by Alison Lurie
Aprons
Wherever I live, an apron hangs on a hook in my kitchen. I use it to protect my clothes, wipe wet hands, lift hot lids, and pry open bottles of tomato juice or furniture polish that I suspect are planning to splash me with their contents. But without it, somehow, I can’t cook as well. When I put it on, I am choosing a role and making a statement, and so is anyone else. Aprons, in all their many forms, are more than just protective devices; they are full of meaning.
There are many kinds of aprons, of course. My mother wore full calico aprons in old-fashioned flower patterns, with pockets and a square upper bib and ties that crossed in the back and fastened around the waist in front. Mine are half-aprons in bright rural colors: barn red, delphinium and sky blue, sunflower yellow. I usually make them myself out of leftover dress material or my husband’s old shirts.
In the past most males never went near a stove unless they had to cook or starve, and most would almost rather starve than wear a woman’s apron, even in private. (The sad, inept husband Dagwood, in the comic strip “Blondie,” looked even more pathetic when he tied on one of his wife’s aprons.) When I was a child, the only things my father would ever cook were popovers and Yorkshire pudding. Sometimes, when my mother had made a roast, he would come into the kitchen to demonstrate this skill. Before he began, he would awkwardly tuck a dishtowel into the band of his trousers.
This, of course, was before culinary activity became respectable for men who were not professional chefs. Back then, they were able to cook without embarrassment only if the activity were carefully decontaminated to make sure that there was nothing feminine about it. Men couldn’t go into the kitchen, where getting dinner was easy and safe. They couldn’t boil, bake, or sauté, or have anything to do with inexpensive dishes like salads or casseroles.
If men were going to cook, the process had to seem difficult and dangerous; it had to resemble the end of a caveman’s successful big-game hunt. It had to take place outdoors, on a grill constructed of crude, masculine materials like rusty iron, smoke-smeared brick, and chunks of stone. It had to involve thick cuts of bloody meat and implements that suggested savage warfare: pitchforks and knives and griddles—and there had to be blazing flames, the more perilous-looking the better.
Of course, this kind of cooking was very messy. Since he wasn’t wearing the caveman’s costume of greasy animal skins, Dad’s clothing had to be protected, but by something with as little as possible resemblance to a woman’s apron. The solution was a garment that imitated medieval armor: a kind of extended breastplate made of heavy canvas or upholstery-strength plastic. These “barbecue aprons” are heavy, clumsy contraptions that fasten low around the hips and totally conceal the shape of the body beneath. The important thing about them is that they don’t look sissy. To make sure that everyone gets the message, barbecue aprons are often printed with symbolically macho designs (meat-cutting diagrams, big game, sports cars) or slogans (BARBECUE BOSS, MASTER CHEF). Today, when women are allowed to use the outdoor grill, you can buy his and hers versions of this apron with similar legends.
There are, of course, some aprons that do not embarrass men, including the leather ones worn by woodworkers and other craftsmen, and the carpenters’ aprons hung with tools. There are the aprons of grocery employees: the cashier’s tie-on vests, the butchers’ heavy-weight bloodied canvas, white or sometimes a light brown that helps to conceal the stains of dried blood. Gardeners may wear serious wrap-around aprons with high bibs and deep pockets for tools and seeds. As women took up these professions, they adopted the uniforms, or others like them: the light-weight gardening smock suitable for cutting flowers and bedding out plants, though not for serious digging, also suggests the working costume of a painter, and conveys the idea that gardening is an art form. Domestic cooks once always wore stiff, starched white aprons with high bibs and long straps that crossed in back; today they are mainly sold by firms that outfit servants and professional chefs.
All these costumes can also be seen on television shows, where their colors often vary according to the subject matter: TV gardeners favor green or tan aprons, suggesting leaves or earth, while TV cooks seem to prefer yellow and cream, suggesting butter and cheese, rather than the white of hired help, though Julia Child, who was supremely confident of her social status, used to wear a big white chef’s apron on her TV show.
Waiters and waitresses, both in real life and on TV, wear aprons that are carefully chosen to express the ambiance of the establishment from the bright gingham ruffles of the ice-cream parlor to the discreet dark rectangles, heavy with pockets for tips, of the expensive restaurant. Both men and women who work in hairdressing prefer smocks, color-coordinated to the ambiance of the establishment—black for the serious high-end establishment, pink for the friendly local beauty salon. But though they often look stylish, these garments are also practical: spot-resistant, hair-shedding, washable, and well-equipped with pockets.
At the other extreme from all this is what might be called the imitation apron, which doesn’t really protect its wearer from anything. Usually it is a kind of tiny, frilly creation of flounced silk or crisp ruffled cotton, with a big bow and sometimes flyaway streamers. These concoctions used to be known as “hostess aprons,” and were often worn by women who had played no part in preparing a meal. In other cases, they signaled a switch of roles; when one of my mother’s friends was cooking for a party, she would wear a big, practical bib apron; then, when guests were about to arrive, she would whip it off and put on a perfectly laundered and ironed miniature substitute. This wisp of cloth was not exactly a lie, because she really had made the dinner, but it suggested that she had done so effortlessly and without the slightest injury to her clothes.
