Exploration in Digital Literature

Pinning Down Information

While using the needles to pin the cloth down, the reader learns that the narrator enrolled in her mother's dressmaking classes even though the narrator did not actually want to be in the classes, or more specifically, she "never wanted to follow the pattern". The reader also learns that the narrator's mother consistently tailored clothes to be too small for the narrator and her sister, causing them to have to endure "too tight waistbands" and bursting "hooks and eyes and buttons". These memoirs help the reader explore the narrator's past relationship with her mother, revealing it as being characterized by constraint. This mother-daughter relationship seems to be constraining because the narrator felt a pressure to take her mother's classes even though she had no desire to and she was physically constrained by her own clothing. Based on this information, it seems that the narrator tried to fit into a mold created by her mother, so the mechanics of having to pin cloth down can serve as a metaphor for the way that the narrator felt pinned to a mold that her mother had created for her (Chew and Mitchell).

This page has paths:

This page references: