Dear friends,
The November issue of Desk Notes will be on its way to you very soon. In the meantime, I thought I’d send a little something extra this month to mark the release of Sebastián Lelio’s The Wonder - a slow-burn drama about a fasting girl and her nurse set in 1860s Ireland. In this ten minute read, I explore the lives of the real fasting girls behind the story. If you enjoy this deep dive into social history, please come and say hello on my history themed instagram page.
Thank you for reading,
Natalie
The Wonder directed by Sebastián Lelio, available on Netflix from 16 November 2022
In rural Ireland, eleven year old Anna claims she hasn’t eaten in four months. The public are fascinated. The press are sceptical. No-one can live without food. Is Anna a medical marvel? A miracle? Or a fraud? A board of local dignitaries - all older men - appoint a twenty-four hour watch to observe her. The Wonder is co-written by Emma Donoghue, adapted from her own novel and heavily inspired by true events. In the nineteenth century a succession of ‘fasting girls’ captivated the public imagination. Not all of them were young, but they were all infantilised as ‘girls’ and characterised by the medical profession as fraudulent attention seekers suffering from ‘simulative hysteria’.
In 1869, Sarah Jacobs became known to the public as ‘the Welsh fasting girl’. Her family claimed she had been fasting for two years and she was soon famous. Sarah was visited by the curious and the credulous; ‘novelty hunters’ who left money and gifts. Many saw her as evidence of a miracle. The mania stoked by newspapers infuriated rational, scientific men. A committee of clergymen and doctors believed the only way to resolve the issue was with an inquiry, submitting Sarah to a twenty-four hour watch conducted by experienced nurses from Guy’s Hospital. Intense scrutiny of this kind had only two likely results: either the patient’s deception would be exposed; or she would continue to maintain appearances (through fear, pride, or a mistaken belief in her own abilities) and starve. Within two weeks of close observation Sarah’s health rapidly declined and she died. In 1870, her post mortem found death by exhaustion and her parents were arrested for manslaughter.
“Science has been fully vindicated; the fasting girl has been exposed; and the physiological truth, that nobody can live without food, is triumphantly confirmed. So far satisfactory; but before scientific men rub their hands in joy… perhaps it would be well to concentrate attention on the fact that the life of a girl of thirteen years of age has been cruelly sacrificed.”
These were the words of The Scotsman in the days following Sarah’s death. Her father was eventually given twelve months hard labour. Her mother just six (the court found she had acted under the control of her husband). The Scotsman argued that Sarah’s death might have been avoided: “What was the inquiry to prove it might be asked and for whose benefit was it conducted?” Could the watch have been ended when it was obvious Sarah was dying, and before it was too late? Should the doctors have removed her from the family home and given her medical care? Surely her rapidly declining health was proof enough that the fasting claims were untrue? The Scotsman was clear:
“The nurses, also, acted a little more faithfully than humanely. For is there not in the following extract from their diary something that might make hearts of marble bleed? — “I consulted, because I thought Sarah was dying. I told the father and mother to get near the bed to her, but I still watched to see they gave her nothing.” Surely, will be the reflection that occurs at this passage, to prevent a girl known to be dying of starvation from receiving food, whether openly or in an underhand way, was fidelity with which few will sympathise. Is not zeal to expose a fraud a little too officious when it kills a girl in order to prove she was an imposter?”
The female body had become the site of an intense, patriarchal battle between religion and science: the locus of a struggle for cultural leadership. As Britain became increasingly secularised, many sought the ‘truth’ of fasting in medicine and pseudo-science. Did fasting girls have legitimate medical problems affecting their throats and stomachs? Or could science explain how they ‘lived on air’? Doctors agreed it was possible to survive on very little, particularly if the patient was sedentary - which explains how many ‘fasting girls’ lived so long - but total abstinence from nourishment could not be survived beyond a short period of around ten days. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, fasting for brief periods was still considered a legitimate way to express devotion or ask forgiveness, but special enthusiasm was reserved for living miracles like Sarah. In her book, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, Joan Jacob Brumberg explores how Victorian doctors began redefining these acts of, “personal piety” as “symptoms of disease.” By the end of the century, religious motives for fasting were rarely volunteered:
“Food refusal because of so-called divine empowerment became so infrequent that it was easily cast as a form of aberrant behaviour by the emerging psychiatric specialties. In 1896 a physician confidently observed, “At the present day, religious fervour accounts for but few of our remarkable instances of abstinence, most of them being due to some form of nervous disorder, varying from hysteria and melancholia to absolute insanity.” By 1910 the religious delusionary had disappeared entirely from classifications of malnourished individuals. This development suggests that the locus of appetite control and food-refusing behaviour had moved from the religious realm to the secular: patients were simply not articulating reasons of faith when they did not eat.”
