Victorian Femininity and Anorexic Culture: Starvation as the Suppression of the Monstrous Feminine

The Victorian ideal of femininity demands the control of female appetites and the submission of the female body to will. Contemporary advertisements that shame women’s appetites are not a new phenomenon but part of a tradition that can be traced back to Victorian gender ideology. The misogyny of patriarchal cultures manifests in a terror of the feminine. In male supremacist ideology the life-giving and transformative qualities of women’s bodies are feared and must be controlled. Ideal Victorian femininity was thought of as thinness, frailty, weakness and a death-like appearance, emphasizing an extreme passivity. Extreme control of female appetites, both sexual and for food was considered necessary because of a misogynist terror of women’s bodies. If not intensely managed it was imagined that female appetites would spiral dangerously out of control. The underweight and starving female body that denies its hunger was considered a triumph over the terrifying powers of the devouring feminine. These ideas persist and continue to manifest in disordered eating today.

The association of women with terrifyingly voracious appetites is an old one. In her essay “Hunger as Ideology” Susan Bordo writes “Mythological, artistic, polemical, and scientific discourses from many cultures and eras … suggest the symbolic potency of female hunger as a cultural metaphor for unleashed female power and desire” (116). Patriarchal societies that necessitate the suppression of female power and desire grow to fear what they suppress. The refusal to acknowledge female appetites causes them to take on monstrous proportions in the patriarchal imagination. Bordo notes that women’s sexual appetites and appetites for food are deeply linked in the patriarchal imagination and both are feared as insatiably devouring. Active female sexuality is terrifying because, as Bordo points out “the sexual act, when initiated and desired by a woman, is imagined as itself an act of eating, of incorporation and destruction of the object of desire” (117). Thus, the securing of a passive female body without desire or appetite becomes a matter of life and death. The well-fed desiring healthy woman is imagined as a dangerous, deadly threat. In Mysteries of the Dark Moon Demetra George writes about male supremacist societies constructing “a devouring feminine sexuality that causes men to transgress their moral and religious convictions, and then … consumes their vital essence and entwines them in an embrace of death” (28). Female sexuality, hunger and desire were conquered and tamed through the imposition of a starving ideal of Victorian femininity.

The polarization between the Victorian ideal of frail, starving femininity and the monstrous devouring feminine of the patriarchal imagination was carefully and strictly maintained. Woman’s natural state was thought to be closer to that of the monstrous feminine so she must discipline and control her body and appetites to avoid slipping into chaos and carnality. In her essay “Sins of the flesh: anorexia, eroticism and the female vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” Emma Dominguez-Rue notes that in Victorian culture “women were idealized as angelic beings [and] they were simultaneously feared as sexually voracious monsters” (299). Because of the constant threat of degeneration from the feminine ideal to the monstrous feminine the suppression of female appetite and desire became the central defining aspect of femininity. In her paper Victorian literature and the anorexic body Anna Krugovoy Silver describes an ‘anorexic logic’ which treats the female body as “an entity that must be subordinated to the will and disciplined as an emblem of one’s self-control” (27). Anorexic logic, a product of Victorian femininity, defines “the perfect woman [as] the one who submits her physical appetites … to her will” (27). A frail form was important. Equally so was the mastery of self-control.

Victorian culture disseminated these ideas about appropriate femininity in a number of ways. Bordo points out that Victorian conduct manuals operated much the way that advertising does today. Both are tools for dissemination of the knowledge and skills of appropriate femininity, specifically the importance of controlling and suppressing appetite. Bordo writes that conduct manuals “warned elite women of the dangers of indulgent and over-stimulating eating and advised how to consume in the feminine way (as little as possible and with the utmost precaution against unseemly shows of desire)” (112). According to Silver the popularity of the corset during the Victorian era functioned as “a visible marker of the culture of anorexia” (36). Unhealthy behavior like corseting and disordered eating clearly was central to maintenance of Victorian femininity. The female body was literally forced into submission through binding and starvation. The valorization of these practices and the practical knowledge needed in order to carry them out was readily available. Dominquez-Rue writes that “control of food intake was obviously crucial in achieving [the] appearance of sickly loveliness, so fasting and vomiting became effective instruments for young women” (298). The imperative to maintain the starving Victorian feminine ideal and prevent slippage into the monstrous feminine was central to Victorian culture.

