Brontë, Shirley Charlotte | Deirdre Lashgari (essay date 1992)
Deirdre Lashgari (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: "What Some Women Can't Swallow: Hunger as Protest in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley," in Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, edited by Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 141-52.
[In this excerpt, Lashgari discusses images of food, starvation, and eating disorders in Shirley.]
Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. (10:190)
You expected bread, and you have got a stone. (6:105)
—Shirley
Individual eating disorders in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (1849) are portrayed as part of a much larger picture, in which a dysfunctional society starves women, literally and metaphorically, and women internalize that dis/order as self-starvation. Contrary to some readings of the novel, Brontë is not selling the two heroines out to...
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