Lately I watched a spree of films with knitting scenes in them, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Shipping News and Ladies in Lavender. To recap each of the actors in their respective knitting scenes; in Breakfast at Tiffany’s we see Audrey Hepburn knitting in the famous ‘I may be knitting a ranch house’ scene, in The Shipping News we see Julianne Moore knitting on the sofa during an evening she spends with the Kevin Spacey character, while in Ladies in Lavender Judi Dench is busy in several scenes knitting a sock for the young foreigner washed up on the shore outside her home.

Whilst the spectacle of women knitting is something I see very often in real life, I haven’t ever seen much of it on film before and am interested in the conventions and ideas surrounding the cinematic use of knitting. Although the three films I’m talking about here are quite different from each other, there are some wider themes that seem common to all three films. Romantic or sexual unfulfilment (and interest,) whimsy and differing portraits of spinsterhood run through all three films in various ways. Knitting seems to be used throughout all three films to emphasise or describe these aspects of female experience even though the eras, the plotlines, the film genres and the female characters all differ vastly from one another.

Knitting character #1: Wavey Prowse

Knitting project: Unknown
Knitting location: On sofa in own house
Knitting mood: pensive/hopeful
Notable aspects of knitting character: Widow, mother to disabled child, local school teacher
Knitter’s potential love interest: Quoyle

Wavey Prowse plays a grieving ‘widow’ in The Shipping News and describes her husband’s ‘death’ in an outburst to Quoyle, the film’s principal character;

“Herold…my husband, he didn’t die. Not that he didn’t deserve to. He left me when I was eight months pregnant; no good to him in bed. So I took his -footer out into the bay, cracked the hull with a hatchet and sunk her and pretended he was drowned and played the grieving widow and packed my bags to leave town. But then a funny thing happened. All these folk I grew up with they put their hearts around me and Herry so we wouldn’t be alone. And I just couldn’t leave.”

The film is centrally about Quoyle’s tortured quest to find himself and reconcile himself with the past but the relationship he has with Wavey Prowse provides a lot of the redemption and hope that he needs after the death of his first wife. On screen, Prowse and Quoyle’s interactions are peppered with a mix of enjoyment and fear; their happiness is fragile and both of them are haunted by previous heartbreak. When Quoyle first sees Prowse she is seen dressed in black and striding along the road with her disabled son. She cuts a striking, powerful figure and Quoyle comments on this;

‘I’ve seen her around. She’s very tall. I… I mean she… she’s got good posture. She seems very… her stride is different.’

Is the knitting scene in the film used to underline this sense of a proud yet lonely spinster?

Knitting is perhaps also used in the film to convey ideas surrounding domesticity and the home. There is a marked difference between the quietitude of Wavey Prowse’s house and the wild restlessness of the old Quoyle house that is the other notable domestic scene in the film. Where the old Quoyle house is full of loud and troubled ghosts, Wavey Prowse’s home seems to offer a contrastingly peaceful haven. Is the knitting used to emphasise the sense of comfort apparently evident to Quoyle?

Finally it’s probably important to note that much of Quoyle’s ‘new start’ in Newfoundland revolves around re-connecting to the traditions and ancestry of his homeland. Perhaps the knitting is used as a way of depicting a more ‘traditional’ way of life, or to convey a sense of Prowse’s self-sufficiency. So perhaps the knitting is introduced to give us a sense of Wavey Prowse’s connection to local traditions and crafts.

Whether the knitting is introduced as a dramatic device to suggest warm domesticity, a characterising device to convey spinster-like qualities or a contextualising device to convey ideas of traditionalism, in the instance of Wavey Prowse knitting, I feel we are offered a vignette that does little to contradict conventional notions surrounding knitting.

