Language

The language employed in the short story “Don’t You Hate Having Two Heads?” by Christine Poulson is fairly simple and easy to understand. One phrase is written in Italian, the title of the newspaper article “ASSASSINIO SUL CANAL GRANDE” (p. 14, l. 30), but it is quite easy to deduce its meaning.

Several names of surrealist artists are used in the story to give it authenticity, but also to indicate Jessica’s obsession with the way women were “silenced” (p. 14, l. 18) by surrealist artists: Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, and Roland Penrose. As the story mentions, there are many more male surrealist artists than women in history, so Jessica’s obsession with surrealists may be an indicator of the fact that she dislikes this misogynistic view, but also that she hates women being seen as mere objects by men.

Imagery

Imagery is a very important linguistic feature in the story, and it is related to descriptive passages regarding what the characters or the setting look like or how the events unfold. The following quotation contains imagery related to sight and...

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Similes and rhetorical questions

Similes are figures of speech meant to enhance the focus on the characteristics of several characters, places or things. For example, the sculpture “Woman with her Throat Cut” is “more like a gigantic insect than the body of a woman” (p. 11, ll. 3-4):

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Idioms and metaphors

The idiom “she couldn’t hold a candle to you” (p. 17, l. 2) is meant to express the fact that Jessica...

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Symbols

The story abounds in symbols, which we will discuss in detail. First, the sculpture “Woman with her Throat Cut” symbolises the fact that women and women’s bodies are often seen or presented as objects meant to be silenced and abused.

The painting “The Robing of the Bride” symbolises the ugly and the grotesque, but also the violent and “predatory” (p. 11, l. 33) part of the female. All the male surrealist artists mentioned in the story are symbolic of misogyny,...

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