Annotation

Denise Duhamel, 'Bulimia'

The poem opens: ‘A kiss has nothing to do with sex’. Thus the poet establishes 1) the lack of correlation between food and fuel and 2) the analogy between sex and eating. This latter analogy makes the bulimic experience all the more shocking, associating the speaker’s attraction to/revulsion against oral sex with the violent ambivalence towards food. On the one hand, the oral contact with food invokes total merging, the way fetal nourishment is wholly integrated with the maternal blood supply. On the other hand, once the food—represented already in the first stanza by the penis, passes into the reaches of the oral cavity, that merging becomes overwhelming; (“the gagging, the choke...a wad of gum grown too big…”). Thus the word ‘engulfing,’ in the second line, represents a sort of longing gone awry. The desire to become one results in a suffocating relationship. Presumably this dimension, carefully defined as ‘animal hunger,’ represents the fear of sexual hunger as well as the experience of it.

In contrast, the speaker fantasizes a fairy tale relationship, represented by the fantasy kiss, the one that doesn’t go deep. The fantasy (the longing for the fairy tale prince) can be construed as the other unhealthy part of this unhealthy equation. In other words, whereas one type of relationship is perceived as suffocating and engulfing, the imagined desired relationship is wholly unreal. In between, we catch a glimpse of a lonely girl who purchases wedding cakes, which serve as the intersection of these two extremes—the wedding cake which will be the vehicle for her animal hunger and sexual desire and her little-girl fantasies, as are the ambiguously childish/sexualized Valentine candies. The analogies with sexual activity continue through all phases of the bulimic cycle—the longing, the act, and the aftermath. For example, the particular place in the palate where vomiting is induced is likened to the clitoris. And the girl’s ambivalence towards sex is expressed once more in the purging episode through the analogy with consensual intercourse on the one hand (‘as if she were moving her body to meet a man’s during intercourse’) and rape on the other.

This compelling poetic introduction to the psychology of bulimia is accompanied by an equally compelling narrative of the ritual process of purging. We see how the girl protects her secret by visiting different bakeries; we see how she eats step by step, to the devastating “paper doily/under the cake’s third layer, smooth as a vacuumed ice-skating rink.” The speaker uses gestures and language of scientific precision which carry her through the routine, as though she were watching herself. The whole project is ritualized, even objectified as though it were an instructional manual. (This poem is a good example of the way poetic and clinical language merge in their ability to provide a luminously clear description of an illness/behavior.) In any case, these carefully orchestrated routines represent the subject’s desire to protect herself from shame and her own appetites—an agenda offered as insight to the reader, but very apparently not to the sick girl, whose last act, the disposing of the ‘evidence’ in another side of town, is merely the prelude to the next episode.