When I was a kid, the book In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories was very popular at my elementary school. One of the scariest stories to me was The Green Ribbon about a girl who wears a ribbon around her neck and when it is untied her head falls off. As a child this was one of the scariest stories to me (you can see the buzzfeed reaction here, proof that I wasn’t the only one who had nightmares about this for years).
A couple years ago I read Her Body and Other Parties which revisits this story and re-tells it in a short story called The Husband Stitch.
As the name hints, I think that this story can still be classified as horror, but I now see the story as scary from girl/woman’s point of view instead of from the boy/man’s. I now see that the conflict and violence is drawn out over the course of the entire narrative. I love this story because I feel it captures a part of my experience of growing up as a girl and being a woman in our society that I have never quite been able to put into words.
For this assignment, I decided to revisit this short story to understand what Carmen Maria Machado changed about the discourse that showed the story in a new light for me.
For reference, here is a short version of the story, similar to what I read as a kid.
I was curious about the following: how does the story change if the ribbon is tied around different body parts? How much does the ending (the exchange between the husband and the woman) change the rest of the story? Does it matter what kind of man the husband is (good, bad, etc) or what kind of woman the wife is (beautiful, plain, odd)? Does the story change if the woman has a daughter instead of a son?
I wanted to retain the original story I read as a child, but in order to add the other variations I wasn’t exactly able to do this, although some versions are close. The changes in the story are subtle, but I think do achieve telling the story with different discourse - a head falling off is very different than a finger falling off, and a “bad” man asking to untie the ribbon is different than a “good” man asking. The core story remains the same: this is a normal and unremarkable love story (meaning a heterosexual relationship between two cis people) and as time passes they meet, fall in love, get married and have a child. Throughout, the boy/husband/man asks over and over about the one secret the girl/woman/wife has: the ribbon tied around part of her body. Finally, at the end of the story, he unties it.
Below are a few different versions generated by tracery.
You can see my code here: https://editor.p5js.org/lpj234@nyu.edu/sketches/1q9s0BcXSV
