Hope Leslie: Personification 1 key example

"Woof" is a term related to the art of weaving. When a weaver makes fabric, they start with a bunch of threads stretched lengthwise over a loom, running parallel to one another. These threads are called the "warp." The weaver then weaves more threads through the warp to create the fabric. The threads in the second set are called the "woof" or "weft." They also run parallel to one another, and they are most often woven through perpendicular to the warp. Before any of this can happen, the threads themselves must be spun from raw fibers. For instance, a spinner can use a spindle to turn sheep's wool into thread.

In this metaphor, the narrative about Hope is the thread that eventually turns into the "woof of her destiny." The metaphor is complex and has several implicit as well as explicit parts. First of all, the narrative itself is neither warp nor woof, but rather thread: it is the raw material that is going to form the woof. Importantly, the narrator does not suggest that the narrative is the raw material for the warp: the warp, in this metaphor, seems to be strung onto the loom already, waiting for the narrative to be woven into it. The first several pages of the chapter have been taken up by what the narrator calls a "long skipping-place." It is a general description of the way the Puritans treated the Sabbath. No narrative events actually happen here, but the historical description seems to function like threads stretched out across a loom so that narrative might be woven in. If narrative is the woof of Hope's destiny, history seems to be the warp.

The narrator or "historian" is clearly the one operating the loom in this metaphor, but she gives herself a passive role by personifying the "eight days" that have passed as though they are the spinner who has "glided away without supplying" any threads appropriate to the woof of Hope's destiny. This instance of personification allows the narrator to play with the boundary between history and fiction: Hope is a fictional character, and yet there is a sense here that the narrator's creative power is limited. Only events that fit into the warp of history can be woven in.

The sense that the narrator is part of an assembly line of history and storytelling is also connected to capitalism and industrialization. By the time Sedgwick was writing, industrial machines had made it possible to automate the process of fabric-making. Automation and division of labor had both made it far less common than it had been before for one person to make fabric from start to finish. Sedgwick is suggesting here that writing a historical romance is similar. She boosts her credibility as a "historian" by suggesting that she is not making all this up from scratch, but rather that she is handling the small task of weaving Hope's preexisting story into a preexisting history. All the materials were there, and Sedgwick simply helps turn them from disparate parts into fabric.