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1-eat-me

The poem 'Eat Me' explores themes of intentional ambiguity, submission, and the dynamics of power in relationships through the lens of a female speaker's experience with a male figure. It juxtaposes childlike innocence with taboo subjects, revealing the speaker's gradual shift from submissiveness to empowerment as she confronts her identity and weight. The ending leaves readers questioning their assumptions about morality and the boundaries of acceptable behavior, challenging the perception of the female persona in relation to the male's objectification.

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12 views2 pages

1-eat-me

The poem 'Eat Me' explores themes of intentional ambiguity, submission, and the dynamics of power in relationships through the lens of a female speaker's experience with a male figure. It juxtaposes childlike innocence with taboo subjects, revealing the speaker's gradual shift from submissiveness to empowerment as she confronts her identity and weight. The ending leaves readers questioning their assumptions about morality and the boundaries of acceptable behavior, challenging the perception of the female persona in relation to the male's objectification.

Uploaded by

REEM
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Eat Me

 Intentional ambiguity – purposefully deceives the reader. Double entendre. E.g. hit 30. Only
by end of the first tercet, that this is about her weight and the fetish is revealed. Ambiguity
gives false sense of security about relationships and expectations and then shatters them;
breaks down barriers of propriety and what is acceptable.
 Taboo, fetish, extreme – addressed in a very dysphemistic way (opposite of euphemistic).
Impolite subjects in extreme, blunt forms. Tone of exploitation and exposure and sensuality
and risqué is carried throughout the poem.
 Makes it more uncomfortable because framed in this innocent, fairytale, Alice in
wonderland, childlike ‘eat me’ phrase – sense of naivety. Mixes the macabre of the fetish
and sexualised underbelly of society with taboo and the childish innocence and purity of the
fairy tale with the allusion to Alice in Wonderland.
 Imperative of eat me – domination, imposing sense of the masculine voice in the poem.
 Tension increases in poem between two voices – speaker and the male. Heteroglossia.
Italicised masculine voice exerting his dominance, intruding on the female speaker in the
poem. She’s very submissive – can’t even sustain her own narrative voice.
 Short clauses are submissive: “and I ate, did what I was told. Didn’t even taste it.” By third
clause, she absents her self from the process – doesn’t use pronoun, doesn’t personalise
herself in this process. Removal in her identity, makes this shocking – submission so
complete that makes her identity obscelete and irrelevant in this relationship.
 Male pronoun evident throughout – ‘he could watch’; juxtaposition between pronouns ‘he’
and ‘my’ emphatic of his objectification of her and ownership is so complete she fully
surrenders.
 Continues: “the bigger the better…I like big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside” –
repetition, noun ‘girls’ removes her identity, impersonalsies her further. Doesn’t necessarily
say ‘you’, doesn’t individualise her, she could be anybody to him – sense of distance
between speaker and male persona.
 Weight, physical form, ‘soft’, ‘big’, ‘masses of cellulite’ – his fascination with perversion he
revels in, not her.
 Pluralisation of noun ‘girls’ – suggests that this is something universal for him. Not an
individual pursuit for him. Insipid, personal. Not a loving or productive relationship.
 Extended metaphor of the nautical imagery – ‘jacuzzi’, ‘desert island’, ‘tidal wave’, ‘beached
whale’ – references to nautical imagery that grow during the poem. Begins small – jacuzzi,
desert island, beached whale, tidal wave – she amasses her weight but also builds,
progressively, to her change. Final metaphor, the tidal wave of flesh – moment of
enjambment where she goes into her refrain ‘too fat to…’, anaphora of her own self-
criticism, self-loathing, epiphany leads to Volta.
 Growing to tidal wave is a metaphor for an amassing of power and her strength because
language changes: becomes more forceful – “The day I hit thirty-nine, I allowed him to
stroke” – voice changes from passive to active, verb ‘allowed’. I was his -> I allowed him.
Accumulates sense of strength, purpose, intention in poem. Sense of how her weight now
becomes a weapon that she uses against him – literally something to be reckoned with.
Parallels between second line intercept “his flesh, my flesh flowed” can parallel his
domination with her own. His voice becomes the diminutive force.
 “Soon you’ll be forty…he whispered” – voice weakening in the poem, metaphor for power
weakening in the relationship.
 Reach anticipation, climax building at the elipsis – point of no return. “How could I not roll
over on top” – personal pronoun dominates the last two tercets, forces it way back into the
poem, found her identity and sense of self. Everything directed by her.
 Suggestions at end of poem returns to opening intentional ambiguity – reader still left in
place of disorientation and confusion. Speaker in the poem is almost not quite as different
from the male as the poem as we may perceive? Fact she rolled on top, her power that she
usurps from him in killing him, and intentional ambiguity at the end for nothing left in the
house (suggestion of did she eat him?) did she become more depraved, cannibalism?
Something so irredeemable about this persona.
 International ambiguity to challenge reader’s assumptions of how far is too far? And how
much does a reader judge a situation and at what point do our situations change?
All the way through we aligned our sympathies to female persona, but at what point does
this change? Do we only sympathise with her when we feel she is behaving within the
parameters of what we perceive as ‘normal behaviour’? Do they end when we feel when
she’s crossed a line? Are we not prepared to allow her any place in normal society when she
supersedes those boundaries and becomes monstrous as the male persona in the poem
was?

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