Conclusion: the politics of thinness

Summary

I began this book by expressing the hope that exploring anorexia nervosa as a semiotic system or cultural paradigm might help our understanding of why women today succumb to the disease and, more generally, to patterns of disorderly eating. I would like to end by speculating about the kind of political work that literary and cultural criticism can accomplish in the effort to curtail anorexia nervosa both as pathology and as cultural ideology. While I focused on the Victorian period in the introduction, I would like, briefly, to turn to contemporary culture, and end, as I began, with an anecdote.

Recently, I asked students in a course entitled “The Body in Literature and Culture” to complete the following phrase: “My body is.” Their answers did not, unfortunately, surprise me: “an animal – something to fight against”; “contrary to the mind, full of urges and instincts”; “at war with me”; “breeder, sexual, animal”; “something that commits treason against myself.” Perhaps most honest and sad: “I hate to see my body, especially naked.” I asked students to read their own comments alongside Plato's Phaedo, in which Plato writes that “we shall be closest to knowledge if we refrain as much as possible from association with the body or join with it more than we must, if we are not infected with its nature but purify ourselves from it until the god himself frees us. In this way we shall escape the contamination of the body's folly.