1. Introduction
Natalia Theodoridou’s “Her Right Arm” is a compact, deadpan Gothic fable of about 4,300 words. It appears in khōréō, where it is marked “Previously Published,” and carries a 2025 copyright (Theodoridou). The story belongs to a body of work that has appeared in venues such as Kenyon Review, Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons. That work has earned Theodoridou the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction (“Natalia Theodoridou”). I could not verify the story’s original venue, so my reading rests on the text as published in khōréō. Its premise is that a man travels overseas to a new post carrying the severed right arm of his fiancée, Marianne, which she “willingly” gave him when he left.
My thesis is that the story uses a single grotesque conceit, the literalized idiom of giving one’s right arm, to expose how possessive masculine desire turns a person into a part and then treats that part as sufficient. The arm is never reliably monstrous. The horror is the narrator’s slow, self-flattering production of a pretext for destroying it, and the story’s closing image shows that this machinery is already running again.
2. Summary
An unnamed man sails to a new country to take up a post arranged by his employer. He is accompanied only by Marianne’s right arm, which is warm and responsive to touch. Over the voyage he confides in it, admitting that he doubted he ever loved her and that he had misrepresented the journey as unavoidable. Marianne could in fact have joined him, and he saw “an opportunity to start over alone.”
He befriends Victor, a charming young seducer in a green velvet vest, and discloses the arm to him. Victor’s question, “Are you ever scared of it?”, seeds the man’s paranoia. The arm seems to cause a fall in his cabin. He reinterprets Marianne’s tears at their parting as resentment and begins to lock the arm away. After an evening in a brothel with Victor, in which he asks for “both” a man and a woman, he returns to the arm and tries to revive it. Once ashore he comes to resent it, suffers recurring dreams of being strangled by it, and burns it in a woodstove. The next day he meets Victor’s fiancée’s “delightful” friend, imagines their whole future, and compliments her: “You have such lovely arms.”
3. Critical Analysis
3.1 Themes
Synecdoche as possession. The story’s central device is a part standing in for the whole. The narrator reasons that “this particular part can truly stand in for the whole,” and later that Marianne has become “a part that is much larger than the whole.” Synecdoche here is a mode of consumption. A woman’s bodily labor and affective devotion are kept, while her inconvenient autonomy, her scent, and her voice are shed. The arm is the “right” arm, the dominant, skilled, working one, so the sacrifice is also a theft of capacity. His belated wish for the left arm, “a little less deft,” shows that he wants her usefulness without her agency.
Self-deception and the manufacture of grievance. The narrator is a connoisseur of his own alibis. He has “so meticulously obscured” the facts of his departure that “sometimes he, too, forgot about them.” When the arm moves, he calls it an “accident.” Guilt then converts into paranoia, in which the victim is imagined as an avenger, “Desperation can, after all, breed regret. Regret can beget vengefulness.” This is the logic of the abuser who needs the abused to be dangerous. The story never settles whether the arm acts. The grasped shirt, the “bumping blindly in the dark,” and the strangling dream are all open to a psychological reading, and that openness is a strength.
Desire, mediation, and the mirror. Victor is not only a tempter. The narrator’s longing for Victor’s looks and for the touch of the velvet vest is also a longing to be someone else. He later says he has no more use for Victor than “for the vacuous confirmations of a mirror.” This is a nearly textbook case of Girardian mediated desire, in which the model’s wants become the subject’s own (Girard).
3.2 Form and Style
Point of view and structure. The story uses close third-person focalization on a man who is never named. The “he” is both a refusal of individuation and a universalizing gesture. Free indirect discourse produces dramatic irony. Phrases like “willing sacrifice” and “she was so brave” carry the narrator’s vocabulary while the surrounding detail (the reddened nose, the tear-streaked cheeks, the bloodied hatchet) contradicts them. The “• • •” breaks segment the text into short, vignette-like days that mimic the voyage’s rhythms and make the escalation feel like drift rather than plot. The structure is cyclical: the story begins and ends with a man on a voyage thinking about home, and the last scene sets up a new “Marianne.”
Tone and imagery. The register is dry, almost comic. Details like the “lemon so thin you can see through them,” the newspaper “out here at sea,” and the observation that it is “a very small cabin” make the callousness funny before it becomes unsettling. The imagery is domestic and sensory: the arm “nestling next to his body like a cat,” the fingers “nibbling at the loose folds of skin on his neck.” Sweetness recurs as a motif for what he finds cloying in women (Marianne’s perfume, the jam). The sea is yellow and “sickened,” which signals that the moral weather is wrong from the first page. The title’s possessive, “Her,” quietly insists on Marianne’s claim to a limb the narrator treats as his own.
