1. The common assumption that the anorexic logic affects only white women has erased the experiences of gay women and women of color who, as members of the dominant culture, may struggle with anorexic thinking as much or sometimes more than white heterosexual women. For example, until recently, medical research and scholarship on eating disorders assumed a white heterosexual female subject.

1. The common assumption that the anorexic logic affects only white women has erased the experiences of gay women and women of color who, as members of the dominant culture, may struggle with anorexic thinking as much or sometimes more than white heterosexual women. For example, until recently, medical research and scholarship on eating disorders assumed a white heterosexual female subject.

2 . I assume that violence differs across culture, race, and class in significant ways. That the victim we see, Catherine, is a senator's daughter makes this case more sensational.

3. It has been pointed out to me that my language here has an unfortunate echo of the anti-abortion propaganda film Silent Scream. My use of this language is not in any way related, and I argue that it is questionable whether or not a fetus can "scream," while it is clear that women can and do.

4. Thanks to Lawrence DeValencia for suggesting The Silence of the Lambs analogy to my project.

5. On connections between eating disorders and sexual abuse, see Susan C. Wooley, "Sexual Abuse and Eating Disorders: The Concealed Debate," in Feminist Perspectives on Eating Disorders , ed. Patricia Fallon, et al. (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), pp. 171-211. Wooley argues that at least 60 percent of women with eating disorders have also been sexually abused and details some of the reasons why this fact isn't discussed more often by professionals.

6. This line is dialogue from the movie. Clarice is explaining to Hannibal what woke her the morning she attempted to rescue the spring lambs headed for slaughter, and what continues to wake her.

7. Morag Macsween, Anorexic Bodies (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 252 .

8. In this formulation I am indebted to Robin Harders.

9. Nike advertisement, Vogue , British ed. (March 1994).

10. In this attempt I owe a great deal to the French feminist tradition and the formulation of écriture feminine , especially Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman , trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press), 1986.

11. See Macsween's conclusion that "anorexia transforms the social meanings of the body . . . an individual transformation of social meaning . . . the individual woman cannot negate a social meaning" ( Anorexic Bodies , p . 250). Also see Becky, W Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), especially chapter 1, on how eating disorders are equally a response to the injustices of racism, classism, and heterosexism as they are responses to gender inequality.

12. See Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep , whose work is groundbreaking for its inclusion of these previously marginalized women. 

13. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993); and Macsween, Anorexic Bodies.

14. Ellen Wiley Todd, "Kenneth Hayes Miller and Reginald Marsh on Fourteenth Street, 1920-1940," in Gender and American History since 1890 , ed. Barbara Melosh (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 127-54.

15. Los Angeles Times , Sunday, December 6, 1992; and Jennefer Shute, Lifesize (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992).

16. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990).

17. Gillian Brown, "Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism," The Yale Journal of Criticism 5, no. 1 (1991), pp. 189-215; Sandra M. Gilbert, "Hunger Pains," University Publishing 8 (fall 1979), pp. 1, 11-12; Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 1979); idem, Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (New York: Basic, 1973); and idem, Conversations with Anorexics , ed. Danita Czyzewski and Melanie A. Suhr (New York: Basic, 1988).

18. William Withey Gull, "Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)," in A Collection of the Published Writings of Willia Withey Gull , ed. Theodore Dyke Acland (London: New Sydenham Society, 1896), pp. 305, 307.

19. Cited in Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 182. There is a dearth of new statistics; inquiries to the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association and other related organizations did not turn up more recent statistics.

20. See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 8-40; Roberta Pollack Seid, Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies (New York: Prentice Hall, 1989), pp. 137-86; Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Perennial Library, 1981), pp. 20-28; Wolf, Beauty Myth , pp. 181-87; Richard Gordon, Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 102-15; and Susan Bordo, "Reading the Slender Body," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science , ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 83-112.

21. Cited in Wolf, Beauty Myth , p. 182.

22. Quoted in Macsween, Anorexic Bodies , p. 247.

23. See Bruch, Golden Cage , especially pp. 15-18, 25-26, 38-39, 58-59, 68-73, 85, 93.

24. René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy , trans. Laurence J. Lafleur (New York: Macmillan, 1985), p. 22.

25. Chernin, Obsession , pp. 146-47.

26. I should add here that the body is also historically associated with nonwhites and labor, significantly complicating the cultural symbology for women of color who are also working class.

27. In anorexia the gendered configuration of the mind/body split is clear. Bruch writes that in her patients "sooner or later a remark about the other self slips out, whether it is 'a dictator who dominates me' . . . or 'the little man who objects when I eat.'. . . When they define this separate aspect, this different person always seems to be a male" ( Golden Cage , p. 58).

28. Quoted in ibid., p. 15.

29. Quoted in ibid., p. 18.

30. Plato, The Symposium , trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1987), pp. 94, 92.

31. Luce Irigaray, "Women on the Market," in This Sex Which is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985). See also her critique of Plato in Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 243-353. See also her provocative analysis of language in je , tu , nous : Toward a Culture of Difference , trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993).

32. C. W F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit , trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), p. 270.

33. Along with Bordo, Wolf, and others, I read anorexia at least partially as a self-sacrifice on the part of women to the masculine philosophical, literary, and popular ideals of Western culture.

34. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right , trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1942), p. 114.

35. Freud is a highly complex and ambiguous figure for this kind of analysis, since some of his insights have been essential to feminist theory in its formulations of female subjectivity and particularly film theory and constructions of the male gaze. This analysis does not preclude the positive aspects of Freud or attempt to reduce all of his theory to the aspects I present here. Instead, I articulate that aspect of Freud, historically determined, that is congruent with the philosophic logic I analyze. Many essays that I cite are highly ambivalent and also emphasize the constructedness of gender along with a more "naturalized" emphasis. The most influential feminist theorist who incorporates Freud's insights in feminist theory is Juliet Mitchell, whose Psychoanalysis and Feminism  (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) launched a school of feminist theory that is one of the most powerful today. A recent example of feminist theory that involves a reinterpretation of Freud is Teresa Brennan, The Interpretation of the Flesh: Freud and Femininity (New York: Routledge, 1992).

36. Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Phillip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), p. 198.

37. In what can only seem like a betrayal to readers who admired The Beauty Myth , in her new book, Fire with Fire (New York: Random, 1993), Wolf argues that "the meaning of being a woman changed forever" in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. According to Wolf, conditions have now "shifted to put much of the attainment of equality in women's own grasp" ( Fire with Fire , xv), calling, in large, sweeping terms, most feminist critiques of patriarchy "victim feminism." Many feminists have interpreted Wolf's positions in Fire with Fire as opportunistic and as an integral part of the backlash that Wolf herself critiqued in The Beauty Myth. See especially bell hooks, Outlaw  Culture: Resisting  Representations (New  York: Routledge, 1994), chap. 8. I agree with hooks's reading.

38. I argue here, as elsewhere, that cultural standards of female beauty in the United States tend to presume whiteness, and that particularly under pressures of assimilation, women of color are likely to be affected by them. Thompson writes how her case studies of women of color and lesbians "reveal the social inequalities that whittle away at a woman's ability to identify her body as her own" ( Hunger So Wide , p. 20), inequalities that include sometimes virulent racism and homophobia, which sometimes cause women to disavow their colored or homosexual bodies, seeing their devalued bodies as the sources of their pain.

39. Nike advertisement, Vogue , (June 1992).

40. In spring 1995, in the popular media a form of backlash appeared that legislates against the strong, successful career woman. Movies that exemplify this backlash, like Disclosure or The Last Seduction , and fashion's return to fifties-style dresses and jackets, along with the appeal to female power in the form of femme fatale sexuality, rather than power in the workplace—all undermine the image of individual female success. This "family values," back-to-the-home trend has been met in the most recent Nike advertisements (for instance in Vanity Fair , March 1995) with text copy that reads, "Pursue pleasure. No matter how damn hard it may be," in an ad that equates working out with pleasure-a radical departure from the individual achievement ethos of the eighties.

41. Self-esteem is the topic of Gloria Steinem's book, The Revolution from Within (Boston: Little, Brown, 1992). Steinem writes that "even I, who had spent the previous dozen years working on external barriers to women's equality, had to admit there were internal ones, too" (p. 3).

42. Barbara Ehrenreich, "The New Anger," (paper presented at the Women's Studies First Annual Regents Lecture, University of California, Irvine, February 10, 1993).

43. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), p. 133.

44. I'm not saying that consumer culture isn't interested in constructing the male body and subjectivity as well. It's just that in the sociohistorical context articulated so clearly by Julia Kristeva—that "a woman, that cannot be : it is even what doesn't fit into being " ("La femme, ce n'est jamais ça," Tel quel 39 [fall 1974])—advertising deploys itself differently to the male or female subject. Since in the postmodern, being as a category is under question, and the construction of the subject through consumer goods fuels the economy, there is no doubt that this analysis would have to include men and the male body (there are males with eating disorders). But the (non)subject is likely to respond differently if one has aligned oneself or been aligned with the position of nonbeing from the beginning.

45. "Blonde Ambition," Flex (April 1994), p. 141.

46. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality , trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Random, 1978), p. 6.

