Zara-Louise Stubbs critiques The Artwork of Not Consuming: A Uncertain Historical past of Urge for food and Want by Jessica Hamel-Akré (Atlantic Books, 2024).
‘Urge for food,’ Jessica Hamel-Akré writes, ‘was a textual content by which the physique spoke’ (5). Starvation is greater than mere craving; what we do (and what we don’t) eat is, for Hamel-Akré, one thing that accommodates a ‘complete historical past’ (5). By need, our our bodies articulate themselves. They set up their presence, assert their proper to take up house. With its undeniably fleshy aspect, consuming is an particularly visceral method for our bodies to talk. This consuming can be explicitly gendered. A girl’s relationship to need is rendered towards an unlimited constellation of theological, social, medical and political influences. In a daring mix of educational evaluation and private writing, The Artwork of Not Consuming (2024) stitches collectively the significantly embodied historical past of feminine urge for food and suggests how the deceptively insular expertise of urge for food, longing and need are poignantly connective.
As ‘an professional within the historical past of girls’s well being, literature and feminist thought,’ Jessica Hamel-Akré complicates the narrative of ‘ravenous women’. She extricates the abstaining lady from the liminal house between spiritual and medical discourse. As an alternative of positioning the feminine quicker (anorexic or in any other case) as being unduly absorbed in their very own our bodies, The Artwork of Not Consuming reconnects the ‘intertextuality of tales of girls’s self-starvation,’ (Hamel-Akré, 131) with a convention of intellectualism. Weaving literary, medical and private accounts collectively, the textual content constructs a posh internet of feminine meals abstinence. It asks: what does it imply to really feel hungry? What does it imply, extra particularly, to assume by starvation? How are these mental and gastronomic appetites linked? Reasonably than opposing physique and thoughts, Hamel-Akré bridges them by the pairing of cognition and digestion. Her ebook highlights the importance of who writes these narratives of starvation – and who defines the ‘proper’ technique to handle them. The textual content particularly eschews the gendered paradigms of urge for food to ask: what does a hungry physique appear like? How does it act? How is that this typically, totally different from the best way it ‘ought to’ behave? Whether or not she eats or abstains, the feminine physique ostensibly bears darkish fruit.
Articulating Girls’s Appetites
Urge for food can hyperlink us and will even turn into an entry level for connection: as Hamel-Akré muses, ‘urge for food was a bridge between occasions, between our bodies’ (24). It’s this connection to starvation that bridges the varied girls rendered within the textual content. These girls are all associated by their relationship to wanting and satiation. As we learn these narratives, we too turn into more and more linked to those figures. This capabilities, maybe, by what Dr Alessandra Pino calls ‘meals empathy.’ Meals, Pino explains, ‘has the exceptional capacity to function a gateway, transporting the person again in time by intricate particulars and sensory experiences.’ (47). This implies that the particular sensory energy of studying and writing round starvation gives some extent of connection – a second by which we are able to ‘learn’ ourselves into the physique of one other. Making a lineage of female appetites by time, then, may be seen as a radical act; a method of querying the discourse that has regulated the best way girls do (and don’t) eat by centuries of historical past.
The Artwork of Not Consuming hinges on eighteenth-century views on our bodies however ceaselessly pans to the present second. Hamel-Akré’s lingers on her personal ‘private unravelling’ in parallel to these of girls by historical past. This system creates a sort of narrative patchwork. Hamel-Akré’s personal reckoning with the embodiment of being pregnant sits subsequent to Ann of Tutbury’s miraculous fasting. Samuel Richardson’s literary Clarissa (1747) sits towards the non-fiction Account of The Expertise of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), a ‘self-told case of extreme abstinence from meals written by a lady’ recorded by Hester herself (Hamel-Akré, 216). All through the ebook, Hamel-Akré grapples with the idea that feminine consuming – and urge for food for different corporeal acts – must be regulated by an out of doors power which has traditionally been male, ‘spiritual and medical’ (168). Hamel-Akré queries the vanity of a ‘completely imperfect narrative about what a lady not consuming meant’ (226). She investigates the surveillance of female need and its troubling lilt in the direction of self-regulation and panopticism.
