Jenna Gillis and Marrakech Cunliffe
Essay: Snakebit by Alia Volz
Snakebit centers around a young woman who has a severe phobia of snakes or Ophidiophobia. The images of snakes paralyze her, they send her into trances. She links her fear of snakes to a memory. The memory is of her father who was epileptic and took psychedelic drugs. This memory was when her father came home bitten by a snake from a “vision quest” where he would spend weeks alone in the woods. Was she afraid of him never returning? She recalls the memory vividly, yet her family believes it never happened.
Throughout the essay, the author finds self discovery. It’s obvious she blames snakes for her father’s behavior and afflictions. She admits she has nightmares of snakes which in a sense, is a sort of comfort to her. She goes on to tell a story about the time her chicken coup was raided by a snake. The snake did terrible things to the chicks and left one alive which her father had to kill. She realized she blamed a snake for something only a fox could have done. She likes to use the imagery of a snake stuffed with chicks to reason with her own thoughts. She’s not afraid of being bitten or the venom and yet, she hyperventilates when she sees snakes and she couldn’t even eat a snake dumpling. It all circles back to her father, she attached an animal to her fear of the unknown, of losing her father. A deadly animal must be scarier. Snakes comforted her as a scapegoat. In the end, she empathizes with a snake, a female and understands the animal. In this moment of self reflection was she meeting the snake half way in an effort to recognize her real fears? Why does the fact that the snake is female matter to her? Could the snake represent herself?
A bit of background on the author of Snakebit, Alia Volz:
Alia Volz was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. Some of Volz’s most notable achievements in her career are receiving the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice and was named “Best Writers Without a Book in San Francisco” by SF Weekly along with being awarded other notable fellowships. “Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, the Threepenny Review, Nowhere Magazine, Utne Reader, the New England Review, and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Remembering Prince and Golden State: Best New Writing from California,” (Jamison 827). She has written a memoir and is currently working on completing her first book.
Works Cited
“About Alia.” Alia Volz, 15 Feb. 2020, aliavolz.com/bio/.
Leslie Jamison. “The Best American Essays 2017.” Apple Books.
Marra's Blog 
6 replies on “Snakebit by Alia Volz Analysis and Background”
Throughout this essay I defiantly picked up on the dad and snake connection.To answer your first question I feel that her seeing the snake at the end of the story made her realize that she maybe obsessing on snake. But also the author states that “because my dads instability disturbed me, I believed him snakebit.” This quote made me think that she fears snakes because she correlates snake bites with being unstable and being the root of all the things she dislikes in life. Thats all I got out of her fear of snakes. Also, she is pretty obsessive about snakes.
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Sick, absolutely radical analysis of the essay. The way she obsesses over snakes could be expanded on some more, the fear is talked about a lot, but why does she “peek between [her] fingers at YouTube videos of snakes.”? If the snake represents the author, would that mean she blames herself for the instability of her dad in her life? Is asking what the snake represents maybe assigning too much reason to the human brain? I think so, I know first-hand that brains don’t work like that, because I’m afraid of horses. All it takes is one very frightening moment at a critical moment to burn that sort of thing into you.
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In Marra and Jenna’s post they talk about how the author is not really afraid of snakes. The snake represents the unknown and the fear of losing her father. I think it’s really interesting what the human psyche does. It creates something to break your fault or a scapegoat to put your blame on. In the text the author says ““Snakes are deception, surprise, mutability. They violate the predictable. Snakes are agents of chaos”” (677) and thats exactly what the unknown does. It sneaks up on you and it can do terrible things, creating upheaval in your life.
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I left another comment on Jenna’s blog, but I was particularly drawn to the part of the essay in which she talked about her experience trying to eat the rattlesnake pot sticker. When reading it, I had expected that she would feel like she could gain power over her fear if she could see the snake dissociated from its body and in a form that was consumable, but her adverse reaction to the food was only further proof that her fear of snakes was not something tangible and that it was far more layered than it would at first appear to be.
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this analysis was so incredibly amazing that my jaw fell off and I actually had to get advanced surgery to reconnect it. But anyways, when Alia Volz sees the female snake at the end of the essay, she sees its vulnerability and its emotions. This is the point in her life in which she realizes that snakes are simply a representation for her unrealistic fears, putting it, “I’m seeing past my own trickery; how I use snakes as scapegoats for terrors I will not face.” I think that the snake being female allowed her to connect with it a bit more since snakes previously reminded her of the fear of losing her father, a male. She also recognized the daily struggles the snakes had to face, and had a moment of respect for them. She said that she wasn’t going to stop being afraid of snakes, but that her realizations that day would help her stop using the snakes to represent her underlying fears. Please don’t make another analysis this good for a while, my jaw needs time to heal.
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I think Jenna and Marra did an excellent job with their analysis.
I think its really interesting how they point out that the authors fear of snakes was more of a cop out for her fathers looming “threat’ of disappearing. Or at least that is how I interpreted it. I wish they would have dived in to the questioned they asked at the end, could the snake represent her? I think we project a lot of our issues and that would have been interesting to here about.
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