47. Robert Marzec and I came up with the term schizophrenic liberation when struggling to account for the contradictory messages these images presented. Marzec's work on the disinterested subject has been instrumental in helping me think through my own work on the anorexic logic.

48. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), P. 33.

49. See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). The allusion is to systems of signification, which are continually undermined from within, although they try to pin meaning down to a fixed absolute. Therefore, the dense network of cultural meanings, which would seem to fix female bodybuilders, for instance, and to make them readable in a particular way, can always be read in more than one way, leaving some potential for subversion of the dominant cultural logic.

50. Susan Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988), P. 94.

51. Quoted in ibid., p. 105.

52. See especially The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle.

53. I am using "alienation effect" in the Brechtian sense. Brecht defines "alienation effect" as "alienations [that] are designed to free socially-conditioned phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp. . . . a representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar" ( Brecht on Theatre , trans. John Willett [London: Methuen, 1957], p. 192).

54. Noelle Caskey, "Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa," in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives , ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), p. 187.

55. Louise Glück, "Dedication to Hunger," in Descending Figure (New York: Ecco Press, 1980), p. 29.

56. See note 8 above.

57. Eavan Boland, "Anorexic," in Introducing Eavan Boland: Poems (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1981), pp. 52-53.

58. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Vintage, 1987), p. 155.

59. Quoted in Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa," p. 95.

60. See also ibid., p. 92.

61. Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary , s.v. "heresy."

62. Quoted in Chernin, Obsession , p. 195.

63. Webster's Ninth , s.v. "wiles" and "pap."

64. Let me emphasize that the equation between men and abstemiousness is an ideological construct rarely practiced. A reader who read this in draft form protested what seemed like an acceptance on my part of the men-as-less-needy mythology.

65. See also Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 45-92.

66. For a firsthand account of the hunger-strike procedure, see E. Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (London: Longmans, Green, 1931), pp. 301-19, 342-46, 438-54.

67. See, for instance, Wolf, Beauty Myth , pp. 188-91.

68. Writers like Susan Bordo, bell hooks, Michele Wallace, Cornel West, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldua, and Becky W. Thompson are just a few of the many others whose writing attempts to "recover" these bodies. Indeed, the "turn to the personal," although protested, is a large enough movement to draw media attention. See chapter 4.

69. That some female bodies are hated more than others is a point that I should emphasize more fully than I have.

70. Bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge, 1994) contributes significantly to this conversation.

71. Susan Bordo, "The Feminist as Other" (paper presented at the State University of New York, Binghamton, April 3, 1994).

1. Mark Anderson, "Anorexia and Modernism, or How I Learned to Diet in All Directions," Discourse 11.1 (fall-winter 1988-89), pp. 28-41. Maud Ellmann's Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993) is one of the first important books to explore the connection. Her work is, according to the author, "neither a history of starvation nor a work of anthropology, psychoanalysis, or sociology, although it plunders those disciplines at different times. It is best described as a 'phenomenology' in the sense that Gaston Bachelard has used the term, because its aim is not to find the cause of self-starvation but to follow the adventures of its metaphors" (p. 15). Ellmann's work is then about language. She explicitly defines herself against the tradition my own work falls within:

"The body" . . . is an awkward term to use these days because it has become the latest shibboleth of literary theory, particularly west of the Rockies, where essays on the body are churned out of PCs with the same demonic rigor that the bodies of their authors are submitted to the tortures of the gym. Indeed, the theorization of the body has become the academic version of the "workout." In criticism, the cult of the body has arisen in defense against poststructuralism, and especially against the fear that "history" and "real life" have been overlooked in favor of a dangerous Gallic fascination with the signifier. In this context the body has come to represent the last bastion of materiality: if history is nothing but a narrative, ''a tale like any other too often heard," and if the universe is merely an effect of rhetoric, the body seems to stand for an incontestable reality, a throbbing substance in a wilderness of signs. This book, by way of warning, is concerned with dis embodiment," not bodies; with the deconstruction of the flesh; and with writing and starvation as the arts of discarnation. (pp. 3-4)

To the extent that I share some of the concerns that Ellmann mentions, particularly "the fear that 'history' and 'real life' have been overlooked in favor of a dangerous Gallic fascination with the signifier," I stand guilty as charged. Ellmann succinctly characterizes the anxieties of the discourse my work is situated within. I claim, though, that this tendency in literary criticism and in my own work is informed by a deconstructive understanding of "history" and "real life," as well as "the body," and that we are attempting to negotiate what might seem like an impasse between material theories and deconstructive theories. I, too, am specifically concerned with the logic of disembodiment but in a very different sense than Ellmann, for the Western preoccupation with disembodiment in literature, philosophy, psychology, and poststructuralist theory is precisely that logic I have named "anorexic." Ellmann utilizes a narrower definition of the term. Furthermore, as she has perceptively noted and as I have argued, most of us writing on this particular topic are ourselves caught in the grips of its logic, our "essays on the body churned out of PCs with the same demonic rigor that [our] bodies . . . are submitted to [in] the tortures of the gym." My work attempts to theorize the sources and trajectory of that "demonic rigor" to arrive at an understanding of how, in the postmodern economy of the "wilderness of signs," our bodies are produced by those signs in order to negotiate some path of resistance.

2. See Jean-Michel Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's " Cantos " (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 219. Rabate argues that for Pound, although phallic assertion is the "cutting tool" that will eliminate the "bloated [feminine] flesh," it "needs the 'cutting' quality of thought, which dissociates, dissects the 'clots' which become clogs." Rabate interprets this cutting as castration, which then "opens the way to phallic drives." The critical process is the mediator between flesh and phallus as not-flesh. By definition, then, the "feminine" is the flesh that "clogs" and needs to be eliminated before the seminal, phallic creative processes can occur.

3. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century , vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), especially "Tradition and the Female Talent: Modernism and Masculinism," pp. 125-62.

4. See, for instance, Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (New York: Basic, 1973), chaps. 2 and 3; and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), chap. 1, on how the disease cannot be considered as either biological or sociological/cultural in an oppositional way. Such an opposition cannot explain the etiology of anorexia, since anorexia combines the biological, sociological, and cultural in an overdetermined way.

5. The first physician to write about and name anorexia nervosa was Sir William Withey Gull, a prominent British surgeon who discussed the disease in an article in Lancet in 1874. The French physician Charles Lasegue began discussing anorexia in his writings at roughly the same time, but unlike Gull, who confined his discussions of etiology to somatic causes, Lasegue emphasized the psychological dimensions of the disease. Gull did note, however, in a manner typical of Victorian medical discourse that defined female adolescence in terms of hysteria, that "the want of appetite is, I believe, due to a morbid mental state. . . . that mental states may destroy appetite is notorious, and it will be admitted that young women at the ages named are specially obnoxious to mental perversity" ( A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull , ed. Theodore Dyke Acland [London: New Sydenham Society, 1896], p. 311). Many feminist scholars, however, see the disease as concretely expressing the norms demanded of women, which function as a means of social control. For instance, Susan Bordo argues that "many of these behaviors [anorexia and bulimia] are outside the norm. . . . But preoccupation with fat, diet, and slenderness are not. Indeed, such preoccupations may function as one of the most powerful 'normalizing' strategies of our century, ensuring the production of self-monitoring and self-disciplining 'docile bodies,' sensitive to any departure from social norms, and habituated to selfimprovement and transformation in service of these norms" ("Reading the Slender Body," in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science , ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 85). Anorexia, in this argument, is an expression of the culture's deepest pathologies, rather than an individual deviation. See also Susan Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 87-117.

6. See Caroline Walker Bynum, "Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women," Representations 11 (1985), pp. 1-25; and idem., Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987). See also Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Bell, a medievalist, argues that medieval holy women like Catherine of Siena engaged in anorexic behavior patterns like those we see today, creating a psychological continuity in the quest for female liberation from a repressive patriarchy across the centuries. The problem with his argument is that it assumes a fixed female psychology that has remained consistent across the centuries.

7. See Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978).

8. Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 16. See especially the chapter "Ladylike Anorexia: Hunger, Sexuality, and Etiquette in the Nineteenth Century," pp. 12-29.

9. See bell hooks, "Selling Hot Pussy: Representations of Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South  End Press, 1992). Hooks connects the early nineteenth-century construction of Sarah Bartmann to twentieth-century constructions of Josephine Baker and Tina Turner that are based on the same racist logic.

10. Aristotle, De Anima and "On the Generation of Animals," in The Basic Works of Aristotle , ed. Richard McKeon, trans. Arthur Platt (New York: Random, 1941), pp. 555, 561.

11. Hilde Bruch, Conversations with Anorexics , ed. Danita Czyzewski and Melanie A. Suhr (New York: Basic, 1988), p. 120. Subsequent references in this paragraph refer to this text. Bruch's Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 1979) was the first major book on anorexia, and her Eating Disorders (1973) is still referred to as a standard.

12. Richard A. Gordon, Anorexia and Bulimia: The Anatomy of a Social Epidemic (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 83.

13. Frank Lentriccia, Ariel and the Police (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 137.

14. Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970), pp. 88, 92.

