Women Unravelled

Women Unravelled is a project that uses classic novels to understand more about the evolving identity of women. In this project, I analyse the portrayal of female protagonists in three 19th century novels: Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Through different colours of stitches, I give life to each character and draw her outside of the authors’ context. I attempt to rework the text by exploring its fact and fiction by reading against the grain and sorting through the messy, knotted identity of women. I examine the characters through tweaking themes to fit the disparate realities and styles of the authors’ writing. This data-driven approach to character dissection makes it a unique visualisation project. I use stitching as a visual metaphor for the historical domestication of women, and the types of stitching reflect the control and suppression that is tangled up in their identities. The Index book allows the reader to connect and read the right stitched line in the novel with the original sentence that is underneath the stitches to understand the method of categorising.