Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment (review)

244 BOOK REVIEWS is dense and academic, her arguments complex and theoretical, her references wide-ranging through uterature and the visual arts, psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, philosophy and popular culture. It is, however, sufficiently intriguing and unprecedented in its premises and synthesis of scholarship to induce a reader to accept its substantial challenge . While readers acquainted with critical theory should fare better, clinicians with an interest in the humanities but Uttle or no knowledge of criticism could well find Bronfen nearly impossible to follow. Happily, though, her commentaries on individual works of Uterature or art are clear, well documented, provocative, and not at all forced. These alone could make the book, or selected sections thereof, worth reading and useful as a reference. Finally, the text suffers from sloppy proofreading, and while the typographical errors do not pose a serious problem, they occasionally trip up and irritate a reader already struggüng to follow the author into uncharted terrain. —Marcia Day Finney University of Virginia Health Sciences Center Lilian R. Fürst and Peter W. Graham, eds., Disorderly Eaters: Texts in SelfEmpowerment . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. 242 pp. Clothbound, $35.00; paperback, $16.95. Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment is a fascinating collection of essays examining how literature can help readers understand the nonmedical as well as medical aspects of eaters who deviate from cultural norms. In her introduction to this anthology, LiUan R. Fürst observes that the term eating disorder did not enter social consciousness until about twenty years ago. Today's parents, teachers, and health-care professionals have witnessed the havoc such health-imperiling and even lifethreatening diseases as anorexia and bulimia can and do wreak on young people, particularly young women. Yet, as Fürst observes, anorectics and bulimics are not the only "disorderly" eaters. So too are cannibals, ascetics, gourmands, obsessive consumers of particular or "magic" foods and, I would add, fussy or picky eaters, health-food crusaders, extreme vegetarians, constant dieters, junk-food addicts, and so on. As Fürst sees it, the authors in Disorderly Eaters push past the easy assumption that most disorderly eaters are the victims either of their Book Reviews 245 personal obsession with food consumption or nonconsumption or of societal ideals (such as "you can never be too rich or too thin"). Instead, they maintain that "eating, Uke noneating, is a tool for power both over oneself and over one's surroundings" (p. 4). Long before health-care professionals decided to medicalize eating disorders, prescient writers recognized the ways in which people use their eating habits as means to control themselves or other people. Indeed, Paulo Medeiros's opening essay, "Cannibalism and Starvation: The Parameters of Eating Disorders in Literature," suggests that these two conditions are alternative ways for individuals to defy society's restrictions on them. Although Medeiros uses Penthesilea's Uteral devouring of her lover and enemy Achilles as one example of cannibaUsm, my own thoughts turn to the recently convicted Jeffrey Dahmer, who ate the entrails of his young male victims. In the act of reducing his human prey to pieces of meat, Dahmer revealed his total contempt for society's basic norms. Yet, in Medeiros's estimation , cannibalism (the consumption of others) is not that different from anorexia (the consumption of one's self). AU forbidden eating is part of "the desire to transcend mortality," to gain control over the carnal self, to rebel against society (p. 13). Since rules guiding aU sorts of consumption , including that of food, are essential to the social order, food deviants are among its rebels. Medeiros's essay sets the tone for the rest of the anthology, as various authors explore the power dynamics of eating, overeating, and undereating. Six essays focus on nineteenth-century disorderly eaters. Four of them (Paula Marantz Cohen's "The Anorexic Syndrome and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel," Deirdre Lashgari's "What Some Women Can't Swallow: Hunger as Protest in Charlotte Bronte's Shirley," Furst's "The Power of the Powerless: A Trio of Nineteenth-Century French Disorderly Eaters," and Elsa Nettels's "New England Indigestion and Its Victims") pay particular attention to the ways in which women used food...