15. The idea of bodily renunciation as leading to greater literary production has a romantic heritage. Lord Byron, for example, who in his own time was an enormously influential figure in popular culture, made the struggle between body and mind a central one. According to Brumberg, "Byron starved his body in order to keep his brain clear. He existed on biscuits and soda water for days and took no animal food. According to memoirs written by acquaintances, the poet had a 'horror of fat'; to his mind, fat symbolized lethargy, dullness, and stupidity. Byron feared that if he ate normally he would lose his creativity. Only through abstinence could his mind exercise and improve. In short, Byron was a model of exquisite slenderness and his sensibilities about fat were embraced by legions of young women" ( Fasting Girls , p. 183). This romantic sensibility regarding fat and its relationship to literary productivity is central to the modern conception but becomes increasingly tropological and textual, displaced onto texts. There is a preoccupation in the modern with "becoming text," so that the textual body actually replaces the literal one. This logic was only nascent in the romantic period.

16. Quoted in Anderson, "Anorexia and Modernism," p. 32.

17. Malcolm Pasley, "The Act of Writing and the Text: The Genesis of Kafka's Manuscripts," trans. Susan Lhota, in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle , ed. Mark Anderson (New York: Schocken, 1989), p. 214.

18. See Brumberg, Fasting Girls , especially chap. 3, "The Debate over Fasting Girls."

19. Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist," in Selected Stories of Franz Kafka , trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Modern Library, 1952), p. 188.

20. See Mark Anderson, "Unsigned Letters to Milena Jesenska," in Reading Kafka , pp. 244-45.

21. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 30.

22. In a lecture on Kafka at the University of California, Irvine (April 5, 1993), Professor Gail Hartz said that Kafka "gives us the dust, fleas, and food scraps of twentieth-century life." His writing gives us the repressed material of the modern, but in his life and his philosophy of writing he worked incessantly to repress that materiality.

23. Erich Heller, "Kafka's True Will," in Letters to Felice , by Franz Kafka, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken, 1973), pp. xii-xiii.

24. Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice , p. 304.

25. Jacques Derrida, "The Rhetorics of Cannibalism" (seminar, University of California, Irvine, 1990-91).

26. Quoted in Heller, "Kafka's True Will," p. viii.

27. It is an interesting historical footnote that Kafka says that "secretly I don't believe this illness to be tuberculosis," since it probably wasn't. His journals and letters reveal a long history of difficulty eating, coupled with a pervasive logic that proclaimed the need to transcend the daily aspects of material existence to produce art. Probably, Kafka did suffer from anorexia nervosa and was misdiagnosed as having tuberculosis—a common misdiagnosis often made by medical professionals of the time unfamiliar with anorexia. Specialists in anorexia today have written that Kafka probably suffered from this disease, rather than tuberculosis. See especially Manfred M. Fichter, "The Anorexia Nervosa of Franz Kafka," The International Journal of Eating Disorders , no. 2 (1987), pp. 367-77. I am not primarily interested in whether or not Kafka was in fact an anorexic. Rather, because in my approach I critically reproduce the anorexic logic, I am interested in what belonged to Kafka's mind, not his body. I read the body as an outward sign of a pervasive logic, the body as created by culture and the mind, so that my analytical interests lie primarily in these areas.

28. The various figures I examine can be situated along this spectrum. Eliot, Pound, and Williams participate in failed attempts to eliminate or incorporate "feminine weight"; Kafka is haunted by it; Conrad refuses and then embraces it; and Jean Rhys makes the female experience of embodiment her main subject.

29. Franz Kafka, "The Metamorphosis," in The Complete Stories , ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), p. 139.

30. Reiner Stach, "Kafka's Egoless Woman: Otto Weininger's Sex and Character ," trans. Neil Donahue, in Reading Kafka , pp. 149-69.

31. Quoted in ibid., p. 157.

32. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941 (New York: New Directions, 1950), p. 170.

33. T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land": A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 23, 25. Quotations from both transcript and final versions are from this source.

34. T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday , in "The Waste Land" and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, World, 1962), p. 59.

35. See Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; reprint, New York: Random, 1934).

36. Eliot's preoccupation with female sexuality is historically grounded, for the women's movement of the second decade of the twentieth century made female sexuality a central issue. These first "feminists" were divided: some made suffrage the only issue, while others brought female sexuality and birth control into the foreground. It was a very public and hotly debated topic in all spheres at the time. As Nancy F. Cott writes, "[O]lder suffragists hastened to disavow any connection between the vote for women and sexual promiscuity, for free love was a bogey that anti-suffragists had been warning about for decades. Indeed, anti-suffrage writers of the early 1910's very quickly discerned that Feminism was even more alarming than suffragism because of its combined emphasis on women's economic dependence and sex rights along with the vote. . . . By ancient cultural tradition, the loosing of women's sexual desire from men's control released the fiendish contents of Pandora's box" ( The Grounding of Modern Feminism [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987], p. 44). In his writing, particularly in The Waste Land , Eliot seems often to be reacting to his perceptions of these "fiendish contents."

37. Maud Ellmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (London: Harvester Press, 1987), p. 165.

38. Of course, in the literal, empirical world men have just as many "spreading" bodies as women and can hardly stand for the ideal. In this particular context, I refer to the figurative representation, rather than the literal manifestation.

39. Ezra Pound, "Doggerel Section of Letter to Marianne Moore," in The Gender of Modernism , ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 362-63.

40. Ezra Pound, quoted in Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology , p. 217.

41. See Abelard, Historia calamitatum , in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise , trans. Betty Radice (New York: Penguin, 1974), pp. 57-106.

42. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents , trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), pp. 50-51.

43. See, for instance, Sigmund Freud, "'Civilized' Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness," in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love , ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1963), pp. 20-40, in which Freud argues that the artist is highly sexually active, and that this activity enhances and enables his work. This early piece (1908) contradicts the statement from the much later Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). The early work argues that suppressing the libido results in a great loss of energy that would be freed through activity, and that the "lost energy" due to sexual activity and interaction with women is not "expedient" to the claims of civilization. What I call the anorexic logic of literary modernism combines both positions in that the anorexic who suppresses libido through that very act of suppression figured as fasting (rather than sublimation) frees that energy for a higher form of production.

44. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 193. For the translations of Greek and Latin that appear in this canto, I rely on Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the " Cantos " of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 160-62.

45. Quoted in Bryce Conrad, Refiguring America: A Study of William Carlos Williams's " In the American Grain. " (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990), p. 106.

46. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1950), p. 7-8.

47. The pronoun used here is deliberately "his," for I argue that, since literary modernism sees a privileged male position—that of the anorexic— as the necessary precursor for the production of "true" art, women, stereotyped as nonanorexic, are excluded from the artistic domain.

48. Again I use the masculine pronoun to emphasize that in high modernism  the anorexic position from  which artist creates is continually gendered male.

49. Despite the status of imagism as one of the first identifiable "modernisms," in The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), Hugh Kenner reads it as one of the "clots" in Pound's energies, an anomaly that would be better off excised: "from the directed force and constellated virtu of the 'Osiris' articles, through the pulsating universe of Fenollosa's essay . . . and thence into the Cantos , runs a steady preoccupation with persistently patterned energies. Lodged in that current, an enigmatic stone called 'Imagism' created and continues to create its distracting turbulence" (p. 173). Why imagism is lodged as a stone, is not clear, except that Kenner wishes to claim for Pound a primacy that an association with other imagists like Richard Aldington, H.D. or Amy Lowell would seem in his mind to preclude: "[Imagism] had come to mean very little more than a way of designating short vers libre poems in English. But [Pound's] 'doctrine of the image' . . . remains vital. . . . it is folly to pretend, in the way of historians with books to fill, that [Lowell, H.D., Aldington] were of Pound's stature. Vorticism implied his alliance with his own kind: Gaudier, Lewis" (pp. 178, 191). But the criterion that Kenner uses to establish Pound's higher ''stature" sounds remarkably like the vocabulary associated with imagism. As he reads Pound's "Return," these are some of the words he uses to establish the "true artist": "sharp meters," "sharp images," "imagistically sharp and metrically cut," "sculptured stasis," "fragmentary effect" (pp. 190-91). He claims that Pound's "doctrine of the image," rather than the "technical hygiene" of F S. Flint's imagism, "made possible the Cantos and Paterson , long works that with the work of T. S. Eliot are the Symbolist heritage in English," the post-Symbolist verse of which "Pound's imagism set out to reform by deleting its selfindulgences, intensifying its virtues, and elevating the glimpse into the vision . . . delivering post-Symbolist poetry from its pictorialist impasse" (pp. 183, 185, 186). Here again is the metaphor of midwifery, a birth achieved through cutting, through the circumvention of the feminine as reproductive fat. And here again is a rhetoric (although imagism claimed to be antirhetorical, "objective") of gender enacted in Kenner's reading of Pound, his establishment of Pound as "genius": "deleting . . . self-indulgences, . . . elevating the glimpse into the vision," for "Pound's Imagism is energy, is effort. It does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation. The mind that found 'petals on a wet, black bough' had been active" (p. 186). Pound produces, rather than reproduces, creates something new, rather than merely replicates, implying the old trope of masculine spiritual production, rather than feminine material reproduction. His imagism is active, rather than passive; vital energy, rather than placid stasis; masculine, rather than feminine. His imagism makes it possible for male writers to give birth to ''the Cantos and Paterson ." Never "self-indulgent," never easily "appeased," both words associated with misogynist stereotypes of women, Pound is not content with passively "glimpsing" but must rather elevate that "glimpse into . . . vision." In Kenner's rhetoric, vision is only attainable through a particularly gender-coded deletion of the feminine. On imagism's antirhetorical stance, see John T. Gage, In the Arresting Eye: The Rhetoric of Imagism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981), especially chap. 2.

