Carmen Maria
Machado’s Her Body & Other Parties (2017) is a delicious short story
collection which mashes up sci-fi and horror conceits with intersectional
feminist thought. Machado can WRITE, her particular
strengths being the depiction of appetites (for food or for sex) and the
creation of lush atmospheres. Machado uses fiction to explore female desire and
the plurality of womanhood, like imperial-phase Angela Carter refracted through
queer perspectives. Machado avoids a feeling I often have with short story collections
that the constant shifting of characters, premises and narrative forms stops
any single story making a deep impression: a couple of the characters and their
situations do stand out.
Among these is
the opening tale, ‘The Husband Stitch’. We follow a young woman who makes out
with a boy, marries him and has a child with him: so far so conventional. But
there is a difference. The woman has a green ribbon on her neck which is part
of her body; other women in this world seem to have similar ribbons in various
places. The man wants to touch and probe his wife’s ribbon because ‘a wife
should have no secrets from her husband’. Yet the protagonist says, ‘the ribbon
is not a secret; it’s just mine’. The man becomes more tantalised and more
pressing as the story develops, leading the woman to reflect: ‘He is not a bad
man at all. To describe him as evil or wicked or corrupted would do a deep
disservice to him. And yet –’. Men can be blatantly shitty, but they can also
be shitty in entitled, insidious and subtly forceful ways.
Machado suggests
that a long-lasting marriage does not mean complete knowledge of the other
person: private selves remain intact. The idea of ‘two becoming one’ is a myth
and sometimes a damaging one. This is not an entirely new concept; it is
treated for instance in James Joyce’s famous short story ‘The Dead’. But
Machado formulates a particularly male and particularly possessive desire to know. Knowledge, after all, is power. The
almost fairy-tale premise of the ribbons allows some female private self or
core of individuality to be physicalised and considered in new ways. Similarly,
in the world of ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ an affliction strikes only women where
their bodies, at different points in life but inescapably, fade away into translucency,
transparency and finally total incorporeality. These women then must go about
weaving themselves into the fabric of dresses in lament or disrupting voting
machines in protest.
‘Eight Bites’ is
a great story about what it’s like to live in a body that is all too corporeal.
It focusses on a woman whose sisters have all had a procedure that gives them
the perfect body so long as they apparently never eat more than miniscule
amounts ever again. She must decide whether to undergo the process herself whilst
navigating the disapproval of her daughter who is more traditionally feminist
and for whom body acceptance is the only acceptable way of thinking. At one
point the protagonist says:
‘I was tired of
looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them,
clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.’
I have not seen
this written enough. For many of us our bodies are a source of self-loathing.
Body positivity should absolutely be encouraged, but I don’t think it’s
un-feminist to want to change your body. It’s un-feminist to not understand why
women in particular might want that.
One slight flaw
in Machado’s collection for me is that some of the protagonists seem
undifferentiated: a chorus rather than solo voices that come together. The
worlds of the stories are differentiated but I can still always detect
the presence of an author with specific concerns who is perhaps trying to use
characters as vehicles for these concerns. That’s fine- Machado is an
entertaining and often pleasurable companion, whose interests overlap with my own. But Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian (translated
from South Korean by Deborah Smith) achieves something that only a select few
of my favourite books do, where I struggle to imagine how anyone could possibly
have written it. It seems like something someone dug up or found lurking under
their bed, whilst focussing on similar themes to Machado’s collection: female
bodies, appetites and protests.
Kang’s novel may
be called The Vegetarian. But, Reader, the eponymous herbivore,
Yeong-hye, has not been inspired by Greta Thunberg or a lusciously voiced David
Attenborough documentary. No. Yeong-hye is a housewife in an affluent part of
Seoul, her husband noting her ‘passive personality’ and excellent cooking. One
day, however, she throws out all the meat in their house. She will go on to eat
less and less (for reasons I will not spoil). As she detaches herself from a
culture that gives prime place to meat-eating and her body begins to first slim
down and then waste away, her husband accuses her of being ‘self-centred’- of
acting ‘selfishly’ and with excessive ‘self-possession’. She is merely doing
what he has always done, but like the husband in Machado’s ‘The Husband Stitch’,
the husband here cannot accept that she has a private self inaccessible to him. Female independence is immediately
pathologized even before Yeong-hye’s weird dreams take deeper root in her
psyche:
‘Dark woods.
No people. The sharp-pointed leaves on the trees, my torn feet. This place,
almost remembered, but I’m lost now. Frightened. Cold.’
As in this
example, chilling impressionistic snapshots of Yeong-hye’s dreams are embedded
in indented type into the more ordered main narrative style. These moments are
the only direct access the reader receives to Yeong-hye’s psyche, and even they
are elliptical and fleeting. Elsewhere the novel’s tripartite structure offers
us views of Yeong-hye from the outside- the perspectives of her aggressively average and self-absorbed husband, of her
brother-in-law who definitely isn’t just a creepy perv because artists are
special, right?
Lastly we get her
sister’s take, for whom Yeong-hye is a figure of equal parts terror, bemusement
and inspiration. Yeong-hye’s sole focus on her relationship with herself and
her body reveals the fact that In-hye’s identities are primarily relational-
she thinks ‘as a daughter, as an older sister, as a wife and as a mother’ and
‘her life had never belonged to her’. Her sister’s ‘magnificent
irresponsibility’ provokes admiration and disapproval in equal measure, and the complex development of their
sororal bond is at the heart of the narrative’s ending.
As with Machado’s collection Her Body &
Other Parties, the power of Kang’s narrative is that there is no direct,
on-the-nose allegory- you cannot uncontestably state that in ‘The Husband
Stitch’ ‘the ribbon is her private identity’, or that in The Vegetarian ‘Yeong-hye’s
vegetarianism is a feminist protest’. Though they do seem to contain these
meanings, leaving things implied allows for a symbolic resonance murky and
powerful. What is clear is that female bodies, with all their protuberances or
diminishments, sticking out or wasting away, are the centre of desire, shame
and even protest; sci-fi and horror conventions are a potent prism through
which to write these experiences.
