Hunger and Repression in Charlotte's novels

This December, Cambridge University Press releases the paperback edition of "Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body" (originally published in 2002), written by Anna Krugovoy Silver.

Anna Krugovoy Silver examines the ways nineteenth-century British writers used physical states of the female body - hunger, appetite, fat and slenderness - in the creation of female characters. Silver argues that anorexia nervosa, first diagnosed in 1873, serves as a paradigm for the cultural ideal of middle-class womanhood in Victorian Britain. In addition, Silver relates these literary expressions to the representation of women’s bodies in the conduct books, beauty manuals and other non-fiction prose of the period, contending that women ‘performed’ their gender and class alliances through the slender body. Silver discusses a wide range of writers including Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Bram Stoker and Lewis Carroll to show that mainstream models of middle-class Victorian womanhood share important qualities with the beliefs or behaviours of the anorexic girl or woman.

Chapter 3 is devoted to Charlotte Brontë's writings: "3. Hunger and repression in Shirley and Villette". In this chapter the author compares Charlotte´s treatment of hunger and repression with Dickens's treatment of the same topics. A brief extract:

Dickens typically employs the slender female body as a marker of his heroines' selflessness and lack of sensuality, going so far as to sentimentalize hunger and starvation. This sentimentalization of hunger is precisely where Brontë's images of slenderness depart from his. In Brontë's work, hunger is always painful. Moreover, women's lack of appetite (or inability to eat) is not an innate sign of feminine "nature", as it is in Dickens's work, but represents in large part a criticism of women's social roles, most specifically women's inability, because of constructions of feminity, to speak their desires. Unlike Dicken's heroines, who do not eat because they do not have appetites, Brontë's heroines have desires but learn to repress them: the narrator of Shirley, advising Caroline Helstone on "sealing the lips", conflates silence, starvation, and sexual repression within one image. In Brontë's novels, the fasting body is always a physical presence text (...)

Categories: Books, Scholar, Victorian_Era, Shirley, Villette, Charlotte_Brontë