Literary Extracts #1

"In the nineteenth century, anorexia was given its name by William Gull, a former physician to Queen Victoria. The queen herself seems to have had no trouble keeping food down but that was not the case for a growing number of her female subjects.  England was becoming rich and industrialized and increasingly uncomfortable with the body. The more a well-to-do woman was liberated from working or raising children, the less she needed a robust physique and the more her body became an incongruity; an impediment to be refined and refashioned.

But also a source of power.  It was in the Victorian era, [as quoted by Joan Jacobs Bromberg] that "fasting girls" became prevalent. The dinner table in the nineteenth century had become the altar at which the middle-class family gathered. By refusing food, a young girl could seize control not only over herself but over her entire family. A modern class of self-starvers was born that helped update the abstinence of the saints, transforming a primarily religious phenomenon into a modern disease.

Perhaps these young women, who grew more numerous throughout Victorian England and America, were merely acting out the discomfort of an entire age. Maybe there was something about prosperity iteself that spawned its own rejection. Or perhaps industrialization was the villain. With so much denatured around us, our biological selves came to seem by contrast false, faulty. The mystery of the flesh was replaced by mechanical detachment."

[Jonathan Rosen, "Eve’s Apple"]