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Home » Lose Weight Safely » The Claustrophobic Menace of Boarding-School Fiction – The Atlantic

In Oligarchy, Thomass tenth adult novel, the illness in question is anorexia. The protagonist, Natasha, a Russian plutocrats daughter, enrolls at a posh British boarding school where thinness equals social currency. Thomas establishes this dynamic swiftly, using teenage bluntness to maximum effect. (Your thighs should not touch each other anywhere, one classmate tells Natasha curtly.) Natashas instinct is to associate fatness with power, but seeking acceptance, she acquiesces to her peers secret and weird starvation diets. Oddly, their headmaster, Dr. Moone, encourages this behavior, accelerating the students transformation into, as Natasha puts it, hungry ghosts.

Slowly, Thomas turns her characters collective diet obsession into a source of warped female solidarity, which makes for a strangely destabilized reading experience. As the girls mirror and control one another, their adolescent cruelty gives way to mutual protectiveness. The point of view begins sliding among them, as if they share one consciousness. These shifts are crucial to the plots advancement; through the perspective of one of Natashas peers, readers learn that, when alone with his favorite students, Dr. Moone expounds on his theory of asthenics, where bodies must be lean, breastless, taut. He is slowly convincing the studentsand worse, getting them to convince one anotherthat physical frailty is a worthy goal.

Oligarchy uses the familiar phenomena of adolescent copycatting and boarding-school insularity to cannilyand eerilycreate a world that feels women-focused but proves to be the reverse. Outside fiction, misogyny and thin privilegeto borrow a term popularized by the writer Cora Harringtonhave a comparable, if more diffuse, effect. For girls and women, thinness comes with a measure of social acceptance that often serves as an incentive to lose weight, even if that process is arduous, time-consuming, expensive, or dangerous. In Oligarchy, too, bodily control seems to bring the girls closer to power. But more often, it distracts them, or stands in their way.

Oligarchy is deeply concerned with male control of womens minds and bodies, but it puts the body first. The Illness Lesson takes the opposite approach. For Beams and her protagonist, intellectual lifeand, ultimately, intellectual freedomis paramount. Caroline has spent her whole life as the protg of her philosopher father, Samuel, and depends on him for affection and purpose. Finding no place for a female thinker in 1800s Massachusetts, she retreats into Samuels world. When he decides that they should start an experimental girls school, Caroline takes issue with his pedagogical insistence that the soul does not have a sex, but caves to her father and teaches his way.

Beams treats her novels central relationship as an opportunity to explore the pitfalls of female allegiance to patriarchy. Trained in what Cusk calls masculine values, Caroline struggles with female friendship and becomes oddly competitive with her most assertive student, Eliza, around whom the girls begin to unite. Samuel is delighted by his students growing harmony, referring to them as one body, but Caroline finds their desire to mimic one another threatening.

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The Claustrophobic Menace of Boarding-School Fiction - The Atlantic

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Home » Lose Weight Safely » The Claustrophobic Menace of Boarding-School Fiction – The Atlantic