Role of the Ribbon: Sex and Male Power Entangled
Lauren Dang
Instructor’s Introduction
All people tell stories, and these stories reflect, challenge, and script our identities, cultures, traditions, and governments. WR120: Storytelling considers storytelling traditions and power structures through the lens of neuroscience. In Fall 2022, threats to bodily autonomy, questions about consent, and the role of women and mothers within the institution of marriage and beyond had been made newly relevant after the summer’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which threatened abortion access and reproductive equity across the country.
In this particular assignment, students selected a singular tale and analyzed changes across time to discover, and then take a position on, how and why these changes were made in response to the cultural and historical context and audiences of the retellings. Using an evolving thesis to locate a structure for their conceptual argument and selecting key moments of adaptation between the iterations, students put their analysis in conversation with scholars, ultimately revealing the relationship between storytelling and our contemporary lives. Lauren Dang’s essay raises the stakes, locating the tension between the institutions and storytelling as she argues for us to understand that stories contain knowledge and how, particularly for women, storytelling is a vibrant and vital modality for sharing information about how to live in an often unjust and complicated world.
Carroll Beauvais
From the Writer
This paper considers how stories reflect the cultures they come from, and how these stories are not only records of periods of time, but can be used to trace the evolution of our cultural beliefs. In preparation for this paper, I had grown a great liking for one of our readings, Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” due to my familiarity with the original “Girl with the Green Ribbon”/“The Velvet Ribbon” and the feminist themes Machado employed in her retelling. Specifically, the contrast between children’s tales and mature themes like power, violence, and sex posed an interesting target for my own investigation. In this paper, I integrate my own literary analysis of different versions of the Ribbon Tales with academics Will Storr’s and Mary Angeline Hood’s critical perspectives on storytelling to highlight the significance of stories in our society and the responsibilities we, as storytellers, have in shaping current and future cultures.
Role of the Ribbon: Sex and Male Power Entangled
Why do we tell stories of giants hiding in the shadows of the forest? Or tales of monsters creeping out from under bridges and empty highways? These stories may seem to teach us d what to be afraid of, but what do they tell us about ourselves? In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr writes that “…telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself,” proposing that storytelling is inherently a reflection of our minds and nature (Storr 2). The changes we encounter as a culture are thus not only seen in our belief systems as individuals but also in the stories we create, pass down, and adapt. From the birth of fairytales, telling the story of “simpler times” to modern retellings, we can trace the changes in the cultural belief systems that created them through the different details each version preserved or created. This is seen in the various versions of the Ribbon Tales: specifically “The Velvet Ribbon” by Ann McGovern (1970) and its retelling “The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (2017). The largest difference between the two tales stems from the complexity of the depicted story/relationships and reflects how modern perspectives of social issues have evolved. Since the release of “The Velvet Ribbon” and the onset of the 21st century, there has been a shift in our perceptions of sex in domestic and public realms as western second-wave feminism brought about changes in the traditional roles of men and women, particularly through the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s-1970s America. Following this change in culture, the differences in the depictions of the husband’s curiosity and desire for the ribbon illustrate how views towards sex have changed while highlighting the everlasting presence of male power in sex and marriage.
While “The Velvet Ribbon” and “The Husband Stitch” differ in their intended audience–”The Velvet Ribbon” being a children’s horror story and “The Husband Stitch” being a short story for adults–they depict a shared central theme of female (physical and social) autonomy within relationships. This is primarily manifested through the motif of the ribbon in both versions. The titular ribbon refers to a ribbon tied around both of the female protagonists’ necks that their husbands continuously ask about. In “The Velvet Ribbon,” after getting married, the husband asks the protagonist why she wears the ribbon and orders her to take it off. In response, she replies “You’ll be sorry if I do…so I won’t” (1:10). He orders her to remove the ribbon every morning and evening until he eventually cuts it off in her sleep. Likewise, the husband in “The Husband Stitch” also displays curiosity about the ribbon, with instances in which he aggressively requests the female protagonist to take it off. His desire continues to persist into their late adulthood, ending when she gives into his requests . McGovern and Machado’s depictions of this growing power struggle between the two partners aim to highlight the underlying power men have in relationships, particularly in relation to sex. While sex isn’t explicitly mentioned in McGovern’s version, there are sexual implications present in the story. Most notably, the protagonist “wore a different gown each night [to please her husband]” (0:17). On the other hand, Machado writes several sexual scenes, including details like the protagonist bleeding during penetrative sex and oral sex (which her husband always “receives”). When she rejects his attempts to remove the ribbon, he responds violently and in one instance, argues that “a wife…should have no secrets from her husband” (20). The protagonists’ parallel efforts to appeal to their husbands represent the expectation that a wife must make sacrifices in order to satisfy their husband. Although female desire and pleasure exist in the story of “The Husband Stitch,” it is often accompanied by violent/animalistic male desire, rooted in entitlement to and ownership of his wife and her body. Consequently, as the wife yields to her husband’s pleasure, her sexuality becomes her only form of control/power in their relationship. Although it is true that this variation in explicitness may be reflective of the intended audience of the respective versions, the different depictions of sex mark a potential signifier of a cultural difference between the time periods that birthed these tales. It demonstrates how we are able to discuss sex more openly in modern stories and communities, mirroring the shift to sexual liberation following the sexual revolution and publication of “The Velvet Ribbon”.
