I graduated from the University of Leicester in 2010 with First Class Honours in English. Stimulated by my Undergrad work on the nineteenth century, I then went on to complete an MA in Victorian Studies and am now a first year PhD student, whose work, generously funded by the AHRC, builds upon my interests surrounding the relations between literature, medicine and science. Supervisors: Dr Claire Brock
‘For the convenience of the public’, declared the author of an 1889 article printed in Punch, ‘I ... more ‘For the convenience of the public’, declared the author of an 1889 article printed in Punch, ‘I would really suggest that the motto for ordinary busses should be, “Abandon fat, all ye who enter here!”’ Such pressing ‘abandonments’, as facetious as they might seem, were, in fact, patently central in shaping (meta)physical ideals, throughout much of the long nineteenth century. The ideological structures underpinning numerous cultural strands – from the social and sporting, to the scientific and sartorial – espoused a fierce anorexic logic. They placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal discipline, compulsive (non)consumption, and (dis)embodied panopticism than ever before. Through adhering to its own idyllic prescriptions, nineteenth-century culture implemented varying strains of the bodily disorder it sought to expel. The cultural and corporeal orderliness it pursued became itself disorderly. Of course, there already exists a substantial amount of research focused on (dis)ordering the too fat or too thin bodies of the nineteenth-century female. With fleshly embodiment and dis-embodiment being stereotypical female concerns, we often forget to ask about the fat-phobic dis-corporation of men. Surveying a variety of textual material, printed roughly between the years 1800 and 1910, this thesis intends to reconfigure man’s peripheral status in modern histories of diet, disorderly eating and fat shame. Dismissing the timeworn myth that fat is, and always has been, ‘a feminist issue’, it will explore how fat, body-image, and an intense desire to be slender became increasingly central to ideal constructions of the nineteenth-century male
Victorian culture demonstrated a fierce anorexic logic: it placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal ... more Victorian culture demonstrated a fierce anorexic logic: it placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal discipline, compulsive (non)consumption, and (dis)embodied panopticism than ever before. However, with fleshly embodiment and dis-embodiment being stereotypical female concerns, we often forget to ask about the fat-phobic ‘discorportation’ of men. Using a variety of fiction, fashion journals and a small selection of medical treatises, this paper will examine how man’s externally perceptible midriff and gastrointestinal stomach were to become contentious sites of the body. Fusing the Victorian physician’s surgo-medical propensity to cut and trim adipose flesh with a sartorially-crafted rendition of such body sculpting, it will thrust both the protuberant abdomen and the male ‘wasp waist’ into the critical spotlight.
Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
The weight, shape and age awareness which forms a substantial part of all body-conscious cultures... more The weight, shape and age awareness which forms a substantial part of all body-conscious cultures tends to afflict its sufferers with what I shall refer to as ‘number neuroticism.’ From the counting of calories, to the racking-up of wrinkles, our bodies are constantly subject to the rigours of statistical awareness. Underweight, or overweight; above average, or below average, the human body is repeatedly scrutinised with quantitative precision. As pounds are gained, and ounces are lost, as our bodies get older by the day, and our waistlines get wider by the week, numerical tracking forms a constitutional part of our everyday lives.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
This paper will expose how the growing bodies of nineteenth-century males were often prodded, inc... more This paper will expose how the growing bodies of nineteenth-century males were often prodded, incised, and surgically probed. Through its own critical ‘probing’ of the fat boy’s paunch, it will essentially dismiss the timeworn myth that fat is, and always has been, ‘a feminist issue.’ As we shall move on to discover, the overindulgent fat boy – who intuitively spilled from the seams of the literary press– was inexorably stigmatised by nineteenth-century culture. Satirists poked fun at his pronounced convexity, and medics reviled his carnality with scorn. Yet, with disciplinary maxims looming large, the fat boy’s body became reformable: a body that one might, to borrow the words of John Ruskin, ‘chisel into shape.’ Using calorific intake as a manipulative ‘tool,’ writers of both popular and canonical fiction began to sadistically experiment with his adipose flesh. Corporeal snipping, starving, cutting and carving became popular figurative tropes. From an examination of Lewis Carroll’s surgo-medical tendencies in Sylvie and Bruno (1889), to an exploration of the anorectically-motivated ‘chiselling’ in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1901-1904), this paper will ultimately reveal that nineteenth-century literary culture was, as a rule, eager to render the fat boy slim.
