‘Breaking the tethers of need’:
Liberation and the Anorexic Aesthetic in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
MA Thesis in Literary Studies: English Literature & Culture Graduate School of Humanities
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Rebecca Took 11657790
CONTENTS
Contents Page
Statement of Originality 3
Abstract 3
Introduction 4-10
1. Illness and Otherness: The Weight of the Body Made Metaphor 11-21
2. ‘Darkness is the only solvent’: Domesticity and the Dissolution 22-34 of Boundaries
3. ‘To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow’: 35-44 Anorexic Desire and the Immateriality of Memory
4. ‘Breaking the tethers of need’: The Anorexic Aesthetic as a 45-54 Rejection and Repudiation of Consumerism
Conclusion 55-56
Statement of Originality
This document is written by Rebecca Took who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document. I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it. The Faculty of Humanities is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
Abstract
In a lecture on Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980), Amy Hungerford argues that the novel exhibits ‘an anorexic aesthetic’, which she defines as ‘an aesthetic of starving the self into invisibility so that the voice can become present’(00:47:44). By comparing the
presentation of the anorexic aesthetic in Robinson’s novel and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (2015), I shall examine how the anorexic aesthetic can be used to interrogate conventional conceptions of subjectivity, and the body.
While I shall contextualise the anorexic aesthetic in relation to the illness of anorexia nervosa, and the medieval phenomenon of anorexia mirabilis, this is not a medical
humanities study, nor even an examination of the presentation of anorexia in literature. The anorexic aesthetic is literary mechanism which performs akin to allusion, expanding the boundaries of the material, exposing and interrogating the limits of the body and the imagination. By ‘breaking the tethers of need’, the anorexic aesthetic is an aesthetic of liberation.
‘Breaking the tethers of need’: Liberation and the Anorexic Aesthetic in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine
‘I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one.’
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (204)
Anorexia Nervosa, or ‘anorexia’, is defined as ‘a condition marked by emaciation, etc., in which loss of appetite results from severe emotional disturbance.’(Oxford English
Dictionary, n.) According to the DSM-III criteria, symptoms of anorexia include: ‘refusal to maintain normal body weight; loss of more than 25 percent of original body weight;
disturbance of body image; intense fear of becoming fat; and no known medical illness leading to weight loss.’(Brumberg 14)
An ‘aesthetic’ is a common grouping of icons, signs or motifs, the sum of which has a readable significance beyond its constituent parts. According to Stein Haugom Olsen, a literary aesthetic is identified through the judgement of a ‘constellation of textual
features,’(523) which, he reasons, ‘deserve to be referred to as a ‘constellation’ rather than as a mere ‘collection’ because the aesthetic judgement confers on them, taken together, a
significance or a purposive coherence.’(524) An aesthetic, therefore, has a purpose: it is not merely decorative or coincidental.
In this thesis, I shall examine the presence, presentation and features of the anorexic aesthetic in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1980) and Alexandra Kleeman’s You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine (2015), arguing that the recognition of the anorexic aesthetic in both authors’ novels is essential to not only understanding their protagonists, but their philosophical and sociocultural perspectives. The anorexic aesthetic, I shall argue, performs
as a vehicle of liberation, emancipating the subjective self from the limits of the material, and the confines of material need.
Though ‘aesthetics’ can refer to ‘a system of principles for the appreciation of the beautiful’(OED n.1.a.), to apply this definition to the anorexic aesthetic would be to perversely interpret anorexia as a stylistic choice. Understood in the terms of a literary aesthetic – the recognisable construction of an idea, concept or image in language – the anorexic aesthetic invokes the symptoms and behaviours of anorexia nervosa in order to articulate an idea or view of the world which goes beyond the associations of anorexia itself.
In a lecture on the theme of loss in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (1981), Amy Hungerford refers to the ‘anorexic aesthetic’ present in the novel. In Hungerford’s opinion, the anorexic aesthetic is ‘an aesthetic of starving the self into invisibility so that the voice can become present.’(00:47:34-00:47:44) Hungerford reasons that ‘the logic of absence starves away the person so that this fullness can appear.’(00:48:24) Though the idea of absence as a means to ‘fullness’ is a paradox, this is a valuable foundation from which to base an
examination of the philosophical significance of the aesthetic. Hungerford states that the anorexic aesthetic ‘is the dark side of a novel that so many people initially read as a feminist novel, a novel celebrating the strength and the independence of women. It turns to an
aesthetic that has a kind of purchase in our culture; that sense of anorexia blends into the spiritual fullness of imagining memory as this beautiful, lyrical presence.’(00:48:26-00:49:00)
However, though provocative, Hungerford’s reading lacks clarity: it imagines
subjective identity as ‘voice’, yet that which is starved ‘into invisibility’ is referred to as ‘the self’. Hungerford’s unclear differentiation between the physical and non-physical, even to illustrate the elision of this distinction, renders her reading of the anorexic aesthetic
illuminating reading of the novel, she fails to explain the specific features of the aesthetic, or even clarify how the aesthetics of anorexia are recognised. In this thesis, I aim to not only show how the anorexic aesthetic operates, but by dissecting the different ways it functions according to context, to show that the aesthetic is not only a question of voice. Unlike other critics, who have analysed the aesthetic in relation to a single author, by comparing these two novels, I shall expand the scholarship from a situational understanding of the anorexic
aesthetic, to a more comprehensive, theoretical perspective.
Hungerford is not the first or only critic to identify the anorexic aesthetic in literature. Lisa Sewell refers to the ‘so-called anorexic aesthetic’ in Louise Glück’s poetry, noting that, ‘for [Glück], self-starvation was a means of self-construction,’(54) associating the poet’s ‘unadorned language of abstract statement and absolute declaration’(55) with an anorexic sensibility. Heather Kirk Thomas writes of Emily Dickinson’s metaphorical and biographical association with anorexia, arguing that ‘if Proust’s style can be considered ‘asthmatic,’ Flaubert’s ‘apoplectic,’ and Milton’s ‘blind,’ I believe that Dickinson’s style can be
characterised as ‘anorexic.’’(207) However, in my opinion, the anorexic aesthetic differs to an anorexic style: while the latter is understood through a biographical study of the author, a literary aesthetic reflects the culture from which it emerges. The anorexic aesthetic is not a diagnosis of the character to which it applies, but an acknowledgment of the way the body, particularly the way the ill, and/or female body, is metaphorized. The aesthetic is a form of contextualisation, yet one which interrogates convention by holding it up to not only social, but philosophical scrutiny. Leslie Haywood blends sociology with literary criticism in Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (1996), examining the fictional presentation of anorexia through a biographical and cultural study of the illness.
Literary aesthetics are inherently engaged with sociocultural and philosophical beliefs, meaning that, as Alan Singer and Allen Dunn note, ‘aesthetic value can be
understood properly only in the context of a broader enquiry into human values and cultures.’(3) It is notable that all the authors mentioned above, in whose work the anorexic aesthetic has been identified, are female American writers, and my study of Robinson and Kleeman further perpetuates this trend. Due to this common link, the relationship between the anorexic aesthetic, American society, and femininity seems especially significant, and
important to consider. I shall therefore examine how the anorexic aesthetic relates to the experience of female embodiment and subjectivity, and how the refusal of food can be understood as a repudiation of contemporary American consumer capitalism. The anorexic aesthetic yokes these divergent ideas into communion, presenting the starvation of the body as not only a renunciation of consumerism, but a means of female liberation, and spiritual transcendence.
