Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation

The Skull Beneath the Skin

Sasha Garwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000458541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation: The Skull Beneath the Skin is a unique exploration of why early modern noblewomen starved themselves, how they understood their behaviour, and how it was interpreted and received by their contemporaries.

The first study of its kind, the book adopts an interdisciplinary and highly detailed approach to examining women's self-starvation between 1500 and 1640. It is also the first book to focus on this behaviour among noblewomen. Beginning with a contextual outline of gender, food and embodiment in early modern culture, the book then looks explicitly at the food behaviour of several well-known figures, including Elizabeth I, Catherine of Aragon, Mary I, Arbella Stuart, and Katherine Grey. Each case study engages with a variety of primary sources, such as letters and legal documents, as well as with literary texts, providing an in-depth exploration of the relationship between self-starvation and concepts of autonomy, sexuality, and literal and symbolic imprisonment, highlighting the body and specifically the act of eating as fundamental to identity in the early modern period and today.

Employing both literary and historical methodologies, Early Modern English Noblewomen and Self-Starvation is an important contribution to the study of the history of the body and is essential reading for students and academics of early modern women's history, gender history, food history, and the history of the body.

Part I

Contexts

1 Modern vs early modern bodies

Anorexia nervosa and other historically situated forms of self-starvation

Given that anorexia nervosa is now a well-known and increasingly common (if problematically represented) condition, it is worth using this opportunity to draw a clear distinction between the starvation-related behaviour of early modern women and this modern phenomenon, a syndrome that was the subject of almost simultaneous publications in England, the United States, and France in the early 1870s. (There are obvious parallels here with the roughly simultaneous pathologisation of homosexuality, that other attempt to contain a visible threat to the cultural status quo.) As Joan Jacobs Brumberg pointed out, the symptomology we now refer to as ‘anorexia nervosa’ is a ‘historically specific disease that emerged from the distinctive economic and social environment of the late nineteenth century’ (facilitated and refined by the cultural environment of the late twentieth and early twenty-first), and early modern self-starvation bears even less resemblance to modern diagnostic criteria than to those early definitions.¹ Helen Malson’s The Thin Woman offers a brilliant analysis of the gendered discourses of ‘anorexia nervosa’, from its initial appearances in early ‘medical’ texts to the present day. Malson emphasises the extent to which the category of ‘anorexic’ has been constructed around and through a patriarchal concept of the category ‘woman’, despite acknowledgement from the very first that some 10 per cent of sufferers are male.

The two main sets of current diagnostic criteria are the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM) V, and the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) 10 (with 11 on release, presented at the World Health Assembly in May 2019, and due to come into effect on 1 January 2022). Whilst their schema differ, both predicate diagnosis on (a) the conscious maintenance of a body weight considerably lower than the expected norm through restricted eating or other dysfunctional behaviours, (b) ‘intense fear of gaining weight’, and (c) ‘disturbance in how body weight and shape are experienced’ or ‘undue influence of body weight or shape’ on self-evaluation. The last two aspects are conspicuously absent from early modern accounts of similar bodily experiences, which to the modern eye are noticeable for the absence of any articulated fear of becoming physically fat, the practice of dysfunctional behaviours with the specific aim of avoiding bodily growth in mind, the distortion of external bodily perception, or the influence of weight or shape on self-evaluation.

