IV. Philosophical Anorexics: The Flip Side

Indisputably, women's internalization of "anorexic philosophy" contributes to anorexia. While there is no direct causal relation between passages of Hegel and Plato and women on college campuses, in corporate America, or in Iowa kitchens, there is a striking similarity in the logics expressed in these philosophic texts and in texts written by anorexics. Bordo makes the distinction clear: "Anorexia is not a philosophical attitude; it is a debilitating affliction. Yet quite often a highly conscious and articulate scheme of images and associations—one could go so far as to call it a metaphysics—is presented by these women. . . . in the anorexic's 'metaphysics' elements are made explicit, historically grounded in Plato or Augustine, that run deep in our culture."^[50] For women who have internalized the dictates of the philosophical tradition and accepted them as truths, whether the source is the philosophy itself or its numerous forms of enactment in popular culture, they will dedicate their lives, as Glück puts it, to hunger. They attempt to identify themselves with the masculine and exist,

as Chernin writes, "from the neck up," engaged in a daily battle with food and the desire to become something else (white male), instead of writing or philosophizing, culturally producing, themselves (Obsession , 55). As Wolf argues in The Beauty Myth , "Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history. . . . women's bodies are not our own but society's, and . . . thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community" (187). Some women writers such as the contemporary American poet Glück and the Irish poet Eavan Boland, writers I term "philosophical anorexics," use literature as a way of articulating the anorexic logic by which hunger becomes a communal function and a central agency in the constitution of female subjectivity. Glück and Boland clearly articulate how the communal imperative affects women in general physically and emotionally, and how it affects women writers in particular, deflecting them from individual development and poetic production to an all-encompassing obsession with their bodies and food. As Ellen West, one of the most famous anorexic case histories (who is known, perhaps, because of her unusual degree of literary competence), writes, "I felt all inner development was ceasing, that all becoming and growing were being choked, because a single idea was filling my entire soul."^[51] When one can only worry about calories, how much one has worked out, how much one eats, one runs on an endless treadmill that absorbs most of one's productive energy, indirectly assuring that aesthetics and culture will remain primarily a "masculine" province.

Contemporary women writers like Margaret Atwood write specifically about effects of the masculinization of aesthetics on women.^[52] In her work, anorexia becomes the locus where cultural anxieties intersect in the cultural construction of the female body, and her prose enacts the struggle to imagine a different construction. Similarly, Glück writes about the living in a cultural context where the female flesh is rejected as unaesthetic and intrusive. "Art" is defined in opposition to the materiality the female body represents despite its fetishization as a subject for art. The ways in which actual women internalize this dialectic and use it to form and constitute their own bodies is something that Glück's poetry makes explicit, thereby producing an "alienation effect" to that process.^[53] The 1980 poem "Dedication to

Hunger" begins with the focus on what Noelle Caskey sees as a "unity with the father against the mother and all that the mother represents," that is, the maternal body as circumscribed and projected by cultural codes that reduce women to body and reproductive capacity.^[54]

In the opening image of "Dedication to Hunger," the identification of daughter with father is central. The mother watches this identification, rather than takes part in it, but because she has internalized the codes that encourage that identification, she takes pleasure in it. I quote the first section of the poem:

1.  From the Suburbs 
They cross the yard 
and at the back door 
the mother sees with pleasure 
how alike they are, father and daughter—
I know something of that time. 
The little girl purposefully 
swinging her arms, laughing 
her stark laugh: 

It should be kept secret, that sound. 
It means she's realized 
that he never touches her. 
She is a child; he could touch her 
if he wanted to.^[55]  

Here the mother's pleasure is derived from a likeness, a similitude between the father and daughter that negates the daughter's femininity, and by extension the mother in that it removes her from the equation—she is watching, not participating. The daughter is valuable—from the mother's point of view—only to the degree that she is not like the mother. The mother in Glück's poem is self-negating in that her pleasure is dependent upon her own cancellation, upon the daughter's apparent lack of feminine qualities associated with the mother.