Non secular and Gendered Deviancy: Consuming Throughout Time
The ebook is organised into 4 components; ‘The Advantages of Abstinence,’ ‘Ouroboros,’ ‘Angel Meals’ and ‘A Proper to Regale.’ As these titles counsel, the ebook snakes by reflections on urge for food as an virtually mythic phenomenon. The ‘proper’ sort of consuming is equally elusive. The historic medical practices assessed within the textual content warn of the hazards of extra. Nevertheless, in addition they hesitate to reward complete abstinence. This results in Hamel-Akré’s key thesis: what’s the artwork of not consuming? How can girls ‘not eat’ within the ‘proper method’? This invokes an identical question posed by the late Hilary Mantel in her 2004 essay on the transcendent curiosity in consuming (and never consuming):
Anorexia nervosa is alleged to be a contemporary epidemic. In the event you skimmed the press in anyone week it will be laborious to see what’s perceived as extra threatening to society: the flabby, rolling mass of couch-potato youngsters, or their teenage sisters with thighs like gnawed chicken-bones, sunken cheeks and putrid breath. Are we threatened by flesh or its reverse? (Mantel, 172)
This paradigm echoes throughout time. In each the eighteenth-century and the twenty-first, the achievement of the ‘proper’ sort of consuming is ostensibly a public in addition to non-public concern. The battle to situate ourselves within the ‘appropriate’ physique transcends time. Can we posit the ravenous saints thought of by Hamel-Akré and Mantel in the identical vein because the ‘fashionable anorexic’? If not, what delineates them? Is it a matter of religion? Medicalisation? Are the categorisations on ‘pathological’ consuming right down to context, or dedication? Are theological abstainers the identical as political ones? Can the explanations for starvation strike ever justify the means?
Hamel-Akré’s sustained engagement with the work of Dr George Cheyne types a theoretical backbone for the textual content. Medical historian Steven Shapin describes Cheyne (1671-1743) as an ‘iatromechanist, dietary author, and trendy doctor’ (263). Cheyne, like his eighteenth-century contemporaries, argued for dietary temperance, an ethical restraint difficult by the doctor’s private dietary indulgence, with Cheyne being posthumously described as a ‘fats, jovial Scotsman weighing 32 stone at one interval’ (Charlton, 49).
Cheyne’s voice echoes by The Artwork of Not Consuming, stylised as a ghost. Constructing on the works of Cheyne, the Victorian interval noticed a sustained give attention to ‘good’ digestion as an indication of well being. The connection grew to become so prevalent that ‘dyspepsia and urge for food collectively [began] to hauntVictorian lives’ (Beer). This pervasive pairing of ghost and gluttony in eighteenth and nineteenth-century drugs positions the abdomen as an occult gateway, a literal and figurative hellmouth.
Hamel-Akré describes Cheyne’s quest to ‘enhance our bodies’ as multipronged. He was ‘greatest identified for his suggestion that restrictive and selective consuming, adhering to a vegetarian-style eating regimen, may heal a spread of bodily and psychological illnesses’ (Hamel-Akré, 6-7). The textual content’s mental odyssey comes from the need to unravel this follow; to think about the ethics and politics of ‘doctoring’ a physique by mediating its urge for food. More and more, Hamel-Akré identifies Cheyne’s drugs as greater than a straight-forward prescription. His strategy to need reveals itself to be multidisciplinary, functioning throughout a number of planes of being: ‘[h]is drugs was metaphorical, endlessly ethical and mystical’ (8). By theological discourse, girls have been related to the carnal. This, over time, has paired sexual and food-related appetites in a sort of two-pronged, gendered deviancy: ‘Within the easiest of phrases, […] girls needed to work more durable than males to be holy,’ and this message, over time, has been ‘carried ahead because the ideas of girls’s urge for food management got here to reputation’ (177).
