Zara-Louise Stubbs reviews The Art of Not Eating: A Doubtful History of Appetite and Desire by Jessica Hamel-Akré (Atlantic Books, 2024).
‘Appetite,’ Jessica Hamel-Akré writes, ‘was a text through which the body spoke’ (5). Hunger is more than mere craving; what we do (and what we don’t) eat is, for Hamel-Akré, something that contains a ‘whole history’ (5). Through desire, our bodies articulate themselves. They establish their presence, assert their right to take up space. With its undeniably fleshy element, eating is an especially visceral way for bodies to speak. This eating is also explicitly gendered. A woman’s relationship to desire is rendered against a vast constellation of theological, social, medical and political influences. In a bold blend of academic analysis and personal writing, The Art of Not Eating (2024) stitches together the particularly embodied history of female appetite and suggests how the deceptively insular experience of appetite, longing and desire are poignantly connective.
As ‘an expert in the history of women’s health, literature and feminist thought,’ Jessica Hamel-Akré complicates the narrative of ‘starving girls’. She extricates the abstaining woman from the liminal space between religious and medical discourse. Instead of positioning the female faster (anorexic or otherwise) as being unduly absorbed in their own bodies, The Art of Not Eating reconnects the ‘intertextuality of stories of women’s self-starvation,’ (Hamel-Akré, 131) with a tradition of intellectualism. Weaving literary, medical and personal accounts together, the text constructs a complex web of female food abstinence. It asks: what does it mean to feel hungry? What does it mean, more specifically, to think through hunger? How are these intellectual and gastronomic appetites linked? Rather than opposing body and mind, Hamel-Akré bridges them through the pairing of cognition and digestion. Her book highlights the significance of who writes these narratives of hunger – and who defines the ‘right’ way to manage them. The text especially eschews the gendered paradigms of appetite to ask: what does a hungry body look like? How does it act? How is this often, different from the way it ‘should’ behave? Whether she eats or abstains, the female body ostensibly bears dark fruit.
Articulating Women’s Appetites
Appetite can link us and may even become an entry point for connection: as Hamel-Akré muses, ‘appetite was a bridge between times, between bodies’ (24). It is this connection to hunger that bridges the various women rendered in the text. These women are all related through their relationship to wanting and satiation. As we read these narratives, we too become increasingly linked to these figures. This functions, perhaps, through what Dr Alessandra Pino calls ‘food empathy.’ Food, Pino explains, ‘has the remarkable ability to serve as a gateway, transporting the individual back in time through intricate details and sensory experiences.’ (47). This suggests that the special sensory power of reading and writing around hunger provides a point of connection – a moment through which we can ‘read’ ourselves into the body of another. Creating a lineage of feminine appetites through time, then, can be seen as a radical act; a way of querying the discourse that has regulated the way women do (and don’t) eat through centuries of history.
The Art of Not Eating hinges on eighteenth-century perspectives on bodies but frequently pans to the current moment. Hamel-Akré’s lingers on her own ‘personal unravelling’ in parallel to those of women through history. This methodology creates a kind of narrative patchwork. Hamel-Akré’s own reckoning with the embodiment of pregnancy sits next to Ann of Tutbury’s miraculous fasting. Samuel Richardson’s literary Clarissa (1747) sits against the non-fiction Account of The Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), a ‘self-told case of severe abstinence from food written by a woman’ recorded by Hester herself (Hamel-Akré, 216). Throughout the book, Hamel-Akré grapples with the belief that female eating – and appetite for other corporeal acts – needs to be regulated by an outside force which has historically been male, ‘religious and medical’ (168). Hamel-Akré queries the conceit of a ‘perfectly imperfect narrative about what a woman not eating meant’ (226). She investigates the surveillance of feminine desire and its troubling lilt towards self-regulation and panopticism.
Spiritual and Gendered Deviancy: Eating Across Time
The book is organised into four parts; ‘The Benefits of Abstinence,’ ‘Ouroboros,’ ‘Angel Food’ and ‘A Right to Regale.’ As these titles suggest, the book snakes through reflections on appetite as an almost mythic phenomenon. The ‘right’ kind of eating is similarly elusive. The historic medical practices assessed in the text warn of the dangers of excess. However, they also hesitate to reward total abstinence. This leads to Hamel-Akré’s key thesis: what is the art of not eating? How can women ‘not eat’ in the ‘right way’? This invokes a similar query posed by the late Hilary Mantel in her 2004 essay on the transcendent interest in eating (and not eating):
Anorexia nervosa is said to be a modern epidemic. If you skimmed the press in any one week it would be hard to see what is perceived as more threatening to society: the flabby, rolling mass of couch-potato kids, or their teenage sisters with thighs like gnawed chicken-bones, sunken cheeks and putrid breath. Are we threatened by flesh or its opposite? (Mantel, 172)
This paradigm echoes across time. In both the eighteenth-century and the twenty-first, the achievement of the ‘right’ kind of eating is ostensibly a public as well as private concern. The struggle to situate ourselves in the ‘correct’ body transcends time. Can we posit the starving saints considered by Hamel-Akré and Mantel in the same vein as the ‘modern anorexic’? If not, what delineates them? Is it a matter of faith? Medicalisation? Are the categorisations on ‘pathological’ eating down to context, or commitment? Are theological abstainers the same as political ones? Can the reasons for hunger strike ever justify the means?
