“But you’ve always been beautiful, Rachel.”
* * *
The Victorians certainly fretted over the female form, and the masculine anxiety over its containment hung heavy in the atmosphere, influencing contemporary literature and cultural thought. Alice in Wonderland’s legacy, sprawling as it does across cultural terrain, especially imbues this aggrieved preoccupation with size. In the Alice books, the titular character is often hungry or thirsty, with a yen for tarts and puddings. As literary critic Anya Krugovoy Silver remarks, Lewis Carroll’s willingness to feed his heroine and to allow her to gorge differentiates her from the female characters of other children’s literature, who are castigated for their delight in sweets.2 But it’s no surprise that Carroll’s preferences for feminine bodies were luridly specific: he fussed over his child-friends’ diets, concerned that they would overeat. In his estimation, it seems that this transgression was no less grievous than other fleshly misdeeds.3 Carroll was by no means an outlier in his privileging of thinness. Victorian heroines are typically sylphlike, and they rarely evince interest in food—rather, they’re more preoccupied with nourishing others, “[serving] food for Victorian heroes” that they may handle but “not taste.”4 In Charles Dickens’s 1855 novel, Little Dorrit, the titular character’s slight, childlike frame is even delineated by her nickname—her first name is Amy—and she is self-sacrificing as a matter of course. With her ineffectual father, William, imprisoned for bankruptcy in the Marshalsea, Little Dorrit toils as a seamstress to maintain his comfort, as well as that of her elder siblings. And when her employer provides her with meals, she declines to eat with the household so that she can deliver the food to him instead. She is “apparently oblivious of her own hunger,”5 as literary critic Helena Michie observes, and this methodical privation is conveyed as a defining attribute of moral virtue:
She had brought the meat home that she should have eaten herself, and was already warming it on a gridiron over the fire, for her father, clad in an old grey gown and a black cap, awaiting his supper at the table. A clean cloth was spread before him, with knife, fork, and spoon, salt-cellar, pepper-box, glass, and pewter ale-pot. Such zests as his particular little phial of cayenne pepper, and his pennyworth of pickles in a saucer, were not wanting.6
The narrator’s inventoried account of William Dorrit’s dinner table, which directs our attention to small luxuries like a “little phial of cayenne pepper” and a “pennyworth of pickles,” implies a gross asymmetry of circumstances. Little Dorrit does not go hungry in order to feed her father, but rather to embellish his meals, to approximate, to the extent that it is possible, a gentleman’s supper in the dank debtor’s prison. It’s moreover evident that, upon returning home from a laborious workday, Little Dorrit immediately begins these ministrations, her industry set alongside the indolent image of her father, who receives his daughter’s attentions in a derelict state of undress. This scene is intended to stir readerly indignance: we are by no means supposed to approve of Little Dorrit’s father, who reaps the benefits of his daughter’s drudgery but, at the same time, cannot bear to hear of her working outside the home—after all, it’s a reminder of his own fallen state. But Little Dorrit’s choice not to eat so that her father may eat even more functions, for Dickens, as a crystalline differentiation between someone who is selfless and morally upstanding and someone who is a worthless louse. It is wildly unfair and unhealthy, and yet we are asked to celebrate our heroine because of this grandiose suffering.