Writing about anorexia is not uncommon: the protagonists of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Women and Han Yang’s The Vegetarian both develop a neurotic aversion to food; Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder fictionalises the phenomenon of 19th century ‘fasting girls’; Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls presents a narrative from inside the mind of an anorexic teenage girl; and memoirs like Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness provide experienced accounts of living with anorexia. However, this thesis is not an examination of anorexic life-writing, medical humanities or lyric poetry, though these genres contextualise the anorexic aesthetic. It is an examination of the function of the anorexic aesthetic as a literary device which utilises the features and associations of anorexia in order to examine the idea of selfhood, and the culture from which that self emerges.
While the study of You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine forms a lesser part of this thesis, the comparison of Kleeman and Robinson’s novels enables a fuller understanding of the functions and complexities of the anorexic aesthetic. While distinct in style and settling, the novels exhibit several fundamental similarities. Both Robinson and Kleeman’s respective
protagonists are young women, and are presented as relatively lonely, isolated figures. Both eventually leave their own homes, an action which is related to their mutual incompatibility with the conventional world, and refuse sustenance to the point of physical starvation. Both novels are replete with allusion, which expands the connotations of the text beyond the scope of its language, and opens new channels of understanding. Though Robinson’s novel was written 35 years before Kleeman’s, both stories are set in particularly, albeit differently, American settings, encouraging the interpretation of each novel as a reflection of that culture.
Housekeeping is set in the fictional town of Fingerbone: an isolated and insular place, dominated by a lake that regularly floods, and over which runs a railway bridge, which is the town’s main form of transportation. The novel is narrated by Ruth, an intensely meditative girl who, as a young child, was left by her mother, Helen, on the porch of her grandmother’s house, along with her younger sister, Lucille. Ruth reports that Helen committed suicide by driving into the same lake where her own father, Edmund, died years before, when the train he was on derailed. The sisters are subsequently brought up by their grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, until her death, when their great-aunts Lily and Nona reluctantly arrive to take charge, lured in part by the free rent. When Helen’s younger, itinerant sister, Sylvie, returns to Fingerbone, Lily and Nona quickly depart, leaving Ruth and Lucille in their aunt’s
unconventional care. As the house, unkempt and neglected, disintegrates, Lucille increasingly desires conventionality, and eventually leaves to live with Miss Royce, her home economics teacher. After Lucille’s departure, Sylvie’s behaviour becomes increasingly erratic, and the neighbours and local sheriff become concerned for Ruth’s wellbeing, bringing her food and clothing which she only passively accepts. Despite efforts towards conformity, the threat of their separation ultimately pushes Ruth and Sylvie to leave Fingerbone, after attempting to burn their house down. The pair are ‘cast out to wander, and there was an end to
discovering that ‘hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one.’(204) Ruth’s ascetic embrace of hunger continues into their itinerancy, the pair travelling between towns, working as waitresses or clerks. In the final chapter, which is set years after their departure, Ruth shifts into the present tense, creating a division between her life in Fingerbone and her life as a transient. Ruth imagines seeing Lucille again, now an adult, and reports that the town believed her and Sylvie to have died while crossing the bridge, which shades the novel with a sort of ghostly, existential indeterminacy.
Like Housekeeping, Kleeman’s novel is narrated by its protagonist, known as A: a woman in her early-to-late twenties, who lives in a suburban American town with her roommate, B. Recalling her first meeting with B, A says how ‘she seemed so fragile when I had first opened the door, startlingly small in an overlarge dress and bare face. But she wasn’t really any smaller than me – I just couldn’t see myself from the outside.’(50) Their difference relies on A’s subjective perspective: objectively, they are close to identical. A and B’s
similarity becomes increasingly acute, threatening A’s own sense of identity. A works as a proof-reader, a mundane and unrewarding job, and her relationship is presented as similarly lacklustre. Her boyfriend, C, is presented as somewhat emotionally detached and passive, ‘suited to his life and to the historical period within which his life unfolded.’(28) Though she glibly refers to C as ‘a happy camper’, A notes that ‘he always assumed I was happy, too, even when I wasn’t.’(28) A appears removed from the world she lives in, observing but not fully participating. However, she pays obsessive attention to television shows and
commercials, and becomes fixated on ‘Kandy Kakes’, an artificial confectionary heavily advertised in commercials featuring ‘Kandy Kat’ in a series of different scenarios. However, Kandy Kat is never able to grab or consume a Kandy Kake, and grows increasingly
supermarket satirically inspired by the multi-national corporation, Walmart) A discovers the ‘Church of Conjoined Eaters’, a cult-like organisation which preaches that ‘the quickest route to self-improvement is self-subtraction.’(193) The Church forces its congregants (‘Eaters’) to cover themselves in white sheets, and permits them a rationed diet of only six Kandy Kakes a day. A believes that by following these rules, she will ‘grow clearer, thinner, Brighter, a more perfect vessel for my ghost […] with the help of these Kandy Kakes, I would finally become better in the Bright future ahead.’(203) But after finally breaking away from the Church, A realises that her exclusive dependence on the nutritionally empty Kandy Kakes caused her to starve, and the novel ends with an abstract meditation on the inescapability of consumption.
In the first chapter, I shall explore how the anorexic aesthetic can be understood as emancipation from the allegorization of the female body. In chapter two, I shall consider how, by dissolving the boundaries between the physical and immaterial, self-starvation enables liberation from the repressive materialism of the domestic world. In chapter three, I use Jacques Lacan’s theory of ‘anorexic desire’ in relation to Susan Stewart’s interpretation of ‘nostalgia’, showing how Ruth’s imaginative hypotheses evoke the expansionary function of the anorexic aesthetic. In the final chapter, I relate the anorexic aesthetic to the context of American capitalism, showing that the anorexic aesthetic represents not only a rejection of, but liberation from, consumerism.
Chapter 1
Illness and Otherness: The Weight of the Body Made Metaphor
From the medieval metaphor of the body politic (OED n.1) to the post-industrial concept of the body as a machine, the metaphorization of embodiment realizes political and philosophical ideas in those terms most easily and directly comprehensible to us: our own bodies. Comparatively, as illness operates through the body, the use of illness as metaphor functions in much the same way, albeit through inversion, or negation. Disease is defined as the ‘a condition of the body, or of some part or organ of the body, in which its functions are disturbed or deranged’(OED n. 2.a.), rendering illness a fundamental deviation from the norm. The illness metaphor therefore operates through the signification of otherness, highlighting that which is divergent from a default of health. The anorexic aesthetic, if considered an expansion of the illness metaphor, complicates this idea, as it invokes the otherness of both the ill, and the female body.
