I'm reading Outlander last night, and I come across this all-too-familiar scene. The heroine of the story, Claire, has time-traveled, almost been raped, forced onto a horse for hours and is thoroughly traumatized. By the time the rough gang of Scots who have abducted her arrive at their clan's castle, it's been more than 24 hours since she has eaten. She has endured all this while wearing a light cotton dress, and when they arrive at the castle in the dark, she stays up several more hours dressing a man's wound before finally collapsing in bed.
When she wakes up the next morning, she "sips" a cup of light broth, but has "no appetite for the bannocks and parritch that Mrs. FitzGibbons had brought for my breakfast, but crumbled a bit and pretended to eat, in order to gain some time for thought." I don't even know what bannocks and parritch are, but I'm 100% sure they're more hearty than a sip of light broth. And she goes on to pretend to eat some crumbs? A bit later she is taken to the laird of the castle, who has a tray of refreshments brought in. Claire "nibble[s] sparingly at these; my stomach was churning too vigorously to allow for any appetite."
I cannot tell you how many time I have read scenes just like this in fiction. It's actually a trope at this point: women in physical distress or exhaustion turning down an offer of food. Why are we so damn afraid to let a female character eat? Why does that enhance her character?
I'm sending out a call here: Help me out and post, in the comments section, any similar passages you come across in novels. Could be a very interesting list.
UNTIL I FIND THE SPECIFIC PASSAGES IN EACH BOOK, LET THESE GENERAL REFERENCES SUFFICE:
ReplyDelete(1) in stephenie meyer's THE HOST protagonist melanie stryder is a huge martyr character, constantly hurting or denying herself in an effort to help others (or even, more grossly still, repeatedly being beaten or tortured, which is supposed to make us love her more and feel sorry for her; she's a definite punching bag, written in the self-denying female martyr image). meyer is not self-aware enough to realize this is a character flaw indicative of self-loathing; instead she uses this trait to sanctify stryder. in one scene, stryder, starving due to long-term inadequate nutrition suffered by everyone in her human colony, refuses to eat her fair share of scrambled eggs when she sees that a young boy may want more, even though he's already had his ration. the scene plays out for a ridiculously long time, with stryder's refusals to take adequate care of herself making me angrier and angrier with each sentence.
The Host is complicated by the near-starvation conditions, which makes the eating question completely different from, say, an afternoon tea in London or medieval feast. But I agree with you about the excessively martyred aspect of her characters, both male and female. She could pull back a little on that.
Delete(2) in meyer again, this time the entire TWILIGHT saga, protagonist bella swan is repeatedly refusing to eat. she's just not hungry. she's too emotional to eat. she's too tired to eat. she's too angry to eat. it would be rude to eat around vampires who can't enjoyably/comfortably eat human food. a fight/trauma erupts before she has a chance to eat the food in front of her. meyer uses this trope so repeatedly that she effectively has let the plot enforce an anorexia on bella. to me it reads as if meyer has food issues (and, i hear you, sister; who among us doesn't? compassion, baby) and so is writing a fantasy world in which her stand-in, bella swan, is not only not even TEMPTED by food but is actively PREVENTED from eating, which would allow her to become the pale, willowy, anemic, hyper-feminine (culturally speaking) person meyer herself wants to be but isn't. (<-- lots of my own supposition here, but this is definitely the opinion i had after reading lots of meyer.)
ReplyDeleteBella was also criticized for all those scenes of cooking steak dinners, typical of the can't-win headlock of Twilight. But Bella definitely suffers from that feminization of the rejection of food.
Delete(3) in e. l. james's FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, itself adapted TWILIGHT fan fiction, the bella character, this time named ana steele, suffers from bella's type of anorexia (*** some spoilers in the following***): she apparently can only eat when the stars are aligned, and a startling portion of the book's nonsexual dialogue between her and her boyfriend revolves around his -- angrily -- insisting she eat and her anemically refusing. her ambivalence to food -- even when she's shockingly underweight at the beginning of book ii -- reiterates the meyer message that the best, most desirable women simply reject food. ana's heartbreak over losing her boyfriend at the close of the first novel is written as a sort of amazingly effective weight-loss mechanism. if ana were ambivalent about food before, now she outright rejects it. and what a delightful conundrum, james implies, that now a woman is being criticized for her body and relationship with food -- as we almost universally, always are -- but this time because she doesn't embrace it ENOUGH. furthermore, the character name, ANA, is a long-accepted, popular shorthand for ANOREXIA, used in pro-anorexic (pro-ana) forums online to stand in for the idealized woman with a food relationship so disordered that she can reject it entirely in pursuit of an emaciated form.
ReplyDelete(4) leaving literature behind for a moment and entering the realm of film, in the 2006 romantic comedy FAILURE TO LAUNCH, starring sarah jessica parker and matthew mcconaughy, in one scene the protagonists are sharing a lovely picnic lunch on a yacht. comedic complications result in mcconaughy's throwing the food overboard; SJP's character reaction is to panic, and in a flustered manner attempt to stop MM, saying things like, "i'm not one of those waifs who starves herself. i really like to eat. please don't throw away my lunch." it's light-hearted and amusing, and in the face of a cultural constant -- the demand that women not eat if they wish to be valued in society -- it's almost refreshing. but, sadly, the whole message is loaded and problematic, because SJP herself is SO very skinny, so underweight, that the message becomes, "go ahead and eat, girlfriend, but ONLY if you still LOOK like you're starving." and that's even a more impossible demand than that women avoid food entirely and starve. the film's little joke -- undoubtedly mean to make us like SJP's character a little bit more, feel a little bit less threatened by her beauty, perhaps even quietly rap the wrist of a society that insists we starve -- actually encodes an even more damaging message, namely that eating is only acceptable to women who look like they don't eat. the HOST/TWILIGHT/FIFTY message is perhaps anorexia, the FAILURE bulimia.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's very widespread--not specifically a Twilight/Fifty Shades thing. It will be fun to see the examples we find in a types of literature, high and low.
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