"I know something of that time," the narrative voice breaks in, beginning an identification between the speaker and the young girl in the poem, who as the poem progresses becomes an anorexic in training: the identification with the father that leads girls to reject their

bodies as the agency of femininity, since their bodies destroy the identification when they are therefore seen as essentially different from their fathers. The father "never touches her" because according to cultural configuration she is different from him, feminine, and the speaker has seen this. Her realization breaks any unambiguous identification with the father and makes it something unattainable and therefore perpetually desired. The poem is about this moment of realization: that the feminine, figured as difference, is the basis for rejection. Through this realization the girl also begins to reject what is most obviously feminine in herself: her body. Wanting to define herself as different from her mother so as to gain back the likeness with her father, she rejects her mother as feminine and what in herself resembles her mother.

This leads to the poem's second section, which presents the female part of male/female relations as a position of powerlessness:

2. Grandmother 
"Often I would stand at the window—
your grandfather 
was a young man then— 
waiting, in the early evening." 

That is what marriage is. 
I watch the tiny figure 
changing to a man 
as he moves toward her, 
the last light rings in his hair. 
I do not question 
their happiness. And he rushes in 
with his young man's hunger, 
so proud to have taught her that: 
his kiss would have been 
clearly tender— 

Of course, of course. Except 
it might as well have been 
his hand over her mouth. (30)

Rejection and powerlessness become linked in this second section. Her grandmother's voice reports what the speaker of the poem sees as her grandmother's victimization. The grandmother's voice reports

that "often I would stand at the window—/your grandfather/was a young man then—/waiting, in the early evening." The speaker interprets the grandmother's waiting as an essential passivity that she wants to avoid, for it encodes the grandmother's cancellation. "That is what marriage is," asserts the narrative voice. "And he rushes in/ with his young man's hunger,/so proud to have taught her that:/his kiss would have been/clearly tender." According to the speaker, the grandfather teaches the grandmother that marriage means waiting for him, suppressing herself in order to validate him. "His young man's hunger," his sexuality as demand, teaches her that, and when she internalizes this lesson, it makes him "tender." Tenderness or love is bought at the price of self-suppression: "Of course, of course," the speaker ironically states, "except it might as well have been his hand over her mouth." Here, from the speaker's perspective, the only way the grandmother can gain acceptance and love is through voluntary self-cancellation. The grandmother's husband "might as well have" put "his hand over her mouth," silencing her words and, by implication, preventing her from eating. The grandmother's self-suppression is the same kind of cancellation the mother exhibits in the pleasure she takes in the likeness between father and daughter, the same kind the little girl internalizes in her "stark laugh," and the same kind the speaker chooses in the self-cancellation through the flesh that is anorexia: a "dedication to hunger" or perpetual desire for a male body and position, which the father's initial rejection of her initiates.

That her rejection of the mother and the rejection of self is painful and not at all "natural" is something the third section of the poem comments on, invoking the bond between the maternal body and the children it bore:

3. Eros 
To be male, always 
to go to women 
and be taken back 
into the pierced flesh: 

     I suppose 
memory is stirred. 
And the girl child 
who wills herself

into her father's arms 
likewise loved him 
second. Nor is she told 
what need to express. 
There is a look one sees, 
the mouth somehow desperate— 

Because the bond 
cannot be proven. (31)

Through heterosexuality, the male is "taken back" into the flesh he had separated from. The girl child gravitates toward the father only through an act of will, coming to identify with him as she does in the first section only after cultural mediation. But the telos of that act of will and how it manifests itself physically is made explicit in the fourth section:

4. The Deviation 
It begins quietly 
in certain female children: 
the fear of death, taking as its form 
dedication to hunger, 
because a woman's body 
is  a grave; it will accept 
anything. I remember 
lying in bed at night 
touching the soft, digressive breasts, 
touching, at fifteen, 
the interfering flesh 
that I would sacrifice 
until the limbs were free 
of blossom and subterfuge: I felt 
what I feel now, aligning these words— 
it is the same need to perfect, 
of which death is the mere byproduct. (32)

