Summary
Summary The Diet by Carol Ann Duffy
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- AQA
In depth consolidation of the poem :)
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the diet💌 DUFFY’S MESSAGE & INTENTIONS:
irrational expectations
the pressure from society to diet creates this idea that women are not
good enough
also the idea that women are disjointed and disconnected from their ‘THE GOSPEL TRUTH’ -
bodies Adapting an extreme diet in
order to feel beautiful and
destructiveness of media, representations of female identity and diet
to gain approval from
culture
society does not bring
binge eating and cycle of dieting health of happiness. A
consumerism and consumption of food and the diet shallow pursuit of
validation.
weight - prison and the woman is trapped due to consumerism
SUMMARY
woman diets to extreme > fast weight loss > begins to disappear > still feels fat despite the extreme dieting
talks about the effect of dieting on a woman’s body & mind
outlines what the woman is going to cut out, removing essentially everything from her diet
suggests it worked ‘like a dream’ at the beginning - not eating anything leading to the woman rapidly dropping
weight
woman takes the diet further - never eating at all until she was whittled down to nothing
the diet 1
, she becomes smaller and smaller > eventually being blown away by the wind
life had become consumed by the desire to lose more + more weight - losing everything that is dear to her in the
process
eventually: the woman swallowed herself - sent into someone’s stomach due to her tiny size
Duffy uses the metaphor of being eaten to reflect the woman binging on food again
eating as much as she can
and losing herself in the process of this torturous switching between binging and fasting
last line depicts weight as a prison, the woman trapped behind the figure that has come to define her life
CONTEXT WIDER READING
explores the societal pressure placed on women to average age of onset anorexia is 16-17 years old
look a certain way
female obesity is a reaction to gender stereotypes -
manifesting in the unhealthy abiding to diet societal, not personal, illness
regulations of the character woman
1970s - thinness expressed conformity
takes her diet to the extreme, stopping eating
overeating is a way to escape communisation
everything + giving her whole life to fasting
eating disorders are overlooked and ignored by
her life spirals out of control + Duffy uses the
society
metaphor of being eaten to reflect how the woman
herself has become consumed by her dietary practices
the media and the pressure of diet culture
THEMES FORM & STRUCTURE
major theme - dieting or fasting (ironically) 8 stanzas w/ 7 lines each
modern sentiment of physical leanness creates an regularity reflects the strict nature of the diet -
illusion of beauty in women never managing to stray from the intense
requirements of the starvation diet
about all who forget that dieting isn’t a kind of
fasting no rhyme scheme but there is internal rhyme -
assonance
one reaches the extremes + the body sorrowfully
suffers used to speed up the rhythm of the poem
[symbolises pushing the woman ever-onward in
physical beauty
her diet journey]
illusion of physical beauty
final line of each stanza is shorter w/ end stop
people being in good shape is synonymous w/
bluntly ends each stanza
being beautiful + glamorous
the diet 2
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