Analysis of the Limitless Boundaries of Pop Corpse “A fairy tell, a popular tale, a pop tale, a dead tale, a pop corpse. A rotting version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid” (Applegate 1). Laura Glenum’s Pop Corpse is a sort of poetry where boundaries are limitless. It takes a fairy tell like The Little Mermaid and completely twists it around as expressed in David Applegate’s review of the poem. The work includes a character that has a forced identity and struggles with her purpose in the world. This character is XXX. She struggles throughout the whole poem with accepting who she is and tries to change her female role throughout the series of poems. There are many motives that drive XXX throughout the work, but none as important …show more content…
“Turns on webcam. Opens her cutting box and takes out a scalpel. Carefully cuts a hole into her scales where her snatch should be. Lubes her finger with her spit and inserts it” (Glenum 51). Here the audience is presented with a situation where XXX the main character, decides she has had enough with her set identity and wants to change it. She is given a gender in which she is a female, but doesn’t have female parts. She redefines the norm of accepting what you are given, and creates a new form of the female gender, rather than accepting the mermaid gender that she is presented with in the text. This adventure for pleasure by XXX also shows Glenum’s view on the women’s mindset. “I lost my strap-on + I’m hot hot for the Smear” (Glenum 94). All XXX really wants throughout Glenum’s work is sex and pleasure as seen through this quote. In the real world, it tends to be the males who search for this continuous pleasure. However, in Pop Corpse, Glenum has reversed the typical societal view on gender roles and instead places this sex drive and search for pleasure on XXX. In her work, Glenum crosses gender boundaries and switches gender roles. Throughout the text, Glenum uses a character who is on a quest for pleasure to challenge the acceptable Gender norms of society
At first glance, the poems The Chimney Sweeper by William Blake, and Barbie Doll, by Marge Piercy appear to have no tangible similarities. However, upon further analysis and interpretation, they can be seen as somewhat akin. In these two poems, the harsh treatment of children, the use of imagery, and children’s self-image in the poems are comparable. The differences between the two poems include the time period in which they were written, the background of the characters, and the characters’ reactions to the problems that they are faced with. Although the surface level information in the poems Barbie Doll and The Chimney Sweeper is easy to contrast, if one dives a little deeper,
‘The woman’ of the poem has no specific identity and this helps us even further see the situation in which the woman is experiencing, the lost of one’s identity. Questions start to be raised and we wonder if Harwood uses this character to portray her views of every woman which goes into the stage of motherhood, where much sacrifice is needed one being the identity that was present in society prior to children.
The third decade of the twentieth century brought on more explicit writers than ever before, but none were as expressive as Anne Sexton. Her style of writing, her works, the image that she created, and the crazy life that she led are all prime examples of this. Known as one of the most “confessional” poets of her time, Anne Sexton was also one of the most criticized. She was known to use images of incest, adultery, and madness to reveal the depths of her deeply troubled life, which often brought on much controversy. Despite this, Anne went on to win many awards and go down as one of the best poets of all time.
Plath and Sexton's lifetimes spanned a period of remarkable change in the social role of women in America, and both are obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With few established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their agonizing personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. However, although their poems, such as Plath's "Daddy" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," deal with the authors' private experiences, they retain elements of universality; their language cuts through a layer of individual perspective to reach a current of raw emotion common to all human, but especially female, understanding.
The young girl in the story is struggling with finding her own gender identity. She would much rather work alongside her father, who was “tirelessly inventive” (Munro 328), than stay and work with her mother in the kitchen, depicted through, “As soon as I was done I ran out of the house, trying to get out of earshot before my mother thought of what to do next” (329). The girl is torn between what her duties are suppose to be as a woman, and what she would rather be doing, which is work with her father. She sees her father’s work as important and worthwhile, while she sees her mother’s work as tedious and not meaningful. Although she knows her duties as a woman and what her mother expects of her, she would like to break the mould and become more like her father. It is evident that she likes to please her father in the work she does for him when her father says to the feed salesman, “Like to have you meet my new hired man.” I turned away and raked furiously, red in the face with pleasure (328-329). Even though the young girl is fixed on what she wants, she has influences from both genders i...
...emale sexuality or the "castration" undertones. Female viewers, on the other hand, could be angered by the characterization of female sexuality as being something monstrous and almost inhuman. This is the kind of response, however, that can bring into a dialogue contemporary society's prevailing notions of sexuality.
Whereas the extent of my poetic appreciation lies in a decided distaste for Dante and a zest for limericks concerning Nantucket - it behooves me to discuss a poem that my limited capacities can grasp. Fable by Nina Cassian is just such a poem. I view this piece as Ms. Cassian's perspective on life (a "sentence" or an obligation), death, and sadly, the fact that most people do not appreciate the beautific nature of existence.