Here the speaker identifies the cultural narrative of female flesh as decay and death as deadly to women. Certain female children dedicate themselves to hunger, that is, to starving away their flesh, in an attempt to thwart the death with which the cultural narrative has equated them. In that narrative "a woman's body/is a grave." Yet, the

speaker brings into focus the status of that story as a story, rather than a "truth," in the connection that she makes between this narrative, her attempts to write, and her anorexic impulses. Here the anorexia is a remedy that removes the flesh that is perceived as the cause of the implicit criticism that the young girl experienced in the first section of the poem when her father would not touch her. Her body, which made her untouchable in the first place, also makes her untouchable now but in different terms. Her anorexic body can't be rejected, because it is now perfect, stripped of its femininity.

Anorexics perceive themselves as beyond reproach, because they think they have defeated that aspect of themselves that equates them with the grave ("a woman's body/is a grave"), but in becoming anorexic, they align themselves with death. The speaker in Glück's poem experiences her body as "interfering flesh" that she "would sacrifice/until the limbs were free/of blossom and subterfuge," of "soft, digressive" breasts that would falsely identify her with the passivity of her waiting grandmother. She sacrifices the "blossom," the feminine that she experiences as "subterfuge," as something that deceives and conceals her "true" masculine self by its flesh. This is an ironic reversal of the common interpretation of anorexics, who are seen as attempting to escape and evade their "true" adult sexuality as women. But through this irony, which marks her attempt to align herself with the father, what she really does is to align herself with her mother and grandmother in a position of powerlessness. She participates in a fetishistic structure in that her denial of her body that results in a more "masculine" body becomes a fetish intended to cover what she perceives as lack, her female body. She makes herself indeterminately gendered. The anorexic body functions as a disavowal of gender or as a postponement of a choice between masculine and feminine. It gives her the illusionary horizon of an ungendered space, which destroys her, and which, because of cultural mediation, can only postpone the inevitable "fall" into the female body. Rather than using anorexia as a strategy of protest, she leaves the definition of female body as lack firmly in place. Contrary to interpretations of the disease like Sandra M. Gilbert's that describe anorexia as a parodic strategy that protests the social order, anorexia cannot function as a form of self-assertion but rather as a fetishistic structure that leaves

women believing the cultural narrative of female as lack.^[56] Glück's poem enacts the alignment of three generations of women—grandmother, mother, and daughter—in an alignment of its words that articulates a complicated awareness of their parallel processes of self-cancellation.

Most significant, the speaker experiences the purgation of her flesh as an artistic process equivalent to the artistic creation of poetry: "I felt/what I feel now, aligning these words—/it is the same need to perfect." "Perfection" is defined as the successful elimination of female flesh. The speaker of this poem has internalized this logic, but in making it her subject she brings it to the level of consciousness. She begins to rewrite the narrative about how we conceive of bodies. In Glück's work the definition of anorexia as "heroic" is ironized in such a way that we can see the destructive paradox such a definition necessitates.

The last section of the poem shows how art is a process necessarily based on the renunciation of the feminine as flesh, making that awareness part of a conscious, painful deliberation:

5. Sacred Objects 
Today in the field I saw 
the hard, active buds of the dogwood 
and wanted, as we say, to capture them, 
to make them eternal. That is the premise 
of renunciation: the child, 
having no self to speak of, 
comes to life in denial— 

I stood apart in that achievement, 
in that power to expose 
the underlying body, like a god 
for whose deed 
there is no parallel in the natural world. (33)

Here the speaker's achievement of a "self" is the denial of self, which both sets her apart and constitutes her identity. Renunciation enables her both to align words and to stand apart as different, as something other than the female body that if stripped away leaves the more authentic, male "underlying body." It removes her from the mortal, material, feminine realm of nature, making her "like a god/for whose