3.3 Characterization
The narrator is the story’s only fully drawn figure, and he is drawn from the inside by his own evasions. His affect is mild, even tender, which makes him more disturbing than a conventional villain. Marianne exists only by absence, as arm, memory, and the “other arm holding the bloodied hatchet.” That scarcity is the point, since she has been edited into an object, but it also means the story must rely on the reader to supply her interiority. Victor is the most schematic of the three. He is a charming mirror and, crucially, a bad influence whose “I am worried for you, my friend” nudges the narrator toward violence while keeping his own hands clean.
4. Historical, Cultural, and Theoretical Context
Gothic and the severed-hand tradition. The story participates in a long tradition of animate severed hands in Gothic and weird fiction. It inverts the usual direction of menace, since the relic is typically the avenger. Here the question is whether the relic is hostile at all, or whether hostility is projected onto it. Freud’s account of the uncanny, in which the dismembered limb that moves of its own accord is a central example, makes the arm’s ambiguity productive (Freud). Its warmth and responsiveness are uncanny because they blur the animate and the inanimate, the loved and the abject. Kristeva’s abjection helps here: the arm is a boundary object, part of a body and not, and disavowing it is how the narrator reaffirms his clean self (Kristeva). Barbara Creed’s work on the “monstrous-feminine” also frames the question of who gets to be called monstrous (Creed).
Victor and Frankenstein. The name Victor invites a reading against Mary Shelley’s novel (Shelley). Shelley’s Victor assembles a body from parts and flees his creation. Theodoridou’s narrator performs a kind of reverse assembly, reducing a whole woman to a part, and then flees it too. The nightmare of the pursuing creature, and the creator’s conviction that it wants revenge, are redistributed. The younger Victor is a different sort of figure, a seducer rather than a scientist, yet the echo suggests that the instruments of this creation are social: admiration, pity, and male company.
Feminist and queer approaches. Read through feminist theory, the story dramatizes the object status of women, a status Mulvey’s account of the male gaze and Rubin’s analysis of the “traffic in women” both explain (Mulvey; Rubin). It also recalls Gilbert and Gubar’s reading of women divided into angel and monster, since Marianne is first the “selfless, devoted” ideal and then, as an arm, a suspected threat (Gilbert and Gubar). The khōréō content warnings, which list “covert misogyny,” identify this reading as an intended one (Theodoridou). The queer dimension complicates it. The narrator’s desire for Victor and his request for “both” at the brothel are presented without censure, and in Sedgwick’s terms the story is alert to the way male homosocial bonds, here a bond with Victor, can organize and displace desire for women (Sedgwick). The text, however, withholds any redemptive reading of that awakening. Self-discovery does not improve him morally. It only provides a new set of appetites.
5. Evaluation
Strengths. The story’s best quality is its calibration. It sustains an ambiguity about the arm’s agency without ever tipping into either pure supernatural horror or pure psychological case study. The narrator’s voice is controlled, and the humor is complicit with the reader just long enough to make the reader’s own indulgence in his perspective part of the critique. The closing line is a powerful structural turn, since its “greatest compliment he can think of” shows that nothing has been learned and the cycle is ready to recur. The compression is admirable for a piece of this length.
Weaknesses. The reader sees the narrator’s character early, so the story’s tension is more a matter of anticipated dread than suspense. Victor is thinly motivated, and his function as a catalyst is sometimes more apparent than his personality. The dream sequence, in which the arm strangles its owner, leans on a familiar convention and is the least inventive passage. The Frankenstein allusion is intriguing but is not developed enough to pay off thematically, so it risks reading as a nod rather than an argument.
Originality and impact. The conceit has precedent in the Gothic tradition, but its feminist literalization of a common idiom, together with the unreliable focalizer and the refusal to resolve the arm’s agency, gives it a distinct identity within contemporary short speculative fiction. It sits comfortably alongside recent work that uses the weird to examine intimate harm, and its brevity makes it highly teachable.
6. Conclusion
“Her Right Arm” shows how possessive desire reduces a person to a usable part and how self-deception recasts that reduction as love, and then as victimhood. Its refusal to confirm the arm’s malice moves the horror from the object to the man who narrates it. The story’s last line, with its new “lovely arms,” makes the cycle the real subject. Its relevance lies in how it renders an everyday pattern of coercion, in which “sacrifice” is extracted and later rewritten as consent, visible through a Gothic image. Further study might compare it with other severed-body narratives, examine its place in Theodoridou’s wider treatment of bodies and bargains, and consider how the Victor figure rewrites Shelley’s creator.
Works Cited
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock, Penguin, 2003.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979.
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero, Johns Hopkins UP, 1965.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia UP, 1982.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6–18.
“Natalia Theodoridou.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalia_Theodoridou. Accessed 12 Oct. 2026.
Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 157–210.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: The 1818 Text. Edited by J. Paul Hunter, 2nd ed., Norton, 2012.
Theodoridou, Natalia. “Her Right Arm.” khōréō, edited by Isabella Kestermann, 2025, www.khoreomag.com/fiction/her-right-arm/.