Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (24 page)

highly educated. (Berthe Pappenheim—"Anna O."—as we know, went on after recovery to become an active feminist and social reformer.) Freud even comments, criticizing Janet's notion that hysterics were "psychically insufficient," on the characteristic coexistence of hysteria with "gifts of the richest and most original kind."
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Yet Freud never makes the connection (which Breuer had begun to develop)
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between the monotonous domestic lives these women were expected to lead after they completed their schooling, and the emergence of compulsive daydreaming, hallucinations, dissociations, and hysterical conversions.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman does make that connection. In
The Yellow Wallpaper
she describes how a prescribed regime of isolation and enforced domesticity eventuates, in her fictional heroine, in the

development of a fullblown hysterical symptom, madness, and collapse. The symptom, the hallucination that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper of her bedroom, struggling to get out, is at once a perfectly articulated expression of protest and a completely debilitating idée fixe that allows the woman character no distance on her situation, no freedom of thought, no chance of making any progress in leading the kind of active, creative life her body and soul crave.

So too for the anorectic. It is indeed essential to recognize in this illness the dimension of protest against the limitations of the ideal of female domesticity (the "feminine mystique," as Betty Friedan called it) that reigned in America throughout the 1950s and early 1960s—the era when most of their mothers were starting homes and families. This was, we should recall, the era following World War II, an era during which women were fired en masse from the jobs they had held during the war and shamelessly propagandized back into the fulltime job of wife and mother. It was an era, too, when the "fuller figure," as Jane Russell now calls it, came into fashion once more, a period of "mammary madness" (or "resurgent Victorianism," as Lois Banner calls it), which glamorized the voluptuous, largebreasted woman.
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This remained the prevailing fashion tyranny until the late 1960s and early 1970s.

But we must recognize that the anorectic's protest, like that of the classical hysterical symptom, is written on the bodies of anorexic women, not embraced as a conscious politicsnor, indeed, does it reflect any social or political understanding at all. Moreover, the symptoms themselves function to preclude the emergence of such an understanding. The idée fixe—staying thin—becomes at its farthest extreme so powerful as to render any other ideas or life projects meaningless. Liu describes it as "all encompassing."
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West writes: "I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul."
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Paradoxically—and often tragically—these pathologies of female protest (and we must include agoraphobia here, as well as hysteria and anorexia) actually function as if in collusion with the cultural conditions that produced them.
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The same is true for more moderate expressions of the contemporary female obsession with slenderness. Women may feel themselves deeply attracted by the aura

of freedom and independence suggested by the boyish body ideal of today. Yet, each hour, each minute spent in anxious pursuit of that ideal (for it does not come naturally to most mature women) is in fact time and energy taken from inner development and social achievement. As a feminist protest, the obsession with slenderness is hopelessly counterproductive.

It is important to recognize, too, that the anorectic is terrified and repelled, not only by the traditional female domestic role—which she associates with mental lassitude and weakness—but by a certain archetypal image of the female: as hungering, voracious, all needing, and allwanting. It is this image that shapes and permeates her experience of her own hunger for food as insatiable and out of control, that makes her feel that if she takes just one bite, she will not be able to stop.

