it is not because she has a problem with Louise’s weight; rather, she worries for Louise’s future.

For Louise, however, losing seventy pounds seems to change her personality too. She finds that she becomes irritable when ‘‘all her life she had never been afflicted by ill temper.’’ After losing close to forty pounds, she still ‘‘did not feel strong, she did not feel she was committed to and within reach of achieving a valuable goal.’’ Instead, she felt she ‘‘had lost more than pounds of fat; that some time during her dieting she had lost herself too.’’

With her new habits and eating routines, Louise gives up every vestige of her former life. She eats sparse meals—dinner is a piece of meat and lettuce and breakfast is an egg and black coffee—instead of candy bars and other sweets. She no longer eats secretly; instead, Carrie monitors every piece of food that goes in Louise’s mouth.

In fact, Louise’s body—one which ‘‘she liked most when she was unaware of it‘‘—becomes common property. It is shared with Carrie, who charts Louise’s progress via the scale. Everyone she knows comments on it: her parents, friends, and acquaintances. They all seem to be more comfortable and accepting of the new Louise. After she returns home from college, she becomes friends with people she knew as a child ‘‘and even they did not seem to remember her when she was fat.’’ The overarching message is that Louise, the fat girl, is a person unworthy of knowing and loving; but Louise, the slender young woman, is acceptable.

Louise’s relationship with Carrie is also affected by the diet. Since Carrie is monitoring the diet, Carrie is not only Louise’s friend but also her enemy. Louise speaks sharply to Carrie, and she snaps at her about lettuce. In this way their relationship becomes permeated with talk of food. Louise later recalls her final year in college, the diet year, as ‘‘the worst year of her life.’’

The diet year is underscored by her feeling that ‘‘she was going to another country or becoming a citizen of a new one.’’ This country seems to be populated by Louise’s relatives and acquaintances, and at first Louise loves ‘‘the applause in their eyes.’’

Her transformation is officially established by her marriage to Richard. At times during her marriage, Louise tries to embrace her new identity. On the plane returning from Europe, ‘‘she thought of the accumulated warmth and pelt of her marriage, and how by slimming her body she had bought into the pleasures of the nation.’’ At this point, Louise is equating her slenderness with her ability to fit into society and thus partake of all it has to offer—a large lakefront house, expensive vacations, a boat.

Yet these are only possessions, and Louise’s ‘‘moments of triumph were sparse.’’ Sometimes she ‘‘was suddenly assaulted by the feeling that she had taken the wrong train and arrived at a place where no one knew her, and where she ought not to be.’’ This sentence is immediately followed up by a scene between Louise and Richard, in bed, where she talks to him about having been fat. Such positioning seems to indicate that part of the feeling of being in the wrong place stems from her relationship with Richard—perhaps he is the wrong man for her.

Indeed, the narration states:

she knew the story meant very little to him . . . She felt as though she was trying to tell a foreign lover about her life in the United States, and if only she could command the language he would know and love all of her and she would feel complete.

Louise’s desire for completeness and for reconnecting with her own soul, which had gotten lost ‘‘in some rootless flight’’ during her diet years, leads her to regain the weight she so arduously took off. Part of Louise’s transformation back into a ‘‘fat girl’’ may stem from the fact that she has become a mother. During her childhood, Louise’s mother made her daughter feel unworthy and unattractive because of her weight.

When Louise becomes a mother, she is grati- fied that her son responds to her despite ‘‘the folds of fat at her waist.’’ Perhaps Louise sees an opportunity to find someone who will love her for what she is and what she looks like. Louise also may feel that she doesn’t want her own child to grow up as she did: judged and criticized.

As Louise derives pleasure from eating and she regains the weight, she also retreats back to her solitary world. She knows that her weight gain and her refusal to try and lose weight will make Richard leave her. The words, ‘‘[i]t has been in his eyes all summer,’’ implies that Louise not only expects his rejection, but will be relieved by it. In this way, she will discover his true feelings for her.

All her life, no one really has seen Louise except for Carrie. Although her father’s eyes were filled with ‘‘the lights of love,’’ they were also filled with ‘‘pity.’’ His attempts to defend Louise to her mother are ineffectual and contribute to Louise’s secret bingeing.

