Bodies, Storytelling & Magical Realism in Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties
A strange and bewitching collection of short stories, Carmen Maria Machado’s debut Her Body and Other Parties is unsettling, sensual, and intimate. At times, when reading, I felt so involved within the story that it was uncomfortable, like having my personal space invaded. At other moments, however, I felt distant, like I was observing the story from above, incompetent and frustrated at being unable to anticipate the final outcome. And this feeling of detachment is one that’s shared by the women in the stories, too. Machado delves into the relationship between contemporary women and their bodies, and the ways in which female agency is so closely tied to embodiment.
In the story “Real Women Have Bodies”, Machado describes a world in which women become slowly invisible, they “can’t be touched but can stand on the earth, which means they must be lying about something, they must be deceiving us somehow”. “Eight Bites” describes a new weight-loss procedure that tricks women into eating miniscule amounts, yet “feeling only slightly empty, and fully content”. The protagonist of “Difficult at Parties”, a victim of sexual assault, begins hearing the thoughts of characters in porn. The dystopian “Inventory” is one of the shorter of the book’s stories at just ten pages, and tells the story of a woman’s sexual encounters with men and women during the time of a fast-spreading plague transmitted through human contact. Each brief log into this inventory explores the nuances of human connection, and the importance of intimacy in an apocalyptic world where the only way to stay alive is to stay apart. By grounding these stories in the body, Machado breaks down any barriers — real or metaphorical — between individuals and allows for a more inclusive and encompassing exploration of female experience.
A couple of the stories in this collection kind of went over my head. “Mothers” gives an exploration of an abusive relationship and a child that may or may not exist, whereas “Especially Heinous” consists of 272 episode synopses of the TV show Law & Order: SVU, rewritten to take place in the margins between reality and the supernatural. I felt the latter to be slightly too long for such a specific and splintered concept, and wish this story hadn’t been included in the collection mainly because I found it so difficult to connect with, but this might have been different were I at all familiar with the show.
The first story of the collection, “The Husband Stitch”, is available to read online here through Granta and is easily the strongest and most affecting of the collection. Machado loosely retells the fable “The Green Ribbon”, narrating a woman’s efforts to deter her husband, and later her son, from untying the green ribbon that is constantly tied around her neck. What I really love about this story is the relationship Machado builds between herself and the reader. At the beginning, she writes:
(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
ME: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
THE BOY WHO WILL GROW INTO A MAN, AND BE MY SPOUSE: robust with serendipity.
MY FATHER: kind, booming; like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
MY SON: as a small child, gentle, sounding with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
ALL OTHER WOMEN: interchangeable with my own.)
The rest of the story is littered with similar narrative interventions, some simple, advising how to recreate the same sound that she describes (“If you are reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its hinges”). Others, however, are far more gruesome (“give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb. Afterward, thank them”). Blurring the boundaries between oral tradition and literacy, these moments echo the fairytale tradition which Machado revisits throughout the whole collection. In breaking down the barrier between reader and story, Machado unsettles and disturbs readers, engaging them directly. By forcing you to properly engage with the senses and feelings, it’s extremely difficult to disengage and reinforces a kind of inherent connection between female solidarity and storytelling.
It’s extremely difficult to disengage and reinforces a kind of inherent connection between female solidarity and storytelling.
In fact, the genealogy of storytelling plays a huge role in “The Husband Stitch”. Machado weaves in other fables and tales throughout the story, each exploring female experience in different eerie ways. One tells of a young girl who makes the three fatal mistakes a woman can make: scoffing, pride, and being right. Another describes a young orphaned girl raised by wolves. A girl’s mother dies on a mother-daughter trip to Paris, but nobody believes her. A woman cuts out her own liver to satisfy her husband. A young couple kiss in a car.
When you think about it, stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. Each is borne from the clouds separate, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.
One of my favourite aspects of the collection is Machado’s use of magical realism. A central critical debate surrounding magical realism revolves around its basis in Latin American culture, and whether or not it has been appropriated as such by non-Hispanic authors. This idea comes out of the argument that magical realism was a direct outcome of postcolonialism and the hybridity present in this genre can relate to some opposing traditions that postcolonial Latin American people had to come to terms with, such as Western and indigenous traditions. By employing magical realism and storytelling in “The Husband Stitch”, Machado — who has Cuban heritage and cites Gabriel García Marquez as one of her strongest influences — directly references her own culture. And by using magical realism to tell stories that are quite obvious in their Western settings, Machado breaks down some of those perceptions of the origins of magical realism.
I think that it is these interwoven stories along with the narrative interventions that made this story have such an effect on me. The plot and themes of “The Husband Stitch” are interesting to me on their own — love, sex, disbelief of women, power structures, lies — but by involving it in the cultural tradition of oral history and storytelling, Machado grips her readers and she tries — and succeeds — to convince us this could be a story about any of us.
