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hrj(Heard via Podcastle.org, I really need to change my "reviews: books" tag to "reviews: fiction but then I'd have the urge to go back and change them all.)
One of the things about reading (or listening) in genre is that one inevitably evaluates works against genre expectations. A story can be a striking work of polished prose...and yet leave you feeling as if you’ve been tricked into consuming it under false pretenses.
I consumed “The Husband Stitch” via a fantasy venue, therefore I spent the entire story waiting for fantastic elements. On its surface, it’s the sexual biography of a young woman in a nebulous and under-sketched American-50s-tv soft-patriarchal society, beginning with her enthusiastic first sexual experience, tracing through her adventurously satisfying erotic life with the man who then becomes her husband, and following her through the birth, growth, and eventual adulthood of her son. The story strays from her sexual itinerary only in occasional digressions into modern folklore (I’d say “urban legends” but not all of them are strictly urban) of the cautionary-tale sort, and one episode after her son begins school where she ventures out of the home sphere to take a nude drawing class, is erotically attracted to the female model, and has the experience ruined for her when she feels compelled to relate it to her husband who immediately turns it into a prurient “can I join in” fantasy.
Oh, but there’s one other thread running through the story. The protagonist wears a green ribbon tied around her neck, and in a succession of incidents, it becomes clear that the intact state of this ribbon stands in allegorically for issues of consent, bodily autonomy, and independent self-hood. Via the episode with the nude drawing class, and a later school-parent activity episode, we learn that all women in the world of this story have a ribbon tied about some portion of their anatomy that is never removed, even if the location is inconvenient. There’s essentially no subtlety about this allegory, nor is there much subtlety about how the presence of this forbidden item--explicitly never explained to any of the men in her life--becomes the Bluebeard’s Room of the story. The woman’s husband is drawn again and again to torment her with the threat of forcibly untying the ribbon, simply because it is the one aspect of her life to which he has not been granted access.
And, being Bluebeard’s Room, the reader inevitably knows that the ribbon should by rights be the focus of the story’s climax. Unfortunately, the climax--and the only indication of any sort of fantastic element--is the sort of sudden “surprise twist” so favored by urban folklore--a sort of “and there, embedded in the car door, was a HOOK!” (Not entirely surprisingly, in both the female-forbidden Bluebeard's Room, and the male-forbidden green ribbon, it is always the woman who is at risk from violating the prohibition.)
In the end, this story just didn’t work for me as a fantasy story. I felt cheated and misled. Which is a problem, because as a piece of allegorical prose, it’s masterfully written, although not particularly original. I particularly appreciated the conceit of the story narrator inserting performance instructions to a person reading the story aloud, which worked especially well in audio format. But I felt like I’d been tricked into consuming a piece of ordinary literary erotica (not a genre I have any specific interest in) under the promise that it was a fantasy story.
One of the things about reading (or listening) in genre is that one inevitably evaluates works against genre expectations. A story can be a striking work of polished prose...and yet leave you feeling as if you’ve been tricked into consuming it under false pretenses.
I consumed “The Husband Stitch” via a fantasy venue, therefore I spent the entire story waiting for fantastic elements. On its surface, it’s the sexual biography of a young woman in a nebulous and under-sketched American-50s-tv soft-patriarchal society, beginning with her enthusiastic first sexual experience, tracing through her adventurously satisfying erotic life with the man who then becomes her husband, and following her through the birth, growth, and eventual adulthood of her son. The story strays from her sexual itinerary only in occasional digressions into modern folklore (I’d say “urban legends” but not all of them are strictly urban) of the cautionary-tale sort, and one episode after her son begins school where she ventures out of the home sphere to take a nude drawing class, is erotically attracted to the female model, and has the experience ruined for her when she feels compelled to relate it to her husband who immediately turns it into a prurient “can I join in” fantasy.
Oh, but there’s one other thread running through the story. The protagonist wears a green ribbon tied around her neck, and in a succession of incidents, it becomes clear that the intact state of this ribbon stands in allegorically for issues of consent, bodily autonomy, and independent self-hood. Via the episode with the nude drawing class, and a later school-parent activity episode, we learn that all women in the world of this story have a ribbon tied about some portion of their anatomy that is never removed, even if the location is inconvenient. There’s essentially no subtlety about this allegory, nor is there much subtlety about how the presence of this forbidden item--explicitly never explained to any of the men in her life--becomes the Bluebeard’s Room of the story. The woman’s husband is drawn again and again to torment her with the threat of forcibly untying the ribbon, simply because it is the one aspect of her life to which he has not been granted access.
And, being Bluebeard’s Room, the reader inevitably knows that the ribbon should by rights be the focus of the story’s climax. Unfortunately, the climax--and the only indication of any sort of fantastic element--is the sort of sudden “surprise twist” so favored by urban folklore--a sort of “and there, embedded in the car door, was a HOOK!” (Not entirely surprisingly, in both the female-forbidden Bluebeard's Room, and the male-forbidden green ribbon, it is always the woman who is at risk from violating the prohibition.)
In the end, this story just didn’t work for me as a fantasy story. I felt cheated and misled. Which is a problem, because as a piece of allegorical prose, it’s masterfully written, although not particularly original. I particularly appreciated the conceit of the story narrator inserting performance instructions to a person reading the story aloud, which worked especially well in audio format. But I felt like I’d been tricked into consuming a piece of ordinary literary erotica (not a genre I have any specific interest in) under the promise that it was a fantasy story.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 10:02 pm (UTC)1. It was binding her obedience; removal would result in her (either voluntarily or involuntarily) destroying her husband, or perhaps simply would allow her to leave him (as with the fairy wife of Myddfai, or as with the return of a selkie's skin).
2. It was binding her physical form; removing it would result in her changing (voluntarily or involuntarily) into a non-human form, possibly with other consequences.
3. It was binding her body together in an intact form; removing it would cause her to literally fall apart.
These merge into each other at the edges, so grouping them into three and only three possibilities is somewhat arbitrary.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 11:12 pm (UTC)I was coming at it more from the specific direction of having previously read a story that this sounds like it's a very direct retelling of -- namely, this one ("The Yellow Ribbon") and its variants. In particular, when I was checking online to see if the story I was remembering was in Grimm's (it isn't), I found that the other common standardish version of it, in this book, also has a green ribbon.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-08 11:45 pm (UTC)If I'd been familiar with it, I just might have skipped listening to the story entirely, since it adds to the sense that the story isn't doing anything original.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-25 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-25 07:36 pm (UTC)