Knitting character #2: Holly Golightly

Knitting project: Unknown/possibly a ranch house
Knitting location: in own house on quite large needles
Knitting mood: divinely happy (by the knitter’s own admission.)
Notable aspects of knitting character: free-spirited socialite
Knitter’s potential love interest(s): Paul Varjak (writer) and others

Holly Golightly clearly lives in a very different social and geographical situation to Wavey Prowse. Living in New York city and socialising with various characters her life couldn’t be more different to life in tough, rural Newfoundland but she nonetheless also has a fractured marriage lying in the past behind her and is also engaged in a slightly difficult and understated onscreen romantic dalliance. Where Wavey Prowse and Quoyle find affinity through their previous experiences of heartbreak and emotional pain, Golightly and Varjak base their ‘platonic’ friendship on a mutual understanding of rich patronage and living from questionable sources of income; the basis for affinity in both cases is shared grievance.

Like Prowse, Golightly also displays self-reliance, assuring Varjak that she doesn’t need anyone to take care of her. But unlike in the case of Wavey Prowse’s knitting, Holly Golightly’s knitting is less likely to have been used as a dramatic device to depict this aspect of her character. Where Wavey Prowse lives with her child and seemingly maintains a nurturing environment for herself and her son, Golightly struggles to maintain any sense of order in her home. Golightly’s knitting is indicative of the character’s aspirations towards unattainable domestic ideals and doesn’t imply great competence on the part of Ms Golightly. In the same scene where she admits she isn’t certain of what she is knitting, she also blows up whatever she’s cooking in the pressure cooker and her and Varjak are forced to go out to eat.

I’ve taken up knitting…I’m a little nervous about it. Jose brought up the blueprints for a new ranch house he’s building. I have this strange feeling that the blueprints and my knitting instructions got switched. I may be knitting a ranch house.

I’m struck by how the ranch house she hopes to move into with the man she plans on marrying is bought into the conversation along with Golightly’s knitting. The unformed state of the blueprint, the mixup of the knitting pattern and the blueprint and the blowing up of the meal in the pressure cooker all indicate, for me, the naive fragility of Holly Golightly’s ideas of future homely happiness. This fragility is emphasised when we learn that Golightly was once married (to Doc Golightly) and did have children, but left this life behind to pursue things in New York. One wonders what has changed between that life event and this, for the hoped-for marriage Golightly is discussing in the knitting scene to work out differently for her. Where Prowse’s knitting seems to be a cinematic device to indicate warm domesticity, spinster-like qualities or traditionalism, it has a solid, understated quality to it which Holly Golightly’s knitting does not have. We never know what Prowse is knitting or who the knitting is for, but as viewers we do not question the competence of her knitting or the usefulness of the finished garment.

Contrastingly, Golightly’s knitting inspires little confidence in the audience in her crafting capabilities. The knitting appears to be a self-conscious reference to the character’s domestic aspirations rather than evidence that she has actually become the settled-down wife that she apparently wishes to be. Knitting, like speaking portugese and cooking rice, is optimistically undertaken by Holly Golightly but we are not convinced by the authenticity of it as presented and contextualised within the film.

Holly Golightly’s knitting in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is therefore no less conventional in its use as a cinematic device than Wavey Prowse’s in The Shipping News. In her failure to competently distinguish between a ranch house blueprint and a knitting pattern and in the juxtaposition of this unfortunate confusion with the blowing up of the dinner, the inference is that knitting is intrinsically linked to a certain kind of lifestyle that Holly Golightly cannot ever seriously aspire to. There is something hapless and charming about Holly Golightly’s knitting that negates our ability to take her dreams of marriage and migration seriously, and indeed our suspicions are confirmed when the marriage is called off and she is forced to revise her plans.

Knitting character #3: Ursula

Knitting project: Socks for the young, foreign man
Knitting location: in and around house
Knitting mood: besotted
Notable aspects of knitting character: post-menopausal, possibly virginal spinster
Knitter’s potential love interest(s): young, foreign man (Musician)

Ursula, our final onscreen knitter, differs quite a lot from Holly Golightly and Wavey Prowse in that she is quite a lot older and her love interest is unlikely to ever reciprocate her feelings. Where it is inferred that Prowse and Golightly will eventually get to consummate their passions respectively with Quoyle and Varjak, we know from the offset that the handsome and talented young musician that washes up on the doorstep of Ursula and Janet will probably never return Ursula’s tender and complex feelings for him.

