Fat Boys: A Slim Book (review)

Although he does not use the term avoirdupoisie, the intellectual historian Sander Gilman not only theorizes corpulence in his intriguing new book, Fat Boys, but he also provides a context within which to understand Western constructions of male obesity. He chooses to gender extreme fatness (plumpness, solidity, and muscularity gone soft are not his subjects here). Allusions to fat women do appear in the discussion, but not as a feminist issue. Rather, they serve to anchor distinctions between women’s own exaggerated fears about unattractiveness and the medico-social warning of infertility. But it is very heavy men, Gilman finds, who are feminized by their condition. These eponymous subjects are those who, the book contends, are weighed down with largely negative associations.

Gilman’s underlying concern is the way in which the greatly overweight collides with or otherwise challenges normal manliness. He of course deconstructs that norm by pointing out that perceptions of difference and normality are functions of a given cultural moment (ix). To that end, he charts this gendered fat body from classical times to medieval centuries, the High Renaissance, Luther’s Protestantism, Victorianism, World War II modernism, and post-modern rebellion. Ideologically, the Greek Golden Age saw in such gross flesh a complete lack of self-restraint coupled with ugliness. Medievalists embraced thinness and male sainthood and cast as immoral not just the joys of the flesh but of the table. Renaissance lust could coexist well with the stuffed body, and visual and narrative culture rose to document these attitudes. Vide Silenus in a Rubens painting (58), but Falstaff moves from comedy to extreme pathos and drags his dissatisfied libido along. Luther and his followers found the devil at work filling men up with food and pride, while Victorians in their characteristic mixture of prurience and abstinence feared that overeating was draining sexual energy as much as it fostered selfish pleasure. Today’s vision of the thin man residing in every fat man’s body may offer a great deal more redemption, but no less censure of masculine bulk.

As an historian of science, Gilman carefully examines medical discourse in each era’s representation of the obese as the pathological body. Thus the Greek theory of phlegmatic humors mutates into many centuries of warnings against the fatal effects of what Hippocrates called “extreme repletion” (37). Christian and Jewish thought alike took up the cudgel against the infection-prone fat body, and Victorian medicos found in overindulgence the sapping of energy and the quick decay of the young man into the prematurely old. The late-nineteenth-century trope of the wraithlike, consumptive Jew eventually ceded to modern anti-Semitism: the “Oriental” (201), un-athletic Jew’s body became fat and diabetes-prone, double proof of racial inferiority. (Among Gilman’s previous books are The Jew’s Body [1991]). Our time seeks to confront the old dangers with the new theory of the obesity gene. Stomach stapling now combats “obsession in the clinical sense;” eighty thousand such procedures have been performed in the US alone in the past four years (229).

Like so many in Cultural Studies concerned with the fluid boundaries between nations, classes, and creeds, Gilman finds in the fat body not Porky Pig but the “outer limits of the performance of masculinity” (33). He seeks in “the world of male body fantasies” (x) the “moment when fat seemed to become a positive quality” (153). And he seems to find this time in the extended imaginary moments offered by popular British and American mystery texts of the late-Victorian and interwar period. One of his most persuasive examples of the fat detective in popular culture is literally embodied by Rex Stout’s fictive sleuth Nero Wolfe. Wolfe deduces through his pores and instincts rather than striding or moving frenetically around the noirish city. If, as feminism often posits, women’s ways of knowing are pre-patriarchally spiritual, men like Wolfe are primitive in another way. The whale bellies of Wolfe and Sherlock’s portly brother Mycroft Holmes...