It starts with a fairy tale story, where all magical things happen and ends happily. The goodness is rewarded but the evil ones are punish. The closing of the story always ends with “and they live happily ever after,” and the main character becomes unhappy but eventually gains happiness at the end. The traditional Cinderella story figure is from “rags to riches.” It begins with a poor maid girl named Cinderella whose stepmother and stepsisters treated her unkindly, but because of the help of her fairy godmother, Cinderella found her Prince Charming. In Anne Sexton’s Cinderella story, the author made changes to the traditional fairy tale by adding her own tale. Throughout the poem, Sexton uses sarcasm to finish the tale initiating the readers’ expectation of happy ending and a traditional fairy tale to vanish. In doing so, she shows the difference between the fairy tale and reality world. Sexton’s poem mocks the traditional happy ending. She is trying to show the reader that happily-ever-after does not even exist in reality. Overall, Sexton’s poem would be considered a dark classic fairy tale including violence and bloody details. By examining literary devices such as the author’s attitude toward the words she says, sensory details denoting specific physical experiences, and tropes to involve some kind of comparison, either explicit or implied, the reader will gain an understanding on what the author is trying to prove a point in her story.
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
This section to some extent even explores the gender role issues. Being a girl, she wasn’t expected to be physically strong, and to some extent this invited separation as well. “I looked at the other girls' arms and knew I was a different animal.()” There is also a descriptive juxtaposition of her arm and arms of other girls’, and while she acknowledges the contrast there isn’t any shame. When talking about other girls’ arms. She writes,”I couldn't admire them, nor could I despise them with any passion. Does the moose despise the antelope? ”. Later on she also pokes fun at arbitrary standard of beauty. She talks about how her body type initially evoked questions related to vagueness of her gender itself, but later the question transformed into advice. “Women train to look like me, and now and then come up to ask for tips. What do you do to look this way, they
At a glance, the poem seems simplistic – a detailed observance of nature followed by an invitation to wash a “dear friend’s” hair. Yet this short poem highlights Bishop’s best poetic qualities, including her deliberate choice in diction, and her emotional restraint. Bishop progresses along with the reader to unfold the feelings of both sadness and joy involved in loving a person that will eventually age and pass away. The poem focuses on the intersection of love and death, an intersection that goes beyond gender and sexuality to make a far-reaching statement about the nature of being
Billions and billions of people in the world have had their childhood shaped by the words of a single man from a small European country. He is Hans Christian Andersen, born in Odense, Denmark in the year 1805. From “The Ugly Duckling” to “The Little Mermaid,” his stories filled our lives in the form of the faded pages on books, mother’s gentle voice next to the fireside, colorful Disney animations completed with cheerful songs, and stunning snow-blanketed movie scenes. This essay seeks to discuss this great author in the context of one of his most influential works – “The Princess and the Pea” – by first examining the context of his life, then presenting a brief summary, followed
Mariana is a complex poem, a poem which is “notable for its portrayal of regression and decay on both the material and the psychological levels”. Indeed
The narrator has no confidence in himself and always expects things to end unsatisfactorily, therefore he never accomplishes the enormous task that he ponders the entire poem. The main character is completely incapable of normal human interaction, he never asks this monumental question in the story he mulls over the entire poem, because he chickens out, and has very little self esteem. “He knows he is not Prince Hamlet and he does not think the mermaids will sing to him. He knows that he can not make a decision(Lafuente).” An example of this is that the narrator is constantly obsessed with women and his supposed faults, such as baldness and growing old. “Eliot’s use of literary techniques portrays a man incapable of normal day-to-day life, constantly mulling over every action he takes, debilitated by this paralysis (Jaklitsch).” At the end of the poem, mermaids, also known as sirens, represent all of life's opportunities and Prufrock, as he stands on the shore as an observer until his imminent death (Laura). This connection to Modernism is the most obvious, since it is one of the defining characteristics of the poem and Modernism. The reason for this pessimism is because society was faced with the harsh realities of war, the belief that God if he
The authors does not like to state the obvious in her writings. She like to leave clues and have the reader come to a conclusion all on their own. She writes short lines that are to the point, she also does not bother to have an end rhyme in any of her lines. On the other hand Piercy likes to use alliteration in her poem to make up for her lack of end rhyme in the rest of the poem. With such a dark topic the author does a good job of keeping the poem light which such a heavy topic. This topic is a big problem today for girls growing up everywhere and if not dealt in the right way it it could really drag down and give the story a very dark tone. Piercy manage to keep the poem upbeat with short lines and a playful use of alliteration. The author used punctuations and capitalizations to emphasize conflicts and ironies in the poem. “She was advised to play