The anorexic aesthetic is intimately associated with the specifically female body, for, as Joan Jacobs Brumberg notes, the vast majority of anorexics ‘are young and female, and they are disproportionately white and from middle-class and upper-class families’(15). This over-representation provokes scrutiny of the link between anorexia and women’s experience, and role in, society. As Caroline Criado Perez observes, ‘seeing men as the human default is fundamental to the structure of human society.’(5) That which diverges from the default, be it through race, gender, disability or size, occupies a liminal position charged with semantic weight which for the default is absent. Perez proposes that like whiteness, maleness is ‘silent’ because it ‘[does] not need to be vocalized. Whiteness and maleness are implicit. They are unquestioned. They are the default.’(33) The implicitness of the default means that that which is other has to fight to claim subjectivity, else be reduced to type. The common othering of
the female body and the diseased body renders the anorexic aesthetic an effective channel through which to examine women’s place in society.
Susan Sontag objects to the use of illness as metaphor, largely due its reliance on the negative connotations of certain illnesses, and characterizes metaphors of illness as ‘the punitive or sentimental fantasies concocted about that situation: not real geography, but stereotypes of national character.’(3) For Sontag, the metaphorization of illness shames the patient of that illness, through its correlation with ‘what is felt to be socially or morally wrong.’(61) This is particularly acute in the case of infectious diseases: the threat of contamination invokes moralistic notions of sin and repudiation. For this reason, Sontag argues that ‘the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.’(3) However, if metaphoric thinking is an unhelpful way of being ill, this does not mean that the metaphorization of illness is without value.
There is a difference between illness-as-metaphor, and illness-as-aesthetic. To
examine the anorexic aesthetic in, for example, a memoir, would unhelpfully metaphorize the experience of illness, as, being a literary feature, it is fundamentally a vehicle for
interpretation. The process of aestheticization distances the illness from its signification, meaning that that which is inferred from the aesthetic does not necessarily apply to the disorder itself. However, the French critic Rene Girard directly attributes the increased
prevalence of anorexia nervosa to social disorder, arguing that eating disorders ‘are caused by the destruction of the family and other safeguards against the forces of mimetic fragmentation and competition, unleashed by the end of prohibitions.’(19) He argues that anorexia is the pathological pursuit of ‘the one and only ideal still common to our entire society,
slenderness,’(9) and refutes any feminist or Marxist explanation of anorexia on the basis that, ‘compulsive dieters really want to be thin and most of us are secretly aware of this
because most of us also want to be thin. All our convoluted systems of explanation, based on sexuality, social class, power, the tyranny of male over female, and tutti quanti and
floundering on this ridiculous but irrefutable fact. The capitalist system is no more responsible for this situation than fathers are, or the male gender as a whole.’(5) Girard’s argument shames the anorexic, directly correlating anorexia with ‘societal breakdown’(61), and bases his claims on patronising stereotypes of the anorexic.
Girard proposes that ‘the typical victim is well educated, talented, ambitious, eager for perfection. She is the super-achiever type and she knows she is playing by the rules suggested by the most powerful voices in our culture.’(9) This characterisation not only erases the agency of the anorexic, but through the use of the female pronoun, untethered from direct relation to the illness, the agency of women. Girard reductively asserts, ‘the anorexic is too loyal a citizen of our crazy world to suspect that, as she listens to the unanimous spirit of weight reduction, she is being pushed towards self-destruction.’(9) Yet the anorexic is not a citizen of the world, but estranged from it. The consumption of food is considered one of our most basic and universal needs, linking individuals to community and family. Rituals of consumption are common to both cultures and religions: food is imbued with a symbolic meaning that extends far beyond its nutritional value. The anorexic symbolically rejects not simply food, but society. Anorexia is therefore not a reflection of societal disorder, but a reaction against it. The physical manifestation of the eating disorder renders the anorexic’s otherness visible, and the body becoming a metaphor of their renunciation.
Girard’s claims about the anorexic are informed by what he views to be society’s rejection of religion, asserting that ‘the modern world abolishes religion, but it produces new rites that are much more onerous and formidable than those of the past’(61). This argument not only ignores the significant presence of religion in contemporary society – as illustrated in both Robinson’s and Kleeman’s novels – but overlooks the history of medieval ‘holy
anorexia’. While fasting is a feature of many religions, considered means to spiritual enlightenment, it held particular relevance for medieval Christian women. Known as
anorexia mirabilis, religiously-motivated food refusal was seen as a way to not only nourish the spiritual self, but gain respect and authority in a male-dominated system. The 14th-century
mystic, Saint Catherine of Siena, is said to have refused all food except for the Eucharist – which represents not only Christ’s sacrifice, but his unification of the physical and spiritual realms. In Housekeeping, Ruth tells a fairy-tale-like story of a girl, who was ‘transformed by the gross light into a mortal child,’ and so, ‘lost to her kind […] would feed coarse food to her coarse flesh, and be almost satisfied’(204). Similarly, the holy anorexic cannot be satisfied by the ‘coarse food’ of the secular.
In her Revelations of Divine Love, Julian of Norwich describes a revelation
experienced while fasting, after which, ‘when the bodily vision stopped, the spiritual vision remained in my understanding’(9). By starving the body, the anorexic approaches the sacred. ‘Only through arriving at an imageless state,’ Nicky Halett argues, ‘can contemplatives reach their desired end: a pure substance-less spiritual sublimation.’(418) Ruth exposes her desire of ‘a pure substance-less spiritual sublimation’ through her fable of the girl in the orchard: ‘before, she had been fleshed in air and clothed in nakedness and mantled in cold, and her bones were only slender things, like shafts of ice. She had haunted the orchard out of
preference, but she could walk into the lake without ripple or displacement and sail up the air as invisibly as heat’(203). The austere imagery of ice and bones alludes to anorexic
symptoms – cold intolerance, skeletal thinness – yet this invocation of anorexia links the anorexic aesthetic with transcendence. Girard’s argument that ‘the people with eating disorders are not the people with a religious hang-up, the traditionalists and the
fundamentalists, but the most ‘liberated’’(15), not only disregards this history, but fails to recognise that food refusal is itself a means of liberation, an attempt to transcend the limits of
the physical and arrive at an understanding of the divine. Like a medieval Christian mystic, Ruth accepts her hunger, which allows her to emancipate herself from the demands of the flesh, and ‘[break] the tethers of need’(204).
If the anorexic aesthetic, by emancipating the self from the flesh, offers a means to transcendent revelation, it also enables a liberation from the allegorization of the female body. Marina Warner proposes that the female body is ‘a recurrent motif in allegory,’(xix) and it precisely because, ‘women continue to occupy the space of the Other that they lend themselves to allegorical use so well.’(292) Allegorization is akin to objectification, limiting the assertion, or development, of female subjectivity by ascribing the female body with meaning which is projected, not chosen. While it operates through destruction, the anorexic aesthetic is a means of emancipating the self from the body, enabling the articulation of a complex, subjective female identity by transgressing the limitations imposed by male metaphorization. Robinson wrote Housekeeping in direct reaction to the prevalence of the male default in literature, claiming that, ‘my one great objection to the American hero was that he was inevitably male – in decayed forms egregiously male. So I created a female hero, of sorts, also an outsider and a stranger.’(When I was a child 92)
By representing the Other, the female protagonist is not only granted the nuanced subjectivity of the default, but poses an existential challenge to the culture in which their identity is othered. However, in Housekeeping, men are largely absent. The body of Ruth’s grandfather is sunk at the bottom of the lake and her own father is described as
‘putative’(142), a man known only from photographs. Sylvie left her own husband, though the only evidence she provides of his existence is ‘a photograph, clipped from a magazine, of a sailor.’(102) These male relatives are all recounted with a sense of unreality, their lives not so known or knowable as those of the women who populate the novel. The only living man Ruth specifies in Fingerbone is the Sheriff, though he represents an unwelcome, intrusive
world of formality. The sheriff disturbs Ruth’s state of revelation: just as she ‘could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. But then the sheriff came. I heard him
knock’(204). As one of the sole male characters, the sheriff not only represents a repressive conventionality, but the paternalistic world which both Ruth and Robinson are trying to escape. Robinson’s creation of a female hero, who is an outsider despite her gender being the default, allows Ruth to be seen in both subjective and allegorical terms.
