SOURCE: Durham, Carolyn A. “The Subversive Stitch: Female Craft, Culture, and Ecriture.” Women's Studies 17, nos. 3-4 (1990): 341-59.

In the following essay, Durham evaluates Cardinal's comparison between the art of embroidery and traditional feminine roles in male-dominated society, commenting that the protagonist's efforts in Le Passé empiété “ultimately justif[y a theory of female realism in art.”]

By making an embroiderer her central narrative voice and embroidery both the structural and the thematic focus of her most recent novel (Le Passé empiété [The Back Stitch]), Marie Cardinal complements Rozsika Parker's efforts (The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine) to trace the parallel histories of embroidery and femininity through the novel. For both Parker and Cardinal, embroidery figures the creative tension between conformity and subversion that Cardinal posits as common to all women and that results in Le Passé empiété in a complex reevaluation...