The holy women reject passivity and dependency, especially in relation to the Church, which insisted that priests and saints mediate women's relationship to God. Yet Bell emphasizes discernible differences between modern anorexics and their holy predecessors. In his study of Italian female saints, over 50% “displayed clear signs of anorexia”.
Rudolph Bell finds similarities between modern anorexics and starving saints. Diane Long Hoeveler and Beth Lau (New York: Modern Language Assn., 1993) 116–23 (116).ġ5. Diane Long Hoeveler, “ Jane Eyre through the Body: Food, Sex, Discipline,” Approaches to Teaching Jane Eyre, ed. Diane Long Hoeveler, “‘A Draught of Sweet Poison’: Food, Love, and Wounds in Jane Eyre and Villette,” Prism(s) 7 (1999): 149–73.ġ1.
Susan Schorn, “Punish Her Body to Save Her Soul: Echoes of the Irish Famine in Jane Eyre,” Journal of Narrative Technique 28.3 (1998): 30–65.ġ0. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).ĩ. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994).Ĩ. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978).ħ. See Helene Moglen, Charlotte Bronte: The Self Conceived (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1984).ĥ. See Anna Krugovoy Silver, Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).Ĥ.
Sheryl Craig, “‘My Inward Cravings’: Anorexia Nervosa in Jane Eyre,” Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 22 (1997): 40–46 (45).ģ. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1968) 25.Ģ. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Unlike most of the earlier hunger artists who point out their intense personal relationship with a God who sustains them, Jane's hunger artistry denotes a need for earthly justice, sustenance through books and female community, all of which, if realized, would make earth a heavenly home.ġ. Drawing on the work of Caroline Bynum, whose Holy Feast and Holy Fast examines the lives of female starving saints, the author argues that Jane Eyre, whose hunger has often been equated by critics with anorexia nervosa, exhibits the motivations of the starving saints, or what the author terms ‘female hunger artists’, who often rebel against injustice while paradoxically displaying temporary female spiritual power by attracting attention through spectacle. In this essay, the author applies Mikhail Bakhtin's carnivalesque theory and Mary Russo's concepts of the female grotesque to a reading of Jane Eyre which situates Jane's hunger within a mid-nineteenth-century context of self-imposed female hunger, which was largely religious in nature.
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