In contrast, in You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, the body cannot escape objectification. The novel’s title mimics advertising newspeak, a promise evocative of the mimetic, objectifying impulse which drives contemporary consumerism. Kleeman alludes to the slogans which populate advertising particularly aimed at women, its comparative
discourse presenting a single, elusive figure as the ideal. A describes a cartoon woman, featured in one of the ‘Eater Infotoons’, as ‘a living example of the benefits of Uneating, the highest of Conjoined techniques and one that we are all working toward, though we don’t know what it is exactly.’(266) The advertised ideals of Kleeman’s satire are not only artificial – this ‘living example’ is a cartoon, but empty. ‘When sanctity is officially valued,’ Girard argues, ‘the desire not to be a saint but to be regarded as one is bound to become a goal of mimetic rivalry.’(16) If anorexia is a question of mimetic desire – which ‘aims at the absolute slenderness of the radiant being some other person is in our eyes but we ourselves never are, at least in our own eyes’(Girard 17) – the object of desire, the mimetic rival, has only a transient, superficial and subjective value.
In Kleeman’s satire of consumer capitalism, beauty is that ‘officially valued’ sanctity. Brightness, lightness, and thinness are equated with moral purity, while natural processes such as ageing are demonized, figured as threatening. The church-owned cosmetic brand ‘Tru-Beauty’ produces an edible face-cream, which promises to ‘[attack] signs of aging and damage from the inside and out, making sure that threats to your beauty have no place to
hide.’(84) Making a cosmetic product consumable erases the distinction between the inner and outer body, metaphorically collapsing the distinction between the material, surface self and the metaphysical, spiritual self. To be able to ‘have’ – thereby purchase and possess – a body ‘like mine’ is to render the body duplicable, objectifying all bodies through the mimetic detachment of advertising jargon. The body loses meaning as a referent of the self; ‘mine’ becomes an untethered, anonymous signifier without subject.
A argues that ‘a woman’s body never really belongs to herself. As an infant, my body was my mother’s, a detachable extension of her own, a digestive passage clamped and unclamped from her body. My parents would watch over it, watch over what went in and out of it, and as I grew up I would be expected to carry on their watching by myself’(71). The oblique neuter pronoun, ‘it’, illustrates A’s estrangement from her physicality, presenting the body as a burden. The infant body is nothing more than a ‘digestive passage,’ the adult body a mere food source. Embodiment is something to be endured. A describes her subsequent adulthood as, ‘a succession of years in which I trawled my body along behind me like a drift net, hoping that I wouldn’t catch in anything in it by accident, like a baby or a disease […] At rare and specific moments when my body was truly my own, I never knew what to do with it’(71). This experience of estranged embodiment evokes Naomi Wolf’s statement that, ‘women’s’ bodies are not our own but society’s,’ for ‘thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community’(187). However, by exceeding the bounds of acceptable thinness, the anorexic aesthetic simultaneously emancipates and reclaims the female body, denying external objectification.
Absorbed in this world of commercials, A’s own sense of subjectivity is tenuous and poorly-defined. She observes how ‘we care most for our surfaces: they alone distinguish us from one another and are so fragile, the thickness of paper.’(2) The collective ‘we’ indicts society, and particularly the suburban America in which she lives. Appearance, physicality,
that which can be bought and changed, becomes mere ‘surface’, no more an articulation of selfhood than a cardboard mask. A grows disconcerted by B’s increasing similarity to her: ‘with hair cropped to her shoulders, she reminded me of times when I had seen myself reflected in imperfect surfaces, in the windows of shops or cars’(11). If surfaces alone distinguish us from one another, then B’s evocation of A’s reflection in an ‘imperfect surface’ not only suggests the elision of any distinction between them, but the disintegration of A’s own subjectivity. B’s long hair had prevented their similarity from becoming
sameness: after cutting it their ‘surfaces’ become commensurate, and their identities merge. When B presents A with her cut-off hair, A worries that ‘in accepting this chunk of B’s body, I would be diluting myself further, when already it was taking me minutes each morning to remember who I was’(13). Similarity is ontologically destructive: the greater the similarities between A and B, the less A not only feels, but is, herself.
Kleeman exploits the homonym of consumption, meaning both to eat and destroy, when A eats a wad of B’s hair. A describes it as ‘rodenty in shape and flavour,’(163) though she imagines it to be a Kandy Kake in a desperate attempt to make it more palatable. Like a rat carrying the plague, the hair seems to be malevolent. She recounts how ‘my feeling of it disappeared completely when it reached my stomach, except for a heaviness, a sort of burden or weight I carried now that may only have been psychological. The fullness felt like it would never leave my body’(163). Unlike a Kandy Kake, the consumption of which causes A to physically starve because of their nutritional deficiency, the heaviness of B’s hair suffuses her body, starving her sense of self-identity. By eating B’s hair, she contains B’s DNA, making A’s body less her own: the significance of that foreign material inside her is
irreducible even if impalpable. Despite the ‘burden’ being psychological, the act of eating the hair forces A to consider the interiority of her own body, that ‘massed wetness pressing in on itself’(1). By eating B’s hair, A not only blurs the boundary between the internal and the
external, but between A and herself. If B’s body is consumable, then so is hers, and she becomes no more than a replicable mass of organs, held together by mere paper.
In blurring the boundary between her own body and B’s, A undermines the division between her body and all bodies, illustrating the replicability of the self. C deepens A’s fear of replication when he says, ‘in reality people are a lot alike. Any two people, on average, share 99.9 percent of their DNA sequences. The genetic difference between the two of us comes down to something like eye color and whether or not we like the taste of
cilantro’(101). The scientific factuality of C’s response collapses the distinctions between people which we rely upon in order to establish identity, rendering subjectivity dependent on minute, and arbitrary genetic differences. C’s response collapses A’s identity into an
objective commonality and she becomes replicable, interchangeable body parts. Yet from the very first page of the novel, A highlights the body’s tenuous integrity: ‘the heart from my body could be lifted and placed in yours, and this portion of myself that I had incubated would live on, pushing foreign blood through foreign channels. In the right container, it might never know the difference’(1). The ability for the physical self to be dissected not only undermines the coherency of the body, but of the relationship between embodiment and selfhood.