Little Dorrit’s martyrlike relationship with food not only communicates her fundamental goodness, it moreover suggests that she possesses both civility and high manners lacking in the rest of her family. And although she is more modest than her charming older sister, Fanny, self-renunciation reinforces Little Dorrit’s own physical delicacy. Skinny figures were not deemed au courant with the pervasiveness that they are today, but being slim—and, in particular, having a slender waist—became a far-reaching concern by the mid-nineteenth century, magnified by the near-liturgical emphasis upon feminine performance of beauty.7 Ideals of Victorian femininity were famously adopted from the languishing tuberculosis patient, who, contrary to sufferers of smallpox and cholera, were not disfigured by disease but instead beautified. Dying from tuberculosis brought graceful, even exquisite refinement: a lean and pallid form, bright eyes, and flushed crimson cheeks and lips.8 Cumulatively, these admired traits also fashion what Michie describes as “aesthetics of deprivation,” in which signs of starvation—becoming weakened and pale—signified gentility. “‘Ladylike anorexia’ became inscribed and prescriptive as fashion began to decree smaller and smaller waists,” writes Michie.9 Corset laces were pulled tight, brutalizing women’s internal organs to such an extent that, apparently, the uterus was sometimes expelled from the vagina.10
By 1873, two doctors, Charles Lasègue and Sir William Withey Gull, had separately diagnosed anorexia nervosa—although similar diseases had been recorded by physicians for years prior to that.11 “Sitomania,” or the fear of eating, emerged in 1859 when American doctor William Stout Chipley observed it in a patient, and French doctor Pierre Briquet remarked upon symptoms we associate with bulimia—women who purged every time they ate.12 In fact, Silver argues that “anorexia nervosa…is deeply rooted in Victorian values, ideologies, and aesthetics, which together helped define femininity in the nineteenth century.”13 This is to say that Victorian womanhood was culturally organized by punishing, corseted discipline that manifested in most areas of middle-class Victorian life, especially where food was concerned. Being hungry and enduring that hunger while abjuring physical yearnings buttressed nineteenth-century understandings of what it meant to navigate the world in a female body.
Moreover, this rampant fixation with female physical control was witched into a morality lesson, one that was at times indistinguishable from superstition. Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso and his son-in-law, historian Guglielmo Ferrero, authors of The Female Offender (1898), seeking to locate the probability of social deviance in a set of physical traits, claimed that women of ill repute were more likely to be overweight. “Stature, stretch of arms and length of limbs are less in all female criminals than in normals,” they write, “and, in proportion to the stature, the average weight of prostitutes and murderesses is greater than in moral women.”14 Met with the baffling and mutable machinations of feminine bodies, these men set about overreading them with dogged, near-fanatical persistence.
One year later, American writer Ella Adelia Fletcher published The Woman Beautiful (1899), a zealously comprehensive guide to personal upkeep in which no fragment of the body escapes the author’s precise eye. Her book was by no means the only one of its ilk. Just years before, Frances Mary Steele and Elizabeth Steele Adams co-wrote Beauty of Form and Grace of Vesture (1892), and Mrs. H. R. Haweis’s The Art of Beauty was published in 1878.15 Fletcher, like so many of her contemporaries, is determined to advise women on how they may perfect every inch of themselves. Among her exhaustive set of chapters are instructions on the beautification of the hand, the eye (“the soul’s window”), and of course a “woman’s crowning glory,” her hair. Chapter ten takes as its focus “the visible seat of emotion,” directing women in the proper care of “the mouth, lips, teeth, nose, and voice.” Fletcher, moreover, tutors her readers in how to wear perfume, how to properly walk and breathe, as well as how to bathe. It’s almost impressively compulsive.
Of course, nineteenth-century conduct literature on feminine beauty would never overlook physique, and Fletcher’s comments on the issue of weight are predictably punishing. Emphasizing the importance of a trim figure through flagrantly racist rhetoric, she remarks upon “some tribes in Central Africa where the perverted taste for excessive corpulence is carried to such an extent that the ‘beauties’ have to be supported when they walk abroad, their flesh hanging like pendent bags from their arms and legs.”16 Remarks like these, in which people of color are rendered as grotesquely subhuman,
served as instructive shorthand—oftentimes, they still do: to drive one’s point, engage the bigotry and xenophobia of one’s readers by emphasizing a particular aesthetic or practice as foreign. It then seems all the more distasteful. In this case, Fletcher suggests that accepting or, worse, honoring a fat body would be akin to savagery and fundamentally opposed to white genteel decency.
