Knitting in the Reign of Trump

In January 2017, taking a cue from Madame DeFarge in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, I resolved to knit fifty lace love shawls while The Donald occupied the White House. The identification with DeFarge’s incessant knitting and implacable determination to use her knitting to record the names of all the aristocrats she intended to consign to the guillotine may seem incongruous to my purpose to offer love instead of the fear that the real estate magnate sold to his American voters. But in other regards, the connection to Dicken’s novel struck me as highly relevant in several ways. The juxtaposition of the purpose of my relentless knitting with Madame DeFarge’s provides a stark contrast. Like Madame Defarge, my obsessive knitting channels my raw emotions of consternation, shock, and grief; however, unlike Madame Defarge, it transmutes these emotions into acts of love, into gifts for others to wear around their shoulders. Madame Defarge focuses her knitting on vengeance and hatred toward the aristocracy, particularly the Evremonde family, responsible for the deaths of  her sister, her brother-in-law, and her sister’s unborn child. Working with one’s hands is also a vehicle that Doctor Manette uses to deal with his imprisonment for eighteen years under a cruel regime. He hammers single-mindedly at his shoemaker’s bench to assuage his anguish.

Charles Dickens exemplifies a writer with a social conscience who considers it his role to direct the issues of the day in his novels, and so do I. Writers are observers and recorders of the trends and events of history. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens looks backward at the Reign of Terror and reflects on the how the lives of Englishmen and Frenchmen are connected. What happens in France reverberates across the channel just as the events in the American colonies had repercussions in France. Integral to the plot is the redemptive quality of love, best illustrated by Sydney Carton’s sacrificing his life to save Charles Darnay from the guillotine and to ensure the future happiness of the woman he loves, Lucie Manette. Where there is fear, love cannot exist; and Carton rides fearlessly in the tumbril to the guillotine, holding the hand of the seamstress also condemned to die that day with fifty-two other victims of the revolutionary tribunal.

Knitting is a domestic craft, usually associated with women, and an activity that binds them in a communal group. Counting is basic to keeping track of stitches and patterns. The women spectators at the executions count the beheadings as they knit, presumably not dropping a stitch. It is both a mental and a physical exercise in control. Hands and mind work together to maintain focus. Knitting strikes me as particularly appropriate to count the days until The Donald departs the national scene. In the process I am producing an article of clothing that will be both useful and attractive for someone else to wear. Instead of wringing my hands in despair and wallowing in pessimism and doomsday proclaiming, I can use my energy and time to express love instead of to spew hate and disgust.

I am finishing my fourteenth love shawl. I may not reach my goal of fifty lace shawls or I may exceed that number after January 20, 2021. Granted, I am counting on the present occupant of the White House being evicted on that day. Fifty is a good number like Dickens’ fifty-two guillotined prisoners, perhaps representative of the weeks in a year. My number can represent the fifty states in the union subject to the Reign of Trump. It is no coincidence either that the nation-wide march organized on January 21, 2017, to protest his inauguration adopted as their liberty cap the pink pussy hat the marchers hand-knitted to wear for the event. Dickens depicted women intimately involved in the combat for liberty, equality, and fraternity. Miss Pross and Madame Defarge in one of the final scenes of the novel are pitted against each other, one symbolizing the force of love and the other the power of vengeance.  Sydney Carton as he ascends the platform to be guillotined envisions a future where a better world emerges from the blood and turmoil of the Reign of Terror. I, too, choose to envision a better day for the United States when the purge of prejudice, ignorance, greed, and venality is completed, which the current regime inevitably will spawn. Americans will finally be sated and have enough of corruption, braggadocio, and injustice. The country will have learned that ignorance, inexperience, and dishonesty cannot produce good governance and that preservation of democracy depends on an informed electorate. Misinformation cannot be banned from the air waves in a democracy in which snake oil salesmen have the freedom to hawk their goods. Its only antidote is a citizenry that insists upon the facts and solid evidence and will not tolerate being played for fools by con men feeding them what they want to believe rather than the truth that will keep them free.