Today, almost no hostess wears a hostess apron. If she did, it would be seen as a kind of camp gesture: a mock-assumption of old-fashioned femininity. Pretty, totally useless aprons are worn only by maids in French farces and soft-porn films, though they may perhaps be seen in the privacy of the home. If the separation of the sexes is seen as desirable and attractive, certain sorts of apron, not all completely useless from a practical point of view, may seem sexy. Back in the 1950s, one guide to pleasing and keeping a husband suggested that you meet him at the front door in the evening with his favorite alcoholic drink on a tray, wearing only high heels and a semi-transparent little apron. If a wife today were to try this trick, substituting her modern barbecue apron, the effect would be very different—though some might get away with it as a joke.
Like all clothes, aprons may have a symbolic as well as a practical function. To wear one over visible clothes allows you to say two things at once. The underlying getup makes a statement about who you are in “real life”; the apron announces that just for the moment you are also a cook, a gardener, or an artist, and it also says something about the value you assign to this temporary role. On TV cooking shows, not only are the aprons obviously carefully chosen and expensive, but expensive outfits are often visible underneath, to remind us that the presenter is not a servant but a highly paid professional performer.
Recently a friend told me that she never wears an apron; she just wraps “some old rag” around her waist. Is she saying that, for her, cooking is a ratty, unpleasant job? And, if so, would it really be a good idea to go to her house for dinner?
The Mystery of Knitting
Knitting is a kind of domestic magic. I first suspected this as a child when I watched my mother turn a one-dimensional substance—a long red woolen string—into two and finally three dimensions: a stocking cap for my doll, with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands, in fairy stories. And it wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The women who could perform this magic were, in everyday life, everyday humans; but when they picked up their wands they became practitioners of a secret art. The same thing happened in my books. In “The
Six Swans,” from the Grimms’ Household Tales, for instance, six princes are changed into birds by their wicked stepmother. Their sister can break the spell by knitting magical shirts for them out of flowers; she does not quite finish in time, however, and the youngest brother returns to human shape with a swan’s wing instead of his left arm.
Of course, this folktale can be read as a kind of allegory. Women have attempted for hundreds of years to transform wild, free-ranging men into affectionate domestic creatures with the help of hand-made garments, and have sometimes succeeded. Popular culture and advertising have kept the idea alive. “He’ll love you more if you knit for him!” cried a yarn manufacturer in the 1950s, and Seventeen magazine, calling up a rather spooky image, twittered, “You can knit that man right out of your life or—better advice—you can knit one right in.”
My mother, like most of her friends, knew how to knit, but she preferred sewing, and made charming clothes for my and my sister’s dolls on her old Singer treadle sewing machine. When I was seven, she tried to teach me how to knit, but without success. Under her reluctant instruction I managed about twelve inches of a lumpy scarf in alternating wobbly stripes of ugly brown and canary-yellow wool. Then I gave up, and for several years refused to try again.
My mother was of Scottish descent, and always unwilling to waste anything. She took over the wool and created an afghan of alternating brown and yellow squares. It lasted a long time, and was loved by my younger sister and eventually by both her children and mine. For one of them it temporarily became a beloved and comforting “blankie,” or, as psychologists call it, a “transitional object.”
Eventually a friend of my mother’s managed to teach me to knit in the rapid European method, in which the yarn is held in the left hand and there is less movement of the arms. My first project was also a scarf, but this time a more successful one, in a soft blue wool.
Of the domestic handicrafts, knitting is both the most magical and the simplest. It is also probably very old. Few ancient examples have survived, though some socks from Egypt are believed to date from the eleventh century. Archaeologists have found many more woven than knitted textiles, but it seems likely that knitting and crocheting pre-date weaving. Weaving, after all, demands a settled environment and bulky equipment in the form of a loom. Knitting requires little in the way of equipment and can be carried about from place to place and combined with other tasks such as homework or watching small children. It does not demand strong light or a steady hand, and would therefore be well suited to nomadic people who followed the migrations of game or the seasonal ripening of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
By the late Middle Ages knitting was well-established, and widespread. A fourteenth-century painting by Bertram von Minden shows the Virgin Mary finishing up what looks like a small pink short-sleeved top, presumably for her young son. Weavers and seamstresses worked sitting down, but it is possible to knit while standing, or even while walking. You can do it when it is too dark to sew, something that was especially important before the invention of electricity. Knitting wasn’t just a hobby, as it often is today, but an essential household craft. Either you made socks, scarves, and sweaters for yourselves and your family, or you went without. Shepherds and shepherdesses traditionally knit as they watched their flocks, and there are many seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century paintings of women in peasant dress knitting, often while standing up.
Since it did not demand physical strength, knitting was something you could do at any age, and to judge by the art of the period, the very young and the very old were frequent knitters. Some not only supplied their families but made goods for sale, including fine silk stockings for the rich. Young Knitter Asleep, by the eighteenth-century French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze, shows a little girl six or seven years old who has dozed off over this monotonous task.
