"A woman's eye passing over abundance": gender, hunger and control in Louise Glück's poetry

Abstract

This thesis considers selected, repeated motifs in Louise Glück's poetry, particularly those related to issues of gender, hunger and control. I argue that in the poems gender is constructed in terms of oppositional dualism, and this reflects conventional assumptions about masculine power and feminine vulnerability. The first two chapters of the thesis consider Glück's representation of male and female characters, respectively, in order to support this claim. However, Glück's gender representations are complicated by a variety of anomalies that qualify male power. In my third chapter I consider some of these and conclude that despite these qualifications, her representations of male and female characters still support hierarchical gender stereotypes. In my concluding chapter I discuss the extent to which the poet's anorexia nervosa contributes to both the form and content of her poetry, most notably in respect to issues of control.