Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body

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 Bront 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.