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The irreverent piece, "The Hymn of a Fat Woman," puts on display the lack of knowledge of a speaker who tries to excuse her own corpulence by demeaning slim women saints.
This verse, “The Hymn of a Fat Woman,” relies on idiosyncratic musings and undigested bits of information. The title alerts the reader that something religious might be forthcoming; however, the religion turns out to be disjointed atheism that distorts the nature of spirituality. The speaker sets up a dichotomy between herself, a fat woman, and her opposite, the skinny saints. She targets “saints” simply because it is safe to do so. In her atheistic world, she knows that her like-minded readers understand as little about saints as she does; therefore, she can promote her own proclivities while denigrating those with whom she and her audience remain blissfully unacquainted. First Verse Paragraph: “All of the saints starved themselves”The speaker begins by making the claim that “saints starved themselves.” She has probably heard that saints and other spiritual devotees usually observe days of fasting as part of their spiritual routine. But to claim that they starve themselves is prevarication. She then declares that there is not a single saint who is fat. Actually, there are many fat saints, as exemplified by Saint Teresa of Ávila. Saint Thomas Aquinas is noted for being portly. The saints posses as many heavy-set members as any other demographic. The speaker then says, “The words ‘deity’ and ‘diet’ must have come from the same / Latin root.” Actually, they do not: “deity” comes from the Latin “deus,” meaning “god.” And “diet” comes from “diaeta,” meaning “mode of living.” Second Verse Paragraph/ Third Verse Paragraph: “Those saints must have been thin”In the second verse paragraph, the speaker begins a tirade of vilification by saying the women saints “must have been thin as knucklebones / or shards of stained / glass / or Christ carved / on his cross.” Continuing her description, the speaker claims the women saints were “Hard as pew seats. Brittle / as hair shirts.” She alludes to details that children and undisciplined adults find distasteful about the spiritual path. But then she declares, “Women consumed / by fervor.” Instead of consuming ample quantities of food themselves, these ghastly saint-women are themselves consumed by their religious “fervor.” Without any notion of what the saints actually do experience, the speaker has to rely on the notion that the pleasures of the flesh are the only important pleasures. But since the speaker has identified herself as antithetical to religion and spirituality, her willful ignorance has no real locus from which to offer a useful comparison. Fourth Verse Paragraph: “They must have been able to walk three or four abreast”The speaker then speculates about the ability of these skinny skeleton woman to “walk three or four abreast” “down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.” She guesses that they could easily slip through the eye of a needle. She alludes again to biblical lore in order to disparage the lives of disciplined woman for whom she has no tolerance. Fifth Verse Paragraph: “Within that spare city’s walls”In the fifth verse paragraph, the speaker gloats, “Within that spare city’s walls, / I do not think I would find anyone like me.” She is superior to these skinny freaks, because she is a fat woman; she does not partake of that “fervor” that keeps those saintly women looking like a bags of bones. Sixth Verse Paragraph: “I imagine I will find my kind outside”Instead of undergoing the discipline of spirituality that keeps these saintly women thin, the speaker asserts that she will be found “lolling in the garden / munching on the apples.” The “apple” is a symbol of the fall of Adam and Eve after engaging in sexual experience, and literally the apple, as part of the human diet, is not notorious as a culprit in keeping the human frame covered with excess flesh. CommentaryIn order to appreciate this poem, the reader must engage in some serious “willing suspension of disbelief.” Such willingness is not what Samuel Taylor Coleridge had in mind when he explained that critical concept.
The copyright of the article Huff's 'The Hymn of a Fat Woman' in American Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Huff's 'The Hymn of a Fat Woman' in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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