Just before Christmas in 1741, the famed physician George Cheyne replied to a letter from Samuel Richardson, who had published the first edition of his groundbreaking epistolary novel Pamela the year before. This tale, like Richardson’s later novel Clarissa, is preoccupied with conduct and its consequences; most notably the conduct of young women. As suggested by the books’ full titles – Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady – it is the heroine’s status as a “lady” that determines her destiny. Richardson, however, had written to Cheyne about his own conduct – his diet.
Cheyne’s book, The English Malady, published in 1733, was one of the most influential texts of the Georgian age, dealing with what we would now call psychiatric disorders. Cheyne was one of the first celebrity physicians. He was an early advocate of vegetarianism and was passionate in his belief that firm control of one’s eating could cure pretty much whatever ailed you. “I am sorry to find you so perplexed and puzzled about a thing of no manner of consequence,” he wrote to Richardson. “If you enter upon a vegetable diet, will you not live lighter than 9 parts of 10 of most of the people of Great Britain? If the regimen be proper it cannot be entered upon too soon or followed too strictly.”
Yet then, as now, an attempt rigidly to control diet is often of great consequence for those who undertake it, and the source not just of perplexity and puzzlement but of lifelong suffering – as Cheyne’s own case proves. At one point in his life, he claimed to have weighed 32 stone; he knew what it was to suffer what he called “Guilty, animalistic and deceitful” appetite, to be a slave to its “unruly passion”.
In The Art of Not Eating, the historian Jessica Hamel-Akré (who co-created and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary The Unexpected History of Clean Eating) uses Cheyne’s case as a launching point to consider the origins of diet culture, our fascination with restricted eating and her own troubled relationship with desire, with hunger, with want. In My Good Bright Wolf, the novelist Sarah Moss focuses more closely on her own troubled relationship with food but deeply embeds her struggle in a postwar history that tracks between deprivation and plenty; the resulting confusion leads to her own rigid restriction of eating, bringing her more than once to the point of death. That these narratives are familiar makes them no less necessary.
Hamel-Akré’s is the more elusive of the two books; although it is worth examining what the reader wants, or feels she is entitled to, from texts such as this. The author begins with what appears to be a confessional: “He was the most obese man in 18th-century England and I fell in love with him in 2014,” she writes. As an academic, she is engaged in “a historical and literary study of women’s appetite control and the body”, which is how she comes across her subject. But then she skips back to her youth in the late 1990s, the era of the waif, of a panic about anorexia and bulimia. She herself longs to be “serious”: “I thought I needed to be in control of whatever fell under my realm of action.” For women – 75 per cent of those living with eating disorders in the UK are women – being “in control” so often means control of the unruly body.
Also in her realm of action are her studies, and she considers the way in which, in the late 18th century, the female body was codified as “naturally indulgent”. “It could not ultimately withstand its own appetite.” She describes the public – and her own – fascination with women like Ann Moore, known as “the fasting woman of Tutbury”, who seemed to exist on air in the last years of the century; or with Hester Ann Rogers, who published her own account of her self-starvation in 1794. But when Hamel-Akré speaks at conferences and delivers papers, she is aware of a curiosity beyond scholarship: “There was an expectation that I give something away, some mention that I was damaged.” The reader must confront this expectation too – and come to consider the strange, deep, historical wish for women’s bodies to be other than they are.
The history that Sarah Moss confronts hews more closely to her own and that of her family. She begins with a fairy-tale-like recounting of her lineage, her father’s Jewish family escaping the pogroms of eastern Europe, her mother raised in Yorkshire. Suffering and poverty are demonstrated and then – as throughout the text – undercut by an italicised questioning voice that ridicules the narrative voice: “Nonsense, you’ve been reading too much George Orwell.” The book is mostly in the second person, and the use of you and she rather than the memoirist’s “I” highlights the sense of diffidence around this compelling, brutal account of how anorexia has shadowed and damaged Moss’s life.
She calls her parents “the Owl” and “the Jumbly Girl”: more distance, more diffidence. The attitude comes from her awareness of her own privilege: never poor, never homeless, always with enough. White, middle class. The ironic italics interrupt over and again to remind the reader that what is described can’t be real distress: “Didn’t you just say you did ballet on Saturday morning? Which form of terrible suffering was it then, ballet or hiking?” If the book has a weakness, it is that this sometimes seems overdone, and yet it also offers mimesis, the narrator’s experience of an intrusive, oppressive voice attempting to silence her “real” voice.
The parents of the narrator are careless people, preoccupied with themselves and having little care for their “difficult” daughter. Living in Manchester, they venture in all weathers to hike in the Lake District, providing little food, little real attention. Second-wave feminism scorns the domestic. As she tries to make an adult life, she must work around an internal ideology of pain: “Homes are places where vulnerable people are subject to bullying, violence and humiliation behind closed doors.” The wolf of the title is a kind of imagined guardian, called up to revisit the past, to allow wildness and desire. It is a measure of her skill that Moss draws so many threads together, writes with such force and imagination about her own suffering. Her clear-eyed account of the anorexia that nearly killed her is almost unbearable to read; she knows we see what she cannot, that she is ill, not undisciplined or lacking in control. It’s heartbreaking, and one of the best accounts of this condition I’ve ever read.
The shelves of books that consider this topic are laden. Hadley Freeman’s Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia and the chef Shaina Loew-Banayan’s Elegy for an Appetite, are two recent striking examples of what I hesitate to call a genre – but find myself doing so, nonetheless. This is perhaps because I’m dismayed that these stories of danger and shame need to be told and retold, but they do, and these books by Sarah Moss and Jessica Hamel-Akré deepen our understanding of how our bodies are ourselves, and how we may live – allow ourselves to live – in this hard world in our soft and beautiful flesh.
The Art of Not Eating
Jessica Hamel-Akré
Atlantic, 320pp, £20
My Good Bright Wolf: A Memoir
Sarah Moss
Picador, 208pp, £18.99
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 21 Aug 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Christian Comeback