Cultural Practices as Forms of Resilience and Agency in Tracy Chevalier's "A Single Thread"

Abstract

This article discusses Tracy Chevalier’s A Single Thread (2019), with an emphasis on the parallels between the writer’s interest in women’s resilient experiences, which lead to individual and community agency, and the role played in these by cultural practices such as embroidery and bell-ringing. Chevalier’s focus is on the interwar period and its closeness to totalitarianism. Based on aspects from the theory of resilience (Cyrulnik 2006; Herman 1992; Vanistendael 2003), this article explores how the uses and meanings associated with cultural practices can turn them into resources for modulating grief and mobilising such resilience and agency in women’s lives, both from an individual and a social perspective. This article also considers that an understanding of Chevalier’s oeuvre can be of help in shaping future scholarly research on this writer.