To her mother, Louise has been a constant source of disappointment. The only time her mother approves of Louise is after she has dieted to a slender 113 pounds. Her mother ‘‘cried and hugged her and said again and again: You’re beautiful.’’

Richard seems to care little about the woman inside and only covets her slender exterior. ‘‘‘Have you looked at yourself?’’’ he asks Louise after she has gained back fifty pounds. Louise finds none of Carrie’s ‘‘compassion and determination and love’’ in her husband, even after he volunteers to diet with her.

Readers have grappled with why Louise regains weight. Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, says that Louise ‘‘has dieted away her appetite for life, that, in some way, her fatness was part of her essence and now she is only a mannequin of other people’s expectations.’’

Edith Milton contends in the New Republic that ‘‘fat is what she is, and . . . any love worth the name can find her under the blubber.’’

J. N. Baker for Newsweek calls out the ‘‘charade of her existence,’’ which ‘‘inspires a rebellious resolution.’’

Whether or not she regains weight for any of these reasons—whether she is simply meant to be fat, or is gluttonous, or wants to drive Richard away, or even wants to find her own self—the fact remains that in giving herself up to food, Louise finds peace again.

‘‘She knows Richard is waiting,’’ the story ends, ‘‘but she feels his departure so happily that, when she enters the living room, unwrapping the candy, she is surprised to see him standing there.’’ So order for Louise comes with a tall price—the retreat back into the world of childhood, where food could satisfy all her basic needs. It is up to the reader to decide, then, if Louise is a success or a failure.

Source: Rena Korb, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2000. Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing.

Dubus’s short story ‘‘The Fat Girl’’ is about a young woman, Louise, who, from the age of nine, is seen by everyone around her as a ‘‘fat girl.’’ In order to get around her mother’s insistence that she diet, Louise develops the habit of sneaking food which she secretly eats in her bedroom or in the bathroom.

When Louise is in college, her best (and only) friend Carrie puts her on a strict diet, as a result of which she loses some seventy pounds over the course of a year. When she was considered a ‘‘fat girl,’’ Louise felt she could never even dream of being asked out by a man; but once she has lost weight she dates and marries Richard, a young man who works in her father’s business.

However, when Louise becomes pregnant, she begins to revert back to her old eating habits and quickly gains weight. After the baby is born, she continues to overeat. Her husband becomes increasingly angered by her weight gain until, at the end of the story, she defiantly eats a piece of pie and then a candy bar in front of him, almost relieved with his inevitable departure from her life.

Louise’s struggle with being a ‘‘fat girl’’ is characterized by her struggles with her sense of identity. Early in life, Louise is convinced that it is her God-ordained fate, or destiny, to be a ‘‘fat girl.’’ Fate being a concept born of religious conviction, Louise believes that ‘‘God had made her that way.’’ She imagines that her two high school friends, both of them thin, would always remember her as ‘‘a girl whose hapless body was destined to be fat.’’

As Louise’s sense of herself includes the firm belief that it is her God-ordained destiny to be a ‘‘fat girl,’’ the practice of eating takes on religious implications. Eating for Louise is repeatedly referred to as a ‘‘ritual’’—a term normally used to describe a sacred spiritual practice; for instance, ‘‘her creeping to the kitchen when she was nine became, in high school, a ritual of deceit and pleasure.’’

When Carrie puts her on a diet, this new regimen of eating replaces her old ‘‘ritual’’: ‘‘That was her ritual and her diet for the rest of the year, Carrie alternating fish and chicken breasts with the steaks for dinner, and every day was nearly as bad as the first.’’

Nonetheless, Louise’s old eating ‘‘ritual’’ battles for prominence over her new ‘‘ritual’’ of eating: ‘‘. . . those first weeks of the diet . . . she was the pawn of an irascibility which still, conditioned to her ritual as she was, could at any moment take command of her.’’

Louis’s struggle with her eating ‘‘ritual’’ and her identity as a ‘‘fat girl’’ are further expressed in spiritual terms, through reference to her ‘‘soul,’’ and her ‘‘spirit,’’ as well as to demons and morality. When Carrie first puts Louise on a diet, her struggle with hunger is described as a battle for her soul:

In all her life she had never been afflicted by ill temper and she looked upon it now as a demon which, along with hunger, was taking possession of her soul.