deed/there is no parallel in the natural world." This achievement gives the speaker a new identification, makes her godlike because she has transcended the natural world. The denial of feminine flesh makes her godlike both in her difference from other female corpses invoking death and decay and in her ostensible participation in the "eternal." The transcendence of flesh is related to the poetic transcendence: "Today in the field I saw/the hard, active buds of the dogwood/and wanted, as we say, to capture them,/to make them eternal." Making the buds eternal through poetic language invokes the topos of transcending the material dimension of flux and change, but it does so explicitly in reference to gender and how gender codes create a narrative of female flesh that the anorexic then responds to in her self-creation. "The hard, active buds of the dogwood" are contrasted to the passivity and softness of the feminine flesh she experiences as "soft, digressive breasts," as "blossom and subterfuge." The poetic impulse to make eternal is similar to the anorexic impulse to constitute oneself through the renunciation of female flesh, thereby evading the "fear of death, taking as its form/dedication to hunger." "Dedication to hunger" constitutes both poetry and evasion of the woman's body that by an anorexic cultural logic "is a grave."

The fierce control of Glück's poetry, the suppressed rage in the narrative voice, enacts on a formal level the anorexic's self-suppression, even as she makes that suppression her subject. By connecting masculinity, activity, and aesthetics on the one hand and femininity, passivity, and bodily flesh on the other, Glück calls attention to a narrative we all have too readily accepted. The fierce detachment of the narrative voice is the expression of an equally fierce pain, which comes from what the logic of renunciation has encouraged us to will into our flesh, what it has encouraged us to shape our bodies into. In accepting the cultural narrative that makes bodily renunciation heroic and masculine, we try to make ourselves more powerful, "godlike," in a way that destroys us. Glück's poem admits and shows that we still constitute ourselves as gods or heroes through masculinization along the thin side of the thin/fat divide. In doing so, however, the poem evokes a different consciousness about the way we tell stories about ourselves, the way we create ourselves through gendered patterns of language.

The poet Eavan Boland connects anorexia, masculinity and femininity, and the Western philosophical and religious, rather than literary, tradition in her poem "Anorexic":

Flesh is heretic. 
My body is a witch. 
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching 
her curves and paps and wiles. 
They scorch in my self-denials.

How she meshed my head 
in the half-truths 
of her fevers

till I renounced 
milk and honey 
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited 
her hungers. 
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless. 
I am skin and bone. 
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib 
I turn in sleep. 
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia 
a sensuous enclosure. 
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum, 
once by the song of his breath 
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more, 
only a few more days 
sinless, foodless,

I will slip 
back into him again 
as if I had never been away.

Caged so 
I will grow 
angular and holy

past pain, 
keeping his heart 
such company

as will make forget 
in a small space 
the fall

into forked dark, 
into python needs 
heaving to hips and breasts 
and lips and heat 
and sweat and fat and greed.^[57]

In Boland's poem the anorexic narrative is spelled out from a distinctively female subject position—the black hole, to which history, symbology, and her own efforts have consigned her. Enacting the internalization of the logic expressed in the witchcraft trials in Puritan New England, the anorexic differs from those "witches" in that she burns her own body, consumes her own flesh, by refusing to take anything in. Boland's poem creates a voice, a female subject position involved in the process of canceling herself out, which clearly articulates the logic that the historian Carol F. Karlsen describes in her work on the place of gender and ideology in the Puritan "witch" scandal. In Puritan ideology, based in the European tradition of Institoris and Sprenger's well-known treatise Malleus Maleficarum , "Women were by nature more evil than men: in their wickedness, they imitated the first woman, Eve. Created intellectually, morally, and physically weaker than men, the argument continued, women were subject to deeper affections and passions, harbored more uncontrollable appetites, and were more susceptible to deception."^[58] Through a process that seems like ventriloquism, the voices of this European tradition speak in Boland's poem. They speak in the voices of actual anorexics, like another patient from Bruch: "My soul seemed to grow as my body waned; I felt like one of those early Christian saints who starved themselves in the desert sun. I felt invulnerable, clean and hard as the bones etched into my silhouette."^[59]

And yet it is not entirely ventriloquism. Self-starvation is a process anorexics have decided for themselves, a subject position they have chosen , paradoxically, as a means of self-definition. The starved body becomes their identity, their identity  is the process of self-cancellation. This is not something willed upon them by culture—everyone around them becomes united in an attempt to facilitate a "cure." Still, there is something strange in these torturous twists. If anorexia is a choice, why do so many women choose it? But if it is the result of a convergence of historical forces, of a certain form of Christian logic, of philosophic logic, of psychoanalytic logic, of rhetorical logic, if it is the subject position offered to women as redemptive to "cure" or to supplement their "lack" as nonmale, then why don't all women have anorexia? These are questions an analysis of Boland's text can begin to answer.

