menuPaper: Lightness and moral values in Anorexia Nervosa
07 November, 2003
Dans l'eau de la claire fontaine
Elle se baignait toute nue.
Une saute de vent soudaine
Jeta ses habits dans le nues.
En detresse, elle me fit signe,
Pour la vetir, d'aller chercher
Des morceaux de feuilles de vigne,
Fleurs de lis ou fleurs d'oranger.
Avec des petales de roses,
Un bout de corsage lui fis.
Mail la belle n'etait pa bien grosse:
Une seule rose a suffi.
Avec le pampre de la vigne,
Un bout de cotillon lui fis.
Mail la belle etait si petite
Qu'une seule feuille a suffi.
Elle me tendit ses bras, ses levres,
Comme pour me remercier.
Je les pris avec tant de flevre
Qu'ell'fut toute deshabillee.
Le jeu dut plaire a l'ingenue,
Car, a la fontaine souvent,
Ell's'alla baigner toute nue
En priant qu'il fit du vent,
Qu'il fit du vent[1].
This is a song written by George Brassens. It tells the story of a minute woman who is bathing naked in the water of a fountain, when a man passes by and, moved by the fragile beauty of this tiny creature, decides to cover her with petals and leaves. However, she is so petite that one only petal is enough to cover her breast, and one only leave is enough to cover her hips. Once she is dressed, she tends her arms to him to thank him, and in the ardour of the moment, she gets undressed again. We are left with the image of this nearly a-corporeal creature who is so light, graceful and fragile “that a breath of the wind…”. Smallness and frailty here elicit a mixture of feelings: tenderness, sexual desire, sense of protection and there is a sense of beauty surrounding this vulnerable girl.
Society is replete with this kind of model of beauty. To some extent, it is difficult to distinguish a woman who corresponds to this model of beauty from a woman with anorexia nervosa.
Anorexia: the central feature
Let us turn to anorexia now.
According to the ICD-10, the central feature of anorexia nervosa[2] is “deliberate weight loss”[3]. In other terms, anorexia is a deliberate pursuit of lightness. The person pursues lightness with different methods: mainly by control of food intake and by compensatory practices – vomiting, exercise, use of diuretics and laxatives[4].
Dieting and compensatory practices have severe psychological and physiological side effects (ranging from impaired thinking to endocrine and metabolic changes and many others). Mortality associated to eating disorders, up to 20%, is one of the highest in psychiatry[5].
Why do people risk and sacrifice so much for the sake of lightness?
The value of lightness
There must be something good about lightness, otherwise people would not sacrifice so much for its sake. If we want to understand anorexia, then, we need to understand the value of lightness.
Lightness has two meanings. It means “of little weight, not heavy”. It is this sense we will use the term lightness here. But lightness also means “brightness”, “illumination”. This second meaning captures the spiritual significance of lightness, which is also an integral part of anorexia.
In this paper I will argue that lightness and fasting:
- Are viewed in a positive way in our culture and are associated with the pursuit of worthwhile goals
- Are valued means to other important moral ends, especially within Christian morality.
Lightness as a positive state
In ordinary language lightness is associated with positive states: feelings of liberation, purity, and well being (I feel so light…). Lightness is also often presented as a desirable state in music, literature, arts. Consider two examples of the value of lightness in literature:
All the night and morning Levin had lived quite unconsciously, quite lifted out of the conditions of material existence. He had not eaten for a whole day, he had not slept for two nights, had spent several hours half-dressed and exposed to the frosty air, and felt not only fresher and better than ever, but completely independent of his body: he moved without any effort of his muscles, and felt capable of anything. He was sure he could fly... [6]
This passage is taken from the Anna Karenina by Lev Tolstoi. In this novel Anna, who is married to the important businessman Karenin, falls in love with Vronskij. She leaves her husband and son to go abroad with Vronskij. When she comes back, however, she realises that her choice ruined her entire life, and kills herself. In antithesis to this love, the book narrates the love of Kitty for Levin. In the quoted passage, Levin is about to meet Kitty’s family, after they consented to their engagement.
This passage is important because it presents lightness in a positive way: Levin is half-starved and half-frozen but his situation is presented as a highly desirable state, something worth admiration or even envy- he felt as if he could fly. Moreover, here lightness is associated with a positive value, namely love.
Lightness is also presented in a positive way in the following description of Emily Dickinson provided by Joseph Lyman, who courted Emily’s sister.
