Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stich” is a retelling of the classic children’s story “The Girl With The Green Ribbon” through a feminist lens. The woman at the center of this narrative is a representation and placeholder for the universal female experience. In the opening reading aloud instructions Machado states that all women’s voices are “interchangeable” with the narrator’s first-person perspective. From here, the reader can draw all that happens to the narrator as an argument for female experiences when it comes to relationships, boundaries, and personhood. All of these elements are symbolically represented by the green ribbon the narrator wears. The repetitive and increasingly violent ways the husband character tries to take off the woman’s ribbon throughout the relationship argues how patriarchal norms create a systemic devaluation of female autonomy and expectations of women as sex objects owned and controlled by men.
The husband character first notices the narrator’s ribbon after a sexually charged kiss. The recognition of the ribbon happens only after the narrator has been seen as a sexual object by a man. Since the ribbon serves as a symbol of the narrator’s autonomy, the story argues that female personhood is valued second to their sexual desirability. This isn’t even something the narrator seems opposed to, as she is conditioned by patriarchal societal norms to see her sexuality as a tool and as the most important aspect of herself as a woman. She does anything her man asks of her, and she usually does it with a sense of pride, “I tell him that I want him to use my body as he sees fit.” However, many of the sexual acts that happen in the piece are initiated and geared by and for the man, which makes the reader wonder how much the narrator enjoys sex and how much she feels like she needs to because of her gendered role. While we never learn much about what the narrator looks like or other details of her life, we do get extremely detailed descriptions of the sex her and her husband have. The narrator believes, due to patriarchy and her husband’s wants, that she is first a sex object, and second a fully envisioned person.
This is even set up in the boundaries she sets early in the relationship. The first rule is the husband character cannot finish inside of her and the second is that he cannot touch her ribbon. Her first rule regards her sexuality while her second rule regards and protects her personhood. Ultimately, the husband breaks both of these boundaries, which goes to show that under patriarchy, female boundaries aren’t seen as important as the man’s desires. This is shown multiple times in the story, mainly in the form of repetition to show how much the ideas of the ribbon, and by extension, the narrator’s autonomy and choices are questioned.
When the pair are married the questioning of the ribbon gets more intense as the husband feels like he is entitled to this part of his wife. Marriage brings in elements of ownership that aren’t present before they are married, drawing on collective feminine fears that they will lose their autonomy and sense of self in marriage. The husband respects the boundary of not touching the ribbon while the pair are dating and it is only on their wedding day that the he begins to touch the ribbon and alarmingly, each time he tries to becomes increasingly violent and violating:
He startles me, then, running his hand around my throat. I put up my hands to stop him but he uses his strength, grabbing my wrists with one hand as he touches the ribbon with the other. He presses the silky length with his thumb. He touches the bow delicately, as if he is massaging my sex. “Please,” I say. “Please don’t.”
Only shortly after this first violation of her symbolic person and womanhood, the husband literally violates her after she gives birth when he asks for the doctor to give her a husband stich and follows through with it after his wife begs him not to. These incidents being directly next to each other are intrinsically tied together. The touching of the ribbon is what gives him the audacity and perceived authority to authorize a direct violation of her body. After this he is only spurred on more to try to untie the ribbon and makes calculated efforts to do so in the middle of intimate acts. This is a terrifyingly direct metaphor for spousal sexual abuse, and perverts the narrator’s primary mode of viewing herself, which is her sexuality.
In one of these encounters, the husband also uses emotional manipulation and guilt tripping when it comes to the ribbon, despite agreeing to the rule she set about it years prior. He sees the ribbon as “A secret” and believes that “A wife should have no secrets from her husband.” In reality, the ribbon is just her personhood, or as the narrator explains in the story, “It is not a secret; it’s just mine.” The husband’s inability to let the ribbon be illustrates men’s inability to perceive their wives or women in general as autonomous beings. Anything that is not meant for them is seen as secretive and wrong. It is inconceivable to the husband that the wife could want to have anything that does not belong to him.
Ultimately, the husband’s desire “to know” about this part of his wife, and about what is what kills her. Her sacrifice illustrates how the complete control of women eventually kills off all parts of them, which here is represented by her head literally falling off. She states to feel, “as lonely as [she has] ever been” thus resolving that for women to have no personhood and autonomy is a worse fate and a worse, less understandable, loneliness than death itself.
Rachel Loring 