For this week’s blog I was
inspired by a recent article called “5 reasons to date a girl with an eating
disorder”, placed up on an internet forum which I’m sure has incited many to
anger. This article outlines what the “author” believes to be perfectly
acceptable reasons for choosing a girl suffering in this way over others: she
is good at sex, she costs men less money, she is often rich, she is vulnerable
and she will be more likely stay thin and “pretty” than other girls. Not only
does this have the potential to encourage or “trigger” many girls to furthering
their own disorders, or subliminally placing the idea into their unconscious,
but it also adheres to antiquarian views on women.
When one considers the Victorian
novel, in particular upper-class Victorian women, one cannot help but construct
the image of a fainting, pathetic figure falling into the arms of a sturdy man.
Literature has progressed from this ideal, however society doesn’t seem to have
done so.
Wuthering Heights is a key example of
the wasting-away of a woman until her death in Victorian fiction. This form of
death is alluded to in many novels from this period, without much thought being
given to it by the modern reader. However, in this case, as well as more
discreetly, Cathy, the key female character in the novel, reaches a point of
hysteria (“coincidentally” driven to this by men) at which point she breaks
down and refuses to eat. This mission of starvation incapacitates her to such
an extent that she never recovers. Her fragile and vulnerable state does indeed
endear her rival lovers to her, but not because she is somehow more attractive,
but because they know it will kill her. This novel is over 100 years old and yet
manages to understand the concept of an eating disorder better than the modern
understanding in that article.
Indeed, modern
literature has moved away from the idealisation of a skinny white woman and has
begun to accept people of all sizes as attractive. A key example of this is in
Delillo’s White Noise (published
1986). The key protagonist’s descriptions of his wife are nearly always
concerned with her socially “unacceptable” size as she is overweight. However,
this does not paint her in a negative light; she is beautiful. All of his
descriptions of her size come paired with his lust for her body and her mind
intertwined to create who she is as a person.
This is where
modern texts and thoughts should be situated, in a place in which size does not
matter in terms of the integrity of a person. Jack, the protagonist mentioned
above, has also married several other people whose weight has not been
discussed. This is because the author understands the modern world: someone’s
weight is not a necessary factor in who they are. The important point about
women and their shape in this text is that it is transient: women can be who
they want to be and for as long as they want to be. It is not down to men to
categorize whether a woman’s weight is “good” or not, it is up to women to have
that control.
This is an
example of how modern fiction has moved away from the physical constrictions on
women of the Victorian era. Not only are women free to utilise their bodies
sexually in the way in which they desire, but they also should be free to
develop their bodies in the way in which they desire. Neither should they, nor
would they, have to be constrained in an ideal modern world, however
social constraints, particularly those enforced by males, as well as the
marketing industry are attempting to trap women of our generation once again
and thus are unfortunately subverting the literary move towards a modern
representation of women.
