ENCW 202 Spring 2020
Posted in Animals, Desire, Transformations on Apr 12th, 2020
It seems important to understand whether or not it is worth it to sacrifice yourself for someone else. Samantha Hunt’s “Beast” follows the fantasies and guilt the narrator experiences as a result of partaking in an animalistic, one-night affair with a man she met at a bar. It is after this affair happened that the […]
Posted in Art, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic, Obsession on Apr 10th, 2020
“Change in Fashion”’s imagery reminds me of The Handmaid’s Tale; color-coordinated by social class, the female body is hidden by long sleeves and “wings” to hide their faces when out of the house. This short story went on to tell us how the female body slipped deeper into the shadows yet became increasingly more provocative. […]
Posted in Autonomy, Captivity, Consent, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic on Apr 6th, 2020
In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the narrator spends a lot of his time explaining things to “future readers.” In the first paragraph, he writes: Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes […]
Posted in Autonomy, Defiance, Desire, Disappearance, Fantastic, Isolation, Obsession on Mar 29th, 2020
As I was preparing to write this post, I became curious about fashion trends throughout history that we, as modern people, might consider fantastic if there was no evidence to support their existence. One example is lotus shoes, which can only be worn by women with bound feet; foot binding was an ancient tradition for […]
Posted in Animals, Desire, Desperation, Transformations on Mar 5th, 2020
The fantastic in “Salt Slow” is not the many sea creatures that appear dead on the surface of the water; it is the size of the sea creatures. There is not one specific element of the fantastic in this story; a few others are the “baby” born, the webbed fingers that grow as the creatures […]
Posted in Desire on Feb 27th, 2020
The beginning of “Difficult at Parties” introduces what we assume to be a domestic abuse scenario where the woman is the abuser, causing bruises, demanding, and yelling. Moreover, the male, as we know at the time, has the brunt of the abuse. However, the assumption is pushed aside as we learn that the narrator is […]
Posted in Desire, Disappearance, Loneliness, Obsession on Feb 24th, 2020
These two stories by Carmen Maria Machado were paired together for a very specific reason; they have the same message. While “Real Women Have Bodies” is more about women losing themselves and fading away into nothingness (with only their souls remaining), “Eight Bites” is about one woman in particular who’s unhappy with her body and […]
Posted in Desire, Motherhood, Obsession, Transformations on Feb 21st, 2020
For the most part, “Eight Bites” is not a very fantastical story. Until we learn the consequences of the narrator’s life-changing surgery, it feels as if this story could be set in our own world; plenty of people undergo surgeries to reduce their weight or suppress their appetite, and it’s not completely implausible that a person could only survive […]
Posted in Desire, Mystery, Senses and Words on Feb 17th, 2020
Almost every story we’ve read so far by Steven Millhauser in Dangerous Laughter has centered around a modern, suburban town slowly slipping into madness. It may not even have to be the town itself, but rather just the town’s residents. In the short story “Dangerous Laughter”, we witness a small town fixated on this idea of […]
Posted in Animals, Desire, Mystery, Obsession on Feb 6th, 2020
To have a fan base is fun in all; we can recall the time we went to our favorite concert and screamed “I LOVE YOU!” into a sea of people in hope that the band would hear you. While reading Julia Armfield’s “Plug Your Women’s Ears with Wax” in Salt Slow, I got the sense of the Fantastic […]
Posted in Desire on Feb 5th, 2020
In “Stop Your Women’s Ears With Wax,” a band is followed by teenage fan girls that seem to cause destruction everywhere the band goes. However, it seems as though the girls are not the only entities who cause destruction. The story is about a girl band and the odd hype they are receiving; it seems […]
Julia Armfield’s “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax” turns the idea of the obsessive teenaged fangirl on its head; instead of lusting after boy bands, the girls in this story obsessively and savagely follow an all-female band. By doing so, Armfield essentially gives power to the women in her story, letting them take full control […]
Posted in Desire, Loneliness on Jan 30th, 2020
The aspect of “Mothers” that interested me the most was how this woman ended up taking care of a child. It begins with the narrator’s abusive girlfriend presenting her with a baby. Throughout reading this, I almost suspected a couple of times that the child was imagined in order for the narrator to find her way […]
Posted in Consent, Desire, Loneliness on Jan 30th, 2020
Bound by an outer shell of a paperback book, Mothers from Carmen Machado’s “Her Body And Other Parties” lets us into the mind of a woman who rolls with the punches. Locked in an abusive relationship, she remains nameless to the reader but we see her so clearly. Mara, a child who cries non-stop and stresses […]
Posted in Desire, Loneliness on Jan 29th, 2020
At first, “Mothers” was a mildly puzzling read. Who was Bad, who was our narrator, and, most importantly, who in the world is named Bad of all things? The name was a bit of a hint, which I only realized upon reaching the end. Our narrator, a woman living alone since her separation with Bad, is given […]
The “Husband Stitch” is an eerie and uncomfortable tale. Carmen Maria Machado’s story, overall, is about a woman who wears a green ribbon all her life, and throughout the story, the husband is attempting to untie the ribbon sneakily and without her consent. However, in the final scene, she allows him to untie the ribbon, which […]