Silence and fecundity in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her body and other parties”

Więckowska, Katarzyna

doi:10.12775/lc.2020.037

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Machado writes the tale of Bluebeard into her work using retellings such as "The Husband Stitch", the fairy-tale chapter "Dream House as the Queen and the Squid", and her essayistic comments on Bluebeard and intimate partner violence in her memoir. As Katarzyna Więckowska (2020) states, "[i]n Machado's narrative universe, stories repeatedly turn into other stories and proliferate to uncover otherness in the known" (p. 83). Machado draws on the same fairy tales of abused and silenced women throughout her work and thereby shows the need to continue (re-)telling and critically examining these tales in light of the ongoing violence against women in real life.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

Jesussek

2023

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This paper examines the gothic fairy tale in Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House and short story “The Husband Stitch” with a focus on Bluebeard’s insistent presence and the interweaving of reality, gothic horror, and fairy tale. In the memoir, Machado restages her experience of queer intimate partner violence in the form of a gothic fairy tale as “The Queen and the Squid”, reminiscent of the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife. By including gothic fairy-tale elements in the autobiographical text, Machado blurs the boundaries between the fictional and non-fictional realm, between her story and that of Bluebeard’s latest wife, thereby rewriting the tale for a queer context. The annotation of the memoir using Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature further superimposes the fairy tale onto Dream House. Machado’s short story “The Husband Stitch” is a gender-aware inversion of “Bluebeard”. The reappearance of the tale throughout Machado’s work reveals the persistence of abusive behavioral patterns in relationships to the present day. Machado’s intertextual storytelling blurs the lines between autobiographical events and the tale of Bluebeard’s latest wife, creating a shared narrative universe of experiences of women who have dealt with their own iteration of Bluebeard.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

Jesussek

2023

Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Silence and fecundity in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Her body and other parties”

Cited by 1 publication

References 2 publications

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

The Tales of Bluebeard’s Wives: Carmen Maria Machado’s Intertextual Storytelling in In the Dream House and “The Husband Stitch”

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