Middle English texte, from Old French, from Late Latin textus, written account, from Latin, structure, context, body of a passage, from past participle of texere, to weave, fabricate

[Text in TheFreeDictionary.com ]

As its ethymology clearly shows the word “text” implies the idea of weaving, as if the stories it tells and the characters it describes are the result of a complex intermingling and juxtaposition of manifold threads.

Following up to this metaphor, Christine Wilks – a British writer and web artist – develops one of her latest works, Fitting The Pattern, included in the last Electronic Literature Collection, vol. 2. She asks for our help for cutting cloth and sewing together the pieces to create a dress through which she tells us her story.

Her mother was a dressmaker and using her tools we learn a lot about their relationship. It’s an intimate autobiography in which Christine Wilks reveals and at the same time discovers herself to us. The underlying lesson she want to teach us is that as much we want to cut off our roots and grow up as if we were absolutely independent, this is just an illusion. She herself turned to film-making rejecting her mother’s work.

One night though she had a dream: she was using a sewing machine threaded with a 16mm film. Only later in the oniric world she realizes the light-exposed film will be useless. Do we really need Freud to explain this? Isn’t it just the inevitable connection that mother and daughter have by nature and that nothing can disparage, even the sharpest seem ripper.

In the first photograms of this hypermedia Flash story, you read about Christine’s adolescence and you perceive a sort of struggle she is trying to hold against her mother, just like every other teen-ager does. But then, just like every adult is bound to discover later on in his/her life, her mother’s imprinting is much stronger than she thought. Also, it turns out to be not an unbearable mark but the sign of the natural connection that links us to our origins, just like the necessary filament that keeps together the different parts of a beautiful dress.