The fasting girl: A literary, digital, and medical history of anorexia from the novel to the clinic (1740-1900)

The negative connotations associated with self-starvation during the late nineteenth century represent a drastic shift from the well-established Western ideology of fasting as a positive religious moral practice. As a result of this paradigm shift, doctors in the later nineteenth century were able to classify anorexia nervosa as a disease independent from other illnesses that caused physical wasting, including hypochondria, hysteria, and tuberculosis. In my dissertation project, I rely on three modes of analysis: a close reading of the characterization of fasting and wasting-related illnesses appear in Clarissa, Wuthering Heights, and Dracula; a medical case study of Sarah Jacob, the “Welsh Fasting Girl”; and a quantitative analysis of digital corpora of Lancet and The British Medical Journal, two prominent medical journals that began publishing in the early nineteenth century. The novels provide a narrative of changing attitudes toward fasting in literature that both illuminate—and are illuminated by—the medical history I discuss in the Jacob case and my digital analysis of the emerging scientific vocabulary of anorexia. In this way, my project explores the broader cultural and scientific issues that redefined questions of women’s relationship to their bodies, appetites, and male medical authority.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Witte, Jessica C

Contributors dc:contributor

• Markley, Robert
• Courtemanche, Eleanor
• Underwood, Ted
• Littlefield, Melissa
• D'Arcy Wood, Gillen

• medical history
• anorexia nervosa
• digital humanities
• victorian literature

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Jessica Witte

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115667

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115667