Women’s Food Refusal and Feminine Appetites in the long British Eighteenth Century

Dans cette dissertation, “Women’s Food Refusal and Feminine Appetites in the Long Eighteenth Century,” j’étudie le refus de nourriture des femmes tel qu’il est décrit par l’écriture médicale, la fiction, l’autobiographie, et par les textes religieux en Angleterre au cours du long 18e siècle. En m’appuyant, entre autres, sur les écrits du Dr. George Cheyne, de Samuel Richardson, de Hester Ann Rogers, et avec les textes composés sur le cas d’Ann Moore, je considère comment les pratiques et les présupposés des courants de la pensée médicale, littéraire, et religieuse ont participé à façonner une idéologie oppressive du contrôle de soi des femmes, par la diète. Je questionne la manière dont les idées de rationalité et de sensibilité ont influencé la notion moderne d’appétit. Le 18e siècle, qui voit l’influence naissante de l’empirisme, construit le contrôle de l’appétit au féminin comme une nouvelle forme d’obligation morale. Ma recherche démontre que cette période historique a produit des mouvements intellectuels qui ont cherché à établir la notion d’une vertu diététique qui fonde les idéaux modernes des normes morales de l’appétit. In my doctoral thesis, entitled “Women’s Food Refusal and Feminine Appetites in the Long Eighteenth Century,” I analyze women’s abstinence from food as portrayed by British medical writing, fiction, autobiographies, and spiritual self-help tracts from the late 1660s to the early 1800s. With the works of Dr. George Cheyne, Samuel Richardson, Hester Ann Rogers, and through case studies on female fasters such as Ann Moore, I explore how an interaction of medical, literary, and religious presuppositions and practices defined an oppressive ideology of women’s dietary virtue. By considering transformations in the ideals of rationality, sensibility, and appetite in the eighteenth century, I investigate how maintenance of the feminine appetite became a signifier of moral responsibility. I explore a dual conceptualization of appetite as a volatile feminine passion. On the one hand, women’s socially sanctioned appetite control was positively associated with a disembodied, disinterested faith and rationality. On the other hand, extreme food refusal in women was systematically cast as an emotional addiction, rather than considered as a possible digestive disorder or other form of organic illness discussed in the period. My research underscores eighteenth century biases about gender and class that would limit the nineteenth-century understanding of psychological food refusal as an illness. I contend that the eighteenth century’s paradoxical discrimination between socially sanctioned and unacceptable forms of food refusal was the model for distinguishing between “good” and “bad” restrictive eating.

Keyphrases: Refus de nourriture, Histoire de la médecine, 18ème siècle, Femmes et nourriture, Femmes et religion, Troubles alimentaires, Sensibilité, Nourriture et spiritualité, Image corporelle des femmes, Eighteenth century, Food refusal, Women, Appetite control, Eighteenth century, Sensibility, Medicine and literature, History of medicine, Eating disorders, Dieting, Body image, Women and food, Women and reason, Food refusal, Eating and spirituality, Women, Religion, Medical storytelling