Evan Boland, “Anorexic”
In this poem Evan Boland addresses the role of women in a Patriarchal society. There is a duality to the poem. In a literal sense this poem is talking about a woman starving herself because she associates eating with submission and sin. Like the women on hunger strike, she refused to allow herself to be seen as a criminal by means of starvation. She did this with the intent of being seen as a political prisoner of the British. In the cell she remembers a time with her husband where everything was safe. The woman allows that idea to power her through the pain of hunger. If you dig a bit deeper you realize that this poem is really talking about a woman purging herself of the woman that society has told her she must be. It is a woman who is refusing food in order to be free of what makes her the idealistic woman in the eyes of a man. There is a wildness to the beginning of the poem that makes you understand the desperation this woman feels in escaping her old role. Her hate is palpable, the violent diction makes you realize just how much she despises the woman that she is supposed to be, not just the woman, but the society that places the pressure on her to be this ideal woman.
The first part of the poem starts off by saying, “Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching her curves and paps and wiles. They scorch in my self denials.How she meshed my head in the half-truths of her fevers till i renounced milk and honey and the taste of lunch. I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless i am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. Thin as a rib I turn in sleep.” The poem comes right out by showing that this woman is rejecting the idea of this ideal woman of Northern Ireland. A heretic is a person who goes against a widely held belief, choosing to have a different view regardless of what people may think. This is what the woman in this poem is taking pride in. She wants to get rid of her curves, which define her as a woman, starving herself of the food. The food in this case serves to represent what society is trying to nourish her with, this idea of the ideal woman. Once she has starved her body, then she will only be left with the flesh, which to her, makes her who she is. It is only when she renounces food, that she is free of the “fever.”
The last part of the poem goes,”My dreams probe a claustrophobia a sensuous enclosure. How warm it was and wide once by a warm drum and once by the song of his breath and in his sleeping side. Only a little more only a few more days foodless, I will slip back to him again as if I had never been away. Caged so I will grow angular and holy past pain, keeping his heart such company as will make me forget in a small space the fall into forked dark, into python needs heaving to hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed” This is where the duality comes into play. In a literal sense this woman is trying to take comfort in a time where she had her husband and she finds comfort in that. The poem almost seems to say that this man is what gives her the strength to be the way she is now, sinless, without food, and fighting. However, looking at the comfort of this man as a metaphor for the comfort of her old life where she allowed herself to be dominated by the patriarchal society, we find new meaning in the text. There is such a contrast between this half of the poem and the last. Suddenly the diction becomes more dreamy and calm. This represents how easy it would be for her to find comfort once again, by accepting food and her old life. Evan Boland uses “Sensuous” to describe that life. The life that this woman lived, although appealing, was also constricting. However by allowing herself to sink back into that comfort, she would be letting in everything that she is trying to purge herself of.