However, Louise also considers the diet as inherently ‘‘immoral.’’ At one point, Louise lashes out at Carrie, complaining of her hatred of lettuce; Louise concludes that, ‘‘‘We shouldn’t even buy it, it’s immoral.’’’ This again suggests that Louise’s accustomed ‘‘ritual’’ of eating takes on spiritual, religious implications—as if it were a veritable sacrament for her to eat as she always has.

Flying back to school after the Christmas vacation of her first year dieting, Louise is struck by the sense that, in the course of the diet, her very ‘‘soul’’ has been lost, her ‘‘spirit collapsed,’’ and she likens the loss of her old eating habits to ‘‘lost virtues.’’ From the airplane,

She looked down at the earth far below, and it seemed to her that her soul, like her body aboard the plane, was in some rootless flight. She neither knew its destination nor where it had departed from; it was on some passage she could not even define.

For Louise, the struggle with eating and not eating, gaining and losing weight, is also a struggle with her sense of identity. From the age of nine, she It is as if ’flesh’ and identifies herself as a ‘‘fat girl.’’ When she loses the weight, she loses part of herself.

The day before embarking on her college diet, Louise is told to spend one day eating ‘‘as though it were the last day of her life.’’ In some sense, Louise does experience this as the last day of her life; the loss of self begins immediately the next day with the loss of her eating ‘‘ritual.’’

When, after months of dieting, her weight plateaus, she is quick to suggest that maybe that weight is who she is—not just some arbitrary number that can be changed at will:

During the next few weeks she lost weight more slowly and once for eight days Carrie’s daily recording stayed at a hundred and thirty-six. Louise woke in the morning thinking of one hundred and thirty-six and then she stood on the scales and they echoed her. She became obsessed with that number, and there wasn’t a day when she didn’t say it aloud, and through the days and nights the number stayed in her mind, and if a teacher had spoken those digits in a classroom she would have opened her mouth to speak. What if that’s me, she said to Carrie. I mean what if a hundred and thirty-six is my real weight and I just can’t lose anymore. Walking hand-in-hand with her despair was a longing for this to be true, and that longing angered her and wearied her, and every day she was gloomy (emphasis mine).

While everyone around her views body weight as a fluid and malleable thing that may be altered at will, Louise struggles for a stable sense of identity, which includes a stable weight.

Louise’s struggle for a stable sense of identity is also conceptualized in terms of national identity. When, after her first year of dieting, Louise’s mother buys her new clothes and hires a photographer to document Louise’s weight loss, Louise expresses her sense of alienation in terms of feeling like a foreigner in a foreign country: ‘‘The new clothes and the photographer made her feel she was going to another country or becoming a citizen of a new one.’’

When she meets Richard, Louise once again expresses herself in terms that suggest that only by losing weight is she able to become a legitimate citizen of her own country: ‘‘. . . she thought of the accumulated warmth and pelf of her marriage, and how by slimming her body she had bought into the pleasures of the nation.’’

At the same time, Louise still feels out of place in the world, as if being thin were not her desired, or legitimate, ‘‘destination’’ in life:

But there were times, with her friends, or with Richard, or alone in the house, when she was suddenly assaulted by the feeling that she had taken the wrong train and arrived at a place where no one knew her, and where she ought not to be.

In trying to explain to her husband what it was like to be a ‘‘fat girl,’’ Louise again expresses her frustration in failing to adequately communicate her experience in terms of national identity, as she feels like a foreigner in her own body and her own life: ‘‘She felt as though she were trying to tell a foreign lover about her life in the United States, and if only she could command the language he would know and love all of her and she would feel complete.’’

After having her baby, Louise returns to her old ‘‘rituals’’ of eating; her return to these rituals feels like a return of her ‘‘spirit.’’ As her husband criticizes her weight gain, Louise ‘‘remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit, and watched his frustration, his impotence.’’ It is as if ‘‘flesh’’ and ‘‘spirit’’ are one and the same for Louise, as if gaining weight were, for her, equivalent to feeding her spirit, just as losing weight feels to her like draining her spirit.