Ladies in Lavender is a beautifully understated and I think intelligent exploration of post-menopausal sexuality. Ursula and Janet, (sisters) live in an exclusively female domain with their employed domestic help, Dorcas. Their existence is depicted as genteel and civilised involving drinking cups of tea, listening to selected programmes on the wireless and taking afternoon naps. When young Andrea (a talented musician) is washed ashore and taken in by them to recover, the resulting flood of wild passions unleashed in Ursula in particular, is rendered onscreen in restrained and believable terms.

The socks that Ursula knits for the young man become representative of her complex feelings towards him. The knitting of the socks allows us to know that Ursula is thinking about Andrea whenever we see her working on them. As a small object that could be easily overlooked by her watchful sister, the knitting of the socks also appears to provide the perfect crafting focus for Ursula’s feelings. When she presents the socks to Andrea with a mixture of embarassment and girlish pride, we see him take them as from a doting mother, while she gives them to him like an enamoured beau.

Socks are the perfect knitting project for Ursula since they are not large enough to arouse suspicion and it is seemingly quite proper for an older lady, in a spree of maternal generosity, to make something so practical and useful for a man who has suffered the misfortune of shipwreck.

We can therefore suppose that the knitting is introduced as a dramatic device to articulate the conflicting forces of social propriety and surging devotion warring inside Ursula during Andrea’s stay in her home.

During the film we also see a dream sequence in which Ursula sees a younger, girl-like version of herself frolicking with Andrea. Her own face is replaced in the dream by the face of a much younger woman – Olga – who introduces Andrea to her brother and thereby leads him away from the home of the aging Janet and Ursula and into a life of musical acclaim. This dream sequence, coupled with a conversation Janet and Ursula have about Janet’s marriage collate to form a portrayal of unconsummated sexuality and unfulfilled desire and lead us to the conclusion that Ursula, having not really experienced the blisses of a satisfying sexual relationship, is now probably (given the social constraints of the time) too old to do so.

In this context Ursula’s knitting is inexorably linked to the cultural ideas of spinsterhood. We note that Janet, who was once married, does not feel the need to industriously pour her unconsummated passions for Andrea into sock-knitting; perhaps this is because she is not a true spinster in the same sense as Ursula.

But the other point about Ursula’s knitting is that it is probably used as much as with Wavey Prowse’s knitting, to convey traditions and activities of the period as anything else. As women living between wars in rural Cornwall, Ursula and Janet would undoubtedly have knitted.

But whether used as a focus for unfulfilled passions, a dramatic device to connote spinsterhood or a historic reference designed to more accurately reflect the films’ period, I feel that with Ursula’s knitting we are offered yet another vignette that does nothing to contradict conventional notions surrounding knitting.

These musings have led me to consider what kind of knitting film I would find genuinely reflective of the women I know who knit. I think some basic revisions to the films I’ve already cited would show that if you change the knitting, you change the entire characterisation of the lady in question.

For instance, as a woman entrenched in the culture of seafaring and fishing seen in Newfoundland, there is no reason why after the collapse of her first marriage, Wavey Prowse couldn’t have undertaken an ambitious, thematic knitting project. She could have been inspired by Debbie New and knit a Coracle with which to enjoy the bays on less stormy evenings, or have joined a local Stitch’n’Bitch group. Likewise, there is no need for Holly Golightly to have been incompetent with her knitting; if she had in fact been knitting a ranch house, she could have become a successful contemporary artist and gotten herself a major show in a New York gallery. Likewise, Ursula’s character would have seemed quite different if the knitting she had been absorbed in doing had been something for herself; perhaps a challenging Shetland shawl or something made from the yarn of pre-war, Cornish sheep breeds.

The trouble with these changes is that they would reduce the far greater plots that are the true focus of these films and make knitting central to each film.

But could a film with a knitter’s quest for self-determination, self-expression and some kind of ultimate knitting achievement ever comprise engaging and rich cinematic viewing in and of itself or will knitting always have to be merely an accessory to plots about other things? Given the ghosts of spinsterhood, unfulfilment, unattainment and domestic longings that seem to haunt the cinematic instances of knitting I’ve looked at briefly here, I certainly hope so.