeds in telling on her own, the sacrifice of Iphigenia, recalls by both its content and its narrative process Susan Gubar's perceptive analysis of the ties between female anatomy and creativity: “one of the primary and most resonant metaphors provided by the female body is blood, and cultural forms of creativity are often experienced as a painful wounding … the woman artist who experiences herself as killed into art may also experience herself as bleeding into print” (“Blank” 296). Clytemnestra's neck bears the indelible imprint of her historical silencing—“A wound that cut across her throat. … Couldn't she talk any more? Did she no longer have a voice?” (260)—and the scar reddens and reopens as she struggles to speak. Still, her inability to continue alone has important, if temporary, implications for female creativity in and of itself. As the actress and the embroiderer begin to relay each other in the composition of the narrative, the fluidity and often indistinguishable interpenetration of their voices suggest a new model for artistic collaboration, reminiscent of Suzanne Lamy's description of female conversation as “an embroidery on a background that disappears under the movements and the colors” (30).

But Clytemnestra cannot finally overcome her fear of creative choice and responsibility, and she reclaims an existence in which her masks provide her identity, legend dictates her actions, and she mouths only the words of others “like a parrot” (333). She rejects the self-expression the embroiderer offers, equated with life itself, to repeat Iphigenia's sacrifice of her right to speak, equated with death itself: “My daughter still upsets me deeply. What happened in what she never said? Because only others made her speak. She never expressed any opinion. … Millenary silence of obedient women! Where do their words go?” (267-68). Ultimately, Clytemnestra prefers the alternate etymology of her name: “Klutos: that of which one hears, famous because talked about” (Auffret 72). In opting to be “killed into art”—“For she much preferred remaining the horrible queen of the legend to no longer figuring in the legend at all” (284)—she reminds us that one of the major obstacles to women's ability to see themselves as artists has been their established role as characters in male—authored creations.

Although the embroiderer's identification with Clytemnestra as both rebellious woman and artistic collaborator makes her personally vulnerable to the appealing refuge of cultural conformity, she frees herself from the female ancestor as she has from the male. This time she explicitly rejects the quest for models as such: if this is a striking break from general feminist practice, it is also fully in keeping with the sense of her title image: “Once and for all I must refuse to be trapped by the sorcery of models. They should remain in my memory but they must not represent my future.” Importantly, the narrator's gradual liberation from Clytemnestra takes the form of her progressive assumption of artistic authority: “I gave up trying to identify with her. I interpreted her stories in my own way and I didn't care whether she approved or not” (335). Clytemnestra's final performance, the reenactment of her own silencing, respects the cathartic function of Greek tragedy: “I exorcized myself by justifying her murder, … in order to stop behaving with others as a guilty woman and to start acting like any ordinary human being who has a natural right to selfhood, to self-expression” (347). The narrator's decision to embroider a motorcycle in one corner of her representation of Clytemnestra's death marks her final understanding of the importance of modernity, and, although she expects to be accused of surrealism (358), justifies after the fact both the false note the story of the accident initially strikes and its troubling juxtaposition with Greek myth. The narrator has mistakenly attempted to transform herself into a tragic heroine, to give the dimensions of tragedy and myth to an event that was, in fact, only an “accident.” Similarly, she has credited the erroneous belief that female creative autonomy constitutes a “tragic flaw.”

If the embroiderer's understanding that the common events of women's lives need not lead to a single, endlessly repetitive employment seems clearly liberating, her conception of the woman artist has become more problematic. From the point at which she stops listening to Clytemnestra and begins to substitute her own narrative for that of the queen, she bears a disturbing resemblance to the model of the artist as authoritarian, interpretative, and appropriate against which Clytemnestra attempts to rebel. Moreover, despite the embroiderer's repeated insistence that Clytemnestra must tell her own story, the art object necessitates a double alienation. The narrator successively transposes Clytemnestra's spoken words into coherent written narrative and into embroidered art. As Toril Moi points out in a discussion of feminist literary criticism, “it is not an unproblematic project to try to speak for the other woman, since this is precisely what the ventriloquism of patriarchy has always done” (67-68).

In this context, the embroiderer's determination to let Clytemnestra tell in its entirety the story of her own choosing, even though the end is predetermined and the embroiderer no longer believes the story valuable, plays a highly important role. Even provoked by Clytemnestra's exasperating silence in the instant before her death, the narrator resists “the desire to pass her my words” (362), the temptation to speak in her place. In allowing the opposing woman artist the same creative autonomy she claims for herself, she discovers that her own rebirth as artist depends upon it. Indeed, since myth poses an obstacle and a threat to the woman artist precisely to the extent that it has become a reified and deterministic plot structure, one could argue that Clytemnestra's assumption of narrative authority has considerable aesthetic importance in and of itself, regardless of the particular story she tells.