Unlike Robinson, who deliberately choses meaning-filled names for her characters, Kleeman foregoes the personification process of naming, giving her main characters the designations of A, B, and C. This is a self-conscious literary act, evocative of Edgar Allen Poe’s unnamed narrator in ‘The Man of the Crowd.’(1840) Such labelling is not only arbitrary, but is an act of disembodiment. In algebra, letters signify variables, which
represents an arbitrary or unknown value. Variables are easily replaced, their worth wholly dependent upon their context. Without a name, the subjectivity of the character is untethered, floating without stable referent. When asked by A if he thinks she and B looked alike, C
replies, ‘well, if I had to describe you and her with words […] I guess they might be the same words.’(45) If, as Hungerford proposes, identity is constructed through voice, then C’s choice of ‘the same words’ destroys A’s subjectivity. Although, it should be remembered that the names of A, B and C are reported by A herself, which suggests that it is not C who reduces A and B into analogy, but A herself. When A is paired with her partner in the church, she decides ‘to call her Anna’, noting that it ‘wasn’t so far from my own name.’(201) Proper names are not absent from A’s narration, but by referring to herself and those closest to her by arbitrary signifiers, A’s sense of self is shown to be externally construed. If identity is materially dependent, it is rendered pure object, and subjectivity collapses under its weight.
While for Ruth, the anorexic aesthetic is a means of emancipation from the tethers of corporeality, freeing a subjective, enlightened self, A is unable to transcend the limits of the physical, and the anorexic aesthetic renders her body pure object. When A passes into an acute state of involuntary starvation, she dissociates, unable to recognize her own body. She describes seeing a mass, ‘the colour of natural wax, pale and creamy. It had shadows in places, strewn through its smoothness. Then I saw. Those were ribs. That was the jut of a hip bone. It was a whole human body: female, naked, holding its arms out as though waiting for an embrace. “That’s my body,” I said to myself, and then I realized that I was starving.’(274) Unlike Ruth, who wills her body into sublimation, A’s association with the anorexic aesthetic lacks agency, and therefore, rather than liberated from the tethers of allegorization, she merely starves. A attempts to escape the fact of her own duplicability by starving her body into immateriality. This is not a positive statement of subjectivity, but a reflection of the society in which A lives.
While some may interpret the anorexic aesthetic as a nihilistic aesthetic, considering its associations with loss, starvation and mortality, I would argue that in Housekeeping, the anorexic aesthetic’s sublimation of the body is presented as an aesthetic of liberation. Though
the Transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, might have achieved liberation through the reduction of the material life and the appreciation of nature, the allegorical weight of the female body inhibits such a direct route to transcendence. In literature, as in society, the female body is replete with a semantic significance which the male body is unburdened with. In order to escape from this, the female body must be starved into sublimation.
Chapter 2
‘Darkness is the only solvent’: Domesticity and the Dissolution of Boundaries
In an interview with Tace Hedrick, Marilynne Robinson explains how Housekeeping follows ‘that characteristic pattern of so much American literature where people go through a journey that leads to a kind of realization that is just at the limits of their ability to
comprehend or articulate, and after that, there’s an openness where earlier experience
becomes impossible, and you’re abandoned into a new terrain without being able to use your old assumptions about how to find your way.’(Hedrick/Robinson 6) I would argue that the anorexic aesthetic exists at this limit of comprehension, pushing beyond the boundaries of embodied experience, and into a new, immaterial ‘terrain’ of spiritual insight and revelation.
Knowledge of Robinson’s literary influences means that the ‘American literature’ which she references is understood to be that of the Transcendentalists. Indeed, in his 1836 essay, ‘Nature’ Ralph Waldo Emerson describes a journey into nature which leads to a kind of revelation: ‘standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.’(38) Robinson’s discourse of ‘openness’ corresponds with Emerson’s image of ‘infinite spaces’: both express an optimistic vision of the capacity of the human mind, despite – or perhaps, because of – the dissolution of the body.
Robinson’s Transcendentalist association is deepened by her proposal that Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), ‘could have been called Housekeeping,’ arguing that, ‘in Walden, Thoreau is trying to create, in terms of physical existence, in terms of food and shelter, a life, a physical life in the world that is both minimal and optimum. It’s the reduction of being into essentials with the assumption that this kind of reduction is an
enhancement.’(Hedrick/Robinson 4) Like the life of the Transcendentalist, and that of the transient, the anorexic aesthetic challenges the idea of the essential. Ruth’s anorexic rejection of food, shelter and community interrogates the meaning of a material life tethered by need. Through Housekeeping, Robinson asks, ‘if you carry deprivation beyond the limits that Thoreau asserted for it, beyond a sort of austere adequacy, then what?’(Hedrick/Robinson 4-5) If the anorexic aesthetic is the vehicle for Robinson’s enquiry, transcendence is the answer.
In an article on the expressive capacity of literary language, Robinson recognises the ‘reduction of being into essentials’ in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, another literary
influence associated with Transcendentalism. Robinson notes that the ‘extreme compression’ of Dickinson’s poems ‘strip away everything inessential, greatly magnifying the potency of each individual word.’(Finding the Right Word para.1) Robinson correlates this quality with Dickinson’s suspected anorexia, noting how ‘she puts an extraordinary pressure on language by her parsimoniousness. But she restricted not only her language very narrowly – apparently she restricted her life very narrowly, too’(Finding the Right Word para.1). Indeed,
Dickinson’s poem, ‘Renunciation’ – ‘Renunciation – is a piercing Virtue -- | The letting go | A presence’(782) – certainly exhibits an ascetic, anorexic aesthetic. However, Robinson’s common interest in the idea of the reduction of the inessential demonstrates that, unlike Emily Dickinson or Louise Glück, Robinson’s invocation of the anorexic aesthetic is not about anorexia itself, but the way in which anorexia challenges our limits of comprehension. By stripping away the non-essential, by, in the words of Ruth, breaking ‘the tethers of need’, Robinson argues, ‘you can get real definitions of things and people and experience’(Finding the Right Word para.2). The anorexic aesthetic is therefore understood as means to approach ‘real definitions’, untethered from the limitations of the material.
In the same way that the compression of Dickinson’s language is seen to enhance the potency of her meaning, the anorexic aesthetic enables enlargement through reduction, minimising the noise of the material world in order to show the capaciousness of the individual mind. By alluding to Dickinson, Robinson not only invokes the poet’s use of the anorexic aesthetic, but demonstrates the expansive capacities of allusion to open and extend language beyond its own semantic and temporal context. Robinson notes how Ruth ‘deploys every resource she has to try to make the world comprehensible. What she knows, she uses, as she does her eyes and her hands. She appropriates the ruin of Carthage for the purposes of her own speculation’(When I was a child 89). Ruth does not mention reading the Bible, because she is subsumed in it: her allusiveness shows her direct engagement with scripture, rather than blind subscription to ‘Biblical injunction’. Literary allusion is a means for Ruth to expand her perception of the world, and transcend the limits of her own language. The
expansive capacity of allusion is illustrated by Housekeeping’s first line: ‘My name is
Ruth’(1), which invokes the opening of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael’(1). The mutual derivation of these characters’ names from the Old Testament draws Robinson into cross-temporal communion with both her literary and Biblical predecessors, creating a subconscious dialogue between her own protagonist, and the journey embarked upon by Melville’s.