50. Natan Zach, "Imagism and Vorticism," in Modernism, 1890-1930 , ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 238.

51. Brumberg cites Gilbert and Gubar's discussion of anorexia in The Madwoman in the Attic , as well as Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady , as examples of this tendency to glorify anorexia as a political strategy of resistance to the dominant patriarchal culture. I agree with Brumberg that this is a problematic position for the reasons already cited.

52. William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956), p. 179 (hereafter cited as American Grain ) .

53. Quoted in Conrad, Refiguring America , p. 106.

54. Quoted in ibid.

55. Williams, American Grain. The passage quoted is not located on a numbered page but stands as a kind of epigraph at the beginning of the book before the table of contents. I am assuming that it is placed there as a kind of summary, meant to declare Williams's intentions. While this might then function as a commentary on method, on what has been attempted, it is by no means clear that the essays reveal the "true character" Williams says he seeks. His alternative histories never seem to claim the same status, and his ambivalent stance toward the characters he seems to identify with rather have the effect of offering another point of view without claiming that this view is "truth." Paradoxically, then, while the essays don't seem as uncomplicated as this declared intention, as just another view they also cannot function as the shared ground for community and identity Williams seeks to establish through his newly constructed myths.

56. William Carlos Williams, author's note to Paterson (New York: New Directions), 1963. Page numbers are not given in the author's note to this edition, but the quotation is from the third page of that text.

57. Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," Studies in Entertainment , ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), p. 191.

58. William Carlos Williams, "Queen Anne's Lace," in American Poetry , ed. Gay Wilson Allen, Walter B. Rideout, and James K. Robinson (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 741-42.

1. Albert Guerard, foreword to " Typhoon " and Other Tales , by Joseph Conrad (New York: Signet, 1962), p. vii.

2 . Joseph Conrad, author's note to Heart of Darkness , ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 3. All references are from this critical edition.

3. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), pp. 93, 98.

4. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. 9. On Conrad and narration, see Royal Roussel, The Metaphysics of Darkness (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971); Suresh Ravel, The Art of Failure: Conrad's Fiction (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986); and Edward W. Said, "Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative," in Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad , ed. Ted Billey (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 27-47. Roussel discusses a shift in Conrad's work that derives from the problem raised by the detached narrators like Marlow who insist upon the unreality of existence, the fact that "it is impossible to make a recognition of the self's ephemerality the rationale of its continued existence" (p. 139). Roussel argues that as a result of this impossibility, in the later work Conrad drops the detached narrator and his search for an ontological ground for the subject, attending instead to the "incidents of the surface'' or what I have been referring to as "the personal." It is not that Conrad is no longer "man enough to face the darkness," but rather that his perspective changes to include as valid "the surface" he had formerly wanted to dispense with. I recast the shift from ironic detachment to a kind of political and emotional engagement with "the personal" as a progression from an anorexic logic to one more inclusive of and positively inclined toward things "feminine."

5. J. Hillis Miller, " Heart of Darkness Revisited," in " Heart of Darkness ": A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism , ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), p. 212. Conrad's statement of his goal to "make you see" is from the famous preface to The Nigger of the " Narcissus. "

6. Quoted in Jefferey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1991), p. 150.

7. Joseph Conrad, "Typhoon," in " Typhoon " and Other Tales , p. 250.

8. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York: Penguin Classics, 1988), pp. 244, 242.

9. Quoted in Meyers, Joseph Conrad , p. 165.

10. On this aspect of the women's movement, see Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 41-50. Cott explains that public discussion of female desire and sexuality and its liberation from male control was seen as a threat to the social order: "In the very years that feminists were articulating this threat, the thrill and the fear female sexual assertiveness posed to male control was translated into mass culture by the vamp star of the silent screen, Theda Bara. She reigned supreme from 1913 to 1916, her role emblematic of the simultaneous allure and threat to the social order contained in the female erotic" (pp. 44-45). After centuries of silence the open discussion of the female erotic by women themselves must have contributed to the period's uneasiness about materiality and the body's status, particularly the female body.

11. Roberta Pollack Seid, Never Too Thin: Why Women Are at War with Their Bodies (New York: Prentice Hall, 1989), p. 82.

12. In a seminar on European decadence (University of California, Irvine, 1989), Barbara Spackman emphasized the connection between anxiety about the body's uselessness in the modern context and the futurists, who, in an attempt to save the body from obsolescence, turned the body into a machine.

13. Quoted in Meyers, Joseph Conrad , p. 166.

14. Quoted in ibid., p. 171.

15. On Conrad and his various illnesses, see ibid., pp. 23-28, 104-8, 130-31, 140-41, 258-59; Bernard Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 63 n, 104, 120, 166, 183, 219, 269; and Fredrick R. Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), pp. 46-48, 51-52, 62-63, 68-72, 92-94, 96-97, 111-12, 194-95, 239-41, 284-85, 293-98, 345-46, 423-25, 496-99, 572-79, 667-70, 749-50, 809-10, 903-4.

16. G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters , vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1927), p. 232.

17. The "seminal" analysis of this trope in Western culture is Luce Irigaray's "'Mechanics' of Fluids," in This Sex Which Is Not One , trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 106-18.

18. Aristotle, "On the Generation of Animals," in The Basic Works of Aristotle , ed. Richard McKeon, trans. Arthur Platt (New York: Random, 1941), p. 678.

19. On Poradowski, see Meyers, Joseph Conrad , pp. 93-97; on Jane Anderson, see ibid., pp. 293-311.

20. Meyers, for instance, writes that "Conrad wanted and needed a sacrificial wife and surrogate mother," citing a letter Conrad wrote to an editor after his first son's birth: "I really ought to have a nurse-since my wife must also look after the other child" (ibid., p. 143).

21. Quoted in ibid., p. 142.

22. Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (London: William Heineman, 1926), p. 45.

23. In the Heart of Darkness manuscript included in the Kimbrough edition of that novel, Marlow says, referring to the Roman conquests as opposed to contemporary imperialism, that "the best of them is that they didn't get up pretty fictions about it" (p. 10).

24. On the emergent connection between obesity and the lower classes, Seid writes that "in a curious inversion of popular imagery, the poor and lower classes began to be seen as stocky and plump rather than as thin and undernourished—or rather, plumpness began to be associated more insistently with the lower classes" (Never Too Thin , p. 91). The quotations from Morrell, Woolf, and Wells are from Meyers, Joseph Conrad , p. 144.

25. Quoted in Meyers, Joseph Conrad , p. 226.

26. Ruth L. Nadelhaft, Joseph Conrad (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1991), p. 9.

27. Thomas Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), p. 99.

28. Noelle Caskey, "Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa," in The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), p. 175.

29. According to some studies the average twenty-year-old woman has 28.7 percent body fat, while the average man of the same age has 11 percent; other, more conservative estimates are 22 percent for women and 15 percent for men. My source is Seid, Never Too Thin , p. 175.

30. Often people are so influenced by these codes that husbands write to "Dear Abby" complaining that they love their wives, but that these women are so fat that they will have to get rid of them. An exemplary letter to "Dear Abby," quoted in Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York: Perennial Library, 1981) reads as follows: "My wife gained ten to 15 pounds while pregnant with our son 11 years ago. She has never been able to lose that weight despite many dieting attempts. . . . I weigh the same as when I graduated from college. I have tried every method I can think of to encourage her to lose weight—incentives, insults, praise, punishment, joint exercise, and threats. . . . Otherwise she is a great wife and wonderful mother. I do love her, and have no desire to see our marriage end. However, I cannot accept her as she is no matter how hard I try. . . . This problem is continually on my mind, and I am afraid that a permanent separation will eventually be the result" (pp. 111-12).

31. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 191.

32. Seid notes that the establishment mandate that "thin is in" and furthermore is necessary to national health was one mandate left unquestioned in this country by the counterculture of the sixties (see Never Too Thin , chap. 7). The preference for thinness in Conrad is one ideological formation he leaves unquestioned, while he subjects so many others to scrutiny.

33. On the thin body as signifying an intellectual nature and the relationship between this signification and contemporary anorexia, see Chernin, Obsession , especially, pp. 56-65; Caskey, "Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa," especially, pp. 184-87; and Wolf, Beauty Myth , pp. 179-217.

34. See Seid, Never Too Thin , pp. 81-102.

35. See Hilde Bruch, Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (New York: Basic, 1973), pp. 211-27; and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), chap. 1.

36. On Conrad and race, see Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ," The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977), pp. 782-94; Hunt Hawkins, "The Issue of Racism in Heart of Darkness ," Conradiana 14 (1982), pp. 163-72; and Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London: Macmillan, 1983).