In the final moments of the story, Louise becomes resigned to the knowledge that Richard will soon leave her because of her weight gain. In holding the baby to her body, Louise again equates her body with her soul, as she ‘‘carries the boy to his crib, feels him against her large breasts, feels that his sleeping body touches her soul.’’

Source: Liz Brent, for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2000. Brent has a Ph.D. in American Culture, specializing in film studies, from the University of Michigan. She is a freelance writer and teaches courses in the history of American cinema.

‘‘Her name was Louise.’’ So opens Andre Dubus’s short story ‘‘The Fat Girl.’’ But before readers even learn the protagonist’s name, they have already learned the most important aspect of her identity from the story’s title. The frank adjective ‘‘fat’’ is a powerful label. The story outlines how Louise negotiates this identity, focusing on her relationships with her parents, female friends, and men. Louise sees herself as a fat person in a double way—in terms of her own, private self-image, which includes self-love and pleasure, and in terms of how others see her, which centers on pity, worry, and disgust. Even when she succeeds in losing weight, fatness remains a dominant part of how she sees herself. Louise’s struggle to come to terms with her identity as a fat girl reflects a larger cultural debate about the way obesity should be understood and dealt with.

As a nation, Americans are obsessed with weight and are chronically fat. According to medical researchers at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), ‘‘obesity is a public health epidemic and should be treated like one’’ reports Maggie Fox, who covered the conference for Reuters. Medical experts see obesity as an illness rather than a personal issue, attributing to it a host of health risks running from diabetes to heart disease. Despite evidence that obesity is largely attributable to genetics, research has shown that most Americans associate thinness not only with beauty, but with character and virtue as well. Fat people are often perceived as unattractive and asexual. Furthermore, they are often held responsible for their condition and labeled as undisciplined, lazy, even stupid. American culture stigmatizes fat people to the point that obesity often has stronger detrimental effects on their social and emotional lives than it does on their physical health.

According to fat-acceptance advocacy groups such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), in light of such discriminatory attitudes, obesity should be seen primarily as a human rights issue, not a medical one. They advocate for fat people who are routinely subjected to discrimination in employment, housing, and other arenas. They oppose weight-loss diet programs (which, NAAFA claims, have a collective 95–98 percent failure rate over a three-year period), speaking out against a diet industry that funds obesity research and exploits fat peoples’ psyches and pocketbooks. Fat-acceptance advocates claim that it is years of off-and-on dieting, not obesity in itself, that leads to health problems among the fat.

Perhaps the most important part of NAAFA’s mission, however, is to offer social and emotional support for fat people, many of whom are depressed and isolated. Because the mainstream culture looks so unfavorably on obesity, they strive to create a subculture where it’s okay to be fat, offering fatfriendly social events, pen pals, and dating services. One recent internet search retrieved over seventy fat-acceptance groups, as well as a range of online magazines such as Abundance Magazine, BBTeen E-zine, Fat?So!,Big Times and Fat and Fabulous, which address issues including health, fashion, romance, and sex in the fat person’s life. Such forums help foster self-acceptance and social ties among the obese.

In ‘‘The Fat Girl’’ Louise vacillates between a mainstream perspective—seeing her weight as a weakness and the source of her problems—and an accepting one—seeing it as no more than an incidental aspect of who she is. From a young age she seems to understand that ‘‘she was fat because she was Louise. Because God had made her that way.’’ But she is the only fat person in the story (at one point she explains, ‘‘I was always thinking what people saw when they looked at me and I didn’t want them seeing two fat girls’’) so she also internalizes the ideas about fatness that thin people tend to have. Describing this double perspective on her weight, Louise says, ‘‘When I was alone I didn’t mind being fat, but then I’d have to leave the house again and then I didn’t want to look like me.’’