With the clinical emergence of anorexia nervosa in the late 1860s, the Victorian physician was qu... more With the clinical emergence of anorexia nervosa in the late 1860s, the Victorian physician was quickly confronted with a plethora of patients who wilfully wounded their bodies and tortured their nerve-strung souls. Indeed, as an illness which elicits a metaphorical battle between both body and soul, self and other, the psychological war-wounds patent to this condition offer new and illuminating insights into the well-chartered terrain of Victorian trauma narratives. Through an examination of clinical case notes, autobiographical fragments and the nineteenth-century novel, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Victorian manifestations of disorderly eating and deranged body image might have emerged through the occurrence of earlier physical or psychological traumas. From an exploration of the boyhood fears and fantasies of J.M. Barrie in his eternally treasured Never-Land, to a discussion of the ‘trauma-induced’ anorexia of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, this paper will explore how both the fictional and non-fictional could be equally afflicted by what I have called ‘Thin Trauma.’ Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
The gruel-begotten boys of Mr. Bumble’s malnourished Workhouse might longingly bellow “Food, glor... more The gruel-begotten boys of Mr. Bumble’s malnourished Workhouse might longingly bellow “Food, glorious food” as they salivate over “hot sausage and mustard” in the 1968 musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837), but were all nineteenth-century males advocates of a hearty appetite and banqueting in bliss? As this paper will hopefully demonstrate, far from being a part of the “food, glorious food” camp, many nineteenth-century males were, in fact, averse to food; or, perhaps more accurately, averse to the weight-gain associated with food. Indeed, the fat body was relentlessly stigmatised by nineteenth-century society. As a consequence, the once greedy, gentleman-gourmand was urged to curb his cravings and tighten his belt. From an examination of the nutritional neuroses of Lord Byron, to a discussion of the low-carb diet and exercise plan of William Banting, this paper will explore the fat man’s burden in a body-conscious world. It will discuss the nineteenth-century emergence of modernity’s most destructive eating disorders; ponder the practice of male tight-lacing; and assess the physical and psychological damage done by the era’s largely fat-phobic philosophy.
Invisible Monsters (1999) and Vernon God Little (2003) are novels which unite in a broad-brush ba... more Invisible Monsters (1999) and Vernon God Little (2003) are novels which unite in a broad-brush backlash against the marginalisation of Otherness. A mélange of ‘rampant grotesqueries,’ and marginal misfits take centre-stage in these works in order to spotlight the extent to which twenty-first century America is complicit in the creation of its ‘monstrous’ mayhem. Revelling in the aftermath of high school massacre, where ‘normal times just ran howling from town,’ Vernon God Little presents trailer-park Texas in all its dysfunctional glory. It has been described as a ‘deep-fried white-trash odyssey’ and the ‘jiving freak-show’ of a fast-food age. Dirty-But-Clean Pierre’s misfit of a book offers us a screwed up snapshot of a world gone wrong, a scatological meditation on society run mad. Likewise, Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters manifests a scathing critique of a sick society, exhibiting an in-your-face, brutal unmasking of the patina of normalcy.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
One need only recall Oliver Twist’s frightened cry for ‘more’ to see that the underbelly of ninet... more One need only recall Oliver Twist’s frightened cry for ‘more’ to see that the underbelly of nineteenth-century society’s poverty-stricken people was infiltrated with painstaking pangs of hunger and a vast array of scrawny, skeletal skinniness. However, it takes a more scrutinising gaze to see that, in the midst of prosperity, the flowering females of the flourishing middle and upper classes were also dwindling fast, wilting and waning into a pitiful puniness. But, what exactly was provoking this pandemic of withering women? Indeed, diseases characterised by wasting were rife throughout the Victorian epoch; yet, unnervingly, many of these fragile-figured females, who relentlessly refused to eat, appeared to be lacking any organic disease. This uncanny mystery that was pillaging the female pansies of the Victorian terrain is where the history of anorexia nervosa begins.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.
