'I never talk of hunger': Self-starvation as women's language of protest in novels by Barbara Pym, Margaret Atwood, and Anne Tyler

Whether they are traditional or feminist, psychotherapists generally see women's anorexia nervosa as an indication of their pathological relationship with food and their bodies, stemming from an unhealthy relationship with the mother that causes the daughter to direct against herself her anger and aggression she secretly wishes to take out on her mother. They also argue that women's anorexia arises from their need to control their desires and to reject their femininity in the process. This study of Barbara Pym's Quartet in Autumn, Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, and Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant challenges critics' reading of these novels, as well as psychotherapists' analyses of anorexia. It posits the theory that women's self-starvation functions as a language that articulates their perceptions of society's weaknesses and their protest against and rejection of the roles this dysfunctional society imposes on women. Women who use self-starvation as a language of protest are not inarticulate, however. They belong to what social anthropologist Shirley Ardener calls a "muted group" whose perceptions and experiences cannot be translated into spoken language because the "idiom of the dominant group" which is encoded by men does not accommodate women's views of the world.;Although Marcia Ivory, Marian MacAlpin, and Jenny Tull come from different generations and socio-economic backgrounds, they all face the inability of words to express accurately what they perceive and go through and rely on self-starvation as a language to communicate their defiance of the dominant ideology and perceptions of women's prescribed roles. Their language of self-starvation articulates their perceptions of an increasingly indifferent patriarchy that places limits on women's lives and expects them to subsist within those limits. Rather than accept their roles and adapt their perceptions to fit the dominant ideology, all three characters protest and reject these roles, expressing in their language of self-starvation their refusal to acquiesce or be silent.