by Stephen Wade
We know now that there are family defence mechanisms. Defence mechanisms explain what a person does within the fabric of internal worlds of a family. A family creates a structure and each member then becomes, in external show, a visible part of that structure. If a family makes a fantasy or a number of what psychologists call ‘imagos’ in each member, then that mode of enacting what other family members want to see and know will go on. The psychologist who has done most to disseminate this in the modern period is R.D. Laing. His discussion of collusion explains much of what could have happened in the two years of Sarah’s fast.
The individuals in a family collude (literally ‘play together’) in behaving in ways that each wishes or has to see. Two family members, the theory goes, see the advantages in playing along with what each one appears to want; their ‘game’ then becomes a factor in their life that steps up the whole business into two projections of personality, each one being supportive of the game they play. In everyday life this might mean that two people derive great pleasure from giving each other the kind of responses they want. How does this carry over into Sarah’s story?
When it became plain to Evan that his problematic child was somehow fulfilled in a life in her bed, he helped her to play out the fantasy of that pleasing life. This will happen when relationships are dominated by appearances, that is, in a Victorian rural working family, daily demarcated work defined how the family operated and survived; if bad health threatened that, then the fantasy found a way to fuel the contentment of each individual. In short, father and daughter saw their dependency, and they saw the advantages to both if roles were maintained.
The important point here is that all this is not necessarily intentional, or planned like some dark scheme of power. More likely, it is the creation of a relationship that makes some sense of a stressful, very trying situation.
Sarah’s reading told her that invalids confined to bed could still find a kind of fulfilment. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had learned Greek and made scholarly translations; she had written poetry. We know that Sarah read and wrote poetry. Her bed and the area of the large bedroom in which she was centred gradually became a shrine to the family fantasy. It started as a series of comforts, efforts to make her feel special although she would normally be seen as a burden, when there was work to be done. Then this melded into something in which all the siblings and the parents colluded: ‘we have a special sister who is confined to bed… with a mystery illness’. Time passed and the family narrative then became we have a sister/daughter who is ‘beyond help except from the hands of the Doctor Mawr in heaven’.
Laing wrote that each person in the collusion works hard to become what the other projects. Evan very likely enjoyed being the father of a ‘miraculous’ child and his fraud was mainly on himself, the family collusion over-riding anything extra-family, anything in the world beyond the walls of the long house. He began to believe his own made-up explanation of his daughter’s condition.
There is an old saying that the need of the calf to suckle is less strong that the yearning of the cow to be suckled. In between the longing, there is a space to be filled, and in families that may be unspoken, simply a place when enactment takes place. This collusion would explain Evan’s statements about his daughter’s supposed ‘fits’ and the possibility of her experience of the hysterical ‘globus’. When she complained of the deadness on one side of her body and the alleged paralysis of her hand (both of which were contradicted by doctors) we are led to think that Evan either was some kind of idiot, or more likely, that he saw only what he wanted to see, and believed what he desired in his fantasy of himself, projected into Sarah’s consciousness every time he showed special care and concern. Even when the nurses were there, it had to be Evan who lifted Sarah into another bed while they changed sheets. When asked about urine in the sheets, he had only seen ‘spots;’ and most of all, he repeatedly talked about his ‘vow’ to Sarah not to feed her. All this suggests that gradually, a scenario was made in which the members of the family could contribute to their projected narrative of suffering when asked. If, as Laing later argued, the participants in collusion ‘counterfeit’ a relation, it is done without a studied design: it just happens, like an actor ad-libbing. The danger for the Jacobs was that this unspoken game grew into something that looked very much like a con trick, and the legal and medical minds around them saw that as the obvious answer.
It has to be asked, following this line of thought, why was the collusion not broken when Sarah’s condition worsened? She was surely taking food in the night up until the second watching; even if the parents and siblings had chosen to ignore this and to believe their fantasy, surely a traumatic experience would have shaken them back into reality? At that point, when Daniel insisted on feeding Sarah, we have the external third party, an individual outside the fantasy (or ‘phantasy’ in Laing’s spelling), and that is a threat. What did Evan do? He turned violent – something he had not done before, even when he had been offended by Dr Hughes’ examination of Sarah, and which had led to his attempt to prosecute for assault.
All Evan’s actions before any real threat to the bond of the collusion were vocal, not physical. He had never threatened to kick anyone until Daniel was clamouring for food to be brought for Sarah.