A library dimly lighted […] Enter a spirit clad in white, figure so draped as to be misty [,] face moist, translucent alabaster, forehead firmer as of a statuary marble. Eyes once bright hazel now melted & fused so as to be two dreamy, wondering wells of expression, eyes that see no forms but gla[n]ce swiftly [& at once] to the core of all thi[n]gs – hands small, firm, deft but utterly emancipated from all [fleshy] claspings of perishable things, very firm strong little hands absolutely under control of the brain, types of quite rugged health [,] mouth made for nothing & used for nothing but uttering choice speech, rare [words] thoughts, glittering, starry misty [words] figures, winged words[7].
Emily is described as a mere “spirit”, “draped” so as to be misty, whose hands are small and emancipated from all fleshy things. One gets the impression of a near-transparent waif who has moved from the earthly world of the flesh. Not only is she presented in a positive light, but Emily elicits fascination in Lyman as she has apparently overcome the “mortal” world and reached a nearly spiritual dimension.
As with Levin, Dickinson’s lightness is presented both positively and associated with another great value. In Levin’s case, it was love; in Dickinson’s case, as we are now going to see, the writing of poetry.
The value of the Spirit over the body in Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson valued writing in a special way: she believed that the written word, lasting over mortal bodies, makes the human being closer to eternity, as is for example illustrated in the following letter, which she wrote to the literary critic Thomas Wenthworth Higginson.
A Letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend[8]
A Word made Flesh is seldom
And tremblingly partook
Nor then perhaps reported
But have I not mistook
Each one of us has tasted
With ecstasies of stealth
The very food debated
To our specific strength –
A Word that breathes distinctly
Has not the power to die
Cohesive as the Spirit
It may expire if He
“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”
Could condescension be
Like this consent of Language
This loved Philology[9]
In this poem Emily asserts the immortality of the Word and Spirit, which is juxtaposed against the mortality of flesh – a Word may expire if God were to make a Word flesh and dwell among us.
For Emily, intellectual activity was superior to physical or social activities, and the soul was clearly superior to the body. In her letters, she writes:
“I do not care for the body, I love the timid soul, the blushing, shrinking soul; it hides, for it is afraid, and the bold obtrusive body…”[10]
“[W]ho cares for a body whose tenant is ill at ease? Give me the aching body, and the spirit glad and serene, for if the gem shines on, forget the mouldering casket”[11]
It is not clear whether Emily Dickinson was anorexic herself, in the sense as we would today describe anorexia. But she certainly was a person who rejected bodily existence, and the values which directed her life tell us something important about anorexia. Both the life of Emily and anorexia express a desire for elevation that is connected to a need for moral integrity.
Now I am going to show that lightness fits within this need for moral elevation. In order to understand how lightness is a means to moral integrity, we need to understand the relationship between spirituality, moral integrity, lightness and fasting.
Spirituality, moral integrity and lightness.
At least since the spread of Christianity, moral perfection has been identified with the idea of elevation to God. This is why spiritual exercises are called ascetic practices, where asceticism also means ascension, elevation.
Fasting (weight loss – therefore lightness) has always been considered as one of the most effective ascetic techniques[12]. The reasons for the connection between lightness and asceticism are probably to be found in human psychology. The idea of lightness is related to images of lifting, floating, flying, rising, ascending. In ordinary language we have expressions like feeling “light-headed”, for example, or feeling light, or feeling “high”, when we are “over” excited. So, lightness – which, as we have seen means both not heavy but also illumination - is associated with the idea of elevation to a higher, superior dimension. Fasting is the most obvious way to become light.
[SHOW SLIDE N.11]
This is how lightness and fasting are connected with morality and spirituality. Lightness promotes ascension, fasting promotes lightness, and thus they are valuable as a means to spiritual elevation and moral integrity.
There is also another sense, related to this, in which fasting/lightness are morally valuable.
The scarce consideration of the flesh
Anthony Johnson (one of the biographers of Emily Dickinson) points out that one of the fundamental values of Puritanism was the scarce consideration for “the flesh”[13]. This belief is rooted in the Christian tradition, but has had a notorious secular equivalent in Kantian ethics: according to this ethics, a person behaves morally when she or he submits the “phenomenal/physical” side to the “rational” or “noumenal” side. Morality requires that we submit our phenomenal side to our will and to our reason[14].
Within this ethic, it is obvious that control over one of the most pressing physiological impulses, namely hunger, is praised.
Fasting has been associated (and is still associated) with ideas of control over the chaotic passions of the body, and the person who is able to exert control over hunger, such a powerful physiological impulse, has often been brought up as an example of moral integrity[15].