The thin people in the story—with the notable exception of Louise’s father—cannot imagine simply accepting her for who she is. They assume that Louise’s weight is preventing her from leading a happy, fulfilled life. From a young age Louise is encouraged to lose weight for the specific purpose of attracting the opposite sex. ‘‘If you’re fat the boys won’t like you; they won’t ask you out,’’ Louise’s mother tells her bluntly. But Louise does not find this very powerful incentive. Her single sexual experience, being kissed by a drunk boy, is not pleasurable or affirming: ‘‘He jammed his tongue into her mouth.’’ By contrast, she takes such great pleasure in eating that Dubus describes it in sexual terms. Likening the chocolate that Louise keeps hidden in her drawer to ‘‘lewd photographs,’’ he describes how Louise ‘‘thought of the waiting can- dy with near lust.’’ The candy seems to offer her the solace of love that is otherwise missing from her life. According to this way of thinking, Louise would stop lusting for candy when she finally found a fulfilling love relationship, which would therefore make it possible for her to give up food and be forever thin.

This is, indeed, what her friend Carrie seems to believe when she encourages Louise to go on a diet. Thin, chronically depressed Carrie has recently fallen in love for the first time. As she rides the bus from her boyfriend’s place back to the dorm room she shares with Louise, she starts worrying about Louise’s prospects for the future. ‘‘I was thinking about when we graduate. What you’re going to do. What’s to become of you. I want you to be loved the way I love you. Louise, if I help you, really help you, will you go on a diet?’’ The context of Carrie’s concern suggests that she believes that Louise will be alone—without friends and also without the chance to find romantic love—if she doesn’t lose weight.

While Carrie’s response to Louise’s weight is based on concern and sympathy, and her mother’s response is more judgmental and hostile, both of them tie happiness and love—and, significantly, the love of men—to being thin. But, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that what makes Louise unhappy, angry, and resentful is being hungry, not being fat. When, with Carrie’s help, Louise sheds enough weight to no longer be seen as a fat girl by those around her (including her new husband, Richard), her new attractiveness and social acceptance do not bring her real happiness. ‘‘She felt that somehow she had lost more than pounds of fat; that some time during her dieting she had lost herself too.’’ She later reflects on the year of dieting as ‘‘the worst year of her life.’’

As a thin, beautiful woman Louise must live in denial of her physical and emotional appetites, suffering a dislocated sense that those around her do not know who she really is. She occasionally feels ‘‘cunning’’ and ‘‘triumphant,’’ but ‘‘there were times, with her friends, or with Richard, or alone in the house, when she was suddenly assaulted by the feeling that she had taken the wrong train and arrived at a place where no one knew her, and where she ought not be.’’ It is not until she gains weight back and loses Richard’s love that she begins to see others’ intolerance toward her weight as their problem or weakness rather than hers. She has feelings of happiness and fulfillment when she is eating and nurturing her infant son. She is not heartbroken to lose Richard, whom she understands as crippled in his incapacity to love her truly, as herself, the way God made her.

Since Louise has never had a social network to support her in accepting her size, where does this emerging sense of self-esteem and self-acceptance come from? Throughout the story, Dubus describes Louise’s father as somewhat weak but loving. He offers her love unconditionally and ‘‘kissed her often.’’ He is the only character in the story that encourages her to eat and the only one to express ambivalence when she eventually loses weight, commenting, ‘‘But now there’s less of you to love.’’ Though he too pities her, he is the one figure from whom she receives a message that she is lovable just as she is, as a fat girl.

Another origin of Louise’s eventual self-acceptance is the fat actresses with whom she was fascinated as a teenager. These women, who had ‘‘broad and profound faces,’’ reflect for Louise an alternative affirmative vision of herself and her future—one that doesn’t involve dieting, self-denial, and transformation. She imagines that ‘‘they were fat because they chose to be.’’ In our thinworshipping culture, this is a radical idea. ‘‘And she was certain of something else too: she could see it in their faces—they did not eat secretly.’’ They are not ashamed of who they are. By the end of the story, Louise, too, is finally able to eat openly and without shame, despite her mother’s silent disapproval and her husband’s resentful rejection. ‘‘She is remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit,’’ Dubus writes, suggesting that Louise’s body and soul are at last in harmony. She is free to feed her hungers and this—rather than the approval of the thin mainstream— is what brings her true happiness and peace.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy for Short Stories for Students, Gale, 2000.