These diagnostic criteria are in general adhered to in current clinical practice. The (increasing) problem is that some of those criteria apply to the majority of Western women and girls to some degree, regardless of their shape or size. Modern anorexics’ food refusal belongs to a cultural context that ideologically approves restricted eating for women, whose bodies are often constructed as objects rather than subjects of sexuality. The contemporary medical establishment, faced with an ever-increasing number of patients with disordered eating behaviours, have nevertheless striven to maintain a strict theoretical division between ‘anorexic’ and ‘non-anorexic’ food behaviours, even though numerous studies have demonstrated the increasing normativity of disordered eating and that ‘dieting and body dissatisfaction’ (two crucial diagnostic criteria) are ‘more prevalent’, and therefore more ‘normal’ or normative, than non-dieting amongst women and girls.² This renders the assertion that there is a clear distinction between ‘anorexia nervosa’, a discrete physical and psychological condition, and ‘normal’ (feminine) eating behaviour increasingly problematic, especially given that multiple studies have repeatedly demonstrated that this is not the case.³ The proportion of Western women ‘dieting’ – not including those not doing so but unhappy with their weight, appearance, or existing food intake – at any one time, regardless of racial or class background, has been estimated to be as high as 80 per cent.⁴ On the contrary, ‘eating disorders’ (of which self-starvation is one) represent merely one end of a problematic food/weight behaviour continuum inhabited by the vast majority of women, as the increased flexibility of the ‘anorexia nervosa’ DSM and ICD categories (and the expansion and subdivision of DSM V’s ‘Unspecified’ and ‘Other Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder’ sections) problematically demonstrate. So ‘anorexia nervosa’ becomes not an absolute condition but a discursively constructed category, representing either a collection or constellation of various more or less common symptoms – or, further, simply one end of a continuum of dysfunction on which the entire population can be situated.

Reba-Harrelson et al.’s revealing 2009 study of ‘Patterns and prevalence of disordered eating and weight control behaviours in women ages 25–45’, involving thousands of women selected through a national (US-based) quota-sampling procedure, found that

disordered eating behaviors [sic], extreme weight loss measures, and negative cognitions about shape and weight were widely endorsed by women in this age group [regardless of racial background]. Thirty-one percent of women without a history of anorexia nervosa or binge eating reported having purged to control weight, and 74.5% of women reported that their concerns about shape and weight interfered with their happiness.

The researchers concluded, unsurprisingly, that ‘unhealthy approaches to weight control and negative attitudes about shape and weight are pervasive even among women without eating disorders’.⁵ Many studies suggest that a majority of participants, regardless of age, relationship, or employment status, suffer from body dissatisfaction and assess their food intake accordingly, perceiving cultural pressure to maintain a specific body shape and themselves to be continually judged thereby.⁶ Insisting, then, that ‘a dread of fatness [persisting] as an intrusive, overvalued idea’ constitutes a specific psychopathology is deeply problematic in a society that persistently mocks and devalues fatness, where subjects are surrounded by intrusive media representations of the ‘obesity epidemic’ and its dire physical implications, and doctors themselves have been demonstrated to make unfair judgements of their patients purely on the basis of their physical size.⁷ Such a fear of ‘fatness’ seems to be particularly prevalent among younger women and teenagers, perhaps because of greater media exposure and the normalisation of digital editing for cultural images.⁸ One of Courtney Martin’s interviewees, enthusiastically corroborated by her peers across the social spectrum, concluded disturbingly that body hatred and obsession was ‘just being a girl’, and Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters provides ample evidence that feminocentric spaces and bonding rituals hinge heavily on evaluation and criticism of the physical self.

It’s not just women, either: increasing attention is being given specifically to boys and men, and more recently non-binary or agender people, suffering from eating disorders.⁹ Susie Orbach’s 2009 Bodies, in an evaluation of her cross-gender clinical practice, argues persuasively that authentic embodiment is increasingly problematised in modern culture regardless of gender; not only has the body increasingly become the subconscious site of articulation for purely psychological concerns (as in psychosomatic symptomologies in response to psychological triggers), but postmodern culture renders authentic and unquestioned experience of the body so problematic that problems with embodiment have begun to create their own psychopathologies.¹⁰

