Teenage waistlines and pathological piety
What fasting for the Lord can teach us about fatphobia
CW: As you might have guessed, this newsletter gets into eating disorder stuff AND potentially traumatic religious stuff. As a person in long-term recovery for an eating disorder (and a person who is precisely 0% religious), I’m going to be sensitive and imprecise about potentially triggering actions, but it still might not be for everybody.
When the movie “The Wonder” came up on Netflix, I was like “oh, that sounds interesting,” completely forgetting that I had read the book of the same name like, less than a year before. Evidently, I’d found the book (and, subsequently, the movie) so unremarkable that just now, to tell you this story, I had to go Google “Florence Pugh Irish movie.” Maybe I’m simple, but I found both to be, well, forgettable.
In that I literally forgot them.
Which is weird, because the subject matter - an English nurse (Pugh) is sent to Ireland to watch a little girl who allegedly doesn’t eat because she survives only on “manna from Heaven” - should be right up my alley. The Wonder itself is not a true story, but it is based on a true phenomenon of the “Fasting Girls.”
But instead of wrestling with the broader idea of Spiritualism vs psychiatry or the ways in which self-starvation is a fairly uniquely gendered syndrome OR the ways that religion interacts with mental illness, “The Wonder” just sort of…was. Which is too bad, because there’s a way bigger story here to tell.
Faithful girls and forgoing food
Fasting Girls were basically teens and tweens who were often (but not always) of middle- or upper-middle class status, who came from highly religious households, and who functionally developed an eating disorder in the name of God.
Perhaps the best-known Fasting Girl is Mollie Fancher, also known as the Brooklyn Enigma. Fancher, who suffered not one but TWO life-threatening accidents, “spent 50 years in bed, during much of that time she appeared to be blind, paralyzed, and helpless,” according to The New Yorker in 1934, several decades after her death.
How was she so enigmatic? A better question would be how wasn’t she enigmatic. Again, from The New Yorker:
She could find lost articles by divination, could describe the dress and demeanor of some friend or relative in some distant city, and subsequent checking invariably proved her to have been right. She could read letters and books by running her hands over the or by putting them, unopened, beneath her bedclothing.
Of course, the writer admitted, “there were many physicians and laymen who denounced her as a fraud.” Not just because of the whole “reading while blind even though Braille had been around for nearly a century” thing. Fancher was also, as her family alleged, able to survive without consuming almost anything, citing one four-month period where she “ate nothing more than four teaspoons of milk punch, two teaspoons of wine, one small banana, and a cracker.”
And that was what really shocked people.
In The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery, Michelle Stacey explores the intricacies of this weird story, as well as the broader phenomenon. Because of course, Fancher wasn’t the only fasting girl. This has been a thing for a long time - so long that it even has a pathological medical name, anorexia mirabelis, or the practice of the fasting of St. Catherine.
Anorexia mirabelis literally means a “miraculous lack of appetite,” which is absolutely what I said I was experiencing when I was white-knuckling through days of underfeeding my poor, brittle body. But of course, I was not, because there is no divine intervention that can actually free you from the fact that your body is always growing, always consuming, always using resources, and always in need of more.
Because that’s how bodies work. But for very religious people, there are always exceptions. And at a time when people were looking toward God to help them with the wretchedness of their actual lives (the Victorian era was, as we’ve discussed before, stinky, sickly, and clearly dangerous, as evidenced by Mollie Fancher’s two near-death experiences), divine intervention of the intestines sounded awesome.
One can’t look at fasting girls without considering the impact of going without food and water, which is to say that it will kill you but not before it makes you small. And it’s the “getting smaller” part that’s really critical. Because while “The Wonder” makes no mention of weight (it’s a sort of distilled narrative that really just focused on the religiosity of traumatized people) and is set in the time just after the famine which ended the lives of more than a million Irish residents, the narrative is different in the real-life stories like that of Mollie Fancher.
People were also deeply into science - or at least, the science of the time. And Mollie, a chronically ill girl who was both infantilized and criticized for “tricking” the men of the medical establishment, was subjected to an endless stream of tests. Poking and prodding every bit of her, collecting everything that left her body, and hunching over here just to stare, doctors made her life a persistent discomfort. It wasn’t a good living - but it was also the only living an injured woman could hope to have. Which doesn’t exactly feel holy.