Just as the anorexic aesthetic reaches towards enlightenment by transcending the limits of the body, allusion expands the connotative capacity of language by transcending its semantic limits. According to Nicky Hallet, ‘often in nuns’ writing, immediate sources and personal authorship are obscured; indeed, that is their very purpose, to enact the permeability of bodies and subjectivities, and of texts as a continuum of both’(417). Such writing ‘is more than a meditative mode’, for ‘it allows revelatory knowledge to be shared by textual
spiritual epiphany’(Hallet, 417). Hallet actually cites Robinson, arguing that, ‘while writers bear witness and attend to the needs of intensely spiritual experience, they often do so by putting their reader in contact with other pious figures to enable a distinctively contemplative ‘felt experience’(Robinson 2010:13).’(417) Ruth’s proclamation that ‘I simply let the
darkness in the sky become co-extensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones’(115) directly alludes to Emily Dickinson’s poem, ‘The brain is wider than the
sky’(1862). The invocation of the body – ‘skull and bowels and bones’ – links contemplation to ‘felt experience’. In these examples, both Robinson and Dickinson celebrate the incredible capacity of the human mind to comprehend immensity, and its unknown expansiveness. For Robinson, ‘each successive work of literature expands the possibilities of our language, deepening our expressive capacity.’(Finding the Right Word para.4) Allusion is not simply a literary device, but dissolves temporal boundaries, showing the permeability and awesome capaciousness of not only language, but the human mind.
In Housekeeping, Sylvie desires, and to an extent represents, the permeability of bodies and the dissolution of boundaries. Ruth tells us that ‘Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air’(85). She leaves the doors and windows open, puts living-room
furniture in the front yard, and sweeps leaves from room to room. Sylvie allows nature to take possession of the house: she does not fight the flood, nor the leaves which enter from the orchard, and finally encourages the building to burn. Even Sylvie’s name, which means ‘from the forest’, signals her to be extensive with nature, and incompatible with the formal,
domestic world. Ruth notes that ‘Sylvie liked to eat supper in the dark’, a preference which foreshadows Ruth sense of being ‘happily at ease in the dark’(204). This inclination not only counters convention, but the embrace of darkness signals an openness to new modes of comprehension. Sylvie’s incompatibility with the material world is highlighted when Lucille – a name derived from the Latin ‘lux’, meaning ‘light – turns on the kitchen light, causing the
window to go ‘black’, and the ‘cluttered kitchen [to leap], so it seemed, into being, as remote from what had gone before as this world from the primal darkness.’(100)
Like Eve and Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, after which ‘the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked’(Genesis 3:7 KJV), when Lucille turns on the light, they ‘saw that we ate from plates that came in detergent glasses, and we drank from jelly glasses’(100). Lucille ‘startled us all’, Ruth says, by ‘flooding the room so suddenly with light, exposing heaps of pots and dishes, the two cupboard doors which had come unhinged and were propped against the boxes of china’(100). The kitchen’s
illumination shows Ruth and Sylvie for their disorderliness, their nakedness. Ruth sees that ‘everywhere the paint was chipped and marred’(100). If, as Ruth tells us, ‘darkness is the only solvent’(116), then artificial light condenses, reducing things to their physical limits. Like the fruit of the tree of knowledge, materiality is presented as destructive.
Artificial light, like the spiritually obliterating reason of scientific ‘fact’, perniciously distinguishes between the physical and the nonphysical. For Robinson, this distinction ‘is an important error, understandable in 1400 but inexcusable now. It has spiritualized the soul out of meaningful existence and de-spiritualized the world into an object of contempt at worst, or, more typically, a thing defined by its difference from anything called spiritual, which includes, as I have said, almost everything that is distinctively human’(Givenness 232). In Robinson’s view, as ‘we have no way of knowing the true nature of the reality in which we are immersed, of the substance of which we are composed’(When I was a child 192), the only way to approach understanding is through transcendence, dissolving the division between the physical and the non-physical. However, Karen Kaviola criticises Robinson for showing ‘how compelling it can be – especially in the context of significant loss and perhaps
especially for women – to try to overrun boundaries between self and other, to merge, to be absorbed. At the same time, she shows how dangerous it is to allow one’s boundaries to be
overrun’(688). For Kaviola, who approaches Housekeeping through an examination of its presentation of female subjectivity, the dissolution of boundaries is ‘dangerous’. However, for Ruth, in the context of the anorexic aesthetic, dissolution is emancipatory.
Kaviola cites the scene in which the sisters spend the night in the woods: Ruth recounts how Lucille ‘sat down beside me in our ruined stronghold, never still, never accepting that all our human boundaries were overrun’(115). While Lucille would say that her sister simply fell asleep, Ruth describes an experience of transcendence: ‘I simply let the darkness in the sky become co-extensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings’(115). The repetition of ‘darkness’ merges the matter of the sky with skull, the homonym collapsing these discrete entities into mutuality: both are within, and part of, the universe. Ruth’s embrace of the totality of darkness dissolves the material boundaries of the self, blending the physical and non-physical in a form of transcendence. This scene does not suggest the dissolution of boundaries to be dangerous, but rather shows to the incredible capacity of the mind to imagine limitlessness. Later, when Ruth hides in the orchard from Sylvie, she experiences a kind of revelation:
I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as
discomfort. I felt giddily free and eager, as you do in dreams, when you suddenly find that you can fly, very easily, and wonder why you have never tried it before […] I was hungry enough to begin to learn that hunger has its pleasures, and I was happily at ease in the dark, and in general, I could feel that I was breaking the tethers of need, one by one. But then the sheriff came.(204)
Ruth’s emancipation from ‘the tethers of need’ makes her feel ‘giddily free’, liberated from the body through the acceptance of hunger. The derivation of pleasure from hunger appeals to
the aesthetics of anorexia, in which starvation is not interpreted as a threat, but embraced, for it promises a transformation into a greater state of being.
This scene evokes Emerson’s metaphor of the ‘transparent eye-ball’, which reduces the physical self to ‘nothing’, yet the self remains, as ‘I see all.’(Nature, 38) The first-person pronoun ‘I’ exists even after the material ‘eye’ becomes transparent, sublimated into the infinitude of space. Robinson finds ‘dignity in the thought that we are of one substance with being itself, and there is drama in the thought that ultimate things are at stake in these moments of perception and decision’(When I was a child 185). The author recounts walking into the woods as a child and ‘feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle […] and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion – feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a
place.’(When I was a child 88) Robinson’s perception that solitude is a means to access the sacred echoes Emerson’s association of solitude and self-insight, however, ‘to go into solitude,’ he argued, ‘a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.’(37)
The ‘chamber’ is not simply a reference to the material life of the home, but a reference to the body. As in the metaphor ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’, in Ruth’s figuration, body and house become metonym. Ruth refers to her body as a house, calling for deceased relatives to ‘come unhouse me of this flesh, and pry this house apart. It was no shelter now, it only kept me here alone’(159). As opposed to solitude, loneliness is an
embodied state, the painful reminder of Ruth’s separation from her family. To be ‘unhoused’ would sublimate the self into ‘one substance with being itself’, and free Ruth from her loneliness. Paula E. Geyh proposes that ‘unhousing is both the deconstructing of a unitary, grounded subjectivity and the passing or flowing into a different subjectivity – that of the female transient, the wanderer.’(112) Ruth and Sylvie pass into the subjectivity of the
transient through a literal unhousing, by burning down their house. Ruth recounts the
attempted arson in terms of a cremation, imagining that, ‘every last thing would turn to flame and ascend, so cleanly would the soul of the house escape, and all Fingerbone would come marvelling to see the smoldering place where its foot had last rested.’(212) Evoking Christian funeral liturgy, ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’(Book of Common Prayer 338), the house shall become commensurate with the surrounding orchard. However, Ruth must be emancipated from both house and body in order to reach this transient subjectivity. The anorexic aesthetic, like arson, enables transcendence by burning down the house.
