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Author
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Comment
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janepmerrillmsncom
Unregistered User
(3/29/05 10:23 am)
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Eating disorder symbolism
I am editing a book of interviews with celebrities (men and women) who are in recovery from eating disorders. I know I've seen correspondences/revelations in fairy tales from many cultures but now that I want to recover them don't know where to look. Help would be much appreciated and acknowledged in the book. My current book is "The Harder They Fall," with a website at www.thehardertheyfall.com
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(3/29/05 11:08 am)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
I don't know if I can help you with the eating disorder symbolism, but there are a number of stories that revolve around (in)appropriate eating: Hansel and Gretel are in the middle of a famine, and put themselves at risk by gorging themselves on a gingerbread cottage, after wasting bread the previous evening. Kronos tries to preserve his supremacy by eating his own children. Zeus swallows Metis in an effort to forestall his own fall from power. In the earlier versions of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf tempts/tricks the little girl into eating bits of her grandmother's flesh and drinking her blood. In Rapunzel, the mother's desire for a particular bunch of fresh greens triggers the story. Baba Yaga eats people, I'm pretty sure. You might also want to look at myths of vampirism and the wasting-disease-like symptoms of being a vampire's victim. Good luck.
Oh--and I think there's a tale in *Arabian Nights* about a beautiful woman who eats rice with a pin, grain by grain, hardly consuming anything at all. One day her husband stays up to watch her, and she turns out to be a ghoul, and gorges on corpses every night.
Persephone is committed to Hades by eating pomegranate seeds.
Edited by: Veronica Schanoes at: 3/29/05 11:11 am
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Elizabeth
Genco
Registered User
(3/29/05 2:46 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
Ghah... that sounds incredibly disturbing, even more so than most tales.
---
What's that fiddle player in the subway thinking
about?
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(3/29/05 2:58 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
There was a topic recently about food which you can access here:
Good
Food Guide. I think it was from the point of view of
food as a good thing rather than a problem, but various aspects
of food in tales were discussed.
Best,
Alice
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Chris
Peltier
Registered User
(3/29/05 5:24 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
There's also the story collected by the Brothers Grimm, called The Juniper Tree. A woman cuts her finger beneath a juniper tree, and she prays for a child as red as blood and as white as snow. She dies shortly after the birth of the child, and her husband remarries. The new wife gives him a daughter, but is constantly jealous of the first child. She ends up killing the boy, and serves the corpse in a stew to her husband. The daughter buries the bones beneath the juniper tree, and a white bird springs up from it, singing about these recent events.
There is also the request by the Queen in Snow White that the woodsman cut out the heart of the little girl, so that the Queen might have it for her supper.
Perhaps you could make the connection that fairy tales portray eating disorders as an indication of turmoil within the family unit.
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Black
Sheep
Registered User
(4/3/05 7:37 am)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
This might make me unpopular with all the Cinderella fans around here but I'd suggest that Cinderella and other similar stories exhibit a prominent fairy tale theme which could reinforce anorexic patterning in any girl who has those tendencies.
The theme is:
Starveling Cinders = beautiful + good
Well-fed sisters = ugly + bad
History gives the lie to the story, of course, because the girl who works (Cinders etc) will be bigger/fitter/more muscular (less "feminine" by some standards!)/more adult than the girls who don't work.
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(4/3/05 11:24 am)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
Maybe, but remember that Perrault's stepsisters were quite beautiful--they were just nasty. I don't believe the stepsisters got ugly until Disney took a hand.
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AliceCEB
Registered User
(4/3/05 1:13 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
Also, being slim wasn't always a marker for beauty. In fact being skinny was viewed as evidence of poverty, and ugly. (In a contradictory way, having a wasp sized waist was considered beautiful, hence the development of ghastly corsets and the remarkable number of women fainting.)
Alice
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KathieRose
Unregistered User
(4/3/05 3:05 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
These references are to myths instead of fairytales but: Persephone doesn't just eat the pomegranate seeds in the underworld; before this she STARVES herself. There are two variants about her eating the pomegranate seeds that I know of: in the first, she is SO hungry that she can't resist anymore though hmm, it might be a pear that she eats then and Hades' gardener sees her and tells Hades. In the other, she's about to return to the upperworld,having been ransomed back by Demeter [who, interestingly, threatens all of humanity with starvation by withdrawing the crops until Zeus relents and allows Persephone to return], and just as she's about to leave, Hades slips several pomegranate seeds into her mouth and she inadvertantly swallows them.
There's a Jungian book by Angelyn Spignesi titled [if I remember correctly] Starving Woman that focuses deeply on this aspect of the myth and anorexia; I don't agree with all of its perspective but it's scholarly and quite good. Published by Spring Publications, I think, sometime in the 80s. And slightly different but related: there's a Greek myth [found in Robert Graves' commentary on the Persephone myth in his Greek Myths] in which Demeter punishes an arrogant man-- Erisichthon was his name, I think-- who chops down one of her sacred trees by condemning him to perpetual hunger without satiation. He eats everything in sight, bankrupts his parents with his eating, sells his daughter into slavery to buy more food, and finally devours himself. And-- I'm remembering now-- Demeter as goddess of the grain doesn't have this power to create this hunger herself, she has to appeal to a nymph named Hunger to do it. Mention of the nymph or seeing if you can find more about her might be worth pursuing.
