Embroidering the tale: Reading Luce Irigaray reading Snow White

Spinning a yarn, embroidering a tale; as Marina Warner points out in her book on fairy tales, such metaphors betray an age-old link between storytelling and the traditional arts of women. 1 Indeed, as Warner suggests, the very process of working with thread and fabric is embedded in the tales themselves. Not only do fairy stories, with their predictable repetitions and detailed elaborations, structurally mimic the process of weaving thread into cloth, they also assume the rhythm and relationships of women's productive work in pre-modern times; in the sewing room or Spinnstube, work would continue without interruption as characters were embroidered and plot-lines spun from the threads of the spinsters' chatter. Even today, fairy stories assume an active audience, with their threadbare characterisations providing "gaps into which the listener may step.