Moreover, fasting has been associated (and is still associated) with the idea of purity. Eating disorders are an important expression of this belief: for the person with eating disorders, being empty from food is being “clean”, and compensatory practices, such as self-induced vomiting, abuse of laxatives and diuretics are also called “cathartic” practices. Through these practices, the person purifies herself from food.
These arguments link anorexia to a Christian/Protestant ethic. Through mortification of the body, the anorexic shows control over the body, will-power, and thus attains a higher spirituality, just as Emily Dickinson sought to achieve. It is the Christian and especially Protestant value placed on self-control and austerity, and the role of fasting in achieving these, that is in the dominant background of the psychology of anorexics.
Conclusions
Let me try to draw some conclusions from all this.
The central feature of anorexia is the deliberate pursuit of lightness as weight loss. If it were not possible to value lightness, anorexia would not exist. I have argued that, as weight loss is deliberate, anorexics pursue lightness for normative reasons, and I have asked what is good or valuable about lightness.
We have seen that lightness is often presented in a positive way in our culture, and is associated with the pursuit of worthwhile goals, in Tolstoi, with Love, in Emily Dickinson, with the Word. Moreover lightness/fasting are also thought to be instrumentally valuable as means to spiritual/moral perfection both because they are thought to promote “elevation” and because they are seen as proofs of individual capacity to exert control over the body.
These conclusions on the value of lightness tell us something important about the anorexic pursuit of lightness.
Sociological and clinical studies show that typically people with eating disorders are very sensitive to the Christian/Protestant ethic: perfectionism, discipline, austerity, hard work, spirituality, guilt, and especially to the belief that the submission of the “physical” to the “spiritual” is manifestation of moral integrity[16]. Eating disordered behaviour, which is all about controlling what happens in the body, is the expression, in extreme terms, of the belief that moral principles “work in opposition to basic and unrestrained impulses”[17]. Those who develop the disorder are invariably “rule-bound” people. Values such as hard work, self-control, responsibility, intellectual achievement, postponing gratification to work, not accepting any form of pleasure unless is earned are typically those around which the life of the person with eating disorders is organised[18]. People with eating disorders are just people who have taken these values seriously. It is no surprise to find that people who take these values seriously find strength in lightness and that the more they become emaciated, frail and vulnerable, the more powerful they feel. This is also why bulimia, food orgies and lack of control over food are reason for shame and guilt, whereas rigid diet is reason for pride, in people with eating disorders. Those with anorexia, like many other people, believe that there is something moral in the capacity to control this chaotic body, and something immoral in the incapacity to control it. Lightness is the demonstration of successful abnegation, whereas heaviness is the expression of the most repugnant vices: indolence, weakness, moral collapse[19].
I am not saying, of course, that other variables do not play a role in the articulation of such a complex syndrome; I am saying that the fight for control that is at the heart of anorexia appears unintelligible unless one also takes into account the fundamental part played by moral pressure[20],[21]. Claims that eating disordered behaviour is irrational, symptomatic of an illness or of a mental problem are not, I believe, related to the fact that eating disorders are difficult to understand, but rather proof a general unwillingness to question ordinary morality, and to accept that “morality” “rightness” and “goodness” may have bad consequences.
If these arguments are accepted, this will have important clinical and social implications in terms of how anorexia is understood and approached, and may also have important implications for the moral philosopher. Eating anomalies should be seen as the coherent implementation of moral imperatives that are just being taken seriously. These moral imperatives are part of ordinary morality; striped of their original religious significance, they express moral codes that are routinely applied to all areas of daily life. What one should discuss, therefore, is not eating, but morality. The focus should shift from the person with eating disorders, from her eating habits and from what happens “in her mind”, to our shared moral assumptions about being “good” and “right” and their repercussions. It is not the mind of the anorexic which is disordered. If anything is disordered, it is the moral values that she takes on, often Christian values that have been accepted as a part of ordinary morality. Rather than needing repair, these moral values may need absolute dissolution. But that is a topic for another paper.
[1] In the water of the bright fountain/ She was bathing undressed/ When a breath of wind from the south/ Threw her clothes to the clouds./ Distressed, she asked me to help her/ And to look for vine-leaves, fleurs-de-lis or of orange./ With petals of roses I made her a blouse/ But she was so little that one single rose was enough./ With the vine-leaves I made her a skirt/ But she was so little that one leaf suffic
[2] This paper will mainly refer to anorexia but what is said here will help to understand a wide range of behaviours that are related, in one way or another, to the idea that lightness is desirable (for example bulimia, other eating disorders, exercise abuse)
[3] World Health Organisation, International Statistical Classification of Diseases-ICD-10, World Health Organisation, Geneva, 1994, F10-19.