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Black
Sheep
Registered User
(4/3/05 5:59 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
I knew you'd post Veronica you unreconstructed Cinders apologist!
But you know as well as I do that most kids don't read Perrault. They watch Disney, go to pantomimes, and are told/read versions of the story which equate goodness & beauty with the ahh-diddums-starveling (among other things) and badness & ugliness with the _older_ & fatter characters.
Changing the subject: didn't bestselling French author Amalie Nothomb write a novel about an anorexic princess?
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Veronica
Schanoes
Registered User
(4/3/05 6:13 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
Between you and me, Cinderella's my least favorite fairy tale--all
that good-girl obedience stuff! But, fair enough: the stepsisters
are ugly now, in the most popular versions of the story.
I find that their ugliness tends to be depicted more by big noses
and dark hair than by figure, but, as a big-nosed brunette, that
may just be me.
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Black
Sheep
Registered User
(4/6/05 1:24 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
The English version of the novel featuring anorexia by Belgian author Amelie Nothomb is reviewed here:
www.arts.telegraph.co.uk/...onot16.xml
I haven't read any of her books but they're popular and the plots usually seem interesting.
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avalondeb
Registered User
(4/8/05 8:14 pm)
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Re: Eating disorder symbolism
Snow White - eating the apple causes her to fall into a death like state
Persephone - is condemned to hell three months out of the year for eating three pomegranate seeds
Rapunzel - her mother has ravenous cravings, which when satisfied, resulted in Rapunzel basically being the witch's slave
Hansel & Gretel - they almost become witch food for wanting to eat part of the gingerbread house
Baba Yaga - also known as Baba Yaga Boney Legs, because, in spite of a ferocious appetite, she is as thin as a skeleton
Ambrosia and Nectar - it was by eating and drinking that mortals became immortal gods, Psyche, Ganymede, and Tantalus, etc.
Gilgamesh - he is told where to find the plant "all the old men are young again" which will give him immortality, but it is stolen while he is sleeping.
Also, all the witches and/or wild women seemed to like to eat people. Hansel & Gretel, the 3 witches from the Perseus story, the wild women from The Luck Child, etc.
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kristiw
Unregistered User
(4/8/05 11:17 pm)
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eating disorder symbolism
Funny how this keeps coming up-- I started a thread on Women and Appetite a while back, and I thought I'd add the perspective I've come to on the villainous, ravenous witches and the starving heroines.
The spaces witches inhabit act as extensions of the body; figures like Baba Yaga are practically appetite personified. They cannot consume themselves; for the witch in Hansel and Gretel to eat her own gingerbread house would be an act of self-destruction, leaving her homeless and helpless. Like all healthy bodies, witches turn their appetites to things beyond themselves and take nourishment into the body. To starve is literally to eat oneself alive, and that is what their passive victims often seem to do...
I'm also thinking of cannibalistic women, and the consumption of children in general. In one light it is rebellion against a feminine role which is to some extent self-sacrificing: a pregnant woman is being consumed from within, her sustenance is being stolen (you could say shared, but the baby will take it regardless). Eating children turns the tables on their innocent but demanding appetites. On the other hand, you could argue the consumption of children is an act of *jealousy,* a desire to get a child inside one by any means at one's disposal.
As you can see, the Insatiable Woman thread has helped me immensely
to shape my ideas. I am still a little uncertain what to do with
Baba Yaga, though. My argument has an inherent contradiction: if
the witches are "healthy" for turning their appetite outward
(but denounced because ambitious women are dangerous) and the victims/heroines
(only in specific stories, mind, I'm not suggesting the terms are
synonymous) are upheld for being good, self-denying little anorexics,
then why does the witches' food fail to sustain them? Why is Baba
Yaga still "Old Boney Legs"?
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catja1
Registered User
(4/9/05 6:25 am)
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Re: eating disorder symbolism
Kristi,
That's a really interesting reading! Just an idea, but maybe Baba
Yaga's continued skinniness has more to with the fact that she's
not really your average witch, but much closer to a full-blown goddess?
And as a goddess, her domain is that of death -- she's *skeletal*.
Koschei the Deathless, another ambiguous sorceror-kind-of-god figure,
is also depicted in art as scrawny, like a skeleton held together
by sinews alone. But someone here, I think Helen, specializes in
Russian material, so listen to her instead of me. Most death-gods
aren't exactly fat and happy, unless they're depicted as malevolent
eaters of the dead. But even then, there don't seem to be any fat
ghouls... Hm.
Re eating symbolism: there's stories of fairies stealing the "goodness" out of food, leaving the food looking the same, but really just a hollow shell with no nutritional content.
Also, Marina Warner has a great section on bodily consumption --
though more of the "fear of being eaten" than "fear
of eating" variety -- in No Go the Bogeyman.
Edited by: catja1 at: 4/9/05 6:27 am
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Black
Sheep
Registered User
(4/9/05 8:11 am)
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Re: eating disorder symbolism
In less verbally explicit times having a "well turned ankle" (for women) or a "shapely calf" (for men) was a common compliment on someone's sexual attractiveness. I don't know the Baba Yaga material well but I can imagine several potential readings which might combine a lack of overt physical attractiveness with a literal hunger for children.
Or perhaps, as Catja hints, it's a matter of cannibals in some cultures
only managing to consume bodies and not souls? Hmm not sure about
that one but it ought to have legs in Christian cultures at least.
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