37. Johanna M. Smith, "Too Beautiful Altogether: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness , in " Heart of Darkness ": A Case Study , p. 180.

38. Nina Pelikan Strauss, "The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad's Heart of Darkness ," Novel (winter 1987), pp. 123-37.

39. See Susan Ludvall Brodie, "Conrad's Feminine Perspective," Conradiana 14, no. 2 (1984); Nadelhaft, Joseph Conrad ; Smith, "Too Beautiful Altogether"; Strauss, "Exclusion of the Intended"; and Zohreh T. Sullivan, "Theory for the Untheoretical," College English 53, no. 5 (1991). Brodie and Nadelhaft are sympathetic toward Conrad's portrayal of women in the text, while Smith and Strauss view women's position as "out of it" as the bedrock that upholds the ideology of imperialism.

40. Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,"' in The Purloined Poe, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 28-54.

41. Important feminist analysts of the Victorian and early modern period include Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985); and Sexual Anarchy (New York: Viking, 1990); Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978); and Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington: Univ. of Indiana Press, 1972).

42. My references to Falk are from Joseph Conrad, Tales of East and West , ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Hanover House, 1958), p. 234.

43. John Carlos Rowe has pointed out to me that "old wine" is the sign of aristocracy for the Victorian gentleman, a trace of the landed gentry to which the professional bourgeois gentleman aspired. The wine cellar that preserves the wine is a sign of the firstborn son's inheritance. That this group drinks the "old wine" and refuses "execrable" food is no doubt linked to class pretensions, just as anorexia was originally a disease of the upper class. At the turn of the century, noneating was a sign of refined, upperclass status.

44. "Eating the other" is on my mind from the Jacques Derrida seminar on "The Rhetoric of Cannibalism" (Univ. of California, Irvine, 1990-91).

45. On this metaphor, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987), pp. 260-77; as well as Margaret Atwood, The Edible Woman (New York: Warner Books, 1969).

46. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on Sexuality , in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. 7, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 159.

47. In the later Totem and Taboo , of course, Freud makes a similar historical argument.

48. The best example of this is Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966). See also Meyer, Joseph Conrad.

1. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, The Last Sex: Feminism and Outlaw Bodies (New York: St. Martin's, 1993), p. 12.

2. Judith Kegan Gardiner, " Good Morning , Midnight ; Goodnight, Modernism," Boundary 2, nos. 11 and 12 (fall/winter 1982/83), p. 233.

3. Although inadequate for situating the subject within Rhys's cultural and historical context, some labels from psychology do apply to her life and some of her characters, and have a limited usefulness in explaining one strand of the logic that informs her texts. To explain them using only this vocabulary would be a mistake, however, for it would risk defining a pathological subject, rather than, as Rhys suggests, a subject that, if she is pathological, is made that way by the social forces impinging upon her. As Gardiner writes, "[P]sychological labels fit Rhys and her characters. Beaten as a child, molested as an adolescent, Rhys repeatedly involved herself in painful situations, and her characters share some traits with incest victims. She and her characters are also often depressed, even suicidal, and paranoid about their persecution by neighbors; they may appear as Laingian divided selves or as Horneyan neurotics whose insatiable demands for love drive people away. From the perspective of self-psychology, Rhys and many of her heroes manifest a 'narcissistic personality disorder' with weak sense of self and difficulties with self-esteem. Such people crave mirroring or idealizing relationships in which they feel merged with something more powerful than themselves.... Rhys has seemed paradigmatic of the way that social prescriptions make women 'mad"' (Rhys, Stead, Lessing and the Politics of Empathy [Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989], p. 21). Carole Angier, author of the authoritative biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990) also discusses the psychological diagnosis of Rhys when she reports on her consultation with analysts about her:

The analysts all agreed too on what she was. I put :n my list all her most permanent and most painful feelings. Her sense of being nothing, a ghost, already dead; or else twins, one docile, the other lost in a dark wood. Her constant anxiety . . . her constant battle against depression, which was what the make-up, the clothes, the treats, the drink were all for. Her absolute inability to be alone . . . her inability none the less to ever feel anything but alone: ever to feel any real connection to or understanding of another human being. Her wild changes of mood, hope to despair, exaltation to abasement. . . . her immediate and intense expression of her feelings in her face . . . her inability to contain her very worst feelings, so that her rage and violence burst out even against those she most needed, even to the extent of public humiliation. Her extreme passivity, and her extreme incompetence . . . her extreme emotional need and dependence—which could so suddenly change to extreme opposition and independence. . . . They recognized it all. Jean suffered, they said, from what is now called a borderline personality disorder. This disorder goes back to infancy, to a failure of the relation between mother and child. The child's needs are not met; from the start, therefore, it feels what Jean felt: hostility from the world, and deep, unassuagable rage towards it. And it fails to develop a complete, autonomous self. That is the key: the nothingness where the self should be. That is the nothingness Jean always felt. . . . the doctor's explanation of her personality is surely true; it is illuminating; but it doesn't touch the real mystery. If Jean was a borderline personality of course she couldn't be alone, of course she couldn't control herself or accept control, couldn't act or decide, couldn't do what was hard, above all couldn't accept the evil inside her. And yet she did. She should have been only a cripple, only a drunkard. But she was not. . . . The nothing she so feared, and saw behind and under everything was her own self. But in her writing she herself made it whole (pp. 657-58). I would add that in writing, Rhys made the connection to the social and historical forces—including literary ones—that define women as "nothing," so that while Rhys's "nothing" was a construction she projected upon the outside world, it also was projected on her—and she accepted it. The blame cannot go one way or the other. If Rhys suffered from "borderline personality disorder" (also known as "borderline syndrome"), she shares this with clinical anorexics, for borderline syndrome is one of the central features of anorexia. See Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 21.

4. I stress this point because as I have begun to circulate my work on anorexia among an academic audience, I have found that many of the young women, generally first- or second-year graduate students who were at some point anorexic themselves, have a strong emotional investment in claiming anorexia as a valid social protest. I empathize with their position and, having held that position myself, understand all too well the powerful feelings of frustration and need to claim agency that motivate it. It is, however, not a tenable position, since in an anorexic's "critique," she must first accept the rejection of the feminine that derives from the very standards she ostensibly questions. By taking "absolute control" of her own body, which the cultural matrix tries to define and label for her and uses to label her subjectivity as well, she may well develop anorexia as a protest against the social standards that designate her a "powerless woman." To the extent that this control can only be an agency of negation that ultimately destroys her, however, its political viability is severely limited and is usually cast in terms of individual pathology. Anorexia is a disease enacted in extreme isolation, and that often is part of a competition with other women. The anorexic derives feelings of superiority from her "greater control" and often has much contempt for those women ''weaker" and more feminine than herself (see Bruch, Golden Cage , pp. 79-83). The anorexic acts out bodily the annihilation of female subjectivity she perceives and to this extent "protests" that annihilation, but it is a central feature of the disease that in her protest, she violently rejects those aspects of herself labeled "feminine," the aspects that in the cultural matrix put her in a position of disempowerment. In that rejection she merely repeats the rejection of the feminine that created that position of disempowerment in the first place. This is the anorexic's double bind.

5. Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), p. 27.

6. See Susan Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," in Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988).

7. Rachel Bowlby, "The Impasse: Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight ," in Still Crazy after All These Years: Women, Writing, and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 34.

8. This echoes William Faulkner's designation of himself on the map at the back of Absalom, Absalom! as "sole owner and proprietor" of the fictional universe he has created, Yoknapatawpha County (New York: Vintage, 1986). It is perhaps the same impulse, configured differently according to the subject's social relationship to power, that causes a male author like Faulkner to designate himself "sole owner and proprietor" of a fictional kingdom, while the anorexic designates herself "sole owner and proprietor'' of her flesh, an ownership that is often taken away through medical treatments like forcefeeding. Professor Gabriele Schwab emphasized the connections between force-feeding and rape (American Studies Group, Univ. of California, Irvine, March 12, 1993). This raises the important question that if, as an agency of negation, anorexia is a willed suicide, does the medical establishment have the right to intervene and force-feed patients, intravenously or otherwise? Poststructuralist assumptions aside, to be "sole owner and proprietor" of one's own text is very different than to be "sole owner and proprietor" of one's own body. The social machinery that allows males to express themselves poetically, while women are forced to express themselves physically, is undoubtedly part of what the anorexic expresses through an "agency of negation." In her book Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa and the Person Within (New York: Basic, 1973), Hilde Bruch highlights the ways in which anorexics have an underlying sense of themselves, what I describe as subjectivity as black hole, that is very similar to that expressed in Rhys's novels: "[Anorexics] experience themselves as acting only in response to demands coming from other people . . . as not doing things because they want to. . . . [This] is camouflaged by the enormous negativism and stubborn defiance with which these patients operate, and which makes personal contact so difficult. The indiscriminate nature of rejection reveals it as a desperate cover-up for an undifferentiated sense of helplessness" (p. 254). Anorexics are entirely dependent upon the perceptions of others for a sense of identity: "She felt she could not possibly be fat because nobody would respect her, and she could not exist without respect from people" (p. 259). The underlying issue, Bruch explains, is not loss of weight to fit a particular ideal of beauty but rather "the urgent need to lose weight is a cover-up symptom, expressing an underlying fear of being despised or disregarded, or of not getting or deserving respect. . . . Karen would resort to complaints about her worthlessness and emptiness" (p. 262). Emptiness, which so characterizes the metaphysical horizon of characters in Rhys, characterizes the anorexic horizon as well. Bruch writes of an anorexic similar to Rhys, who in her life and novels expressed a belief in fate: "in Sharon's philosophy (and that of most anorexics) 'fate' directed everybody's life and all she had to do was fulfill it" (p. 263). Repeatedly, Bruch's patients express that "what [they were] afraid of is something [they] called 'emptiness'" (p. 271). Anorexics experience an unrelenting sense of ''emptiness," Bruch writes, and their "drive for achievement . . . precedes the whole syndrome. The noneating and fear of being fat are resorted to after previous efforts at establishing a sense of 'being in control' have failed" (p. 275). Anorexia is a desperate attempt to control a life that feels empty and out of control, because of the lack of agency they sense (characterized by a belief in "fate").

