![]() ![]() ![]() This first love seems to stand apart from the rest of the boys she keeps inside her he is purer somehow, perhaps a memory of how she herself once was she hopes he doesn't run into the other bad men she keeps locked away, including the aforementioned blue-eyed Johnny, who she keeps chained in the basement. When he touched her breast he fell through a trapdoor and, the speaker tells us, he still lives inside her body-metaphorically-along with many others. The speaker's first love is the first in a list of men who have been able to make their ways into the house of the speaker's body and, sometimes, mind. She tells them she doesn’t look like a doll, but rather a house, and proceeds to use that analogy to point out abuse. When the girl was young, she was asked to point out on a doll by social workers where she had been inappropriately touched. Anwar never made it all the way inside Basil waited too long outside Yusuf was locked out and Blue-Eyed Johnny told the speaker about the tricks he had used on other women. These are all men who succeeded-one way or another-in making their way into the speaker’s “home.” They somehow won her heart, or held the key to deeper parts of her, or forced or tricked their ways in-but none of them succeeded in making a home out of the house none of them succeeded in winning and keeping the speaker's love. Anwar, Basil, Yusuf, and Blue-Eyed Johnny He serves as a stand-in for what the narrator would like to do in order to gain revenge against the men who have wronged her: she wants to make them feel as vulnerable as they made her. He was invited back to the narrator's house and placed in a tub filled with ice and-one assumes-castrated. The man in the tub is not identified and exists only as fantasy or symbol. Judging by the anger in this image, the father was a negative, abusive force in the lives of his wife and daughter. The father is a spectral figure in the poem, seen only as a stuffed pig on the dining room table. The mother has clearly had bad experiences herself, and wants to prepare her daughter for them, knowing she cannot be protected. She has a fraught relationship with her husband, though we only see this relationship in surreal metaphor. The mother is the first person to tell the speaker that a woman's body is like a house, and these words form the foundation for the rest of the poem and indeed for the speaker's mode of self-conceptualization. She views herself as a house, and is haunted by many memories, especially of men who have harmed her since she was young. The speaker is a woman tracing the physical places where sexual assault and physical relationships have manifested themselves on her body. ![]()
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