Content area
Full Text
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short-story collection Her Body and Other Parties (2017) is steeped in folklore and urban legends. Nearly all the stories include, at the very least, allusions to folk traditions—the escaped murderer with the hook hand who attacks teenagers having sex in a car, for instance, or the dangerous cabin in the woods, or the person who swears she had been traveling with another person even though everyone else insists they saw her alone. In the story “Real Women Have Bodies,” Machado engages most explicitly with European folk and fairy tales. The prominence of dresses in the story encourages a comparison to “Cinderella” and related tales featuring magical gowns. Meanwhile, the melancholy tone and concluding disintegration of the female body (including the loss of the ability to speak) evokes Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (1836). Primarily, though, this essay argues that “Real Women Have Bodies” reworks the traditional folktale of the enchanted or animal bride.
A folktale of this extremely widespread type generally begins when a man encounters and is captivated by a female figure who is not entirely human—a human by night, perhaps, and a bird or other animal by day. They maintain a romantic relationship for a while, sometimes consensually. In the end, however, the female returns to others of her kind. Enchanted bride tales have always reflected their cultures’ perceptions of and anxieties about gender roles; in particular, though many fairy tales speak to women’s apprehension about marriage, enchanted bride tales generally address men’s capacity to control or simply understand women. In the #MeToo era, revisiting these tales is particularly urgent. But Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” uses the tradition of the enchanted bride to delve into the anxiety not of men but of women: the fear that, as Machado stated in an interview, women’s bodies might be “chipped away at or made unreal against their will” (qtd. in “Carmen Maria Machado”). Whereas the traditional animal bride story expresses men’s fear of losing women, “Real Women Have Bodies” expresses women’s fear of losing themselves.
Machado’s story echoes the traditional enchanted bride tale in that it concludes with a central female character’s departure from her romantic partner and from human society more broadly. But “Real Women Have Bodies” differs from...