Let us explore this image. Let us break the tie with food and look at the metaphor: hungering voracious extravagantly and excessively needful . . .without restraint . . always wanting always wanting too much affection, reassurance, emotional and sexual contact, and attention. This is how many women frequently experience themselves, and, indeed, how many men experience women. "Please, God, keep me from telephoning him," prays the heroine in Dorothy Parker's classic "A Telephone Call,"
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experiencing her need for reassurance and contact as being as out of control and degrading as the anorectic does her desire for food. The male counterpart to this is found in Paul Morel in Lawrence's Sons and Lovers: "Can you never like things without clutching them as if you wanted to pull the heart out of them?" he accuses Miriam as she fondles a flower. "Why don't you have a bit more restraint, or reserve, or something You're always begging things to love you, as if you were a beggar for love. Even the flowers, you have to fawn on them."
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How much psychic authenticity do these images carry in 1980s America? One woman in my class provided a stunning insight into the connection between her perception of herself and the anxiety of the compulsive dieter. "You know,'' she said, "the anorectic is always convinced she is taking up too much space, eating too much, wanting food too much. I've never felt that way, but I've often felt that I was too much—too much emotion, too much need, too loud and demanding, too much there, if you know what I mean."
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The most extreme cultural expressions of the fear of woman as "too much"—which almost always revolve around her sexuality are strikingly full of eating and hungering metaphors. "Of woman's unnatural,
insatiable
lust, what country, what village doth not complain?" queries Burton in
The Anatomy of Melancholy.
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"You are the true hiennas," says Walter Charleton, ''that allure us with the fairness of your skins, and when folly hath brought us within your reach, you leap upon us and
devour
us."
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The mythology/ideology of the devouring, insatiable female (which, as we have seen, is the image of her female self the anorectic has internalized) tends historically to wax and wane. But not without rhyme or reason. In periods of gross environmental and social crisis, such as characterized the period of the witchhunts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it appears to flourish."
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"All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women
insatiable,"
say Kramer and Sprenger, authors of the official witchhunters handbook,
Malleus Malificarum.
For the sake of fulfilling the
"mouth
of the womb . . . [women] consort even with the devil."
113

Anxiety over women's uncontrollable hungers appears to peak, as well, during periods when women are becoming independent and are asserting themselves politically and socially. The second half of the nineteenth century, concurrent with the first feminist wave discussed earlier, saw a virtual flood of artistic and literary images of the dark, dangerous, and evil female: "sharpteethed, devouring" Sphinxes, Salomes, and Delilahs, "biting, tearing, murderous women." "No century," claims Peter Gay, "depicted woman as vampire, as castrator, as killer, so consistently, so programmatically, and so nakedly as the nineteenth."
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No century, either, was so obsessed with sexuality—particularly female sexuality—and its medical control. Treatment for excessive "sexual excitement" and masturbation in women included placing leeches on the womb,"
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clitoridectomy, and removal of the ovaries (also recommended for "troublesomeness, eating like a ploughman, erotic tendencies, persecution mania, and simple 'cussedness'").
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The importance of female masturbation in the etiology of the "actual neurosis" was a topic in which the young Freud and his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess were especially interested. Fliess believed that the secret to controlling such "sexual abuse" lay in the treatment of nasal "genital spots"; in an operation that was sanctioned

by Freud, he attempted to "correct" the "bad sexual habits" of Freud's patient Emma Eckstein by removal of the turbinate bone of her nose.
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It was in the second half of the nineteenth century, too, despite a flurry of efforts by feminists and health reformers,
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that the stylized "Scurve," which required a tighter corset than ever before, came into fashion."
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"While the suffragettes were forcefully propelling all women toward legal and political emancipation," says Amaury deRiencourt, ''fashion and custom imprisoned her physically as she had never been before."
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Described by Thorstein Veblen as a "mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work," the corset indeed did just that.
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In it a woman could

barely sit or stoop, was unable to move her feet more than six inches at a time, and had difficulty in keeping herself from regular fainting fits. (In 1904, a researcher reported that "monkeys laced up in these corsets moped, became excessively irritable and within weeks sickened and died"!)
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The connection was often drawn in popular magazines between enduring the tight corset and the exercise of selfrestraint and control. The corset is "an ever present monitor," says one 1878 advertisement, "of a welldisciplined mind and wellregulated feelings."
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Today, of course, we diet to achieve such control.

