Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (review)

On December 9, 1869, four nurses commenced watching beribboned little Sarah Jacob, the famous "Welsh fasting girl," to certify that she was indeed refusing to eat. Jacob died eight days later, amid conflicting interpretations of her fast as a miracle or a hysterical bid for attention. The previous year, William Barry Lord had published his guide to The Corset and the Crinoline, recommending a "very sparing diet" (36); five years later, Christina Rossetti published her macabre children's story, Speaking Likenesses, discouraging gluttony. As these examples suggest, gender, food refusal, and the constrained body had accrued complex meanings for Victorian readers. Anna Krugovoy Silver's book seeks to make sense of those meanings and to trace their relation to gendered narratives of food and fasting in Victorian texts.

Silver argues that "Victorian gender ideology was . . . built upon an anorexic logic" by valorizing the slim, spiritual, nonsexual, self-disciplined bourgeois woman (14). Silver examines the Victorians' pervasive association of eating and fullness with masculine characters and with feral women, in contrast to the ideal of the frail, selfless, appetiteless woman. Silver's goal is not "retroactively diagnosing particular nineteenth-century women as anorexic" (although she occasionally does), but to show how "aspects of Victorian . . . gender ideology . . . made the development of the disease possible" (3, 27). Her topic requires that she consider familiar canonical texts and gender norms, but Silver keeps her analysis fresh by reading across disciplinary bounds, examining texts ranging from the literary (Charlotte Brontë's Shirley [1849] and Villette [1853], Rossetti's "Goblin Market" [1862], and Bram Stoker's Dracula [1897], for example) to the pedagogical, popular, religious, and scientific (such as the Girl's Own Paper; John Ruskin's mineralogy primer; Rossetti's devotional prose; and a generous representation of beauty manuals, conduct books, and medical cases).

While Silver's readings of often-discussed novels like Villette or Dracula are perhaps competent rather than momentous (for example, she concludes that the meaning of the fat body in Dracula is "ever-shifting"), her fascinating chapter on children's literature argues that the logic of anorexia shapes children's stories as well as the pedophilic impulse visible in Ruskin's letters to Kate Greenaway. This chapter draws meaning from even difficult or ambiguous examples, such as her reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), to show how "anorexia becomes a symbolic system in a text that is not directly 'about' anorexia" (71). Silver's most nuanced and persuasive chapter complicates her thesis by arguing that Rossetti's work is shaped by the tradition of religious fasting more than an anorexic logic, given that Rossetti yearns for spiritual fullness even as she critiques earthly, or secular, appetite.

Silver makes excellent use of nonliterary primary sources. Reading beauty manuals, she remarks upon how changes in fashion, particularly the developments in corset technology that produce a wasp waist in paradoxical conjunction with plump arms, bust, and hips, participate in the logic she identifies. She is also well informed on Victorian medicine. She discusses the overlap between the holy fast and the hysterical or anorexic fasts recognized by physicians but insists, rightly, on some crucial differences, such as the obsessive nature of the anorexic fast and its fascination with physical appearance. Her analysis of "fasting girls" might, however, have been usefully contextualized by comparison with the larger category of hysterical afflictions, in the same way that she discusses religious fasting in the context of self-mortification more generally. Fasting was just one of a host of spectacular behaviors exhibited by adolescent girls, including Margaret M'Avoy's claim to see colors with her fingers and Mary Jobson's prophesying (both also associated with medical conditions and, in Jobson's case, refusal to eat). Silver's use of twentieth-century scholarship on anorexia tends to universalize the phenomenon, suggesting an ahistorical definition of anorexia that sits oddly in a book so determined to historicize the practice as one enabled by a particular...