Analysis Of Richard Rhodes 'Essay' The Battle For My Body

In his essay “The Battle for My Body” Richard Rhodes relives the two of the most difficult years of his childhood, the period during which he lived with his father and his stepmother, Anne. She was a selfish and sadistic woman and as Rhodes says, “we never did call her Mother…” (45). Anne made it her mission to abuse Rhodes and his brother and she employed a variety of methods to do so: she beat them, she fed them spoiled foods, and she refused to let them used the bathroom at night. The boys, too young fight back, had no choice but to suffer. The first method Anne used to abuse the boys was to beat them viciously if they broke a house rule. Rhodes describes that the first method of control Anne used was violence; she had strict rules for her house, and if broken she would

She used this method to hurt the boys from within, and unlike the beatings she could use this method with more frequency. Children like very few foods. They care little about health benefits and eat food based on taste, mostly candy and sweets. Rhodes, however, recalls that his stepmother would feed them food they did not enjoy, “cayenne gravy, mint jelly, moldy bread” (45). Parents making their children eat foods they do not enjoy is common, but it is for the children’s health. However Anne would feed them these food to manipulate and undermine the children’s boundaries; furthermore, she clearly did not care for the health of the boys as she would even feed them moldy bread. This form of abuse attempted to diminish the boys’ boundaries from within, just as a virus or parasite would do. Control feeding had a bigger psychological damage then the beatings, as it would put the children’s own physiology against them. It was an all-out attack against the children’s boundaries. Although forced feedings is a form of control, it did not have as much of an effect on Rhodes as one of her