Crochet, patterns for which first appeared in the early nineteenth century, was at first a very different kind of handicraft. It belonged to what was often called “fancywork,” which included tatting, tapestry, and embroidery. The important thing about fancywork was that it was both artistic and unnecessary. It was the leisure occupation of well-to-do women who did not have to create anything essential. Instead they demonstrated their taste and skill by making decorative objects: embroidered handkerchiefs and slippers, lace for edgings and trimmings, little net purses, doilies and runners for tables, and antimacassars for sofas and chairs. Knitting was practical and plebian; fancywork was prestigiously useless and ladylike.
In nineteenth-century fiction, very often, good women knit and bad women do fancywork. In Jane Austen’s Emma, the long-suffering good girl, Jane Fairfax, is a dedicated knitter, as is her aunt, Miss Bates. Emma herself does not knit. Hester in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is a self-supporting single mother who knits and sews for a living. In Vanity Fair, Thackeray’s anti-heroine, Becky Sharp, practices fine “netting” in order to show off her long white fingers and catch her chosen fish, Josiah Smedley.
In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Levin’s loyal and lovable wife, Kitty, knits while she is in labor with her first child. Anna herself, on the other hand, crochets nervously as she confronts her love, Count Vronsky, who has just returned from a party:
“You don’t know what I have suffered waiting for you [she says]. I believe I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous. I believe you when you’re here; but when you’re away somewhere leading your life, so incomprehensible to me… .” She turned away from him, pulled the hook at last out of the crochet work, and rapidly, with the help of her forefinger, began working loop after loop of the wool that was dazzlingly white in the lamplight, while the slender wrist moved swiftly, nervously in the embroidered cuff.
American domestic history took place to the accompaniment of the steady clicking of thousands of needles and crochet hooks: wood, bone, steel, and plastic. Pioneer women report knitting by firelight and on the swaying seats of covered wagons, and knitters still often carry their work with them: even today you will see them at work on long plane or train journeys. From the Colonial period on, directions for knitting projects in newspapers and magazines followed current trends. The practical shawls and heavy wool socks of the early settlers and Western pioneers were supplemented in the Victorian era by fluffy, light-weight wraps and lacy scarves with names like “The Cloud” and “The Fascinator.”
In the 1920s, daring flappers made themselves little cloche hats and “hug-me-tight” sweaters; during the Depression and World War II, there was a fashion for dark knitted wool dresses and suits which resembled a kind of protective armor against the (often literally) cold world. After the war, knitting became softer and lighter again, and directions for clothing the baby boom were everywhere: it was now possible, and fashionable, to knit a complete layette, plus sweaters with Scandinavian designs, for your husband and older children. In the counterculture 60s and 70s, knitting became a quick, cheap way to look cool and young: directions for creating big loose-fringed shawls and multicolored vests and afghans in flower patterns were everywhere: I and my friends made many of them.
Whenever there was a war, though, knitting became virtuous and practical as well as, or instead of, decorative. At intervals over the last three hundred years, thousands of American women attached themselves to balls of navy-blue, gray, and khaki yarn, and as the New York Times put it, “Armies Marched on Hand-Knit Socks.” In Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, both Jo and Beth knit for the troops. Beth knits happily and uncomplainingly, though when her father’s letter from camp is read aloud, she becomes weepy and pauses. But then “she wiped away her tears with the long blue army sock, and began to knit again with all her might.” Jo’s reaction is different.
“It’s bad enough to be a girl, anyway [she says], when I like boy’s games and work and manners. I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy. And it’s worse than ever now, for I’m dying to go and fight with Papa. and I can only stay h
ome and knit, like a poky old woman!” And Jo shook the blue army sock till the needles rattled like castanets, and her ball bounded across the room.
The tradition of patriotic knitting continued for years. During World War I, President Wilson marched down Fifth Avenue ahead of a six-mile-long procession of Red Cross workers, some of them beating on tin buckets with knitting needles, and others carrying poles adorned with hand-knit military socks, now khaki instead of blue. In the last years of World War II, when I and my friends were in college, we were recruited as knitters, and met weekly in a Unitarian Church in Cambridge. I still remember the hanks of heavy, slightly oily khaki yarn we were issued, and the blurred greenish mimeographed patterns for scarves and socks. The more expert knitters among us were also able to produce thick gloves, and mud-colored khaki helmets that covered the entire head and neck except for eye- and mouth-holes, a style now seen mostly on skiers and people who hold up drugstores. When I arrived on my first day as a volunteer and was met by a figure wearing one of these death’s-heads, I was for a moment terrified.
In fact, this apparition should have been no surprise; the association between knitting and death is a persistent one. Readers of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness will remember the two women, one young and one old, who sit silently knitting black wool in the office of the company that is about to send his hero Marlowe to the Congo. As Marlowe looks at the older of the two, he tells us:
An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing continually to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes. Ave! Old knitter of black wool, Morituri te salutant. Not many of those she looked at ever saw her again—not half, by a long way.