In modern Western culture, food and body size are all-pervasively associated with moral values – thinness as virtue, attractiveness, sex appeal, self-control, perfection, power; fatness as greed, self-indulgence, excess, gluttony, weakness, need, insatiability.¹¹ This recalls a Cartesian duality between a valued masculinised (thin) intellectual and a devalued feminised (fat) physical.¹² Physical substance – body weight – is overwhelmingly negatively loaded, regardless of gender. Many cultural narratives, particularly prevailing medicalised media discourse, ‘create fat as a “spoiled identity” … that can communicate only its own failure’, allowing little space for representations of fat people as aspirational, powerful, effective, sexual, or appealing.¹³ (In particular, there is hardly any cultural space at all for portraying fat women thus. The majority of fat women in the public eye, outside fat activist circles, reinforce with self-loathing cultural accounts of fat as failure, although the welcome emergence of figures like Lindy West, Tess Holliday, Roxane Gay, and Ashley Graham into the mainstream suggests this may be changing.)¹⁴ It is more complicated than a simple duality, however. Whilst excessive thinness, for example, can be constructed as ‘petite’, hyperfeminine vulnerability, for many anorexia sufferers it can also represent androgyny (and thus freedom from the many demands and expectations of adult femininity) and/or the defiant lack of need. Excessive thinness can signal both adherence to cultural dictates of (often masculinised) self-restraint of a (feminised) body as a virtue (for either gender) and a grotesque parody of such demands, a refusal to conform, a drive for an externally documented individuality, a concrete self.¹⁵

From a Foucauldian perspective, this relentless self-criticism is an expression of ‘discipline’, an exercise of control by a ‘Classical Age’ which ‘discovered the body as the object and target of power’.¹⁶

He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power … he inscribes in himself the power relations in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.¹⁷

(Given the extent to which women, in particular, have internalised such subjectivity, I cannot be alone in finding Foucault’s pronouns here ironic.)¹⁸ In fact, modern capitalism ensures that it is ‘primarily through consumption that we construct our identities’, and it is the body which provides visible evidence – and evaluative potential – of the selfhood thus constructed.¹⁹ Perhaps the original inclusion of appearance-focused criteria in the diagnostic assessment of ‘eating disorders’ stems from the fact that such concerns are readily understandable within the dominant self-evaluative cultural paradigm. Their inclusion thus enables eating-disordered behaviour to be rooted firmly in individual psychopathology rather than cultural realities or everyday experience. This in turn lets off the hook an increasingly criticised (and, demonstrably, partially effective at best) medical treatment model that has been shown to exacerbate eating-disordered thought-patterns, recreate problematic gender/power relations, enhance focus on food intake as means of self-articulation and identity formation, and magnify misogynistic cultural forces.²⁰

The cultural experience of food, gender and the body in modern culture, then, is fundamentally different from that of the early modern person, particularly the early modern woman. Modern diagnoses, food behaviours and experiences of the body hinge on several factors entirely absent from the early modern body: systemic cultural devaluation of the fat body and fetishisation of the thin one; persistent, widespread, and socially ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• PART I: Contexts
• 1. Modern vs early modern bodies: Anorexia nervosa and other historically situated forms of self-starvation
• 2. Fasting and food in early modern society: ‘At dinner, supper, or in taverns’
• 3. Women, food, and early modern households: ‘None other wyse than the capitaine of a garison’
• 4. The female body in early modern England: ‘Oh, that we may call these delicate creatures ours/and not their appetites!’
• 5. Women and self‑starvation on the Renaissance stage: ‘Dead’ ‘Dead!’ ‘Starved!’
• PART II: Case studies
• 6. Catherine of Aragon and Mary Tudor: Eating and identity, royalty, and resistance
• 7. ‘The body of a weak and feeble woman’: Elizabeth I and eating, power, politics, and penetration
• 8. ‘With my body, I thee worship’: The tragedy of Lady Katherine Grey
• 9. ‘So Wilfully Bent’: Arbella Stuart, starvation, strategy, and survival
• Conclusion: The skull beneath the skin: starvation and embodied selfhood then and now
• Bibliography
• Index