Newspapers were at the heart of this cultural shift towards science. For Brumberg, newspapers, “provided physicians with the opportunity to demonstrate their virtuosity as diagnosticians and their rhetorical power as spokespersons for their scientific perspective.” The diaries of the nurses sent to observe Sarah were published in the press, recording her daily activity and state of mind, along with her bladder and bowel movements. In 1869, Doctor Fowler, the district medical officer for the East London Union, visited Sarah and sent his notes in a letter to the Times. It was reprinted by regional newspapers throughout Britain, making a case for medical doctors as professional experts whose knowledge in the treatment of fasting girls could not be matched.
“The cunning stratagems and deceptions sometimes practiced by young girls afflicted with this form of hysteria are well known to medical men, though not generally credited by nonprofessionals,” wrote Fowler. “Being made an object of curiosity, sympathy, and profit is not only totally antagonistic to this girl’s recovery, but also renders it extremely difficult for a medical man to determine how much of the symptoms is the result of a morbid perversion of will, and how much is the product of intentional deceit.”
Fasting girls now belonged to medical science, not religion. Upon Sarah’s death the Times declared that, “Such an instance shows how long any pretence, however unnatural, may be credited and maintained; but it also shows that, however skilfully practised, it can be detected by duly qualified observers.” When religious motives were proffered, this excessive piety was blamed for inducing a medical condition known as ‘simulative hysteria’ to which young women were particularly vulnerable. Doctor Fowler himself wrote that, “During the last parliamentary session we heard a great deal of the influences of the ministers of religion, and the power of the territorial aristocracy in Wales.” The Scotsman speculated that:
“The books which [Sarah Jacobs] was fond of perusing are not stated; but a mind so constituted is not likely to have selected a very high class, and there is too much reason to conjecture that she may have met with books the indiscreet authors of which would, unintentionally perhaps, persuade her that three meals a day was a gross gratification of carnal appetites, and the eschewing of dinner a defying of Satan. Dr Maudsley, well qualified to speak on these matters, has testified to the enormous amount of mischief done to weak minds by indiscreet enthusiasts writing books full of loose, violent, and exciting language.”
This was a popular view. Biological determinism dismissed women as weak minded and vulnerable; a result of their unstable reproductive systems. Adolescence was an especially risky time. A favourite of women, circulating libraries were careful about the books they stocked. In The Victorian Novel, Kate Flint explains that some libraries, “went so far as to ban modern novels entirely: librarians in Newcastle upon Tyne feared that if they were to allow them on their shelves, “their library would be flooded by unmitigated trash.”” The most popular circulating library, Mudie’s, created an image of middle-class exclusivity by carefully curating a catalogue of titles that were considered morally ‘safe’ for women and children, reassuring their concerned husbands and fathers. The novel was in its infancy and the private act of reading was still considered dangerous. “Withdrawn from anything outside the text, immersed in a private imaginative world,” the reader's ideas, writes Flint, “could not be policed.” Brumberg explains how the work of Lord Byron, who was notorious for dieting, was condemned by the Victorian press:
“Adults, especially physicians, lamented Byron’s influence on youthful Victorians. In addition to encouraging melancholia and emotional volatility. Byronsim had consequence for the eating habits of girls. In Britain, “the dread of being fat weighed like an incubus” on Romantic youngsters who consumed vinegar “to produce thinness” and swallowed rice “to cause the complexion to become paler.” According to American George Beard, “our young ladies live all their growing girlhood in semi-starvation” because of a fear of “incurring the horror of disciples of Lord Byron.” Byronic youth, in imitation of their idol, disparaged fat of any kind, a practice which advice writers found detrimental to their good health.”