In a chapter entitled “This So Ponderous Flesh and the Opposite Condition,” Fletcher embarks on a merciless crusade against the rotund, with the following thesis: “Every additional pound of flesh beyond that required to round out the form to artistic lines and harmonic proportions is a menace to woman’s beauty and health and usefulness, and, consequently, to her happiness.”17 With vigorous condemnation, she declares the impossibility of living contentedly and in good health if one is obese, a term she unsurprisingly leaves to vague interpretation. “But obesity is not merely a beauty-destroyer,” Fletcher avers. “There is a stronger charge yet to make against this most uncomfortable condition. Even roly-poly plumpness takes all the youth out of a woman’s face and step; and every ten pounds added beyond plumpness ages her.”18
But concerns over health provide a mere translucent mask for the abject prejudice motivating so much of the ink spilled over weight loss. Even those who take to their soapboxes with good intentions—a committed interest in public health, for example—are influenced by a long history of regimenting women’s bodies: how they appear, how they move, and what they ingest. The too muchness of a fat body, Fletcher argues, results from a predisposition to pamper oneself and a disinclination to submit oneself to a more rigorous diet:
The phlegmatic temperament, however, which takes life easily, is oftener than not prone to self-indulgence, and therefore peculiarly exposed to be a victim of over-assimilation and mal-assimilation of food. If allowed to run its course the disease is one of constant encroachment and may bring in its train most painful complications.19
Decadence can only be overlooked if its effects are imperceptible. Although we readily impart shame upon those whose behavior is immodest according to convention’s standards, we’re generally more forgiving of bodies that conceal their participation in so-called excesses. It is therefore the fat body—the one that demands more space for itself—that is reliably accused of laziness and gluttony. But it is not enough to levy these charges against women who cannot or choose not to abide by these sermons of thinness. By way of warning, Fletcher maintains that any woman who is socially designated as overweight must necessarily be miserable, a conclusion evidently reached by way of her own disgust:
Could the woman who has let this monster of flesh overmaster her by such insidious degrees that she cannot remember the simple joy of lightness of foot, but for a moment change her corporal prison for the litheness and freedom of the alert Diana, who chases balls over the golf links, she would move heaven and earth and accept any discipline rather than submit to such death in life, as her imprisonment actually is.20
Language like this—so overblown that its cruelty is nearly obscured—can be difficult to consider in a critical context. It might seem so absurd that it could only be thought an outlier, the musings of some unhinged jerk. But we know better than that. We know how this rhetoric tucks into a Western lineage of fat-shaming with disturbing facility. Bodies that demand more from us, that compel us to interrogate our ideologies of beauty and fitness and health, have long been pilloried and treated as vicious social interlopers. And as far as Fletcher is concerned, a fat woman is precisely that. “Wherever the fat woman finds herself in a crowd—and where can she avoid it in the metropolis?—she is in effect an intruder,” she proclaims. “For, she occupies twice the space to which she is entitled, and inflicts upon her companions, through every one of her excessive pounds, just so much additional fatigue and discomfort.”21 Per The Woman Beautiful we are not speaking in metaphors when we refer to the space allotted to women. When a woman gains more weight than is perceived as acceptable, she metamorphoses into an “intruder” who has not only squandered her own life but also become a burden upon others by encroaching upon space that ought to be available to them. She is thus multiply diminished, primarily as a woman and as a public citizen.
This tirade takes a final manipulative turn as Fletcher bemoans her own helplessness in her campaign for women’s beauty against the fat woman’s fleshy protective shield:
Too often, this so redundant flesh seems to serve as a bullet-proof armor, repelling all consciousness of the rights of others. The woman who makes a god of her stomach is incorrigible, and I fear no word of mine will avail to induce her to reform. She is the innately selfish woman who makes her very existence an offense.22
Perhaps this condemnation is meant as some ghastly form of reverse psychology—to spur women into action by relinquishing them as lost causes. But it seems just as feasible that this vitriol is only that: another hyperbolic call to alienate women whose bodies do not perform according to Fletcher’s interpretation of beauty. We’ve long insinuated that heavyset or obese women ought not exist: by refusing to produce clothing in their sizes, mocking them on public transportation, and countless other infractions and aggressions. Fletcher opts instead for icy clarity: to live in a fat body is offensive, so much so that it would be better not to live at all.
