28 pages • 56 minutes read
Carmen Maria MachadoHer Body and Other Parties
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 1 Summary: “The Husband Stitch”
The protagonist, who remains unnamed, meets her future husband at a party when she is 17. She identifies in him a willingness to meet her most perverted sexual desires. The couple unabashedly meets each other’s fantasies with only two conditions: He will not ejaculate inside of her, and he agrees not to touch her green ribbon, which she wears around her throat. The first rule is broken moments before they walk down the aisle to be married.
Over time, the protagonist’s husband allows his curiosity about her ribbon to grow, violently touching it from time to time. Less than a year after they are married, the protagonist bears a son. During the first years of his life, the son is sweet and gentle. However, after seeing the protagonist’s husband attempt to touch the ribbon, the little boy tries to do the same. The protagonist forbids her son to touch her ribbon, and her son becomes upset. After this incident, the protagonist notes, “Something is lost between us, and I never find it again” (21).
While her son is at school and her husband is at work, the protagonist enrolls in an art class. She meets other women who have ribbons, but in different places on their bodies. She finds herself attracted to one of her classmates. They go for coffee, but, frightened of her same-sex attraction, the protagonist never returns to class again.
When their son goes off to college, the protagonist and her husband make love like they did when they were young. Afterward, her husband attempts to touch her ribbon once more. Though the protagonist feels afraid and betrayed, she lets him. Her head rolls off of her body and on to the floor.
Story 1 Analysis: “The Husband Stitch”
The protagonist’s struggle against her husband to keep her green ribbon intact, and consequently to keep herself alive, points to the difficulty of female agency even in self-protection. Her husband’s insistence on touching the ribbon throughout the relationship, and the constant threat that the protagonist endures, flesh out the book’s theme of male dominance and male entitlement and lay the groundwork for the theme of female oppression. The protagonist eventually bends to the well of her husband’s desire for her ribbon, and her doing so serves as a metaphor for the sacrifices that women make for men.
“The Husband Stitch” uses fairytales to illustrate the ways male dominance and subsequent female oppression have been embedded in the very stories that parents have passed down to their children for centuries. The protagonist constantly refers to fairytales during unsettling times, though instead of finding comfort in them, she only finds other examples of women like her who have perished at the hands of male entitlement. The theme of male entitlement is further emphasized through the protagonist’s son’s loss of innocence: the moment when he learns to exert his masculine power over his mother and their bond is broken forever. However, in this scene, the protagonist blames her own self-preservation for this severed bond, illustrating how women internalize male dominance.
“The Husband Stitch” glides over the motif of queer desire, highlighting the shame of queer desire and hinting at its repression due to heteronormative conventions. Machado shows how the protagonist’s queer desire is instrumentalized to fulfill her husband’s fantasy but never consummated for herself.