For anorexics the body is experienced as entirely distinct, as "other"; the body is not the self. The body is gendered female, while the mind that attempts to control it is gendered male.^[60] Bruch writes in The Golden Cage that

many [anorexics] experience themselves and their bodies as separate entities, and it is the mind's task to control the unruly and despised body. Others speak of feeling divided, as being a split person or two people. . . . when they define this separate aspect, this different person seems always to be a male. . . . They had felt throughout their lives that being a female was an unjust disadvantage, and they dreamed of doing well in areas considered more respected and worthwhile because they were "masculine." Their overslim appearance, their remarkable athletic performances, with perseverance to the point of exhaustion, give them the proud conviction of being as good [as men]. (58-59)

"Flesh is heretic," says Boland's anorexic speaker. "My body is a witch./I am burning it." Speaking a synthesis of attitudes expressed in Plato, Institoris and Sprenger, Hegel, Descartes, and Freud, she splits herself off from her body, labels it "heretical," a "witch," and "burns" it. To combine flesh and heresy collapses the literal and the figurative in the way characteristic of anorexic logic. "Heresy" is defined as "an opinion of doctrine contrary to church dogma; dissent or deviation from a dominant theory, opinion, or practice; an opinion, doctrine, or practice contrary to the truth or to generally accepted

beliefs or standards."^[61] When the speaker says, "Flesh is heretic," she describes her body as a deviation from "truth," from "church dogma," from the "dominant theories" of subjectivity and being. Her body asserts an alternative subjectivity "contrary to generally accepted beliefs and standards" that she herself works to annihilate. Her body is not a "natural" object; it is a set of discourses, of dogmas and their contraries. It is a competing set of definitions, in which she cancels the second alternative, the embodied female subject, in order to reinforce the traditional dualist masculine subject.

In the embodiment that the poem's speaker struggles to overcome, she identifies her body with a "witch" upon whom she is imposing her own version of "burning" at the stake. The heretical burning body is witchlike in its dissent from the dominant disembodied tradition, just as "witches" dissented from the dominant religious tradition that consigned them to the social position of a man's "helpmeet." As Karlsen writes in The Devil in the Shape of a Woman , "Puritans defined discontent as thinking oneself above one's place in the social order," and they defined "witches" as those who were dissatisfied with the status quo: "It was [women accused of witchcraft's] perceived dissatisfaction with the religious system—and by extension with the religiously defined social system—that linked them to their sister witches. . . . By treating female dissent as evidence of witchcraft as well as heresy, the authorities may have effectively silenced Puritan women's opposition [to the religious system]" (127, 125, 197). Paradoxically, the anorexic is both dissenter and prosecutor, the accused and the judge. In her unconscious protest against an ancient logic that defines her by her body, this protest is nonetheless at war with an identification with that logic, an internalization and acceptance of that logic's standards: Yes, I am an evil body. Yes, I am a witch. Because I am this, I will destroy myself, this part of myself. I will become something else. I will become male, or at least not-female. Prelapsarian identity is for me a space without sexual difference, a space where there are no demarcations between masculine and feminine, between his world and mine. Ellen West, a famous anorexic case study, wrote that "I feel myself quite passively the stage on which two hostile forces are mangling each other." ^[62] With West's self-conception, characteristic of most anorexics, she cannot experience herself as anything but "passive," as

a stage on which "two forces," detached from her own will, "mangle each other." Those "forces" are the struggle between an identification with the Western tradition and a rejection of it. Her anorexic obsession with her body is the convergence of those forces. As Chernin writes, "Obsession is, in fact, a drama, in which that inner being one has hoped to dominate and control keeps struggling to return" (Obsession , 190). That "inner being" Chernin identifies with emotion, passion, creative potential: "Thus, from Ellen West we learn how a young woman invariably rejects, along with the female body, the passionate, 'feminine' side of her nature, from which her creative development would arise" (186). Anorexic obsession takes the place of creativity, of thought, of activity, of the "world beyond her plate."