Visceral attacks of this kind against fatness also surface in fictional venues, reinforcing the tacit cultural prejudice burgeoning across the nineteenth century. The narrator of William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair scarcely offers a kind word to any of the novel’s characters—in fact, he’s probably Victorian literature’s bitchiest narrator, omniscient or otherwise. But his indisputable punching bag is Joseph “Jos” Sedley, the cowardly and doltish dandy whose obesity the narrator describes with painstakingly nasty particularity:
He was lazy, peevish, and a bon-vivant; the appearance of a lady frightened him beyond measure…His bulk caused Joseph much anxious thought and alarm—now and then he would make a desperate attempt to get rid of his superabundant fat, but his indolence and love of good living speedily got the better of these endeavours at reform, and he found himself again at his three meals a day. He was never well dressed: but he took the hugest pains to adorn his big person: and passed many hours daily in that occupation…His toilet-table was covered with as many pomatums and essences as ever were employed by an old beauty: he had tried, in order to give himself a waist, every girth, stay, and waist-band then invented.23
Often read by literary critics as a queer figure, the narrator emphasizes Jos’s more feminine sensibilities, particularly his shyness, his love of fashion and fine food. As critic Joseph Litvak argues, “the girlish Jos threatens to expose sophistication itself as already sissified.”24 Thackeray never explicitly suggests that Jos is gay, although he indicates that his desire for food outweighs his interest in sex, and in fact he typically derives his most sensuous exercise from gobbling his meals. But Jos, who purposefully orders his flamboyant, bedazzling clothes to be made too tight (something every fat man does, according to the narrator) and whose vanity is a platter of perfume bottles, cannot be tolerated as a legitimate presentation of masculinity. Instead, the novel subjects him to all manner of indignities, while simultaneously lobbing the greatest of insults: that he behaves in an excessively feminine manner. We are always reminded that his nonnormative male presentation—his femininity—is inextricable from his “superabundant fat,” and in fact he becomes the novel’s embodiment of shame: a blushing, stuttering oaf who drinks too much and regularly bemoans his fatness—but purportedly lacks the discipline to whittle himself down to a more conventionally attractive weight. It would be facile to interpret Jos’s character as an attack on women: he manifests a host of anxieties regarding queerness and embodiment. However, the novel’s implication is that fatness, and the perceived emotional compulsion of gluttony, render a man more feminine, which is to say that they are undesirable qualities more expected in a woman.
Yet Queen Victoria, who reigned
while Thackeray and Carroll wrote, grew visibly plump over the course of her reign—the impact of bearing nine children over seventeen years. “It is true she would never be a great beauty, and always wrestled with her weight,” Julia Baird writes in her biography of the monarch.25 Of course, her royal status shielded her from more direct intervention; moreover, as the sovereign of an empire, a full figure signified capacious strength: a body that could and had produced British heirs to the throne and that commanded attention despite her short stature (she was barely five feet tall). The Queen Victoria Memorial, located at the front of Buckingham Palace, portrays her as maternity in marble, stern and dumpling-faced, enswathed in billowing robes. Still, contemporaries remarked upon her appetites for food and for sex, neither of which were seemly in a Victorian gentlewoman, but could not be refused to the Crown. In a malevolent and unethical turn, Victoria’s obstetrician, Charles Locock, gossiped to female friends that, during pregnancy, “She will be very ugly and enormously fat…She goes without stays or anything that keeps Her shape within bounds;…she is more like a barrel than anything else.”26 Locock’s nasty account of the pregnant sovereign—women had just recently been socially excused from wearing corsets while pregnant, although he clearly found her doing so ghastly—anticipates Fletcher’s The Woman Beautiful, with its acidic accusations against plump women. In the eyes of her uncharitable beholder, Queen Victoria, like so many powerful women, appeared neither impressive nor even human. She was a thing to look at, an unpleasant, bulging splotch that offended precisely because it did not incur desire.
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