9. Morag Macsween, Anorexic Bodies (London: Routledge, 1993).

10 . Thanks to John Carlos Rowe for providing the concept "agency of negation." Rowe used the term to explain Sethe's action in Toni Morrison's Beloved. Sethe enacts an agency of negation when, confronted with the prospect of slavery—outright ownership of the body and soul—for her child, she negates that ownership by slitting the child's throat. It seems to me that this term also provides the most apt formulation of the anorexic position. Although anorexics are hardly in the position of slaves, the agency of negation combines the idea that the anorexic is enacting a protest against her socially determined position as devalued feminine flesh/emotions with the idea that, although such an act demonstrates a kind of agency, this agency is negative and self-destructive, and so ultimately falls back into the very terms that it protests, since those terms (Hegel's "impotent shadows") define the subject negatively.

11. Jean Rhys, Quartet (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990), p. 186.

12 . Mary Lou Emery, Jean Rhys at "World's End": Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990).

13. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), p. 24. See also Teresa de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory," in The Cultural Studies Reader , ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 1993).

14. The following studies are very powerful readings of Rhys, and I do not pit my own interpretation against them to discredit them. To do so would follow the anorexic logic of literary criticism, which posits that to do a reading yourself, you must first eliminate everyone else's. I would rather situate my work in conversation. I document one particular tendency in Rhys—I do not claim to account for everything. Those studies that persuasively present alternative ways of knowing, reading, and writing in Rhys include Deborah Kelly Kloepfer, The Unspeakable Mother: Forbidden Discourse in Jean Rhys and H.D. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), which articulates the ways in which Rhys's writing "instinctively insists on subverting the premise of language—that to write means to relinquish the mother" (p. 22); Emery, Rhys at " World's End ," which argues that Rhys, through her use of Caribbean culture, "present[s] an alternative to European concepts of character and identity. . . . an isolated and alienated female protagonist vies . . . with a more communal satirical laughter that derives from the Caribbean carnival . . . an exploration of subjectivity that seeks an alternative to that of the European novel" (pp. xii, xiv); Nancy R. Harrison,Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women's Text (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1988), which argues that Rhys "both disrupts the framework of masculine discourse and fills in the gaps in that discourse to expose her own language—our language—and theirs. In this process of exposure she places the 'silent' speech, the 'unsaid things,' center stage. Her writing speaks out loud what is left unsaid, showing us, allowing us to hear, the full resonance of our speech through the gaps, the spaces, the 'holes' in masculine discourse" (p. 53); and Hite, The Other Side of the Story , who shows how "Rhys continually places a marginal character at the center of her fiction and in doing so decenters an inherited narrative structure and undermines the values informing this structure. In particular the novel, a form that emerged with the bourgeoisie and embodies the ethical priorities of this ascendant class, privileges agency'' (p. 25). Hite shows that Rhys shows how those "inherited narrative structures" grant agency to some through the designations of others as "other"—a designation that makes their agency possible.

15. The hunger striker position has been associated with the anorexic position most thoroughly in Susie Orbach, Hunger Strike: The Anorectic's Struggle as a Metaphor for Our Age (New York: Norton, 1988). Orbach's argument, echoed by many others, is that anorexia is a form of female selfexpression that the culture has denied them:

the individual woman's problem—for which anorexia has been the solution—is that despite a socialization process designed to suppress her needs, she has continued to feel her own needs and desires intensely. . . . her anorexia is the daily, even hourly, attempt to keep her needs in check, to keep herself and her desires under wraps. . . . Whenever a woman's spirit has been threatened, she has taken the control of her body as an avenue of self-expression. The anorectic refusal of food is only the latest in a series of woman's attempts at self-assertion which at some point have descended directly upon her body. If woman's body is the site of her protest, then equally the body is the ground on which the attempt for control is fought. (p. 19)

The problem with the parallel between the anorectic's "self-expression" and the hunger striker's is that the hunger strike is a temporary state, a specific strategy with specific goals and is usually undertaken as part of a larger political community vying for change, as with the British suffragettes. The anorexic, by contrast, is obsessively alone, cutting herself off from all contact with others. Her struggle, and I agree it is a political struggle, is directed toward herself, not at the system that has produced the necessity to protest in the first place. Unlike the hunger striker who openly questions the standards of the dominant culture, the anorectic has internalized those standards to a radical degree. Even if she makes use of an agency of negation and defies the powerless woman position the cultural matrix has assigned her, in her defiance of that position she accepts the pejorative definition of the feminine and attempts to excise it, to distance herself from it—precisely the opposite of the suffragettes who struggled to empower women through the vote.

16. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 162. In Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988), Joan Jacobs Brumberg points out that the problem with this statement is that it "obscures the real distinctions between conscious political strategies involving refusal of food until a goal is reached and forms of food refusal that are unrelentingly self-destructive" (p. 293). Since the anorexic position accepts the pejorative definition of the feminine/female body and protests an identification with that body, rather than the definition that defines it pejoratively, it is very different from the hunger strike, which protested the definitions of women and the infringement upon their rights that the definitions created.

17. For an excellent reading of the ways in which Rhys makes the relationships between gender and genre clear, exposing who is and who is not authorized as a "proper" subject for literature, and whose voices the literary tradition erases, see Hite, "Writing in the Margins: Jean Rhys," in Other Side of the Story , pp. 19-54.

18. As representative of the first, more critical view, see A. Alvarez, "Down and Out in Paris and London," The New York Review of Books 37, no. 15 (October 10 , 1991). Enthusiastic feminist readings include Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Woman's Text , which argues that "it matters not if what her heroine narrators say is unsuitable for today's more 'liberated' woman: the recording of a woman's unspoken response within the set framework of masculine speech or discourse is the point. . . . Rhys shows us the conversation, the dialogue, between the powerful and the powerless. She displays the use of language as a tool of repression" (pp. 63, 68). Harrison's point is that the female half of the dialogue or conversation, usually equated with the personal, is what is usually cut out of literature, since traditional literary standards do not value the inclusion of her voice. Rhys, she argues, is a pioneer in breaking those traditions and restoring the female voice to literature.

19. To unproblematically conflate Rhys with her heroines, as well as to assume that the heroines are all the same woman and that this woman is Rhys, has been a problem in Rhys criticism. As Hite writes, "[M]any feminist critics have salvaged [Rhys's] characters by identifying them with the author, and in the process have turned Rhys's writing into compulsive self-revelation, a by-product of therapy. . . . to make biography the principle that governs interpretation of her works is to make Rhys unable to control the form and ideology of her own text. . . . Rhys in no way wrote five novels about the same woman; she did write about five women in analogous situations" ( Other Side , p. 22). Despite the tendency in recent feminist criticism to attempt to go beyond the notion of agency, critics always return to this idea. To make Rhys able "to control the form and ideology of her own text" is to grant her a form of agency. Agency is a notion that, at this particular time, I think it is important to retain, since the "real" of the social and political relations we negotiate daily is still very much informed by it.

20. Angier writes,

I think Jean was the baby they had to assuage their grief over the loss of her sister. Often, perhaps mostly, this works, and pulls the mother back into life. But sometimes it doesn't. Then there is a phenomenon which doctors also recognize: what can happen to a child with a mourning mother. It can be left with a lifelong sense of loss and emptiness, of being wanted by no one and belonging nowhere; of being nothing, not really existing at all. . . . It must go back to her mother, who mourned her dead sister and preferred the living one to her. . . . from the beginning she was unhealable, a stranger on the face of the earth and full of rage. ( Jean Rhys , 11, 658)

While this is a possible explanation for some aspects of Rhys's life, it seems reductive and somewhat reactionary to attribute everything to failed mother love—blame it on the mother!

21. Kloepfer, Unspeakable Mother ; and Lori Lawson, "Mirror and Madness: A Lacanian Analysis of the Feminine Subject in Wide Sargasso Sea ," Jean Rhys Review 4, no. 2 (1991), pp. 19-27. Emery offers a different interpretation than the dominant one that Rhys's writings express a longing for a nurturing, maternal influence: "Rhys's characters, especially Antoinette and Anna, discover new sources for identity and kinship through spiritual communities of women descended from Caribbean slave society. Rather than centering their personalities, such kinship ties fulfill their characters by replacing their multiplicitous selves within the folk history of a pluralistic culture" ( Rhys at World's End ," p. 128).

