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Sarah Tucker
Professor Jeanette Bushnell
Honors 210A
16 December 2016

The Green Ribbon

The first part of my presentation was simply a story which I presented to the class. It is a
short horror story that I was very fond of when I was young; I don’t know why it captured my
imagination so, but it has managed to remain at the back of my mind even as I read wide
varieties of more complex and more thought-provoking literature. The story goes like this;
Once, there was a young girl; I knew her to be called Jenny. Jenny was a
perfectly ordinary young girl, if a little subdued. Every day, Jenny wore a
different dress and different shoes, but one thing about her appearance always
remained the same; Jenny wore a green ribbon around her neck. No matter the
season, or time of day, that ribbon was as much a part of Jenny as her hands, or
her eyes.
Jenny lived next door to a boy her age named Alfred. Alfred was very
curious about the ribbon that Jenny wore, and would often ask, “Jenny, why do
you always wear that green ribbon?” But every time, Jenny would respond,
“You’ll be sorry if you know, so I can’t tell you.”
Jenny and Alfred grew up, and fell in love, and eventually, they got
married. On the day of the wedding, Alfred asked, as he had when they were
young, “Jenny, why do you always wear that green ribbon around your neck?”
But once again, Jenny replied, “You’ll be sorry if you know, so I can’t tell you.”
Now, in some versions of this story, Alfred becomes fixated upon the
ribbon. What was once a passing curiosity becomes an obsession, and its
presence enrages him and tears apart their marriage, until one night he snaps
and grabs a pair of scissors, cutting Jenny’s ribbon from around her neck as she
sleeps.
But that’s not the story I grew up with. In this story, Alfred remains
curious about the ribbon, but he and Jenny lead a full and happy life. They grow
old together, and the day comes when Jenny falls ill, and the doctor informs her
that she is going to die.
She calls Alfred into the room, and tells him, “Alfred, it is finally time for
me to tell you why I wear this ribbon around my neck.” And she smiles sadly at
him, and reaches up, and unties the ribbon.
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And Jenny’s head falls off.