In Boland's poem, the speaker's anorexia is the act of "torching," through the venerable religious tradition of "self-denial," the body which is, presumably, self-indulgent: "her curves and paps and wiles." The speaker splits off from her body, designating that body first "it" and then "she" and "her," so that the gender of this flesh is clear. For the speaker, "curves" are equated with "wiles," which are defined either as "a trick of a stratagem intended to ensnare or deceive . . . to lure by or as if by a magic spell," or as "to pass or spend pleasurably." Furthermore, "pap" is defined as "nipple," "a soft food for infants or invalids," "political patronage," or "something lacking solid value or substance."^[63] The "curves" are the female flesh traditionally thought to lure men from their important, culture-/state-based sublimated activities and into the fleshly self-indulgence of sexual gratification and love. The female body is the "lure" into pleasure, and the speaker, through  "self-denial" (the "self" defined  as hungering  body), "torches" and "scorches" that flesh in a violence that reflects and internalization of the larger cultural attitude of violence toward that flesh. Like Plato and the biblical tradition she later explicitly draws upon, the speaker identifies this hungering female flesh as a distraction from truth, for "she meshed my head/in the half-truths/of her fevers/till I renounced/milk and honey/and the taste of lunch." Her "fevers," her bodily desires, are a distraction from truth and can only be conquered by a renunciation of "milk and honey," which in the biblical tradition signify the plenty and prosperity of God, who smiles down upon you and provides if you are "good." Defined as the other

of "good," the speaker denies herself this plenty, the reward from which she knows she is by definition excluded. The self-inflicted violence toward her desires, femininity, and flesh continues, through violence, toward hungers succumbed to: "I vomited/her hungers./Now the bitch is burning." The hungers are vomited; the burning continues; "she," the body, has been properly punished: "I am starved and curveless./I am skin and bone./She has learned her lesson."

At this point in the poem the violence stops, and the tone shifts to a tenderness bound up with masculine identification. The speaker is an Eve who has accepted the male definition of herself as inherently evil, desiring, fleshly, and thereby responsible for the Fall and death of the human race. This punitive Eve longs to redeem herself through the loss of sexual difference and of the body that has caused all the problems in the first place. In a reverse parody of the psychoanalytic account of male self-differentiation from, and womb-longing for, his mother, here Eve wants to rejoin Adam, to literally become him again, to fit back into the rib from which she has ostensibly come, a fit accomplished by the "burning" of her body that she performs in the earlier stanzas of the poem. "Thin as a rib," Eve says, evoking the second and more widely taught creation myth in Genesis: "I turn in sleep./My dreams probe/a claustrophobia/a sensuous enclosure./ How warm it was and wide/once by a warm drum,/once by the song of his breath/and in his sleeping side." Like the psychoanalytic myth of the child's longing for the warm womb, here the "sensuous enclosure" is Adam, since he has mythologically given birth to Eve. Her desire is a regression to this undifferentiated state where she is literally part of him and thereby male. Sinless, fleshless, beyond need, she will forget her own hungers, her own designation as fleshly evil: "Caged so/I will grow/angular and holy/past pain,/keeping his heart/such company/as will make me forget/in a small space/the fall/into forked dark,/into python needs/heaving to hips and breasts / and lips and heat/and sweat and fat and greed." The renunciation of her flesh allows her to "forget" herself, to become male, to become Adam, apparently a subject position that is beyond "python needs," since it does not partake of, or at least is not defined by, "hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed." She attains this subject position only through self-starvation and the resulting dis-

appearance of the body: "Only a little more,/only a few more days/ sinless, foodless,/I will slip/back into him again/as if I had never been away." The lack of food leads to the lack of body, which leads to the lack of sin, which leads to a male subject position, or least to that prelapsarian state of gender identity before sexual difference—before the inevitable split and rejection when "us" is not necessarily different from "them," when the boys will still play with us at recess.^[64]