It is important to emphasize that, despite the practice of bizarre and grotesque methods of gross physical manipulation and external control (clitoridectomy, Chinese footbinding, the removal of bones of the rib cage in order to fit into the tight corsets), such control plays a relatively minor role in the maintenance of gender/power relations. For every historical image of the dangerous, aggressive woman there is a corresponding fantasy—an ideal femininity, from which all threatening elements have been purged—that women have mutilated themselves
internally
to attain. In the Victorian era, at the same time that operations were being performed to control female sexuality, William Acton, Richard von KrafftEbing, and others were proclaiming the official scientific doctrine that women are naturally passive and "not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind."
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Corresponding to this male medical fantasy was the popular artistic and moral theme of woman as ministering angel; sweet, gentle, domestic, without intensity or personal am

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bition of any sort.
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Peter Gay suggests, correctly, that these ideals must be understood as a reactionformation to the era's "pervasive sense of manhood in danger," and he argues that few women actually fit the "insipid goody" (as Kate Millett calls it) image.
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What Gay forgets, however, is that most women
tried
to fit— working classes as well as middle were affected by the "tenacious and allpervasive'' ideal of the perfect lady.
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On the gender/power axis the female body appears, then, as the unknowing medium of the historical ebbs and flows of the fear of woman as "too much." That, as we have seen, is how the anorectic experiences her female, bodily self: as voracious, wanton, needful of forceful control by her male will. Living in the tide of cultural backlash against the second major feminist wave, she is not alone in constructing these images. Christopher Lasch, in
The Culture of Narcissism,
speaks of what he describes as "the apparently aggressive overtures of sexually liberated women" which "convey to many males the same message—that women are
voracious, insatiable,"
and call up "early fantasies of a possessive, suffocating,
devouring
and castrating mother."
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Our contemporary beauty ideals, by contrast, seemed purged, as Kim Chernin puts it, "of the power to conjure up memories of the past, of all that could remind us of a woman's mysterious power."
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The ideal, rather, is an "image of a woman in which she is not yet a woman": Darryl Hannah as the lanky, newborn mermaid in
Splash;
Lori Singer (appearing virtually anorexic) as the reckless, hyperkinetic heroine of
Footloose;
the Charley Girl; "Cheryl Tiegs in shorts, Margaux Hemingway with her hair wet; Brooke Shields naked on an island;"
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the dozens of teenage women who appear in Coke commercials, in jeans commercials, in chewing gum commercials.

The images suggest amused detachment, casual playfulness, flirtatiousness without demand, and lightness of touch. A refusal to take sex, death, or politics too deadly seriously. A delightfully unconscious relationship to her body. The twentieth century has seen this sort of feminine ideal before, of course. When, in the 1920s, young women began to flatten their breasts, suck in their stomachs, bob their hair, and show off long coltlike legs, they believed they were pursuing a new freedom and daring that demanded a carefree, boyish style. If the traditional female hourglass suggested any

thing, it was confinement and immobility. Yet the flapper's freedom, as Mary McCarthy's and Dorothy Parker's short stories brilliantly reveal, was largely an illusion— as any obsessively cultivated sexual style must inevitably be. Although today's images may suggest androgynous independence, we need only consider who is on the receiving end of the imagery in order to confront the pitiful paradox involved.

Watching the commercials are thousands of anxietyridden women and adolescents (some of whom may well be the very ones appearing in the commercials) with anything
but
an unconscious relation to their bodies. They are involved in an absolutely contradictory state of affairs, a totally nowin game: caring desperately, passionately, obsessively about attaining an ideal of coolness, effortless confidence, and casual freedom. Watching the commercials is a little girl, perhaps ten years old, whom I saw in Central Park, gazing raptly at her father, bursting with pride: "Daddy, guess what? I lost two pounds!" And watching the commercials is the anorectic, who associates her relentless pursuit of thinness with power and control, but who in fact destroys her health and imprisons her imagination. She is surely the most startling and stark illustration of how cavalier power relations are with respect to the motivations and goals of individuals, yet how deeply they are etched on our bodies, and how well our bodies serve them.