Juan Ignacio López Calderon

Literary Analyses of “Girl,” “The Husband Stitch,” and “Help Me Find My Sister in the Land of the Dead”

“Starving in the Land of the Dead”

“I haven’t held my sister in so long, not since we were children. She is like something starving, an animal with too many bones, and she pushes against me” (Machado).

This simple yet powerful passage is from Carmen María Machado’s striking short story, “Help Me Find My Sister in the Land of the Dead.” The story is told through the format of a Kickstarter campaign rather than a traditional narrative, and follows the relationship between two estranged sisters, Ursula and Olive. In a classic example of magical realism, Olive has decided to visit the Land of the Dead, which can be casually accessed (albeit by paying an expensive fee) by living beings in the story’s setting. Ursula, frustrated by her sister’s antics, decides to travel to the Land of the Dead and retrieve her sister herself, setting up a Kickstarter to receive the necessary funds to do so.

Through Ursula’s Kickstarter, the audience observes the sisters’ relationship as fractured and unstable, with Ursula stating that, aside from genetics, Olive is a “stranger” (Machado) and that one of her biggest regrets is having her for a sister.  Ursula’s many posts on her Kickstarter, create the impression of her as a disdainful, angry, yet at the same time unfulfilled person with little to show in terms of close relationships with others. Aside from examples of her obviously strained relationship with her sister and how much her sister frustrates her, we also see her cancel her wedding day and her general disdain for familial relations. Ursula mentions how her parents “fetishized” the very concept. Through all these examples, one can easily believe the sisters’ eventual reunion will be a negative, frustrating experience for both the straight-laced Ursula and the unpredictable Olive. However, instead we witness the utterly unexpected: an embrace.

This perfectly leads us into the selected passage, where Ursula describes Olive akin to a starving, bony animal, devoid of affection inside of its “stomach” and desperately holding on to her sister when they finally see each other eye to eye, Olive hiding in a recollected version of their childhood home. We see a moment from their childhoods reflecting the last time Ursula held Olive the same way she is doing at the moment; they were both trapped inside a gas station as a thunderstorm raged outside. This, alongside Olive’s description as thin and starving, allows us to truly glimpse what really ails the two sisters and their attempt at reconciliation: they’re both mostly empty, and are only able to fill each other up.

As part of Ursula’s posts in the Kickstarter campaign, we see that their parents were not particularly loving. Not only does she mention her father shooting her mother for unknown reasons in a grisly murder-suicide, but we also see how Olive mentions bringing them back from the Land of the Dead, how “it can be different this time” (Machado). Subtle hints like these allow us to perceive the lonely childhoods of two sisters who, despite being complete opposites personality-wise, not only are but generally must there for each other. As poorly as Ursula speaks about Olive throughout the story, we see her not only set on a trip to another country to bring her back home,  she also specifically mentions having bills to pay. Her harsh words, “viscosity of blood” and “ungrateful wastrel of a sibling” (Machado) are, at the end of the day, a facade to deal with the fact that, as much as Olive frustrates her and has done so since their youth, she deeply loves her and wishes to be by her side, just like when she protected her from the thundering rain at the gas station.

The emotional, passionate moment we see in the passage, a sister giving a meal to a starving animal, so to speak, leads us to believe that perhaps the two of them can fully reconcile and start anew once Olive gets out of the Land of the Dead, which only makes the subsequent twist that concludes the story a fantastic yet tragic ending for the tale.

Works Cited

Machado, Carmen María. “Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead.” Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 50, Jul 2014, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/help-follow- sister-land-dead/.

*

“Sex and Obligation in “Girl” and “The Husband Stitch”

“Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid and “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen María Machado are fundamentally different pieces of literature. The former, which is almost poetic in nature, is a stream of consciousness narrative which puts us in the consciousness of a young Caribbean girl, her every thought reflecting the instructions given by her mother throughout her life. These initially appear overwhelming and even cold, but we are then able to see them transform into important life advice to enable the girl’s survival in the world as her own person. “The Husband Stitch” is a traditional narrative, occasionally interspersed with small tales. It’s a modern retelling of a French folk tale, describing a girl who keeps a green ribbon tied around her neck at all times, the girl’s eventual growth into adulthood and marriage, and how her husband’s desire to know what lies under her ribbon leads to terrible consequences. Despite the two stories’ significantly different subject matter and style of writing, they both examine the idea that women appear to owe their bodies in a sexual manner to men no matter what, and how ultimately society paints the very notion of a woman as a sex object without agency.

