Lionel Shriver on obesity and the surplus of attractive characters in fiction: “The solution is to…
Lionel Shriver on obesity and the surplus of attractive characters in fiction: “The solution is to get a grip and put human beauty in perspective”
Novelist Lionel Shriver writes about body image at The Cut, and starts by remembering a stranger’s pronouncement, the summer after she finished college: “You will never look better than you do right now.” She talks about feeling beautiful as “a social experience, of wielding a small power… a short-lived little crack high that I would argue we overrate.”
Still, rail against it as you might, the concept of physical beauty — thus, alas, also of homeliness — is implanted in early childhood and fortified every day… Multiple studies document that children from Iowa to Italy have established a powerful aversion to fat — and to fat children — as young as age 3. Shown drawings of peers who are disfigured, missing limbs, on crutches, in wheelchairs, or obese, kids say they least liked the “fat” child.
Authors, Shriver points out, “exclude fat characters from the cast altogether,” or pair physical deviance from the ideal with a psychological peculiarity to match. “In literature, fat has persistently marked a character as disagreeable,” she states, citing Jane Eyre’s John Reed and Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursley among others. She quotes one of her own characters, Irina, who straightens her teeth and finds herself in a new world of politesse: “People who’ve always been good-looking, [Irina] says, “haven’t a clue that how they’re treated — how much it has to do with their appearance…. Ugly people, fat people, even people who just aren’t anything special?… They have to do something to prove out, whereas when you’re pretty to look at you don’t have to do anything but sit there and everybody is plumb delighted.”
But Shriver says that “making characters just happen to be fat would be socially naïve. In truth, fiction writers’ biggest mistake is to create so many characters who are casually beautiful.”
With the population getting only heavier, the yawning chasm between the real and the ideal is a formula for widespread discontent. Yet the solution can’t be to artificially fiddle with standards of beauty as if they can be adjusted like the width of the margins in word processing. The solution is to get a grip and put human beauty in perspective… Our contemporary equivalence between the self and its ever-corrupting, malady-prone shell profoundly diminishes what it means to be a human being. After all, it’s hard to imagine ever commending one friend to another, “Oh, you’d just love Nancy, she’s so thin!”
Shriver is attempting to parse out a complicated, reflexive space; as one of her characters puts it, she wants to separate the “who” and the “what” of a person, although social frameworks may prevent that from being possible from an early an age as 3. “As a novelist, I may appreciate that the body can both affect and, to a degree, reflect character. Yet as a person, I philosophically reject a linear relationship between this mortal coil and the soul it houses,” she writes, and then concludes, rightly: “Whatever our sizes, in time the body will betray us all.”