[4] American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV [4th ed], Washington DC, 1994, 307.1
[5] Treasure J. Anorexia and bulimia nervosa. In: Stein G, Wilkinson G, eds. Seminars in general adult psychiatry. London: Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1998:858-902. Crow S, Praus B, Thuras P. Mortality from eating disorders. A 5-to 10 years record linkage study. International Journal of Eating Disorders 1999;VOL.26,1:97-102. Herzog DB, Greenwood DN, Doer DJ, et al. Mortality in eating disorders: a descriptive study. International Journal of Eating Disorders 2000; VOL.28,1:20-6.
[6] Tolstoy LN. Anna Karenina. London: Penguin, 1977: ch 15. It is sometimes argued that this sense of exhilaration and spiritual power is ultimately rooted in physiological processes. On this point, research is not in one direction. For example, Richard Gordon argues that fasting has a potentially addictive lure, and that is why health cultists usually prescribe time limits on fasting. See Gordon R. Anorexia and bulimia, anatomy of a social epidemic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990: 123-5. Other researchers are, however, more sceptical on this point. See Slade R. The anorexia nervosa reference book: direct and clear answer to everyone's questions. New York: Harper & Rowe, 1984: 34-5. Despite this controversy, what matters in this context, is that mystical and ethical connotations are often attached to this experience of purity and spiritual enthralment (whether or not underpinned also by neuro-physiological factors).
[7] Sewall RB, ed. The Lyman letters: new light on Emily Dickinson and her family. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965: 69.
[8] Dickinson E. Letter No 330. In: Johnson TH, ed. The letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958: 460.[9] Dickinson E. Poem No 1651. In: Guidacci M, ed. Poesie e lettere. Firenze: Sansoni, 2000: 398.
[10] Dickinson E. Letter No. In: Johnson TH, ed. The letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958. letter No 39: 103.
[11] Dickinson E. Letter No 54. In: Johnson TH, ed. The letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958: 140
[12] Vandereycken W, Van Deth R. From fasting saints to anorexic girls: the history of self-starvation. London: Athlone Press, 1994: chs 2, and 11.
[13] Guidacci M, ed. Poesie e lettere. Firenze: Sansoni, 2000: 382.
[14] Kant I. Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals. London: Hutchinson House, 1955: ch 1. Kant I. Critical examination of practical reason. In Abbott TK, ed. Critique of practical reason and other works on the theory of ethics. London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1948: 87-200.
[15] Bruch H. Eating disorders: obesity, anorexia nervosa and the person within. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974: 25; Weber M. The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1976: 166; MacSween M. Anorexic bodies: a feminist and social perspective. London: Routledge, 1995:211[16] Vandereycken W, Van Deth R. From fasting saints to anorexic girls: the history of self-starvation. London: Athlone Press, 1994: chs 2, and 11. Lawrence Marlin, The Anorexic Experience, The Women’s Press, London, 1984: 32-35; Bruch Hilde, Eating Disorders: obesity, anorexia nervosa and the person within, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974: 25.
[17] Marlyn Duker and Roger Slade, Anorexia nervosa and bulimia: how to help, Open University Press, Buckingham-Philadelphia, 2003, p.130
[18] Marlyn Duker and Roger Slade, Anorexia nervosa and bulimia: how to help, Open University Press, Buckingham-Philadelphia, 2003, p.110
[19] MacSween M. Anorexic bodies: a feminist and social perspective. London: Routledge, 1995: 249-50
[20] Marlyn Duker and Roger Slade, Anorexia nervosa and bulimia: how to help, Open University Press, Buckingham-Philadelphia, 2003, p.130
[21] The following objection may be raised: if it is true that these values still affect our life, and if it is true that eating disorders spring from these moral values, why is it that mainly women suffer from the condition? However, the idea that eating disorders are a “female” problem is misleading. It is true that, if one sticks to diagnostic criteria, the majority of those who are diagnosed as having anorexia and bulimia are women. However, exactly the same dynamics that shape eating disordered behaviour also inform male behaviour in a number of areas ranging from sports to work activities. It will not be uncommon to find similar patterns of behaviour as those adopted by the person with eating disorders in the body-builder, in other sportsmen and in all those, men and women, who have accepted the idea that achieving is proof of adequacy (see Duker and Slade, op. cit., p.132)
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