Machado opens “The Husband Stitch,” the first in her collection of short stories entitled Her Body and Other Parties with a cast of voices that reads, “(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices)” and proceeds to describe the Narrator, her eventual spouse, her father, her son, and other women. By aligning the unreliable Narrator with a classical monster and employing elements such as the grotesque in describing her sexual appetite and notorious green ribbon, Machado creates a fragmented postmodern horror story that satirizes the loss of a woman’s autonomy under the patriarchal thumb.

The Narrator takes the form of a monstrous-feminine, placing her firmly in the company of other engendered monsters, such as Medusa, particularly through her overt sexuality. The author, Carmen Maria Machado, guides her character through a bildungsroman horror maze filled with patriarchal gender constructs and castration anxiety, which results in the husband beheading the Narrator in the finale. Presented in the first-person, “The Husband Stitch” traces the heteronormative narrative of an unnamed woman who meets and marries her husband and bears a child before passing in an unexpected manner. My interpretation ends in the finale as, like Medusa, the Narrator’s husband beheads her, resulting in the satirical conclusion that the perfect patriarchal woman dies as soon as she is created. To this end, I align the Narrator with Medusa through secondary research, marking her as an archetypal monster through her overt sexuality, pregnancy, and green ribbon. Machado describes the Narrator’s sexuality with grotesque and abject terms, separating her from the patriarch’s preferred sexual and domestic compliances. The Narrator presents her unreliability and evasiveness through a metanarrative cast of voices that identifies males as evolving beings while women remain in stasis.

The bildungsroman narrative follows an unnamed woman who struggles with the slow decline of her autonomy, which includes her husband and her obstetrician mutilating her vagina with the eponymous husband stitch. This literary analysis of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” reinterprets women who exist outside patriarchal prescripts. Department of English, University of Texas at San Antonio

Synopsis of her body and other parties