(Not-)Consuming as Textual content: Towards Readability
Self-starvation sits at an particularly complicated junction between private theorisation, company and subjectivity. Whatever the motives behind meals refusal, one aspect stays the identical: the understanding that, typically, it’s not the topic however the spectator who in the end ‘defines what ache and starvation seems to be like’ (Hamel-Akré, 147). Regulating urge for food means greater than altering consuming habits. Policing consuming is, in fact, each harmful and alarming. However, if we strategy consuming as a sort of shorthand for different components of dwelling, we are able to additionally see how meals stands in for a bigger sense of management. We are able to due to this fact use discourse on meals to interrogate questions and experiences of embodied life. Maud Ellman explores how meals has a peculiar multivalent high quality. It’s, in her phrases, ‘metaphorically omnivorous’ (44); it might probably imply many issues on the identical time. Ellmann writes:
Meals is the prototype of all exchanges with the opposite, beneath verbal, monetary, or erotic. Digestion is a sort of fleshy poetry, for metaphor begins within the physique’s transubstantiation of itself, whereas meals is thesaurus of all moods and sensations. (53)
The regulation of girls’s need, then, provides us an perception into attitudes to gendered embodiment. The worry of those wishes being recognized is heightened by the potential ‘readability’ of the physique. In studying girls’s appetites by time, The Artwork of Not Consuming confronts this concern immediately. ‘I’d come to consider my physique may categorical my secrets and techniques in an act of betrayal,’ Hamel-Akré writes (101). As Susan Bordo expresses in Insufferable Weight, ‘the symptomology of those [eating] issues reveals itself as textuality’ (Bordo, 168). Consuming is due to this fact dialogical; even inter-corporeal. By urge for food, our our bodies can start to talk for themselves. However how can we belief that this articulation is precisely translated by these round us? As Hamel-Akré emphasises: ‘I already knew not all fictions, nor truths, have been made equal. It mattered who advised the story of urge for food’ (57). Theorising the physique for the self turns into a technique to revitalise the narrative. Studying how one can eat (or not eat) and need exterior the burden of preordained discourse turns into a sort of reclamation motion. It turns into a device within the motion towards readability.
‘What was the story of their our bodies, I might ask myself, like so many others. What was the story of mine? I requested myself as a result of the story mattered and everybody was hungry for it’ (Hamel-Akré, 100, unique emphasis). A niche exists then, between the tales our our bodies ‘inform’ and those that they reside. The duty, which Hamel-Akré has begun, is to probe this hole: to problem the concept that our our bodies are transparently readable to others and, maybe most importantly, to study to learn and attend to the wishes of our personal our bodies truthfully, with out the mediation of outdoor discourse. To learn our our bodies for ourselves, moderately than reorder ourselves for the studying. To place the physique earlier than the narrative.
References
Beer, Gillian. “Dream Contact.” 19: Interdisciplinary Research within the Lengthy Nineteenth Century Vol.19, 2014. n. pag. Internet.
Bordo, Susan. Insufferable Weight: Feminism, Western Tradition and The Physique. Berkeley, College of California Press, 1995.
Charlton Anne. ‘George Cheyne 1671 or 73-1743): 18th-century doctor.’ J Med Biography, Vol.19 (2), 2011 (49-55).
Hamel-Akré, Jessica. The Artwork of Not Consuming: A Uncertain Historical past of Urge for food and Want. London Atlantic Books, 2024.
Mantel, Hilary. ‘Some Ladies Need Out: The Hair Shirt Sisterhood: 2004.’ in Mantel Items: Royal Our bodies and Different Writing from the London Evaluate of Books. London Fourth Property, 2020. (155-177)
Pino, Alessandra. ‘Exploring The Function of Meals in Gothic Literature.’ Petis Propos Culinares, Vol. 129, 2024. (41-83)
Shapin, Steven. ‘Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Experience, Frequent Sense, and Ethical Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic drugs.’ Bulletin of the Historical past of Drugs, Vol. 77, 2003. (263-297)
In regards to the Writer
Zara-Louise Stubbs is a PhD Researcher in English on the College of York. Zara has a grasp’s diploma in Medical Histories and Humanities and presently researches the connection between gastronomy, mysticism, and the transformative potential of literary investigations of urge for food. She is the editor of The British Library title The Uncanny Gastronomic: Unusual Tales of the Edible Bizarre (2023). She tweets @zarastubbs.
