Analysis Of Rebecca Foust And Ai's Child Beater

Rebecca Foust and Ai are both great poets. Ai was born in 1947 and passed away in 2010. She wrote a lot of realistic dramatic monologues (Gwynn, 360). Ai wrote “Child Beater” in 1973. This poem is about a mother that abuses her daughter. It can raise a lot of emotion in readers. Rebecca Foust was born in 1957 in Altoona, Pennsylvania and is still alive today. She had a job as an attorney, but later quit her job and became a stay at home mom. As a stay at home mom she began to write poems about raising her autistic son (Gwynn, 395). Foust wrote a poem titled “Family Story” in 2009. This poem was about a single mother that raised multiple children with very little help. Throughout the following essay “Child Beater” and “Family Story” will be compared along with a few methods of poetry used in both poems. The speakers, imagery, and themes of each …show more content…
The speaker of “Child Beater” is most likely a mother whom abuses her child. There are a few lines throughout the poem that infer the speaker is a mother that abuses her daughter, not a father. The best example can be found in lines 7-8; which state, “Her body, somehow fat, though I feed her only once a day, / reminds me of my own just after she was born” (7-8). In order for the daughter to remind the speaker of his or her body after birth, then the speaker must be the mother of the child. This line can also infer that the mother of the child is suffering from postpartum depression, because she is still thinking about what her body looked like after giving birth to her daughter. Ai takes a chance by taking on the perspective of a child abuser. It seems as though she is trying to get readers to feel empathy for the woman abusing her child. Ai most likely wants her readers to consider why abusers abuse their children, instead of immediately assuming that people who abuse children are terrible people that need to be