Moreover, even though Clytemnestra herself fails to achieve creative autonomy, she initiates a significant shift in the embroiderer's theory of art. She is originally committed to abstraction: though specifically designed to foster the self-expression that embroidery otherwise thwarts—“I felt like playing with colors and using my needle to project the forms of my most incomprehensible drives” (34)—abstract art does not readily allow the representation of gender. Indeed, Cardinal's embroiderer specifically rejects any such possibility: “I have a taste for the hidden, the mysterious, the foreign. That's what I embroider, and that has nothing to do with my gender” (257). The use of this technique to portray her father's life no doubt metaphorically reflects the degree to which male reality is and will remain an abstraction for her. Clytemnestra, in contrast, begins immediately to push the narrator toward greater realism: “I'm not in the habit of figuring my desires but gradually, encouraged by her, I began to” (286). Cardinal's realistic portrayal of Clytemnestra herself acknowledges the strongly influential role that the figures of our literary and cultural past continue to play in the daily lives of many women; Cardinal may refuse models but she does not for a moment regard them as abstractions.

Once again Cardinal challenges traditional conceptions of female art. Because of the use of patterns, embroidery has usually been seen as devoid of significant content and its subject matter has been ignored in favor of its technical execution (Parker). Cardinal's own project of myth revision respects the terms of this aesthetic; she readily grants Clytemnestra the indelibility of legend, susceptible only to formal changes in tone or narrative technique: “I can't change your legend but I can change its spirit and the way people look at it” (301). But Cardinal now reverses this hierarchy by making representation accessible and central. Moreover, her shift to realism defines a specifically feminist theory of art. Cardinal's first realistic work represents Clytemnestra's nude body, a venture that initially seems “indecent” and that will prove so disturbing that the embroiderer can only progress by returning in places to what she calls “the modesty of abstraction, the convenience of a theoretical expression” (319-20). In a reversal of positions too often dichotomized as French and Anglo-American, Cardinal reminds us that women's realistic depiction of their own bodies and their own lives is a daring and potentially revolutionary art practice that can revalorize the culturally devalued and represent the previously unacceptable. Even more importantly, realism transforms embroidery from a decorative into a political art form and substitutes a representative world view for individual self expression. Thus, the embroiderer's initial attempt to represent the priority of the specific over the general (of the individual over the gender specific) is necessarily unsuccessful: “My goal was … to embroider her in such a way that someone looking at the embroidery could say: ‘It's Clytemnestra,’ even before thinking: ‘It's a woman’ … I failed” (321-22). Cardinal's inability to personalize Clytemnestra other than by the expression of her eyes reinforces the commonality of women and the continuity of female lives that Clytemnestra and the embroiderer jointly represent and that ultimately justifies a theory of female realism in art.

Although Le Passé empiété reveals most of the traits Stewart identifies as characteristic of the female Kunstlerroman—notably, the linking of artistic creation and the mythic tradition, the refusal of the traditional literary image of women antithetical to that of the artist, the conflict between the self as artist and the self as woman, the rejection of men, the awareness of the societal denigration of women artists, and the knowledge of how existing myths pattern our lives—the novel is most remarkable for what it refuses to share: the polarization of female reality and the realm of art, the failure of the artist as either artist or woman or both, artistic rebirth resulting in either abortion or the creation of a monster. Stewart herself may provide the explanation for Cardinal's success: “one of the most difficult things for a woman is to assume the role of destroyer. But without destroying—conventions or overused word patterns, for instance—one cannot create” (141-42). Cardinal does not embrace the role of destroyer uncritically—indeed, Clytemnestra's decision to reintegrate her literary image as destroyer determines her destruction as both artist and autonomous woman—but she subverts the false dichotomy between destruction and creation. By embroidering over the cultural and artistic background hostile to the woman artist, she outlines a new future based on continuing respect for the past and the traditional activities of women that form an important part of it.

Notes

1. Using the same imagery as Benjamin, Garcia equates writing in general with female craft: “Writing [‘l'Ecriture’] is also this artisanal activity that is patiently learned, the page representing a loom where little by little [“de fil en aiguille,” literally, stitch by stitch] words are knit together” (1:110). Cardinal's “knitting discourse” also designates textual production as a whole: “le long tricot, rang par rang, est devenu un vrai chandail qui tient chaud” (AD 75). Cardinal thus restores the female text to its original definition as an artisanal activity: text, from Latin “woven thing,” from texere, to weave, fabricate (hence the same double meaning as that contained within the concept “embroidery”).

2. See Showalter, “Feminist Criticism,” for further discussion of female culture and the interplay of the muted and the dominant.

3. In general, Cardinal attaches considerable importance to the female body, particularly as a source of imagery, but “the expression of the body is always mediated by social, literary, and linguistic structures” (Showalter 89) in her work.

I am indebted to Parker's discussion of embroidery throughout this essay, and I have borrowed its title from her.

All translations from French are my own.

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