| " 'Why am I a Girl?': Twentieth Century Poetry and the Discourse of Anorexia Nervosa" brings into conversation the theoretical discourse that has developed around the causes and meanings of anorexia nervosa, and the work of four late twentieth century American poets: Louise Gluck, Sylvia Plath, Ai and Frank Bidart. The work of contemporary feminist psychologists and cultural critics broadly suggests that the self-denying, self-diminishing rituals of anorexia stage an objection to the ways cultural gender enforcement conscripts and constricts women's lives. This study shifts the focus of the discussion and examines the multiple levels of contradiction that inform anorexia through the lens of psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity that have been articulated and explored by Jacques Lacan in his "return to Freud." Making use of a Lacanian conceptualization of the self-divided, split subject, and focusing on the question of sexual difference rather than on cultural constructions of the feminine, I show that the anorexic exposes the incoherencies that underlie any construction of the self, blurring the boundaries policed by normative subjectivity and exposing the threat of non-differentiation that underlies sexual difference.;Chapter One reviews the literature on anorexia that has developed over the past thirty years, including biomedical theories of the disorder and the work of feminist and cultural critics. Chapter Two presents an expanded understanding of the disorder, focusing on the case history of "Ellen West," a mid-century European woman whose struggles with anorexia have been recorded and analyzed by existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger. Beginning with Chapter Three, I turn to the poetry, engaging this expanded theorization of the disorder in a reading of Ararat, Louise Gluck's fifth volume of poems and elaborating the ways anorexia blurs the boundaries between self and other, subject and object. Chapter Four then goes on to connect aspects of Sylvia Plath's poetry to an anorexic sensibility and to reflect on the ways the disorder disturbs the relationship between life and death. Chapters Four and Five explore the question of sexual difference that the anorexic poses, as well as the performative aspects of the disorder through the dramatic monologues of Ai and Frank Bidart respectively. |