My second piece was a drawing based off my personal thoughts about the above story
(see attached). I always found it impactful that the story ends without showing the husband’s
reaction to Jenny’s secret, instead allowing the reader to superimpose their own reactions onto
him. I therefore tried to maintain this theme in my artwork, keeping the man’s head, and
therefore his facial expression, out of view while keeping the focus squarely on Jenny and on
Jenny’s secret. I also wanted to capture the macabre nature of the story and highlight the ribbon
as the focal point of both the story itself and of Jenny and Alfred’s life together, which I
attempted to do by keeping most of the drawing in grayscale and highlighting the ribbon in
bright green. In my eyes, the aftermath of “The Green Ribbon” is meant to remain a mystery, but
I couldn’t help but try to work out a snapshot of what may have followed the story’s end.
The story of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck has been told in many
variations; the role of the husband, the color of the scarf, and the relative ‘scariness’ of the girl
herself all varies. The elements of the story that remain consistent are as follows; there is a girl
who always wears a ribbon or scarf around her neck. She meets a boy who is curious about the
scarf, but she refuses to explain her reason for wearing it. They grow up and get married, and it is
revealed either by the husband’s obsessive curiosity or the girl’s impending death by natural
causes that the scarf has been securing her head to her body for her whole life. The story always
ends at the moment that her head falls off.
It was difficult for me to understand why or when this story was told. In my case, it came
from a book of short horror stories, but other versions of the story are out there. It has been
speculated that parts of the story originated with the French revolution, when it became a fashion
statement to wear red ribbons around the neck to symbolize the fatal wound left by the guillotine.
This understanding of the story places it into a subversive context, but this speculation is by no
means the verified origin of the text, and one cannot be completely certain that the original
author of the story intended it to be anything more than simple horror. At its heart, “The Green
Ribbon” is a horror story, one that is told around campfires and altered, as I first heard it, to be
just scary enough for children to enjoy. It doesn’t seem to express a clear moral (although this
does not mean that it doesn’t convey a value system), and thus tends to be told for no purpose
greater than that of diversion. Examining it carefully, though, reveals a series of interesting
assumptions and narrative choices within the story that have the combined effect of subtly
influencing the audience’s perception of the world.
The first thing that stood out to me when I began to think critically about this story was
its lack of an overarching moral context. In most of the stories that I was exposed to as a child,
the moral was made self-evident. I knew what I was supposed to be getting from the stories, and
this understanding provided the framework for how I internalized the story itself. One of the
things that Pamela Bond talked about as part of her guest lecture was the concept that different
people learned different things from the same story, and that in fact the stories she told were
meant to be presented mostly without comment, for the listener to learn from them as they would
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(Bond). In thinking about this story that fascinated me so much throughout the years, I realized
that it was this ‘presentation without comment’ that made “The Green Ribbon” unique when
compared to the other stories I was told as a child. This method of storytelling thus benefits from
being viewed through the lens of “dialogical narratology”, a way of understanding stories that
focuses less on the themes and morals of the story, and more on the way that the story forms a
relationship with its hearer, who is in turn shaped by the story and shown a different way of
being. As stated by Anishinaabe storyteller Kathleen Westcott, stories “position” and “shape”
hearers; stories, and especially the story of “The Green Ribbon,” are two-way communications
between the story and the hearers, not one way deposits of knowledge (Doerfler et al 67).
It is interesting to consider the parallels between Barbara Mann’s discussion of the
differences between indigenous women’s and men’s stories and this story’s combined woman-
centered narrative and subversions of traditional Western narrative traditions. Among other
things, Mann described the stories of Haudenosaunee women as free of context, focused more on
women, and shared in fragmented ways (Mann 423-425). The story of “The Green Ribbon,”
despite its origins in Western culture, contains the same sorts of patterns. The story presents little
to no background information on the girl or her environment, simply presenting a series of
events. The story is also completely fixated upon the girl’s life and perspective, at least in the
version I read. It begins with her and ends with her, and even when her husband plays a vital role
in the plot he is not a point-of-view character. Finally, the story is typically short. Although it is
presented here as text, its original style is much more suited to verbal communication, and its
shortness lends itself to this.
It can be observed that, while these characteristics apply to the version of “The Green
Ribbon” that I read as a child, they do not apply to the longer, ostensibly darker versions of the
story that can be found online. These versions focus on the anger of the husband at being kept in
the dark, give more minute detail about the couple’s daily lives, and generally strip away the
agency of the protagonist in service of the emotions of her husband. These stories are, because of
this, less narratively interesting and less meaningful. They have been assimilated into a male-
dominated, traditionally Western narrative, and have thus lost touch with the story’s uniqueness.
Although parts of the narrative go against traditional Western children’s tales, the one
thing about the story that is utterly mainstream is its depiction of a ‘normal’ life trajectory. The
ribbon is depicted to be the only out of the ordinary part of the protagonist’s life; this implies that
every other choice she makes-like getting married and having children-is the typical way of
doing things. This part of the narrative reinforces the mainstream, Western view of life, the
assumption that a normal person is one who enters a monogamous male/female relationship, gets
married, has children, and grows old. Much of Western culture (and especially American culture)
is centered around this ideal, which has the unfortunate effect of marginalizing those who cannot
or do not fit into the role prescribed for them by society. This can be further interpreted,
however, as an attempt to create common ground with the (presumably white and European)
reader. This technique has been seen in argumentation since the Ancient Greeks, and was also
common in cultures far removed from European areas, such as in Cherokee life (Carney 127).
This approach is typically seen when one is trying to persuade others to act or think in ways they
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want them to, which at first glance does not seem to apply to a horror story. But horror is built
around subverting expectations, around persuading the audience to buy into the narrative, and
around convincing the audience that the world depicted in the book, or movie, or short story,
could be their own. Horror is persuasion, and even when it depends on norms that do not fit in
some-or even most-cases, its techniques for persuasion betray a human constant; a desire for
connection, and a universal method of communication.
To be honest, I almost didn’t want to consider what I could have learned from this story; I
was afraid that if I sought out a moral the story would lose the ambiguous sheen that made me
love it. Part of the reason this story was so constant in my head was that it seemed like it didn’t
have a point. A girl lived a normal (for a certain value of normal) life with a secret she did not
reveal until the right time, at least in my version of the story. Considering the story now, I think I
have tended to relate to the story’s protagonist more than I usually assumed. The idea that it was
okay to keep some things personal, that I didn’t owe my inner life in its entirety to the ones that I
loved, was something that resonated with me. “The Green Ribbon” presented me with an
example a woman who could keep her secrets and still be loved and respected by those she cared
about, something I hadn’t really seen in other media. Similarly, I tend to dislike retellings of the
story in which the twist is revealed through the actions of the protagonist’s husband; to me, the
story of “The Green Ribbon” is at its best when it is a story about a woman’s agency.
This story is best heard without commentary, at its simplest (ironic to say after having
presented a fairly in-depth analysis of said story, I know). Even the version I presented in class is
not necessarily my favorite way of telling the story; in my opinion, “The Green Ribbon” is best
experienced in the way I first experienced it. This may be a bias spurred by childhood nostalgia,
but if I were to tell this story again, I would tell it to a child, in the shortest sentences and the
simplest terms, and allow them to make of it what they will.
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Works Cited

Bond, Pamela. Honors 210A: Stories of Knowledge; Knowledge of Stories. University of

Washington, Seattle. 3 Oct. 2016. Lecture.

Carney, Virginia. 2001. “Woman Is the Mother of All”: Nanye’hi and Kitteuha: War Women
of the Cherokees. In, Native American speakers of the Eastern woodlands: selected
speeches and critical analyses. Contributions to the study of mass media and
communications, no. 60. Westport: Greenwood Press. 123-143.

Doerfler, Jill, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (eds).
2013. Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World through Stories.
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba.

Mann, Barbara A. 1997. The Lynx in Time: Haudenosaunee Women’s Traditions and
History. American Indian Quarterly. 21(3)423-449.