Lisa Coar
I graduated from the University of Leicester in 2010 with First Class Honours in English. Stimulated by my Undergrad work on the nineteenth century, I then went on to complete an MA in Victorian Studies and am now a first year PhD student, whose work, generously funded by the AHRC, builds upon my interests surrounding the relations between literature, medicine and science.
Supervisors: Dr Claire Brock
Supervisors: Dr Claire Brock
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Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.
Through its examination of the era’s amateur forms of ‘lipo-surgery,’ this paper will begin by revealing how the distended stomachs of the epoch’s men were sadistically scaled-down and surgically probed. Moving from the clinical realm of invasive surgery to the commercial world of corsetry, it will then analyse the somatic impact surrounding the tight-lacer’s own body-truncating endeavours. In its critical observations of the overweight male who threatened to burst apart at the seams, this paper will essentially explore how squeezing his stomach into a corset and probing his paunch with a knife could become alternate means of corporealising and de-corporealisating the central abdominal cavity of the Victorian Male.
Without doubt, the burdens of today’s anti-ageing and weight-loss industries are predominantly placed on women. However, the nineteenth-century forerunner to modernity’s eponymous “Fat and Forty Syndrome” was, in fact, the Victorian male. Indeed, throughout the epoch in question, the existential narrative of male ‘ageing’ was repeatedly depicted as one of unremitting horror. Ruddy-faced and rotund, grey-haired and gargantuan, the Victorian male was often dupe to a pound-and-inch-frenzied, ‘mid-riff’ crisis. With countless advertisements for rejuvenating ‘life pills’ and girth-curtailing ‘diet potions’ in print, such enumerative patterns of ‘mid-riff’ consciousness were beginning to saturate the male-targeted press. Alongside the ceaseless publication of such fat-phobic material, height and weight charts and mechanical scales were also coming to assume an integral part in forming the somatic identity of the Victorian male. As a result, the burgeoning bodies of the period’s once ineffectual ‘calorie counters’ were to be submerged into an unprecedented state of mathematical monitoring and regulation: they were to be quantified and modified with numerical precision; or, to borrow Michel Foucault’s term, rendered ‘calculable.’
From a critical examination of the epoch’s weight-focussed periodical works, to a discussion of the ‘number neurotics’ imbuing William Banting’s, Letter on Corpulence (1863) this paper shall expose how – when read through the lens of age anxiety – the fat male body often fortified the angst which underpinned Victorian notions of senescence. It will likewise reveal how the nineteenth century’s interest in fat, both dietary and bodily, was symptomatic of a more general fascination with proportionate control and quantification. In tracing the cultural evolution of these interrelated age/fat phobias, this paper will ultimately disclose how the nineteenth-century male risked transforming his corporeal feats of weight-and-measure centred dieting into an anorectically-driven, age-defying act: a number-conscious, nostalgic unburdening stimulated by ‘mid riff’ despondency, and sustained through ageist ‘dis-ease.’
Although this perplexing strain of psychosomatic trauma is used in a merely speculative light, I use the phrase with the intention of stressing just how ‘traumatising’ the era’s prevailing body configurations could become. Certainly, as this paper shall reveal, Victorian culture itself was implicated in an unnervingly anorectic, psychosomatically damaging process: a process which, through its privileging of the thin over fat, and the weightless over the weighty, would eventually leave its initiators no choice but to pick up the pieces of its broken males.
As a society deeply invested in ‘norms’ – and one underpinned by a tyrannical force-fitting of people into pre-packaged standards – contemporary America’s dehumanizing commodity culture is slowly instilling us in what Victoria Pitts Taylor calls a ‘toxic narcissism.’ Terrified of not fitting in and becoming a monstrous, marginalised ‘Other,’ people are going to absurd lengths just to feel accepted. This paper will interrogate the terrifying impact of America’s monstrous materialism and the critical consequences of its panoptic pandemonium. It will expose the grim-reaper reality of cosmetic surgery; examine how acceptance increasingly means freakish plasticity, ordering ‘designer genitals to go,’ putting ‘the Cadillac of vaginoplasty’ on your Visa. It will unlock the gendered gates of the Binary Zoo and venture into the liminal terrain of trans-identity. It will confront ‘terrifying’ teens and unleash hordes of ‘horrifying’ homosexuals from their sexual closets. Ultimately, its aim is to demonstrate that whilst the surface of capitalism is picture perfection and shinier teeth, the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is not so perfect, or so pretty.
This paper will examine how the various gender and class ideologies of the nineteenth century fertilised the landscape of weedy women rooted within it. It will interrogate the cultural prescription of a dangerously dainty diet, ponder the saintly slenderness of the ‘angel in the house’ and scrutinise culture’s conflation of sickness and beauty. It will undress the era’s females of Dame Fashion’s fatal frocks and expose the skeletal stature that lurked beneath the corset. Ultimately, filtered through a medical lens, its aim is to distinguish the farcical, pernickety food-picker from the fatal faster who, after 1873, was clinically branded anorexic.