‘For the convenience of the public’, declared the author of an 1889 article printed in Punch, ‘I ... more ‘For the convenience of the public’, declared the author of an 1889 article printed in Punch, ‘I would really suggest that the motto for ordinary busses should be, “Abandon fat, all ye who enter here!”’ Such pressing ‘abandonments’, as facetious as they might seem, were, in fact, patently central in shaping (meta)physical ideals, throughout much of the long nineteenth century. The ideological structures underpinning numerous cultural strands – from the social and sporting, to the scientific and sartorial – espoused a fierce anorexic logic. They placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal discipline, compulsive (non)consumption, and (dis)embodied panopticism than ever before. Through adhering to its own idyllic prescriptions, nineteenth-century culture implemented varying strains of the bodily disorder it sought to expel. The cultural and corporeal orderliness it pursued became itself disorderly. Of course, there already exists a substantial amount of research focused on (dis)ordering the too fat or too thin bodies of the nineteenth-century female. With fleshly embodiment and dis-embodiment being stereotypical female concerns, we often forget to ask about the fat-phobic dis-corporation of men. Surveying a variety of textual material, printed roughly between the years 1800 and 1910, this thesis intends to reconfigure man’s peripheral status in modern histories of diet, disorderly eating and fat shame. Dismissing the timeworn myth that fat is, and always has been, ‘a feminist issue’, it will explore how fat, body-image, and an intense desire to be slender became increasingly central to ideal constructions of the nineteenth-century male
Victorian culture demonstrated a fierce anorexic logic: it placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal ... more Victorian culture demonstrated a fierce anorexic logic: it placed more emphasis on (in)corporeal discipline, compulsive (non)consumption, and (dis)embodied panopticism than ever before. However, with fleshly embodiment and dis-embodiment being stereotypical female concerns, we often forget to ask about the fat-phobic ‘discorportation’ of men. Using a variety of fiction, fashion journals and a small selection of medical treatises, this paper will examine how man’s externally perceptible midriff and gastrointestinal stomach were to become contentious sites of the body. Fusing the Victorian physician’s surgo-medical propensity to cut and trim adipose flesh with a sartorially-crafted rendition of such body sculpting, it will thrust both the protuberant abdomen and the male ‘wasp waist’ into the critical spotlight.
Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
The weight, shape and age awareness which forms a substantial part of all body-conscious cultures... more The weight, shape and age awareness which forms a substantial part of all body-conscious cultures tends to afflict its sufferers with what I shall refer to as ‘number neuroticism.’ From the counting of calories, to the racking-up of wrinkles, our bodies are constantly subject to the rigours of statistical awareness. Underweight, or overweight; above average, or below average, the human body is repeatedly scrutinised with quantitative precision. As pounds are gained, and ounces are lost, as our bodies get older by the day, and our waistlines get wider by the week, numerical tracking forms a constitutional part of our everyday lives.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
This paper will expose how the growing bodies of nineteenth-century males were often prodded, inc... more This paper will expose how the growing bodies of nineteenth-century males were often prodded, incised, and surgically probed. Through its own critical ‘probing’ of the fat boy’s paunch, it will essentially dismiss the timeworn myth that fat is, and always has been, ‘a feminist issue.’ As we shall move on to discover, the overindulgent fat boy – who intuitively spilled from the seams of the literary press– was inexorably stigmatised by nineteenth-century culture. Satirists poked fun at his pronounced convexity, and medics reviled his carnality with scorn. Yet, with disciplinary maxims looming large, the fat boy’s body became reformable: a body that one might, to borrow the words of John Ruskin, ‘chisel into shape.’ Using calorific intake as a manipulative ‘tool,’ writers of both popular and canonical fiction began to sadistically experiment with his adipose flesh. Corporeal snipping, starving, cutting and carving became popular figurative tropes. From an examination of Lewis Carroll’s surgo-medical tendencies in Sylvie and Bruno (1889), to an exploration of the anorectically-motivated ‘chiselling’ in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1901-1904), this paper will ultimately reveal that nineteenth-century literary culture was, as a rule, eager to render the fat boy slim.
