Abstract
This chapter explores a number of plays that construct female characters and shape their personalities through a myriad of negative stereotypes associated with fat. I mainly focus on the portrayal of fat women as voracious consumers who threaten the equilibrium of the world of the play. I use the word consumer both for its economic connotations and for its other meanings to refer to women who eat, devour, and destroy what is around them, literally or emotionally. I want to highlight the connection between portrayals of women as primary consumers of products in a capitalist marketplace and portrayals of fat women as excessive, wasteful consumers of food, drink, and physical as well as psychic space in our culture.
Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Tennessee Williams’ Ravenous Women: Fat Behavior Onstage,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society 1:1 (2012): 75–90. Reprinted by Permission of Taylor and Francis.
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Notes
Jennifer-Scott Mobley, “Tennessee Williams’ Ravenous Women: Fat Behavior Onstage,” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Weight and Society 1:1 (2012): 75–90. Reprinted by Permission of Taylor and Francis.
Samantha Murray, The ‘Fat’ Female Body (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 13–14.
Andrea Elizabeth Shaw also uses the term “fat behavior” with essentially the same meaning as above in her book, The Embodiment of Disobedience (New York: Lexington Books, 2006), 50.
Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo, in Three by Tennessee (New York: Signet Classic, 1951; reprint, 1976).
For a full discussion on the notion of the Fat Woman “letting herself go,” see Cecelia Hartley’s essay “Letting Ourselves Go” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression, eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (New York: Routledge, 1966), 2.
Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana, in Three by Tennessee (New York: Signet Classic, 1961; reprint 1976).
Tennessee Williams, Small Craft Warnings (New York: New Directions Books, 1972).
Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Signet Publishing, 1962; reprint, 1983), 7.
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 116–17.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 187.
Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).
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© 2014 Jennifer-Scott Mobley
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Mobley, JS. (2014). Monsters, Man Eaters, and Fat Behavior. In: Female Bodies on the American Stage. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428943_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137428943_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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