The Diet: Exploring the Truths and Issues Surrounding Femininity

1. LQ: What is the message and style contained in ‘The Diet’?

2. Analysing ‘The Diet’ • The title:What issues do you assume will be raised in this poem? What truths do you think will be revealed in relation to femininity? • In pairs, read the poem through. Highlight all descriptions of the woman and what she is doing / is happening to her. • Try and spot at least 10 literary or linguistic techniques that Duffy is employing in the poem • Pinpoint the moment where the poem takes a turn for the surreal – note down quotes that demonstrate this. • Now jot down quickly the story of what is happening to the central figure, write this story onto your copy of the poem. • What is the story. Now identify key quotes that are used to represent the shrinking of the woman.

3. Hyperbolic List Starts plausible, but soon becomes absurd. Parodying diets based on abstention. Cliches Satirising the limited and typical mind-set of must-get-thin-quick Enjambment Replicates the sense of excitement/shock, before reality ensues Time Frame Mimics the goal orientated nature of dieting The diet worked like a dream. No sugar,salt, dairy, fat, protein, starch or alcohol.By the end of week one, she was half a stoneshy of ten and shrinking, skipping breakfast,lunch, dinner, thinner; a fortnight in, she waseight stone; by the end of the month, she was skinand bone. Asyndetic List Creates a claustrophobic, spiralling nature – she cannot stop – focussing on just getting thinner Parallelism Relatively symmetrical structure also creates a sense of inevitability and inescapability

4. Enjambment Stared in give hope – introspection – before being disappointed by the resolution – the mirror. Like a diet Triadic List and Consonnance Each increases the mundane nature of her existence Sibilance Weak sound of bitterness and fatigue Parallelism What does the separation of each adjective represent – pride? Disappointment? A struggle? Distance? She starved on, stayed in, stared inthe mirror, svelter, slimmer. The last appleaged in the fruit bowl, untouched. The skimmed milksoured in the fridge,unsupped. Her skeleton preenedunder its tight flesh dress. She was all eyes,all cheekbones, had guns for hips. Not a stitchin the wardrobe fitted. Symbolism Rejecting an apple – symbolic of rejecting Eve’s actions. Also symbolic therefore of rejecting womanhood? Metaphor Demonstrates the violence of anorexia – but at whom is the aggression directed? Personification Gruesome image coupled with the verb preen – like a peacock – moves into the grotesque

5. Rhetorical Question Genuine concern and curiosity or just a tabloid headline? Enjambment Air is disappointingly empty – water similarly so. Again, building anticipation to nothing . Metaphor Signifies physical and spiritual atrophy Personification Reflects the warped nature of womanhood and female identity. What passed her lips? Air,water. She was Anorexia’s true daughter, a slipof a girl, a shadow, dwindling away. One day,the width of a stick, she started to grow smaller – child-sized, doll-sized, the height of a thimble.She sat at her open window and the windblew her away. Metaphor Compound adjectives symbolise her regression of female identities, ultimately becoming objectified? Imagery/Volta Poem suddenly changes tone and becomes incredibly surreal

6. Enjambment Stared in give hope – introspection – before being disappointed by the resolution – the mirror. Like a diet Imagery Highlights horrific regressive nature of the condition Internal Rhyme Hints at internal conflict Narrative Focus Shift from the physical to emotional – nothing left? Seed small, she was out and about,looking for home. An empty beer bottle rolledin the gutter. She crawled in, got drunk on the dregs,started to sing, down, out, nobody’s love. Tiny othersjoined in. They raved all night. She woke alone,head splitting, mouth dry, hungry and cold, and madefor the light. Imagery Return to focus on the physical sense, which begins with a sense of alone Pun Heaven? Health? The street outside? Simple Sentence Complicated sequence of events turned into four words – hazy memory?

7. ? Metaphor/Cliche Wants to be attractive but at best gets galnces from the barman She found she could fly on the wind,could breathe, if it rained, underwater. That night,she went to a hotel bar that she knew and floated intothe barman’s eye. She slept for hours, left at dawnin a blink, in a wink, drifted away on a breeze.Minute, she could suit herself from here on in, gowhere she pleased. Subtext Hints at depression Cliché Focus is entirely on herself –alone Metaphor Indicates a lack of purpose

8. Simile Links back to the idea of being a seed earlier, but also at the contagious and illness-like nature of anorexia She stayed near people,lay in the tent of a nostril like a germ, dwelledin the caves of an ear. She lived in a tear, swamclear, moved south to a mouth, kipped in the chapof a lip.She loved flesh and blood, wallowedin mud under fingernails, dossed in a fold of faton a waist. Metaphor Again, links back to sadness and depression Imagery Indicates a fixation of the physical Rhyme Replicates her sense of enjoyment at last as she gorges Imagery All focussed on visceral imagery

9. Consonance Replicates the fragility of her position Connotations Indicates something shameful/disgusting Triad Indicates fixation with the sensation of swallowing Asyndetic List Creates a disorientating effect, especially the reversal of direction- confusion. Echoes of earlier reference to the barmanhh7ccccccccccv ttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt But when she squatted the tip of a tongue,she was gulped, swallowed, sent down the hatchin a river of wine, bottoms up, cheers, fetched upin a stomach just before lunch. She crouchedin the lining, hearing the avalanche munch of food,then it was carrots, peas, courgettes, potatoes,gravy and meat. List Nothing particularly exemplary, but still afforded positions of reverence Metaphor Indicates her perspective on the food she is eating – unstoppable

10. Juxtaposition/Subversion However, revealed to just be describing desert – focus on food Symbolism Initially seems to suggest some sort of decadent enjoyment Triad All foods are decadent Asyndetic List Indicates gorging with no distinction Then it was sweet. Then it was stilton,roquefort, weisslacker-kase, gex; it was smoked salmonwith scrambled eggs, hot boiled ham, plum flan, frogs’legs. She knew where she was all right, clamberedonto the greasy breast of a goose, opened wide, thenchomped and chewed and gorged; inside the Fat Woman now,trying to get out. Hyperbole The physical strain of eating the sheer volume that she is Pun/Cliché Cliché ‘I’m a fat person in a think person’s body alongside alluding to the virus-like nature of anorexia Syndetic List Indicated the physical process and pleasure of eating

11. How is this woman Represented ? What does ‘The Fat Woman’ at the end of the poem represent ?

12. Look at the 2 quotes – can you find any evidence of these views in the poem ? “We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need” MaryaHornbacher Today, massiveness, power, or abundance in a woman’s body is met with distaste…Dieting disciplines the body’s hungers: appetite must be monitored at all times and governed by an iron will. Since the innocent need of the organism for food will not be denied, the body becomes one’s enemy…Anorexia nervosa, which has now assumed epidemic proportions, is…the crystallization in a pathological mode of a widespread cultural obsession.