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A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic"
A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic"
A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic"
Ebook35 pages24 minutes

A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 19, 2016
ISBN9781535818452
A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic"

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    A Study Guide for Eavan Boland's "Anorexic" - Gale

    1

    Anorexic

    Eavan Boland

    1980

    Introduction

    As the title of the poem suggests, Anorexic examines the troubling issue of self-inflicted starvation, a topic that some readers (and some poets) consider controversial and out of place in poetry. But that, Eavan Boland would say, is all the more reason to write about it.

    Beginning with the publication of In Her Own Image in 1980, Boland began to explore and present in her work intimate subjects dealing with all aspects of a woman’s life, including her sexuality, her relationship with men, and her relationship with herself. In Her Own Image includes poems with such provocative titles as Menses, Masturbation, and Mastectomy, as well as Anorexic. These poems make public the highly personal thoughts and behaviors of women, and Boland’s strong feminist views are the driving force behind their creation. These poems have been both praised and condemned but often by readers who do not fully appreciate their motivations.

    Anorexic relies heavily on irony to present Boland’s disdain for the long-held social practice of judging females by their look or weight. This poem, however, rather than being a straightforward account of a woman’s suffering, involves a cynical twist. The speaker imagines herself as the biblical Eve longing to disappear back into Adam’s body and become the rib from which she was created. By presenting the woman’s body as hideous, with its sweat and fat and greed, Boland ironically points out the female’s desperate desire for independence and an identity separate from an attachment to a man. By using the voice of a woman who believes in society’s conception of the perfect female and who is willing to waste away to become it, the poet exposes her outrage that such a conception

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