Boland's poem remarkably details the anorexic logic. At the same time, it gives that logic a specific historical and cultural context, connecting the current manifestations of male identification in women that help define anorexia, the Puritan witch scandals and the subject positions relegated to women therein, and the biblical tradition of the Fall, so important in structuring gender and power configurations throughout Western culture. It brings together religious, philosophical, and historical strands that help form a reading of the disease, its logic, its passions, and the cultural conditions that have helped produce it, as well as a reading of those who suffer from it. Boland's poem decodes and enacts the very set of presuppositions that can be traced to the literary ideals of the early twentieth century. Identifying these ideals locates another missing element in the emerging picture of the cultural determinants of anorexia.

These literary ideals are the focus of the pages that follow. I situate myself differently from the little work that has been done on the relation between literature and anorexia, although the goals of my work might be the same. A common interpretation of anorexia offered by feminist literary critics like Sandra M. Gilbert who "want urgently to examine what we might call the feminist implications of anorexia" is that it reflects a strategy through which "women . . . have consciously used literal hunger as a means of protesting the metaphorical starvation in their lives" ("Hunger Pains," 11), starvation for meaningful life choices.^[65] These critics see a parallel between the anorexic and the woman writer: "Denied all other means of self-creation, both the starved woman poet and the starving anorexic transform self-denial into self-assertion, a hunger/pain into a hunger/strike" (Gilbert, "Hunger Pains," 12). "Starved poets" include Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, and the Brontës, and these critics examine their texts for anorexic behavior among characters, which they interpret as a protest

against the patriarchal order. They draw an analogy between the political activities of suffragists like the Pankhursts, who went on hunger strikes as a means of obtaining the vote, and the behavior of anorexics.^[66] While this interpretive model raises anorexia as an important issue for feminist literary study, it is problematic in that it gives artistic status to a "strategy of resistance" that is only self-destructive, and that ultimately affirms the very order it protests.

Furthermore, this model is too gender specific in that it cannot account for a common occurrence in many modernist texts by male authors—anorexic male figures like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, Conrad's Marlow, or Faulkner's Joe Christmas. Nor can it account for the curiously "anorexic" strategies of revision in modernist literary manifestoes, such as imagist poetics, that mandate the radical reduction of textual bodies. As recent theorists have repeatedly insisted, anorexia needs to be examined in relation to the gendered context that produces it.^[67] For white male modernism  a dominant aesthetic was anorexic. Theories of creativity relied on an ideology that posited the necessity to renounce "the feminine" as flesh, a "necessity" that functioned as a "higher truth" that the artist alone apprehends. In contrast to the Gilbert thesis, these writers used the disease to refute the very female self-expression referred to above. In short, female disease was transformed into male textual practice, but both disease and textual practice had a grounding in specific cultural and historical contexts.

Bordo has named these contexts "psychopathologies" and argues that they express some of the most vexed points of tension in our culture. Eating disorders, she writes, "reflect and call our attention to some of the central ills of our culture—from our historical heritage of disdain for the body, to our modern fear of loss of control over our futures, to the disquieting meaning of contemporary beauty ideals in an era of female presence and power" ("Anorexia Nervosa," 88). The way the various forms of anorexia—mental, physical, and textual—work to cancel out "female presence and power" will be the focus of the pages that follow. I will attempt to track some of the ways in which an anorexic, male-identified logic is still characteristic of our basic processes of reading and writing in institutions of higher education. Thus, along with many others, I begin to recover the female bodies, the murdered subjects that tradition has so relentlessly skinned, dis-

membered, and generally done violence to in its imposition of a white, upwardly mobile, masculine worldview that explicitly defines itself in opposition to the emotional, the personal, the bodily, the feminine.^[68]