With the clinical emergence of anorexia nervosa in the late 1860s, the Victorian physician was qu... more With the clinical emergence of anorexia nervosa in the late 1860s, the Victorian physician was quickly confronted with a plethora of patients who wilfully wounded their bodies and tortured their nerve-strung souls. Indeed, as an illness which elicits a metaphorical battle between both body and soul, self and other, the psychological war-wounds patent to this condition offer new and illuminating insights into the well-chartered terrain of Victorian trauma narratives. Through an examination of clinical case notes, autobiographical fragments and the nineteenth-century novel, this paper seeks to demonstrate how Victorian manifestations of disorderly eating and deranged body image might have emerged through the occurrence of earlier physical or psychological traumas. From an exploration of the boyhood fears and fantasies of J.M. Barrie in his eternally treasured Never-Land, to a discussion of the ‘trauma-induced’ anorexia of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, this paper will explore how both the fictional and non-fictional could be equally afflicted by what I have called ‘Thin Trauma.’ Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
The gruel-begotten boys of Mr. Bumble’s malnourished Workhouse might longingly bellow “Food, glor... more The gruel-begotten boys of Mr. Bumble’s malnourished Workhouse might longingly bellow “Food, glorious food” as they salivate over “hot sausage and mustard” in the 1968 musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837), but were all nineteenth-century males advocates of a hearty appetite and banqueting in bliss? As this paper will hopefully demonstrate, far from being a part of the “food, glorious food” camp, many nineteenth-century males were, in fact, averse to food; or, perhaps more accurately, averse to the weight-gain associated with food. Indeed, the fat body was relentlessly stigmatised by nineteenth-century society. As a consequence, the once greedy, gentleman-gourmand was urged to curb his cravings and tighten his belt. From an examination of the nutritional neuroses of Lord Byron, to a discussion of the low-carb diet and exercise plan of William Banting, this paper will explore the fat man’s burden in a body-conscious world. It will discuss the nineteenth-century emergence of modernity’s most destructive eating disorders; ponder the practice of male tight-lacing; and assess the physical and psychological damage done by the era’s largely fat-phobic philosophy.
Invisible Monsters (1999) and Vernon God Little (2003) are novels which unite in a broad-brush ba... more Invisible Monsters (1999) and Vernon God Little (2003) are novels which unite in a broad-brush backlash against the marginalisation of Otherness. A mélange of ‘rampant grotesqueries,’ and marginal misfits take centre-stage in these works in order to spotlight the extent to which twenty-first century America is complicit in the creation of its ‘monstrous’ mayhem. Revelling in the aftermath of high school massacre, where ‘normal times just ran howling from town,’ Vernon God Little presents trailer-park Texas in all its dysfunctional glory. It has been described as a ‘deep-fried white-trash odyssey’ and the ‘jiving freak-show’ of a fast-food age. Dirty-But-Clean Pierre’s misfit of a book offers us a screwed up snapshot of a world gone wrong, a scatological meditation on society run mad. Likewise, Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters manifests a scathing critique of a sick society, exhibiting an in-your-face, brutal unmasking of the patina of normalcy.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
One need only recall Oliver Twist’s frightened cry for ‘more’ to see that the underbelly of ninet... more One need only recall Oliver Twist’s frightened cry for ‘more’ to see that the underbelly of nineteenth-century society’s poverty-stricken people was infiltrated with painstaking pangs of hunger and a vast array of scrawny, skeletal skinniness. However, it takes a more scrutinising gaze to see that, in the midst of prosperity, the flowering females of the flourishing middle and upper classes were also dwindling fast, wilting and waning into a pitiful puniness. But, what exactly was provoking this pandemic of withering women? Indeed, diseases characterised by wasting were rife throughout the Victorian epoch; yet, unnervingly, many of these fragile-figured females, who relentlessly refused to eat, appeared to be lacking any organic disease. This uncanny mystery that was pillaging the female pansies of the Victorian terrain is where the history of anorexia nervosa begins.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.
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Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.
Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.