The monstrous feminine, the antithesis of the starved, controlled Victorian femininity, is embodied in the symbolism of the vampire. The female vampire like other feminine, devouring monsters is an embodiment of men’s misogynist terror. Horrifying and endlessly hungering, the vampire is representative of men’s fear of what women would become if ever the female body did not submit to control. Silver writes “the female vampire is a grotesque personification of a woman’s hunger, the hunger that the good woman resists” (125). The female vampire has an insatiable carnal sexuality and hunger for blood. Bram Stoker’s Dracula reflects the Victorian terror of the out-of-control female appetite and acts as a narrative triumph of men over the female body. The violent staking and beheading of Lucy, a female vampire, reflects the misogynist need to destroy the monstrous feminine when it cannot be conquered or suppressed. The violent, phallic and sexualized staking of Lucy turns her from a vampire, a manifestation of the monstrous feminine, into a dead girl, the ultimate manifestation of Victorian feminine passivity. Dominguez-Rue writes “Stoker’s treatment of women in [Dracula] … affirms his adherence to the Victorian culture of anorexia. In the novel, hunger is not only regarded as anaesthetic and immoral but also as grotesque, unnatural and diabolical” (307). Dracula is an example of the construction and dissemination of the starving, feminine ideal in Victorian literature. It also operates as a threat or warning of violent sexual punishment for women who dare to embody the monstrous feminine.

In contemporary Western culture the Victorian taboo of female appetites persists. Although ideal femininity looks all together different today than it did in the Victorian era the underlying central feature remains the same. The suppression of female appetites and the submission of the female body to will remain defining features of femininity. Bordo argues that contemporary advertising “continue[s] a well worn tradition, arguably inaugurated in the Victorian era, in which the depiction of women eating, particularly in sensuous surrender to rich, exciting food, is taboo” (110). Not only is our contemporary cultural landscape crowded with images of impossibly thin, young women but there is also a striking absence of images of women eating. This cultural erasure of women’s eating echoes the Victorian conduct manuals that advised against “unseemly shows of desire” (112). Bordo invites us to “imagine a young, attractive woman indulging … freely [and] salaciously. Such an image” she writes “would violate deeply sedimented expectations [and] would be experienced by many as disgusting and transgressive” (110). This pervasive taboo makes eating shameful for women and contributes to disordered eating today, just as it did in the Victorian era.

Women are taught to be ashamed of their bodily need for food and the pleasure they may take in food. Femininity continues to be constructed as an act of dominance over the female body. Bordo writes that in contemporary advertising like in Victorian conduct manuals “the representation of unrestrained female appetite as inappropriate [and] the depiction of female eating as a private, transgressive act, make restriction and denial of hunger central features of the construction of femininity” (130). This indicates that disordered eating is not only about achieving a particular body type but also about developing a certain subjectivity. Disordered eating is a production of femininity through the denial of hunger and the control of appetite. Pre-dating the image obsession of our contemporary culture is the Victorian taboo of women’s appetites. Disordered eating cannot be thought of only as a desire for thinness but must also be thought of as a desire for control. The absence of images of women eating in advertising today continues the tradition of Victorian gender ideology that positions femininity not only as weak and frail but also as transcendent of the body and conquering of the appetite. This ability to submit the female body to will is essential to women’s training in femininity which necessitates her ability for self-denial, not only of food and sexuality but in many aspects of her life. Bordo explains that “the social control of women’s hunger operates as a practical “discipline” … that trains female bodies in their limits and possibilities. Denying oneself food becomes the central micro-practice in the education of feminine self-restraint and containment of impulse” (130).

Femininity is defined both as a small, frail, weak and passive body and as the ability to deny hunger. This is a Victorian ideal that persists to this day. Female appetites for food and for sexuality are seen as dangerously threatening to misogynist male supremacist societies. The terror of the female body is manifested in the monstrous feminine, as seen with Stoker’s female vampires. The insatiable devouring female is a preoccupation of the patriarchal imagination that is conquered through the imposition of starvation as the feminine ideal. This tradition continues in the contemporary advertising through the erasure of images of women eating and the shaming of women’s appetites. The management and restriction of female appetite and desire not only physically shrinks and weakens women but trains them in the life long practice of self-denial, essential to femininity and to the maintenance of male supremacy. Disordered eating should be considered within the context of the historical and current shaming and terror of women’s desire. Femininity is not only constructed as physical smallness but also as the submission of the female body to will.

Works Cited

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight.  Berkley and Los Angelis: University of California Press, 2003. Print.

Dominguez-Rue, Emma. “Sins of the flesh: anorexia, eroticism and the female vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Journal of Gender Studies 19.3 (2010): 297 – 308. Online.

George, Demetra. Mysteries of the Dark Moon. HarperCollins: San Francisco, 1992. Print.

Silver, Anna Krugovoy. Victorian literature and the anorexic body. Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 2002. Online.