The desire to escape the house is informed by a desire to escape Fingerbone, and the materiality which Fingerbone represents. Ruth says that her neighbours ‘had no way of knowing that I spoke at all these past few months, since I spoke only to Sylvie. So they had reason to feel that my social graces were eroding away, and that soon I would feel ill at ease in a cleanly house with glass in its windows – I would be lost to ordinary society. I would be a ghost, and their food would not answer to my hunger, and my hands could pass through their down quilts and tattered pillow covers and never feel them or find comfort in them. Like a soul released, I would find here only the images and simulacra of the things needed to sustain me’(183). The townswomen seem to believe that material provisions will prevent Ruth from becoming a member of the dispossessed, like those transients who ‘walked through Fingerbone like ghosts, terrifying as ghosts are because they were not very different to us. And so it was important to the town to believe that I should be rescued, and that rescue was possible’(178). Ruth correlates ghostliness with transience: both states signal a rejection of materiality. While ghostliness can be related to the physical effects of extreme starvation (thinness, paleness, lethargy), the understanding of the ‘ghost’ as ‘the spirit, or immaterial part of man’(OED, n. 3.a.), suggests Ruth’s invocation of ‘ghosts’ to be a reference to spirituality.
Ruth compares herself to Noah, his decision to build the arc taken as a sign of
madness, caustically noting, ‘perhaps, pious as they were, these ladies did not wish to see me pass into that sad and outcast state of revelation where one begins to feel superior to one’s neighbors’(184). The anthropologist Megan Warin notes that unlike sufferers of other medical conditions, those with anorexia often describe it as ‘a productive and empowering state of distinction’(86). The neighbours attempt to absorb Ruth into the domestic fold by bringing her ‘casseroles and coffee cakes […] knitted socks and caps and comforters’(179), but the hunger of the anorexic – anorexic desire – cannot be satisfied through materiality. By refusing the sustenance offered by her neighbours, Ruth isolates, yet also elevates herself above their material concerns. By becoming distinct from these women, Ruth’s existence reflexively casts judgement on their lives. She becomes the darkness outside a lit window, reflecting the reality of those within the house.
Ruth says that the women of Fingerbone ‘had been made to enact the gestures and attitudes of Christian benevolence from young girlhood, until these gestures and attitudes became habit, and the habit became so strongly engrained as to seem to be impulse or instinct’(182). Despite having ‘salved the injured and tended the ill and soothed and grieved with those who mourned’(181), the women’s engagement with religion is described in the passive terms of ‘gestures’ and ‘habits’. They may be ‘obedient to Biblical injunction’(182), but as habit is action without contemplation, this exposes their Christianity to be a hollow religiosity. Ruth does not condemn them for this – saying that, ‘if their good works supplied the lack of other diversions, they were good women all the same’(182) – but in exposing their religious belief as mere impulse, she rejects their interpretation of Christianity.
Good works may make ‘good women’, but they are not evidence of genuine religious belief, and do not ensure a direct relationship with God. For Robinson, ‘to associate religion with unwavering faith in any creed or practice does not justice at all to its complexity as lived
experience’(Highest Candle 131). A creed is a statement of religious faith, however, a declaration of faith has little correspondence with religious experience. Without spiritual contemplation and engagement with the words of the creed, they become an empty symbol, a linguistic token of belief akin to the ‘casseroles and coffee cakes’ offered to Ruth by the neighbor women. Without recognizing the complexity of faith as lived experience, religious piety is rendered purely, and emptily, material. In contrast, Ruth describes her grandmother hanging out sheets in the ‘spring sunlight’ as ‘performing the rituals of the ordinary as an act of faith’(15). The association of laundry with domesticity shows that Ruth’s vision of faith does not discriminate on the basis of the action itself, but whether that action is performed through an engagement with the intangible, or spiritual. For Ruth, to participate in a culture in which the gifting of food and the maintenance of a home is confused with faith reduces the complexity and wonder of belief to the limits of the material, erasing the possibility of
spiritual revelation. By refusing food, Ruth refuses to participate in the rituals of consumption which she associates with an unexamined existence, which brings her closer to a
contemplative, rather than habitual, appreciation of the divine.
Whereas Ruth is associated with transience, Lucille’s decision to live with the home-economics teacher relates her to the ‘good women’ of Fingerbone, figuring the sisters as representations of their opposing worlds. However, Robinson has stated that, ‘when I write in general I try not to create oppositions. What I’ve tried to do whenever there are conflicts is to make both sides as equal as possible’(On Influence 4). Though Lucille follows Miss Royce, the home-economics teacher, into an explicitly domestic, and normative life, both sisters are required to leave the family home, and follow a mother-surrogate into a different way of life. This differentiation highlights an ontological issue of belief, evoking that faced by Ruth’s Old Testament namesake. For Robinson, ‘the issue in the Book of Ruth – the question is – who to follow. And the decision that Ruth makes is, “Where thou goest I shall go; thy people
shall be my people and thy God, my God.” It seems to me that in a certain way the Ruth in my book makes that kind of radical choice about whose terms of reality she will accept. When she follows Sylvie, she’s passing from one civilization to another.’(Hedrick/Robinson 2) In Kaviola’s opinion, the ‘acceptance both of Ruth and Sylvie’s radical difference as transients and of Lucille and the town’s conventionality situates readers in unsettling territories where contradictory perspectives meet.’(670) While both Robinson and Kaviola describe Ruth’s decision to follow Sylvie into a life of transience as ‘radical’, for Robinson, this is not merely a rejection of the domestic, but a form of transcendence, challenging a conception of reality based on material ‘need’.
The deprivation associated with transience, associated with the anorexic aesthetic through the reduction of inessentials, unsettles Kaviola, who says, ‘while Ruth does choose to follow Sylvie’s way of life and seems to belong to that transient world, the novel’s
ambivalence about Ruth’s choices makes it hard to feel very good about a way of life that provides so little sustenance’(688). Yet just as Sylvie’s home lacks the routine and order Lucille craves, the terms of Lucille’s reality do not offer Ruth the sustenance she requires. While still living at home, Lucille tells Ruth that when she’s old enough, ‘I think I’ll go to Boston’(131). Indeed, years later, when Ruth thinks about her sister, she imagines ‘Lucille in Boston, at a table in a restaurant, waiting for a friend. She is tastefully dressed – wearing, say, a tweed suit with an amber scarf at the throat’(218). Lucille’s specific association with
Boston is understood as a reference to Emerson’s essay, ‘The Poet’(1844), in which he argues, ‘if thou fill thy brain with Boston and New York, with fashion and covetousness, and wilt stimulate thy jaded sense with wine and French coffee, thou shalt find no radiance of wisdom in the lonely waste of the pinewoods’(276). The sisters illustrate the two sides of Emerson’s metaphor: Lucille in Boston, dressed fashionably yet with a ‘jaded sense’, Ruth itinerant, ‘in the lonely waste of the pinewoods’, yet granted a ‘radiance of wisdom.’ Like
transience, the anorexic aesthetic offers a means to a different kind of wisdom, through the rejection of ‘sustenance’.
