Eating Disorders and Constitutive Absence in Contemporary Women’s Writing

Anorexic narratives share the thesis that compulsive behaviours like eating disorders are determined by a strong existential component fuelled by women’s paradoxical position in present day capitalist western culture. After a review of social and psychological factors that play a significant role in the development of the disorders, this essay explores the representation of anorexia nervosa in three different first-person narratives. By portraying the psychological intricacies of the illness, these texts provide valuable information regarding its aetiology and cure in the line of recent bio-medical research on eating disorders that stresses the need to treat the disease as a symptom of a deeper emotional distress. In short, patients and characters manage to overcome the illness when they acknowledge a sense of constitutive absence as the root of their disease and learn to live with the ensuing need for identity definition