Conflict and Assimilation in the Loss of Identity: Resisting migratory/alien borderlines
Every day people battle themselves over the internal and external conflicts of their lives. In the case of Richard Rhodes, the author of, “Battle for My Body” it's both, an internal battle over his individuality, and battling his greatest enemy. Rhodes’s mother died when he was every young, and his father had to make hard choices for his four boys. He shipped the two eldest sons to family relatives while he kept the two youngest, including Rhodes, and they traveled from boarding home to boarding home. His father met a woman named Anne in a desperate attempt to create a stable household. From that day forth the war had started. His new stepmother beat, …show more content…
Anne was winning the battle over Rhodes's body. For example, Rhodes truly felt tinkered with due to Anne's increasingly more invasive methods“ Our stepmother tinker more radically with manipulating what we took into our bodies...”(45). One of the ways Anne took pleasure was through food. She used fear to force the boys to eat things like cayenne gravy, mind jelly, and moldy bread. Normally it would express love, but in the boys’ case, it represents Anne's hate for the boys and her control over them. Anne slowly took over the boys’ bodies because children do not have the defenses like an adult does to stand up to an epidemic. She was much like a disease In this way. In addition, there are multiple levels of control Rhodes states, “More effective control required undermining our boundaries from within”(45). Making Rhodes do something he would never do on their own accord breaks another mental barrier that he had set up to protect himself. By making the boys eat things they normally would not, Anne now controls Rhodes physically and mentally. The beatings broke the first barrier, with fear, and from that point forward Anne had total control over the boys. Their individuality was stripped away. A sadistic woman who takes pleasure in their pain now has increased the power she holds. Anne can now compel Rhodes and bend his will to hers where before she had to do it by