I believe that Karen Kaviola’s criticism of the text is due to its misreading,
overlooking the significance and signifiers of the anorexic aesthetic, and misinterpreting the novel’s vision of transcendence. Kaviola says, ‘it seems to me inevitable that critics have read Ruth and Sylvie’s transience as a form of female liberation from patriarchal system of containment and control […] but Ruth’s choices do not offer the sustenance she needs.’(689) Kaviola’s oversight of the anorexic aesthetic means that she fails to recognise that Ruth’s liberation is correlated with, and because of, her lack of ‘sustenance’. In her article, Kaviola makes a literal misreading of the text when she says that, ‘it seems for that for Sylvie “need can blossom into all the compensations it requires”(131). It is, however, less clear that the same is true for Ruth’(672). This is true for Ruth, as this quotation was not said by Sylvie, but thought by the narrator herself. Sylvie speech in the paragraph before is designated with speech marks, but the statement ‘need can blossom into all the compensations it requires’ is an observation made by Ruth, as part of a longer contemplation which begins, ‘Imagine a Carthage sown with salt’(152). Not only does the invocation ‘Imagine’ signify one of Ruth’s characteristic imaginative hypotheses, but Robinson herself said that Ruth, ‘appropriates the ruin of Carthage for the purposes of her own speculation’(When I was a child 89). a direct reference to this passage. Kaviola’s misreading undermines her judgement of Ruth’s character, throwing doubt on her criticism of the novel as a whole.
The sustenance which satisfies Lucille, offered and represented by the formal, pious women of Fingerbone, cannot satisfy Ruth, because to do so would be to tether her to a reality which denies the potential of the mind. The habitual religiosity of the townswomen fails to offer Ruth a substantive vision of faith. Instead, it is through the very lack of material sustenance offered by the anorexic aesthetic that Ruth approaches revelation.
Chapter 3
‘To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow’: Anorexic Desire and the Immateriality of Memory
Whereas the Latin anorexia translates as ‘lack of appetite’, the symptoms of anorexia suggest a denial of appetite. The Greek ‘ἀνορεξία’, formed from the negatory prefix
‘ἀν + ὀρέγ-ειν,’ meaning ‘to reach after, desire’(OED, n.), is typically translated as ‘lack of desire’, but may also be understood as ‘un-desire’; the elusion or negation of desire. This alternative understanding accords with the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s concept of ‘anorexic desire’ as desire of the Other, of which the Other is nothing, but ‘a symbol of the lack’(103). The anorexic does not eat nothing, he argues, but ‘the nothing’(104): nothingness. To understand anorexia as ‘desire of nothingness’ suggests that the anorexic does not desire thinness, but disembodiment; self-starvation is not an attempt to control an unruly appetite, but the denial of the existence of a physical appetite at all.
In the context of the anorexic aesthetic, hunger ceases to be mere physical sensation. In You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, when A is loaded into a van by some ‘Wally’s’ – employees of Wally’s supermarket, who also operate as agents of the Conjoined Eaters – and taken to the Church for the first time, she considers that ‘beneath their masks and uniforms, they could be people much like me, with anxieties about those closest to them and a weird misplaced hunger for something intangible that could be satisfied only by snack food.’(186) If artificial food can satisfy a hunger for the intangible, not only does that hunger transgress the physical needs of the body, but its satisfaction comes from what that snack food
represents, rather than the food itself. When A escapes from the Church, one of the Wally’s – who A refers to as ‘Chris’ – tells her that in the supermarket, all the food is ‘decoy […] It’s all idea. It’s made to nourish the ghost. Nobody anticipated having a use for real food
here’(275). Kandy Kakes are made of ‘just chemicals, flour, aspartame, and some food-grade plastic’(278), and two contain just 65 calories, meaning that their consumption paradoxically causes starvation. The food in Kleeman’s novel does not feed physical hunger, but
perpetuates anorexic desire.
A recounts how B would go to the supermarket to take photographs of the food there, finding satisfaction from the food’s non-consumption: ‘afterward she looked rosier, as though she had found something real, something meaty to feed on in the tiny images.’(112) A goes on to speculate, ‘maybe Kandy Kat survived like that, from images of eating and images of food. Light consuming light, the desire for sustenance a type of sustenance in itself. Even if he was always paused on the narrow edge of starvation, what he was doing in pursuit of Kandy Kakes sustained him. They made his life terrible, but at the same time they made him more himself’(112). In Kleeman’s world, the Kandy Kake functions as the confectionary manifestation of Lacan’s concept of l’objet petite a. ‘A’ signifies ‘le autre’ (‘the other’), the unobtainable object of desire which is pursued but inherently cannot be possessed. Like the desire of the anorexic, Kandy Kat can never be satisfied, as his identity relies on the Kakes: to cease hungering for them is to cease to exist. The Kandy Kake, like le objet petite a, both represents and generates hunger for the intangible; that which cannot be satisfied, but itself threatens to consume.
Whereas ‘hunger’ is a visceral sensation – the physical want of food – its synonym ‘craving’ suggests a desire that is metaphysical, not limited to the body. In Housekeeping, Ruth meditates on the effect and function of craving:
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing –
the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries.(152)
Ruth’s almost proverbial statement – ‘to crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow’(152) – corresponds with Lacan’s conception of anorexic desire. Ruth’s statement implies craving, or anorexic desire, to be ontologically dependent on its non-satisfaction. Unlike need, which can be satiated, the satisfaction of desire destroys it, and in doing so, destroys the desiring subject. Ruth’s longing is for her dead family, which is obliquely referenced through the phrase ‘longing, like an angel, fosters us’, as ‘Foster’ was the family surname. As the satisfaction of this desire is only achievable through death, nostalgia functions akin to anorexic desire, the autre being unobtainable; nothingness.
In the context of nostalgia, memory is nourishment. The psychoanalyst Emmanuelle Borgnis Desbordes proposes that instead of eating, ‘the anorexic nourishes herself with the very lack she is missing’(582). The ‘lack’ Ruth is missing is her mother, yet as she herself argues, had her mother not died, had she ‘simply brought us home again to the high frame apartment building with the scaffolding of stairs, I would not remember her that way. Her eccentricities might have irked and embarrassed us when we grew older […] We would have left her finally.’(196) By starving herself to the point of sublimation, ‘like a soul
released’(183), Ruth enables the possibility of transfiguration, becoming ghost-like, and reducing the symbolic distance between her and her mother.
To satisfy, and therefore eradicate, craving, is to destroy the greater understanding which comes through loss. In The Givenness of Things, Robinson speculates that for Christ’s early followers, ‘a flood of new meaning would have become apparent in the aftermath of his death. They would have other bases for interpreting what he did and said, and what his