Furthermore, several aspects of modern feminism, like the further exploration of pre-existing feminist issues and the rise of intersectionality, are also depicted in “The Husband Stitch.” Compared to the week-long marriage in “The Velvet Ribbon,” “The Husband Stitch” takes the reader through the female protagonist’s life from her first meeting with her husband to motherhood. This additional focus on motherhood is a part of a deeper inquiry into how, despite improvements in societal perspectives of women, the systems of marriage and motherhood continue to hurt women and help men. After giving birth, Machado’s protagonist’s life and identity primarily revolve around being a mother, emphasized by an anecdote when her son asks her what she was for Halloween. She is not in costume and tells him that she is his mother (25), demonstrating the loss of her individuality as she prioritizes her identity as a mother. Furthermore, as a baby, her son “never [touched the ribbon] in a way that [made her] afraid” (18) but after her husband attempts to remove the ribbon, she “punishes” her son for touching her ribbon, feeling as though “something is lost between [them]” (21). Through this detail, Machado highlights how this power imbalance does not just exist in marriage but can also be observed between mother and son. Ultimately, through these authorial choices, Machado aims to emphasize that in all systems, men will always hold more power over women no matter their social status.
From the power imbalances in the Ribbon Tales’ marriages, wider implications can be made about how desire plays a role in knowledge and, by extension, power between men and women outside the confines/context of a relationship. Scholar Mary Angeline Hood explores how Machado depicts knowledge in “The Husband Stitch” through her article “Desire and Knowledge: Feminist Epistemology in Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘The Husband Stitch.’” The essence of Hood’s argument is that the stories and legends that Machado’s protagonist recalls throughout “The Husband Stitch” are representative of how, for women, stories and legends “act as counter-discourse and serve as collections of experiential knowledge” (989). Looking specifically at evidence from the text, Hood identifies two instances in which knowledge is manifested differently between men and women. Firstly, after losing her virginity, the protagonist says, “It hurts, but I imagine it could feel good” (5). Hood observes that “the use of the conditional ‘could feel good’” (999) through the protagonist’s perspective, establishes a notion that to be unknowledgeable is to lack in experience. That is to say, knowledge comes with experience and is highly subjective. Conversely, after his proposal to the protagonist, the husband feels “like [he] knows so many parts of [her]…And now [he] will know all of them” (9). This desire to “know” is not a desire to learn – as described in the protagonist’s definition of knowledge–but a desire to own and control. The parallel ideas of sexual desire (as mentioned earlier) and desire to know from Hood’s argument expand our initial understanding of the power imbalance of the “Husband Stitch” relationship with the additional perspective that a woman’s power in sex and life is inherently subjected to male influence and dominance.
As depicted in “The Husband Stitch,” the feminine tradition to learn through experience does not only highlight a power imbalance between genders but also contributes to a cycle in which culture influences stories and vice versa. Recall Storr’s quote that “…telling stories is simply a matter of peering inwards, at the mind itself…” (2). Storr maintains that telling stories is an act rooted in human connection and the sharing of social knowledge. Gossip as a form of epistemology is often associated with women as a downtime activity, something done out of boredom; however, it holds great value in understanding how we learn about the world around us. In The Science of Storytelling, Storr reports that research has suggested that humans have been gossiping since the Stone Age, promoting pro-group behavior through shared moral outrage, “which passes us to act, either against the ‘characters’ in gossip or in their defense” (92). Although gossip and legends slightly differ in their subject, gossip being specific to people and contexts, they both reinforce relationships through a casual and intimate medium “not found in other types of [social] exchanges” (Hood 993). The didactic quality of these two forms of communication allows us to interpersonally engage and learn how to interpret information from what we observe in the world around us. Hood also argues that gossip (including urban legends) offers advice to others and “allows us to explore taboo subjects and make connections we might not normally allow ourselves to consider” (994). She concedes that urban legends like “The Velvet Ribbon” and the ones mentioned in “The Husband Stitch” may appear to “reinforce traditional ideas about gender roles” and the consequences of rejecting these norms (994).
However, the exploration of these taboo subjects provides a space for women to objectively evaluate the systems that oppress them. Hood demonstrates the importance of urban legends through literary analysis of Machado’s use of urban legends in “The Husband Stitch” and analysis of “The Husband Stitch” as a retelling itself.
Although stories (specifically urban legends) may seem trivial in the broader context of our day-to-day present, they are in fact essential for developing our personal perspective and framework for interpreting information from the world around us. The differences in the two tales reveal how stories can both instigate and reveal social progress. The cultural contexts that give birth to different versions of stories are not independent of each other or the stories they manufacture; rather, they feed into each other through a cycle of development and change.
Works Cited
Hood, Mary Angeline. “Desire and Knowledge: Feminist Epistemology in Carmen María Machado’s ‘The Husband Stitch.’” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 53, no. 5, 2020, pp. 989–1003, https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12953.
“The Husband Stitch.” Her Body and Other Parties: Stories, by Carmen Maria Machado, Graywolf Press, 2017, pp. 3-31.
McGovern, Ann, and Scholastic Record. “The Velvet Ribbon by Ann McGovern.” YouTube, 20 April 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcXHQNDH2Ms.
Storr, Will. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better. Abrams Press, 2020.
Lauren Dang is a Neuroscience major and Computer Science minor in BU’s College of Arts and Sciences Class of 2026. She is Malaysian Chinese but grew up in cities like Singapore, Hong Kong, New York, and now Boston. She would like to thank Professor Carroll Beauvais for her valuable guidance throughout the writing process, her previous English teachers for fostering her love for stories, and lastly her family for their endless support.