In “Girl,” one of the most impactful instructions given from mother to child comes at the very beginning of the story,“…on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming…” (Kincaid 320) Early on in the narrative,  this mother accuses her daughter of being a “slut,” a heavy word with negative connotations, especially when applied to a young girl who may not even understand what sex is.

However, as the narrative advances, the mother’s instructions and orders seem to turn into more tender and supportive advice for the growing protagonist, a stark contrast with the way her earlier directives. We learn the mother’s real objective is to protect her daughter as she grows into adulthood, which can be interpreted as her internalizing the values of the society she has been brought up in and is raising her daughter in, where women that act in a certain way are immediately considered “sluts.” This illustrates how women who do not conform to nearly unattainable standards are seen as nothing more than sex objects, which is not only dehumanizing  but also is later internalized and taught, continuing a tragic, eternal inheritance of this stereotype. Thankfully, the mother later appears to understand the ways women can attempt to thrive even in this environment, telling her daughter ways to “bully” a man back or what to do “when love doesn’t work out” (Kincaid 321). She is teaching her daughter how to adapt in a system that works against her, even when she finds herself at a disadvantage.

Earlier in the story she also mentions the proper way to harvest certain crops that must be planted far from the household, thus giving her daughter some degree of freedom; she also mentions how to spit upwards without hitting her in the face, a crass, unladylike action that again displays how the mother wants the daughter to be free even within the confines of misogynistic society. Ultimately, it’s somehow tragic that in order for the daughter to learn all of this, she must also first learn about all the unattainable standards women are set up to have to follow no matter what, where she will have to operate through for the rest of her life.

Women being scrutinized and marginalized as sex objects is the focal theme of the “The Husband Stitch,” as well. Throughout the entire story, the protagonist’s boyfriend and later husband occasionally insists on looking at what is hidden under the ribbon she always wears tied around her neck, starting from the first day they meet and throughout their marriage, with her answer being “no” every single time. He relents yet nevertheless asks again, each time seemingly more intensely than the last. The husband even explicitly states that “a wife should hide no secrets from her husband” (Machado), which directly tells us how he feels entitled to know about her own intimate secret, very easily comparable to something sexual.

If the constant asking was not enough to imply this, we are able to see the way he demands sexual control over his wife’s body directly when he asks for the doctor to give her the titular “husband stitch,” a procedure that can be extremely harmful and risky. “Please, I say to him. But it comes out slurred and twisted and possibly no more than a small moan. Neither man turns his head toward me” (Machado). This clearly illustrates her lack of agency, coming off as almost creepy in the way her body is basically being tampered with; she is in a delirious state after the excruciating process of childbirth. This portrays a system that deliberately ignores the wants and needs of the woman, a misogynistic society similar to the one presented by Kincaid.  

Eventually, we see how, despite her resistance, the wife is forced to play her designated role in the system and give in to her husband. She unties the ribbon and  her head falls off. She even mentions, “…you may be wondering if that place my ribbon protected was wet with blood and openings, or smooth and neutered like the nexus between the legs of a doll. I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I don’t know” (Machado). This is something so intimate, so dear towards her that she does not even know what it properly entails—yet she still allows her husband to take a look after years of keeping it to herself, years of giving all for him and having her intimacy violated. Because in this world, women are ultimately sexual objects who are entitled to give themselves to men no matter what.

Both “Girl” and “The Husband Stitch” afford glimpses into the lives of two different women who grow up in a society that sees them as nothing more than sexual objects. Eventually, the protagonist in “Girl” learns to thrive in the system to her best ability thanks to her mother, while the one in “The Husband Stitch” tragically seems to completely lose her will (or perhaps even her life) to her husband’s desires.

Although society has taken massive leaps and bounds in regards to holding the independence of women in higher regard than in decades past, generally holding both sexes in more equal status, it is still imperative for men to treat women not as objects of sexual pleasure but as their own individual human beings, and for governments to take necessary steps in order to combat systemic misogyny.

Works Cited

Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl”. The Story and its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction, edited by Ann Charters, 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003, pp 320-321.

Machado, Carmen María. “The Husband Stitch.” Granta, 14 Oct. 2014, granta.com/the-husband-stitch