In a reminder that very little changes, just this week the trend for ‘skinniness’ has been splashed across the headlines. Eva Wiseman, columnist for The Observer Magazine, charged the body positivity movement with failing to run deep enough:
“On TikTok, the popularity of searches such as “heroin chic body” has led to further brittle observations that “thin is in” – the low-rise jean requires a low BMI, the baby tee requires, well, no tea at all. Heroin chic, of course, was the fashionable body shape of the 1990s, its outline drawn faintly in charcoal, the curves small caves, the angles sharp, the CK1 smell of liquid melancholy. Current beauty trends lean in the same direction: makeup tutorials show how to fake under-eye circles, or how to look like you’ve been crying using light glitter and blush. The makeup speeds up the process, a kind of diet pill for the skin.”
The association between illness and beauty is not new. In her book, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion and Disease, Carolyn Day reveals how tuberculosis, “a disease characterised by wasting and pallor… seemed to enhance its victim by amplifying those qualities already established as attractive.” A thin physique, weakness and wanness indicated a woman was unsuitable for work and therefore belonged to a higher class. “Women of means were the first to diet to constrain their appetite,” writes Brumberg, “and they began to do so before the sexual and fashion revolutions of the 1920s and the 1960s.” Thinness was already firmly entrenched in the language used to define female beauty when Sarah Jacobs began fasting in the 1860s. In this atmosphere, it was perhaps inevitable that the press would confuse fasting with vanity and jokes about fasting girls were common. Brumberg highlights the treatment of fasting American woman, Kate Smulsey, in this 1884 excerpt from the New York Morning Journal:
“If Miss Smulsey goes on as she has begun she will in time become a transparent woman. This is a class of person which has long been looked for and desired. Lovers who have found it difficult to understand their wayward flames might perhaps persuade them to undertake a little starvation. Such a course would have the further advantage of rendering them ethereal and beautiful. Sarah Bernhardt owes her wonderful popularity and fame to thinness of this character.”
It’s clear that the populace failed to understand what motivated women to fast. In the struggle between religion and science, the patients themselves had been marginalised. Newspaper reports offered the views of doctors, journalists and onlookers, but Sarah Jacobs’ perspective, and that of women like her, are curiously absent. The women are talked about, but not talked too. After Sarah’s death, the press were perplexed. Why would a young girl reconcile herself to what they saw as little more than a prolonged form of suicide? The Times wrote that:
“Her end is as piteous as it is extraordinary. At the age of thirteen she has deliberately accepted a lingering death. Her resolution is equally astonishing by whatever motive it was prompted. It is the death of a martyr without a martyr’s objects. Whether she deliberately preferred a slow death by hunger to detection and disgrace, or whether her delusion had obtained such a hold upon her that she believed she could outlast the watchers, her endurance and power of will must have been put to terrible strain.”
For the Times, the tragic end to Sarah Jacobs’ life would be remembered for the, “strange possessions which, under certain conditions, may occupy the mind, and especially the minds of young women.” Yet the lasting ‘mystery’ did not surround why Sarah fasted, but how the appearances of a fast had been maintained for so long. How exactly had this deception been achieved? The Alnwick Mercury lamented that Sarah Jacobs died, “without throwing any light upon the mystery by which her life has so long been surrounded.”
Regrettably, the medical profession also focussed their attention upon the act of deceit. Doctor Fowler defined, “The whole case [as] one of simulative hysteria in a young girl having the propensity to deceive very strongly developed.” He described Sarah’s will as, “morbidly perverted.” Medical attitudes were dogged by prejudice and biological determinism. Even Fowler reported Sarah’s physical appearance in the language of beauty, describing her as “undoubtedly very pretty” and “lying in her bed decorated as a bride, having round her head a wreath of flowers.” The Scotsman, speculated that Sarah was, “probably a weak-minded, excitable girl with a turn for fasting, able to go without food for a long time, as some constitutions are capable of enduring much fatigue… She finds that she can abstain from food a surprisingly long time, and partly from vanity and the desire to be an object of curiosity, and perhaps partly from the natural wish not to let a gift lie dormant, she repeats the experiments. Fasting, or so-called fasting, becomes habitual… She perhaps knows she can really fast a long time; perhaps she believes that fasting is per se a good and laudable thing… And this perhaps partially explains how a girl of thirteen suffered herself to die without asking for food.”