Hamel-Akré’s sustained engagement with the work of Dr George Cheyne forms a theoretical spine for the text. Medical historian Steven Shapin describes Cheyne (1671-1743) as an ‘iatromechanist, dietary writer, and fashionable physician’ (263). Cheyne, like his eighteenth-century contemporaries, argued for dietary temperance, a moral restraint complicated by the physician’s personal dietary indulgence, with Cheyne being posthumously described as a ‘fat, jovial Scotsman weighing 32 stone at one period’ (Charlton, 49).
Cheyne’s voice echoes through The Art of Not Eating, stylised as a ghost. Building on the works of Cheyne, the Victorian period saw a sustained focus on ‘good’ digestion as a sign of health. The connection became so prevalent that ‘dyspepsia and appetite together [began] to hauntVictorian lives’ (Beer). This pervasive pairing of ghost and gluttony in eighteenth and nineteenth-century medicine positions the stomach as an occult gateway, a literal and figurative hellmouth.
Hamel-Akré describes Cheyne’s quest to ‘improve bodies’ as multipronged. He was ‘best known for his recommendation that restrictive and selective eating, adhering to a vegetarian-style diet, could heal a range of physical and mental ailments’ (Hamel-Akré, 6-7). The text’s intellectual odyssey comes from the desire to unravel this practice; to consider the ethics and politics of ‘doctoring’ a body through mediating its appetite. Increasingly, Hamel-Akré identifies Cheyne’s medicine as more than a straight-forward prescription. His approach to desire reveals itself to be multidisciplinary, functioning across multiple planes of being: ‘[h]is medicine was metaphorical, endlessly moral and mystical’ (8). Through theological discourse, women have been associated with the carnal. This, over time, has paired sexual and food-related appetites in a kind of two-pronged, gendered deviancy: ‘In the simplest of terms, […] women had to work harder than men to be holy,’ and this message, over time, has been ‘carried forward as the principles of women’s appetite control came to popularity’ (177).
(Not-)Eating as Text: Against Readability
Self-starvation sits at an especially complex junction between personal theorisation, agency and subjectivity. Regardless of the motives behind food refusal, one element remains the same: the understanding that, often, it is not the subject but the spectator who ultimately ‘defines what pain and hunger looks like’ (Hamel-Akré, 147). Regulating appetite means more than changing eating habits. Policing eating is, of course, both dangerous and alarming. But, if we approach eating as a kind of shorthand for other elements of living, we can also see how food stands in for a larger sense of control. We can therefore use discourse on food to interrogate questions and experiences of embodied life. Maud Ellman explores how food has a peculiar multivalent quality. It is, in her words, ‘metaphorically omnivorous’ (44); it can mean many things at the same time. Ellmann writes:
Food is the prototype of all exchanges with the other, below verbal, financial, or erotic. Digestion is a kind of fleshy poetry, for metaphor begins in the body’s transubstantiation of itself, while food is thesaurus of all moods and sensations. (53)
The regulation of women’s desire, then, gives us an insight into attitudes to gendered embodiment. The fear of these desires being identified is heightened by the potential ‘readability’ of the body. In reading women’s appetites through time, The Art of Not Eating confronts this concern directly. ‘I’d come to believe my body could express my secrets in an act of betrayal,’ Hamel-Akré writes (101). As Susan Bordo expresses in Unbearable Weight, ‘the symptomology of these [eating] disorders reveals itself as textuality’ (Bordo, 168). Eating is therefore dialogical; even inter-corporeal. Through appetite, our bodies can begin to speak for themselves. But how do we trust that this articulation is accurately translated by those around us? As Hamel-Akré emphasises: ‘I already knew not all fictions, nor truths, were made equal. It mattered who told the story of appetite’ (57). Theorising the body for the self becomes a way to revitalise the narrative. Learning how to eat (or not eat) and desire outside the burden of preordained discourse becomes a kind of reclamation movement. It becomes a tool in the movement against readability.
‘What was the story of their bodies, I would ask myself, like so many others. What was the story of mine? I asked myself because the story mattered and everyone was hungry for it’ (Hamel-Akré, 100, original emphasis). A gap exists then, between the stories our bodies ‘tell’ and the ones that they live. The task, which Hamel-Akré has begun, is to probe this gap: to challenge the idea that our bodies are transparently readable to others and, perhaps most significantly, to learn to read and attend to the desires of our own bodies honestly, without the mediation of outside discourse. To read our bodies for ourselves, rather than reorder ourselves for the reading. To put the body before the narrative.
References
Beer, Gillian. “Dream Touch.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century Vol.19, 2014. n. pag. Web.
Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and The Body. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995.
Charlton Anne. ‘George Cheyne 1671 or 73-1743): 18th-century physician.’ J Med Biography, Vol.19 (2), 2011 (49-55).
Hamel-Akré, Jessica. The Art of Not Eating: A Doubtful History of Appetite and Desire. London Atlantic Books, 2024.
Mantel, Hilary. ‘Some Girls Want Out: The Hair Shirt Sisterhood: 2004.’ in Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books. London Fourth Estate, 2020. (155-177)
Pino, Alessandra. ‘Exploring The Role of Food in Gothic Literature.’ Petis Propos Culinares, Vol. 129, 2024. (41-83)
Shapin, Steven. ‘Trusting George Cheyne: Scientific Expertise, Common Sense, and Moral Authority in Early Eighteenth-Century Dietetic medicine.’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 77, 2003. (263-297)
About the Author
Zara-Louise Stubbs is a PhD Researcher in English at the University of York. Zara has a master’s degree in Medical Histories and Humanities and currently researches the connection between gastronomy, mysticism, and the transformative potential of literary investigations of appetite. She is the editor of The British Library title The Uncanny Gastronomic: Strange Tales of the Edible Weird (2023). She tweets @zarastubbs.
