Abstract
Skeletal images of the anorexic body have been criticized for positioning the anorexic subject within what Debra Ferreday has described as a ‘spectacular regime of looking’ (2012, 148), reducing the ill body to an object of horror upon which to be gazed and, in doing so, eliding the voice of the anorexic subject. Twenty-first-century anthropologists such as Megan Warin (2010) and Anna Lavis (2016) have attempted to recentre the voice of the anorexic subject by examining the feelings of disgust, horror and anxiety through which the disorder is experienced. This thesis transposes this development within anorexia discourse into the context of twenty-first-century fiction, defining the anorexic Gothic as a modality through which to explore the fraught complexities of the anorexic experience and interrogate the revulsion provoked by the skeletal anorexic body as a site of perceived monstrosity. Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection (1982), which describes a horrifying breakdown in categorization between self and other, is the central point around which this thesis is organized. As well as being fundamental to Warin’s anthropological understanding of anorexia as an experience shaped by ‘abject relations’ (2010), abjection is also used by Margrit Shildrick (2002) to describe the process through which monstrous bodies – such as the skeletal anorexic body – are disavowed and placed at a distance.
Critics such as Angelica Michelis (2015), Jen Craig (2014) and Donna Lee Brien (2018) all posit some connection between anorexia and the Gothic mode, which this thesis confirms and extends. As well as examining how the anorexic experience is expressed in twenty-first-century literary fiction through Gothic scenarios and settings such as the monstrous double, demonic possession and the haunted house, I also demonstrate how a Gothic reading of the anorexic experience interrogates and complicates our ability to abject the anorexic body as a site of horror and alterity. Consequently, I argue that the anorexic Gothic echoes Fred Botting’s description of the Gothic as a mode whose monsters ‘not only display alterity, but also demonstrate – and criticize – the cultural practices of making others, interrogating the legitimacy of condemnation, prejudice and exclusion’ (2014, 14).