Spinning Wheels

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the eighteenth century, the spinning wheel’s motion facilitated the metaphor of an invisible, active spinning wheel inside the human mind. The spinning wheel’s resonance in Irish oral poetry, song, and printed literature shows the object’s particular affordance for feminist readings of Irish literature. The communal and widespread tradition of spinning songs gave Irish spinners the opportunity to voice subversive concepts that challenged social gender norms. Similarly, eighteenth-century Ulster poetry invokes the spinning wheel as an extension of the female spinner’s sexualized body and contemplative mind. Sarah Leech’s Poems on Various Subjects (1828) documents a real spinner-poet who used her wheel to justify the publication of her own inner musings. This chapter also uses the feminist materiality of spinning in Sydney Owenson’s Florence Macarthy (1818) to defend Owenson’s underappreciated style as a novelist. The Banim Brothers’ novel The Croppy builds on Owenson’s model by literalizing the significance of Irish material subversion and female agency.