22. Angier notes that, unlike the way Jean always told it, "when she defied her family, when she deceitfully, obstinately insisted on becoming a chorus girl, it wasn't because her mother didn't want her back, and was relieved she'd be earning her own living: it was because she wanted to, and her father let her ( Jean Rhys , p. 52).

23. Alvarez, "Down and Out," p. 43. Alvarez's piece is a review of the Angier biography and demonstrates an extraordinary blindness to the ways in which gender affected Rhys's life. He writes, for instance, that "if you set [Rhys] against America's long line of alcoholic writers who managed to keep a canny grip on their careers, despite their bad habits, you begin to understand both the degree of Rhys's self-destructive rage and helplessness, and her lack of any sense of herself as an artist" (p. 42). "America's long line of alcoholic writers" is, of course, almost exclusively male. This statement completely disregards the ways in which the situation for women writers was drastically different—Rhys "lacked any sense of herself as an artist,'' because for most of her life, she was not treated like one. As Rhys put it herself in Good Morning, Midnight (New York: Norton, 1986 [hereafter cited as GMM ]): "Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale' or 'You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming.' Of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man" (p. 161). Alvarez demonstrates a little anorexic logic himself: "Her prose was pure and self-denying and it kept very close to the facts of her life. In doing so, it distilled them, shaped them, made them seem inevitable. But the facts behind the art are shabby and demeaning" ("Down and Out," p. 43). "Art" is "pure and self-denying"; "life" (particularly a woman's life?) is "shabby and demeaning." Alvarez goes further: "Rhys was right when she said that only through writing could she earn death. In all other ways, her life was monstrous" (p. 43). I'm reminded here of the prim, moralistic language used to describe Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (New York: Bantam, 1987): "What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight tell: it grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face" (p. 278). Designated as a "monster" (many in Rhys's own time, as well as Alvarez, have fixed her with this label), Rhys turns to this "fellow monster," Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre , and tells her side of the story in Wide Sargasso Sea —a text that clearly shows where labels like "monster" come from, which have little to do with the "essence" of the one so called.

24. On Jean's imprisonment for an assault charge, see Angier, Jean Rhys , pp. 445-47. On Rhys and the lack of critical distance between her life and her fiction, see any of the critics cited above. Presence or absence of critical distance is an ongoing controversy in Rhys criticism.

25. The definitive biography is Carol Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work , cited above, n. 3. The letters are collected in Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly, eds., Jean Rhys Letters (London: André Deutsch, 1984). A feature of much recent criticism is an attack on the "autobiographical" argument. As Veronica Marie Gregg writes in "Jean Rhys and Modernism: A Different Voice" ( Jean Rhys Review 1, no. 2 [spring 1987], pp. 30-46), "[O]ne consistent feature of much of the criticism is the obliteration of the dividing line between the author and the critics' interpretation of her characters and themes. Her work is seen as minor, narrow, personal, sordid even, with little connection to anything outside of itself and the author's reality'' (p. 30). I contend that both critical traditions get it wrong. The first, in devaluing autobiography, is decidedly New Critical in orientation, but the second, represented here, is also problematic in that Rhys, more than many writers, does invite a collapse "of the dividing line between author" and her characters and themes. She writes almost exclusively from her own experience and makes little attempt to go beyond her interpretation of the events in her life. While this is not necessarily a basis for criticism, we cannot turn around and separate Rhys too much from her work. To do so is to mystify and elevate the author above "real life." Since the material effects of that life on a disempowered subject is Rhys's content, we run the risk of missing the real personal, emotional urgency that informs her texts and reducing them to the kind of formalistic study that excises the biography from the realm of criticism in the first place. My approach lies somewhere between these two.

26. Ford Madox Ford, preface to The Left Bank , by Jean Rhys (London: Jonathan Cape, 1927). The University of California library still carries this edition, and it may be out of print. Most of the stories in that volume are reprinted in Jean Rhys, The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), hereafter cited as CSS.

27. Alicia Borinsky, "Jean Rhys: Poses of the Woman as Guest," in The Female Body in Western Culture , ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 288-302.

28. Octavio Paz, "The Sons of La Malinche," in The Labyrinth of Solitude (New York: Grove Press, 1961); rpt. as The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1985), p. 86.

29 . Because the anorexic defines herself through a rejection of qualities conventionally named "feminine" and renounces the feminine subject position, she is usually male identified (see chapter 1). Not one of Rhys's heroines is male identified, but several of her representations of the femme convenable are and to that extent share anorexic features, even though they don't starve themselves.

30. Jean Rhys, "Illusion," in Left Bank , p. 29 . All text references to "Illusion" are from this collection.

31. Although this passage, taken out of context, seems to suggest a lesbianism in Miss Bruce, this does not seem the point of the story. The emphasis is on, as quoted earlier, Miss Bruce's ability, given her financial independence and chosen profession, to look at women from the perspective of the male gaze: "she would look appraisingly with the artist's eye and make a suitably critical remark" ( CSS , p. 1).

32. Please see Bruch's comments on the anorexics' senses of emptiness in note 8 of this chapter. A black hole is defined as "a hypothetical invisible region in space with a small diameter and intense gravitational field that is held to be caused by the collapse of a massive star" ( Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary , s.v., "black hole"). As such, the "black hole exists as a powerful vortex," waiting to suck anything and everything into its nothingness, its absence or lack that was once a powerful presence. By analogy the black hole functions as a persuasive metaphor for the traditional constitution of female subjectivity vis-à-vis the male, as analyzed in chapter 1.

33. Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (New York: Harper, 1979), pp. 118, 131.

34. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (New York: Carroll and Graf, 199) , pp. 146-47.

35. See Emery, Rhys at " World's End ," who argues that the question of "where" instead of "who" emphasizes the importance of context or place in the constitution of the self in Rhys (p. 38).

36. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness , ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 69.

37. Critics like Emery have also connected Rhys's sense of alienation with the loss of her Caribbean heritage. Emery's work suggests that the interpretive framework I employ here comes from "the mainly European aesthetic, moral, and psychological standards I believe have operated to misread . . . Rhys's writing [, which] challenges those standards." She argues that Rhys "moves away from European and toward Caribbean cultural values . . . presenting an alternative to European concepts of character and identity From the vision of this alternative, evaluations of Rhys's protagonists as passive . . . no longer hold; instead, we can perceive their efforts at dialogue, plural identities, and community" ( Rhys at "World's End ," p. xii). While I agree with Emery's analysis of the dialogic nature of Rhys's writing, which she relates to the carnival traditions of the Caribbean, I argue that the European and Caribbean traditions are not as opposed in Rhys's work as Emery seems to suggest here. If the heroines, through their language, do present "an alternative to European concepts of character and identity," the latter presumably not defined by agency, then that "alternative" cannot be fully extricated from the terms of the European tradition, because it occurs in indisassociable relation with the European and struggles against that more dominant definition. There are moments, I agree, where the texts seem to envision an alternative and a possible way out, but those moments seem to operate like Julia's flame and "shoot up, having reached nothing." Most often the texts can envision no way out, as in Sasha's dream in Good Morning , Midnight:

I am in the passage of a tube station in London. Many people are in front of me; many people are behind me. Everywhere there are placards printed in red letters: This Way to the Exhibition. But I don't want the way to the exhibition—I want the way out. There are passages to the right and passages to the left, but no exit sign. Everywhere the fingers point and the placards read: This Way to the Exhibition. . . . I touch the shoulder of the man walking in front of me. I say: "I want the way out." But he points to the placards and his hand is made of steel. I walk along with my head bent, very ashamed, thinking: "Just like me—always wanting to be different from other people." (p. 13)

Sasha is "different" because she "want[s a] way out," but neither she nor any of the other heroines ever find one, with the exception of Antoinette, who in destroying Thornfield Hall destroys herself. I argue that because Rhys shares an anorexic mode of thought, although she does protest "things as they are" and seeks alternatives, she is never very good at finding "the way out," because she is fully complicit with the terms she questions. It is, I think, very difficult to find any real sense of community, especially for the heroines, except in a limited way in Wide Sargasso Sea.

38. "Buy" in a literal sense as well, since a large part of the ability to construct oneself as a sexual object comes from the ability to purchase the commodities to create the right image: clothes, makeup, body, shoes, and so on.

39. Jean Rhys, Voyage in the Dark (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 76.

40. Camille Paglia is quoted in Kevin Sessums, "Stone Goddess," Vanity Fair 56, no. 4 (April 1993), p. 202. In a full-page photo featuring Sharon Stone's legs, the writing under the photo, which takes up a good deal of space, proclaims, "She has created a brand-new old-fashioned screen siren: a goddamn goddess for the postfeminist era" (p. 160). "Postfeminist"? It is almost as if feminism never happened, as if the devastating analysis of the mythology of women's "sexual power" had never taken place.

41. Race and class often exacerbate and further complicate the trajectory Rhys's story describes.

42. This material is quoted or paraphrased from Rhys's diary, the "Black Exercise Book," by Angier in her recent biography Jean Rhys , pp. 26-29.