Prolonged fasting, though, didn’t always get the Mollie Fancher treatment. In the home, anorexia mirabelis was just a great way for girls who were already being mashed into corsets to be relieved of the expectation of eating a watercress sandwich at tea time while also getting attention and praise for something other than getting married. Which was really the only thing that they could expect to be praised for. It’s not remotely surprising that fasting boys weren’t a thing - after all, boys were allowed to have bodies that were properly fueled and were permitted to have achievements that didn’t relate directly back to their reproductive organs.
As Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s Fasting Girls, “fasting girls received attention from the educated and the uneducated, the elite and the ordinary.” It was this willingness to endure pain, discomfort, and even death in order to be viewed as special or unique that led some girls to stop eating.
In 1881, for example…21-year-old Lenora Eaton stopped eating and died after refusing food for 45 days. The attending physician and girls’ friends were mystified…the attending doctor did not mention hysteria or any other emotional disorder. People in her town, individuals described as reputable citizens, promoted the notion that Lenora Eaton had “lived without eating,” marking her as a special person and as a symbol of their faith in the miraculous.
Because of course, Victorian England and America were/still are both fully invested in the idea that the size of the body reflects the capability of the person. I suspect you will find no stories of fasting girls in cultures that aren’t steeped, at least somewhat, in fatphobia.
But just as eating disorders are often about more than weight and body image, the stories of fasting girls are about more, as well. Mollie Fancher - who, I again must underscore, suffered numerous head traumas during the years her brain was developing - also showed a number of other “peculiarities,” including demonstrating a fractured personality and hearing voices.
Self-starvation was also a kind of self-flagellation - those who would “miraculously” exist without food must necessarily have more self-control, more desire to be close to God. One girl in Brumburg’s book was described in her town paper as a “champion faster.” When she died a few years later, her weight was published, as was a detailed description of her body’s size and appearance. Her hometown was proud that she had been so good for so long.
A fast track to eating disorders
This is not to decry fasting as a religious act - but I do think it’s hard not to look at the activities of 150 years ago without a modern lens when it comes to this kind of behavior.
Plenty of devout people still fast in a structured religious manner today - like those commemorating Ramadan and Yom Kippur - but in the Christian sects, we a see a lot more open-ended, seemingly ruleless fasting. The Daniel Fast, for example, is popular among nondenominational (read: Evangelical) folks, but they often slip up and let the mask fall, showing that their ~ fast ~ to really be a facet of diet culture. And indeed, religious “fasting” can be a very dope way to conceal disordered eating patterns, especially when churches are, themselves, steeped in fatphobia. Do you know about Gwen Shamblin and the Weigh Down? No? HOO BOY, BUCKLE IN.
And if you want to learn more, there’s no better spiritual guide than the Reverend Jen:
Religion is still a common citation when it comes to examining what would, in the absence of religion, be very clear pathologies. From "voices” - many Evangelicals will say that they actively hear the voice of God telling them how to act - to antisocial behaviors to what could clearly be labeled as disordered eating, psychiatric symptoms are still attached to the divine, rather than the DSM or a messy dopamine reuptake system.
How many of the fasting girls were trying (consciously or subconsciously) looking for ways to get outside of their prescribed paths? How many were on the hunt for ways to feel appreciated and special in a society that made them feel neither? Or how many were feeling the ongoing pressure for a body that conformed to strict societal standards? It’s hard not to notice how many of these stories begin when a girl hit puberty to slightly thereafter.
And how much different would our view of disordered eating be today if we didn’t already so often ascribe it to white women with resources? As I wrote a billion years ago for Everyday Feminism (the good old days of Internet Writing when I didn’t have to have a goddamn newsletter), the fallacy of who has an eating disorder is often propped up by the idea of what consistutes an eating disorder in the first place.
Who knows? Maybe God really does have the ability to stop the metabolism and allow people - saints, I’m assuming - to live on air and piety. But a more powerful force, at least in our current society, seems to be more rooted in gender, the body, and the need for control. Maybe that’s why today’s Fasting Girls are just Internet Moms who are doing it as a way to sell their essential oils.
Honestly, seems just as underwhelming as I found “The Wonder.”