Women Poets and Eating Disorders: 1840s–1970s

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the writings of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Marianne Moore, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. My approach to their writing via a lens focused on eating disorders, informed by drafts as well as medical texts of their eras, allows for an often-overlooked means of analysis. I show, through a selection of poems from draft to publication stage, that their works suggest a knowledge of eating disorder behaviours and symptoms.

The first named eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, was not declared as such until 1873/1874, one decade after Barrett Browning’s death. I demonstrate that from the Victorian era through mid-century America (and beyond), there is a trans-Atlantic progression of eating disorder styles in the works of poets who show markers of such disorders. I consider how dualism, narcissism, regression, family dysfunction, mirror imaging, and purging are not only common themes in these poet’s oeuvres, but also reflective of commonalities of eating disorders.

Some critics, such as Heather Cass, Laurence Stapleton, and of course Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, have sometimes focused on food and hunger within these poets’ works. However, they typically bypass eating disorders and debates about how these disorders might have driven and informed the writing. This is not so surprising considering that Stapleton, Gilbert, and Gubar were analysing poetry in the 1970s, but their works are important to this thesis because they nip at the heels of the last era in which I analyse (Sexton’s). I contribute to such research but expand upon these criticisms to offer a more comprehensive, holistic means for examining these poems.

Using archival research at libraries around the world, I consider the various (and often unpublished, non-digitised) drafts of poems along with personal writings. Collectively, I use these materials to examine these poets’ progression, creative decisions, and drafting process to reveal an intimate knowledge and experience of food and hunger.