As a version, then, of Clarice in The Silence of the Lambs , as a member of the Feminist Bureau of Investigation, I have a kind of mission to complete. Speaking of the serial killer and his victim, Clarice says, "If he sees Catherine as a person and not just an object, it's harder to tear her up." Her mission is to keep women and herself from being torn up; mine is to help keep them and myself from tearing ourselves up. But also like Clarice, whose career as a federal investigator is emotionally motivated by an identification with her policeman father, I have my own identifications and engagements with the tradition I analyze. In a relation like Clarice's to Catherine, I am bound up in the same problematic structure as Hillary, the desperate thirteen-year-old in the gym. During the film's agonizing showdown, when Clarice shouts to Catherine, "You're safe," at precisely the moment she herself is in the most danger, Clarice shows her vulnerability to a tradition of male violence in which one is never "safe," and in which one can function as only the most tenuous form of "savior." Even as I attempt to make Hillary and others like her "safe," bound up in the very structures I analyze, as a lived female body in the cultural matrix, I reveal my own vulnerabilities.

By positioning some of the sources of the hatred of the female body that becomes a hatred of the self, I hope to help dismantle the macabre sisterhood of self-hatred that exists on a daily basis between myself and thirteen-year-olds, twenty-two-year-olds, and thirty-nine-year-olds in the women's locker room in the gym, each of us tensely huddled over her own body as we change clothes, silent in shame, sucking our stomachs in, each hoping that the other women will not "see" the bulges "disfiguring" our bodies. I hope to work toward a strategy in which the literal and the body need no longer function as the vilified others of discourse.^[69] If, in the cultural narratives that constitute the gendered body, there could be a reconfiguration of the hierarchical relationship between the ideal, figurative body and the biological, literal body, this reconfiguration would affect the problem of subjectivity as well. Such a reconfiguration might help inoculate us

against the first strain of anorexic logic, which I encountered in university athletics parading past football players toward the scales. But the second might prove tougher—a kind of Beijing flu. It infects that group of women (and some men as well) who sit in self-imposed silence in the margins of the classroom, or who freeze in frustration and self-abasement in front of computer screens. These women and men feel inadequate to the task of mastering discourse, of "rising" to the occasion of academic debate that is articulated in terms of conquest, domination, or simple one-upsmanship. In order to bring them from the "shadows" of academic discourse into embodiment, we need to change the paradigm that dictates education in general—the ways of reading, writing, and thinking about ideas—so that women and men who are uncomfortable articulating themselves according to male models can really feel they have entered the academy as more than masculine imitations, more than Hegel's "impotent shadows."

I will argue that the persistence of high modernist literature and literary ideals is central to the contemporary quest to reconfigure learning. If we are to change the ways we imagine literature, ideas, the bodies of people in classrooms as well as bodies represented in texts, we need to reexamine modernism and some of its less-discussed assumptions. I hope to show an affinity between "anorexic thinking" and "modernist thinking," and that anorexic logic that produces both. If we are to reclaim the body and recode the systems of logic, the abstract registers we work within, in ways that are integrative rather than exclusionary, we need a pedagogy that has a place for the nonlinear as well as the linear, the literal as well as the figurative, the personal and emotional as well as the logical and the abstract, and the feminine as well as the masculine. We need a pedagogy that values both modes of discourse and that allows persons of both sexes to articulate both in peaceful conversation.^[70] Currently, we remain either locked in the "body" and its registers, "the empirical," or locked in abstract logic, the "theoretical." Good modernists in this particular sense, we have not practically deconstructed the opposition between the empirical and the theoretical. In the academy there remains a violent scar, always in danger of retearing, bifurcating into "girl books" and "boy books," "the canon" and "black books," "women's and minority's issues" and "issues," the practical and the theoretical. As Bordo

emphasizes in "The Feminist as Other," "theoretical" issues are often considered the "real thing," while gender, race, or class issues are considered extra, special, something else, very like the medical school models of the body that designate parts specific to the female body as extra.^[71] There is still an insufficiently questioned relationship of hierarchy and subordination between these registers, a hierarchy that has real effects on real bodies sitting in classrooms every day, as well as on bodies outside of the classroom. It is still a war zone, and there are still political prisoners.