Complete with in-depth analysis that helped me to achieve full marks on the relevant comparative essay, and ultimately full marks in the A-Level exam itself (June 2022). Alongside close reading applies a range of critical perspectives (eg Marxism, postcolonialism etc) to enable alternative readings...
The verb ‘hit’ has violent connotations, possibly suggesting domestic abuse
(supports AO1 point).
When I hit thirty, he brought me a cake,
The cake is made to seem a burden; a sense of heaviness is created.
three layers of icing, home-made, Notably, this is also memetic (the stanzas are three lines). It is ironic that
a candle for each stone in weight. that ‘thirty’ is the goal: this shouldn’t be desirable or appealing.
This is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland; it is particularly disturbing to
allude to a child’s story in an act of seduction.
The nouns ‘pink’ and ‘white’, connoting innocence and purity,
The icing was white but the letters were pink, juxtapose with the aggressive, blunt capitalised imperative.
they said, EAT ME. And I ate, did .
The enjambement (‘did / what I was told’) emphasises speed and relentlessness
what I was told. Didn’t even taste it. of following orders.
The unadorned words and the omission of the pronoun makes it seem like an act
of automatic/robotic instinct.
The man is the active subject – ‘he asked’. The act of walking around the bed
is like a show or parade- renders this disturbing; the verb ‘watch’ further
Then he asked me to get up and walk emphasises the feeder’s disturbing, voyeuristic nature.
round the bed so he could watch my broad
The double letters in ‘belly’, ‘wobble’, ‘judder’ and ‘jugger’ enacts the
belly wobble, hips judder like a juggernaut. ‘wobbling’. The alliterative simile ‘judder like a juggernaut’ enacts the
speaker’s immense physical nature – prefigures hidden power.
This is a cliché – the feeder sees the speaker as an object rather than a human.
The repetition of ‘girls’ patronisingly reduces the speaker to a child in an
infantile, powerless state. That ‘girls’ is a plural noun emphasises that the
The bigger the better, he’d say, I like feeder fails to appreciate the speaker’s humanity – doesn’t care about her as an
big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside individual.
with multiple chins, masses of cellulite. ‘Burrow inside’: the feeder is parasitic – verb ‘burrow’ is particularly disturbing
in relation to the human body – metaphor disturbingly conflates sex and
animalism. The ‘m’ sounds echo the sense of excess and undulating flesh.
‘Jacuzzi’: objectifies speaker; indulges in her. Noun connotes commercialism and
excess.
I was his Jacuzzi. But he was my cook, The alliterative ‘fast food’ has dual semantics: suggests not only the poor quality of
my only pleasure the rush of fast food, the food but also the speed at which the feeder bombards the speaker with
excessive food. The noun ‘rush’ adds to the sense of speed and excess; also suggests
his pleasure, to watch me swell like it is like a drug. The modifier ‘only’ emphasises that the relationship is not satisfying:
forbidden fruit. the speaker only gets gratification from food.
This simile suggests the deviant nature of the relationship: it is a biblical allusion; this implies the
inherently sinful nature of the feeder’s actions.
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