Unfortunately for Sarah, fasting and deceit had become entwined sixty years earlier in the case of ‘the fasting woman of Tutbury’. At the centre of this scandal was Ann Moore, who claimed to have eaten nothing in four and a half years. Initially, writes Brumberg, “local sympathy was compounded by her ability to convince others that the fast was a symbol of her moral reclamation.” Ann had already given birth to two illegitimate children. Public fascination reached such a height that Ann eventually submitted to a twenty-four hour watch and her secret eating was discovered. Ann’s daughter had been providing her with small amounts of food in handkerchiefs and kisses. “Throughout the nineteenth century Ann Moore stood as a symbol of female cunning and deceit,” writes Brumberg, “She was decried by everyone as a fraud and cited in medical books as evidence of the scurrilous nature of religious fasting claims.”
At the opposite end of the nineteenth century, and the other side of the Atlantic, the fasting of American woman Mollie Fancher was similarly blamed on the, “perversion of the moral faculties.” Like so many women before her, she was condemned for reading too voraciously - for seeking too much education - which brought on nervous exhaustion. But Fancher was more successful in fasting her way to empowerment. “By her early twenties,” writes Brumberg, Fancher, “was transformed from a nervous, dyspeptic schoolgirl to a fully empowered female mystic and clairvoyant.” Crucially, Fancher refused to take part in male power games. She declined to be observed under twenty-four hour watch and turned down the opportunity to work as a “hunger artist” for travelling entertainer P.T. Barnum.
“Eventually, Fancher’s flamboyant claims that she did not need food in order to sustain life posed a problem that was critical to the Victorian’s understanding of the world: what is the relationship between the mind and the body? This question dominated late-nineteenth century intellectual life and was a major pre-occupation of the Victorians. Fancher was provocative because, like many female fasters before her, she believed she could transcend the flesh.”
Although Fancher claimed she was not a spiritualist, their stories have many parallels. Like fasters, spiritualists were frequently written off as ‘hysterics’ but séances provided an opportunity for women to use their ‘natural tendencies’ to empower themselves. Judith Walkowitz explains how, “The séance reversed the sexual hierarchy of knowledge and power: it shifted attention away from men and focussed it on the female medium, the centre of spiritual knowledge and insight.” The medical profession responded by portraying spiritualists as, “crazy women and feminized men engaged in superstitious, popular and fraudulent practices.” In her excellent book, City of Dreadful Delight, Walkowitz traces the story of Mrs Weldon, whose husband tried, “to rid himself of a nuisance wife,” by attempting to have her declared insane.
Given the social constraints that limited female behaviour at the time, it’s hardly surprising women felt a desire to transcend their physical bodies. While working-class fasters were made into a spectacle by the press, middle-class women were often treated privately, where doctors finally began identifying issues of oppression and control. In middle class families, “the intensification of family life,” emerged as a contributing factor, writes Brumberg. Girls were getting married later, leaving them economically dependent on their parents (and trapped in subservience to them) for much longer periods. “Among the bourgeoisie, adolescent girls who refused food had the power to disrupt their families,” writes Brumberg, “A girl who declined the food provided by her family became the focus of conversation and concern; her appetite, her diet, and her body became a preoccupation in the child-centred family.” But, even here, the suggestion of ‘attention-seeking’ lurks dangerously beneath the surface.
For these women, fasting as an outlet, as a subconscious attempt to assert control over their own lives, to empower themselves, to be listened to, was a double-edged sword. Brumberg finds that, “regular medicine continued to be concerned with the technical problems of abstinence, deceit, and validation… The doctors did not address the critical behavioural questions of why fasting girls chose to avoid food (or eat secretly) and of the resemblance of these girls to the emerging clinical reports of a newly named disease, anorexia nervosa.”
Today, The Wonder returns a voice to these neglected women. Not only is eleven year old Anna a composite of their experiences, but by re-centring the story on the female nurse sent to watch her, the film finally advocates for them. Although Lib (Florence Pugh) initially views Anna with the hostile scepticism of the medical community, her marginalised position reveals the injustice of patriarchal society. Her curiosity ensures the source of the film’s tension is not how Anna is surviving her fast, but why she has chosen to fast at all. In doing so, The Wonder exposes gender discrimination that continues to this day.
Have you watched The Wonder? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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The featured image is ‘Ann Moore, a fraudulent fasting woman’, a stipple engraving by R. Cooper, 1822. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.
So many topics for discussions here... And so sad (and annoying) to think how we still live by backwards gender-related beliefs. Because I'm afraid biological determinism is still very much alive. As to getting rid of one's wife by trying to commit her to an asylum, many a husband tried it. Charles Dickens included.
A very interesting read 👏