43. Quoted in ibid., p. 27.

44. These passages from Rhys's diary are quoted in ibid., pp. 28, 29.

45. In spite of what would seem the nearly self-evident valence of this particular assertion, a number of women calling themselves "feminists" have recently resurrected the femme fatale as an empowering subject position for women. Disturbing assertions of "female power" include Naomi Wolfs new book, Fire with Fire, in which she refutes virtually all her insights in The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used against Women (New York: Morrow, 1991). In Fire with Fire (New York: Random, 1993) Wolf claims that the feminist critique of beauty and male power is part of the dated ethos of so-called victim feminism, and that we are now in a more progressive era of power feminism, where issues like sexual harassment are moot because American women are now "the political ruling class—probably the only ruling class ever to be unaware of their status" (p. xv). In an article dedicated to disarming "feminists [who] found Basic Instinct and [Sharon] Stone's role as the bisexual killer in it offensive," Wolf also argues that in this film, Stone is a ''complex, compelling, Nietzschean Uberfräulein who owns everything about her own power" (Sessums, "Stone Goddess," p. 202).

46. The "postmodern body" was a feature in Vanity Fair (March 1993), pp. 196-99. The Guess? ads refer to a series that appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine every Sunday in the winter and spring of 1993.

47 . Webster's , s.v. "bad."

48. A contemporary hard rock band headed by Courtney Love pokes fun at this old cultural designation of women as lack, biological and otherwise, by calling themselves Hole.

49. Another powerful example of the role that appearance and male attention plays in female identity construction is Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea (New York: Norton, 1982). Imprisoned in the attic, she says that "there is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now. . . . what am I doing in this place and who am I?" (p. 180). Without the mirror, to a certain extent it is impossible to know who she is, what she is "like," because that identity is dependent on reflection.

50. Of course, Rhys herself, through writing her stories and novels, was not in a position of silence. However, public response and the critical tradition that treated her for a long time in the same way—praising her style but condemning her "sordid subject matter"—repeated the same violent silencing enacted upon her by "Mr. Howard" or whoever the man really was. Since she was condemned for speaking about the relationships between power, sex, violence, and gender, the critical tradition metaphorically repeated the original violation.

51. A good collection of scholarly essays on the Clarence Thomas hearings is Toni Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon, 1992).

52. Public attitude toward sexual harassment has recently become characterized by an almost violent ambivalence. There is the wave of so-called power feminist texts that claim sexual harassment is just another way to designate women as "victims" (Katie Roiphe's Morning After: Fear, Sex, and Feminism on College Campuses [New York: Little, Brown, 1993], which also deals with date rape, is a good example), and David Mamet's play Oleanna (New York: Random, 1993), on stages throughout the country, must be read as ambivalent. While the play is effective in conveying the clash in points of view that so often characterizes sexual harassment, it also seems fundamentally wrongheaded in that it neutralizes the sexual register, focusing on the power dynamic of the teacher-student relationship in such a way that sex, gender construction, and male and female identity construction aren't really part of the issue. This fundamentally misconstrues the problem, deflecting public attention from the real issues in all of their complications.

53. Many experiences of harassment are given voice in The Lecherous Professor: Sexual Harassment on Campus , ed. Billie Wright Dziech and Linda Weiner (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990). Furthermore, many contemporary women writers focus on experiences of sexual abuse, among them, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970); and Jane Smiley in A Thousand Acres (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991).

54. In moving from Rhys's text to my own experience in order to construct a feminist frame, I am undoubtedly guilty of "misinterpreting [Rhys's] intentions," as Angier reports on the feminist "misuse" of Rhys:

America was ready now for [ Good Morning, Midnight ]: especially American women. No sooner had one critic suggested that [the book] might become a "strong weapon in the current and growing movement toward women's liberation" than another used it in exactly that way. Now the only thing Jean liked about feminists was teasing them. . . . She stood outside the women's movement as she stood outside everything. Nevertheless they were right to hail her as a champion. Her novels explored the pain (and pleasures) of female dependency with great insight and honesty. . . . from now on the women's movement would increasingly appropriate her and misinterpret her intentions. But though she meant only to explore her own alienation and oppression, not women's in general, despite herself she did have a great deal to contribute to that wider question. ( Jean Rhys , pp. 596-97)

As Rhys's text stands as a cornerstone in an examination of the material ways in which female subjectivity becomes constructed pejoratively from within, I am willing to "misinterpret her intentions" and draw parallels between her experience and my own, with the assumption that similar incidents and subjectivities characterize the lives of many women.

Although it is beyond the scope of the analysis here, an examination of the issue of sexual harassment should also investigate the problem of the female professor and her relation to her students. The configuration is different, since a culturally disempowered person is placed in a position of authority, thus to some extent neutralizing her disempowerment in relation to a male student, but this doesn't grant her the freedom to abuse that power. The relation of a female professor to a female student is more complicated.

55. This dialogue interestingly echoes the exchange between Rochester and Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea. She asks him, "Why did you make me want to live?" and he responds, "[B]ecause I wanted to, isn't that enough?" (p. 92).

56. Coco the parrot in Wide Sargasso Sea has his wings clipped by Mr. Mason and is used later in the novel as a figure for both Antoinette and her mother, Annette.

57. Again, see Wolf's Fire with Fire , for an argument that could be used to accuse me of "whining" and making women look "weak." What I hope to show, however, is that it's a more complicated question that the simple binary of power/victim. It works both ways. In Getting Personal (New York: Routledge, 1991), Nancy K. Miller writes that "women on college campuses live in a climate of authorized sexual harassment" (p. 19), by which she means that harassment is usual, and I hope to have demonstrated that this is the case. Since harassment is so much a part of ordinary experience, questions of women's empowerment are more complicated than simply "taking control.''

58. See, for instance, Angier,Jean Rhys , pp. 525-67; and Jane Neide Ashcome, "Two Modernisms: The Novels of Jean Rhys," Jean Rhys Review 2, no. 2 (spring 1988), p. 26. Hite asserts that "[i]f Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea has proved by far the most attractive and sympathetic of Rhys's protagonists, the attraction and sympathy are in many respects due to the historical documentation of the novel, to the fact that Antoinette is 'emblematic of an entire way of life,' as [Joyce Carol] Oates observes" ( Other Side , p. 41).

59. On the difference between metaphoric and metonymic presentations in modernist style, see David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Topology of Modern Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977).

60. Joyce Carol Oates, introduction to Jane Eyre , by Charlotte Bronte, p. xvi.

61. In Wuthering Heights , of course, both Catherine and Heathcliff starve themselves to death, but that is another chapter.

62. One of the provisional titles for Wide Sargasso Sea was The Two Mrs. Rochesters.

63. Just recently (April 1993), Fine Line Features released a film version of Wide Sargasso Sea directed by John Duigan, produced by Jan Sharp, with the screenplay by Jan Sharp, Carole Angier (Rhys's biographer), and John Duigan. The film stars the model Karina Lombard, in her first movie role, as Antoinette, and Nathaniel Parker as Rochester. The casting of Lombard seems, to me, at the center of everything that goes wrong in the movie. Because Lombard is, at least at this juncture, a model, not an actress, her performance is singularly wooden and lacking in motivation. Because any understanding of Rhys's text requires a heroine who is unusually spiritually alive, so that her spiritual death at Rochester's hands is that much more horrifying, Lombard was a bad choice. Her beauty is essentially decorative, with nothing to back it up. Furthermore, in the film, since the "death" conversations coincide with lovemaking, which they do not in the novel, their meaning is obscured. As Terrence Rafferty, a reviewer for the New Yorker writes, " Wide Sargasso Sea is so serenely paced and so envelopingly lovely to watch that you may not realize until the end that it is, in the deepest sense, a horror movie—a devastatingly intimate portrayal of the relationship between a monster and his victim. In Rochester the movie gives us a character who progresses from desire to terror to cold, repressive violence: we see the evolution of the impulse to enslave" ([April 19, 1993], p. 111). What the movie gets right is Rochester's sense of entrapment, visually enacted by dream sequences of underwater entanglement in the infamous sargasso that becomes, in his mind, a metaphor for Antoinette. What it gets wrong is the complexity of her character and the extent of her annihilation.

64. At points in this writing I have paused and considered whether I am committing the sin of a characterological analysis, making the fatal mistake of discussing characters as if they were people, rather than linguistic constructs. I have decided that the critical insistence on not talking about characters as if they were people is part of the anorexic logic that depersonalizes them and keeps us from learning the very human lessons they teach.

65. Susan Bordo, "Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture," Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance , ed. Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1988), p. 106.

66. Emery discusses an Amerindian legend about the fight between native Arawaks and Caribs. The Arawaks take refuge in a tree to which the Caribs set fire, burning the Arawaks but converting them to sparks that rise into the sky and become the Pleiades. Hence, Emery argues that Antoinette commits the crime "not of suicide, but of flight" ( Rhys at " World's End ," pp. 58, 59).

67. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4.

68. Quoted in Hite, Other Side , p. 33.

69. See Adam Begley, "The I's Have It: Duke's 'Moi' Critics Expose Themselves," Lingua Franca (April 1994), pp. 54-59.