Was Sarah’s condition hysteria? In contemporary eyes it was; but they were blinkered. Hysteria was a safe and convenient blanket which can be explained by the workings of collusion? I think that makes a great deal of sense. Collusion shatters the bonds and tethers of reason and rationality; it is behaviour that we all do on certain levels of interaction in order, as we say, to please. When Sarah was transmuted into something close to a bride of Christ, or at least to a semblance of a medieval holy woman with anorexia mirabilis, she fulfilled something that was needed in the family: there was an emptiness at the heart of their lives. The sermons and the tracts, the Sunday School stories and the Biblical tales, had fed something down below the words of everyday life. Perhaps they fired a fantasy and the actors stepped in.
The hard men of law would have laughed at this. They had no vocabulary in 1869 for the diseased mind, nor for the impenetrable imaginations at work in family dynamics. It was simple then to look at actions they saw made by Sarah and relate these to what they knew. For instance, all medical men remarked on the thrashing of arms she made in her last two days. This was typical observable behaviour in such a context. But, as we now know from cases in Brazil, from a book called Death Without Weeping by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, children who died of starvation in her study experienced a delirium which came to be called ‘delirio de fome’ – the delirium of hunger. This referred to deaths through malnutrition and dehydration and Kristen Hastrup has noted, ‘The result is that with the gradual medication of Brazilian society the centre of gravity in the madness from hunger is being displaced. Starvation cannot be cured, but madness may be relieved.’
This reverses the Victorian pattern: they saw no way to relieve the ‘madness’ that they could only label ‘hysteria’, and they could have cured the starvation in Sarah’s case by taking her into the nearest hospital and force-feeding her. But they allowed the fantasy (or the imposture) to defeat them. In a sense the determination by the authorities to show off their power in the assize court, and see that a harsh sentence was imposed, throws light on their sense of inadequacy in the face of a little girl and a family collusion – whether criminal or otherwise. In the end it does not matter what the source of the story was: the last act was desperate, utterly avoidable, and serves mainly to illuminate the fears and doubts of a society at war within itself, where science was striving to conquer in every place where the men of power thought a battle was needed, and the Wales they saw as benighted and riddled with superstition was the perfect place for a showdown, with the Jacobs as martyrs to ignorance.
What Sarah was communicating was understood inside the family collusion. As the German poet Eduard Morike put it,
World, let me be, let me be!
&nbs
p; Do not entice me with gifts of love.
Let my heart keep its joy
And its pain to itself….
There is also the question of anorexia. A child with a good layer of fat and healthy organs is hardly the typical anorexia sufferer, but a more accurate term to apply to Sarah is ‘eating disorder’. In addition we have to place her where she lived, in the middle of a century in which women inherited and had to work with the control of their food intake and their attitudes to eating. This was a time when middle class women took afternoon tea in order that they would be able to eat very sparingly at the evening meal when the men tucked into a hearty meal of a dozen courses and ample alcohol.
There is a huge body of theoretical writing on the subject of anorexia and eating disorders at this time, and one established approach is that of ‘spectacular fasting’. This relates to my account in the first chapter of the creation of a fasting girl as a spectacle – something to be admired, gazed at, wondered at. Different lines of thought place the nineteenth century fasting girls, like Sarah and Ann of Tutbury, somewhere between the medieval anorexia mirabilis and the anorexia nervosa, defined in 1870, we are familiar with today.
There is no doubt that Sarah, whether she was a night feeder or whether she really was a miracle, saw her fasting, or at least her spectacular career as bed-ridden invalid, as spiritual. Food had always been the province of the women of the house, of course, and so to control the use and meanings of eating was something that related to a dominant ideology of Sarah’s time. As already discussed, the fast within a Christian life was not only normal, but expected at certain times in the religious calendar. But to indulge in what can only be called a performance in fasting was something the mid-Victorian times would have viewed with ambivalence.
To add to this, there was already established in Welsh popular narrative, a previous Welsh Fasting Girl – Mary Thomas of Merioneth. Her story had been told by James Ward, in his 1802 work, Some Account of Mary Thomas of Tanyrallt in Merionethshire who has Existed Many Years without Taking Food and of Ann Moore Called the Fasting Woman of Tutbury. This book established the idea of the phenomenon as being sensational. In fact, his title and treatment of the subject is in itself sensational, and he uses the word ‘extraordinary’ in his account of Mary. The impetus is to find something there akin to the stories of the medieval saintly women.
This kind of literature and the attitudes behind it, planted a firm foundation of belief in the miraculous element in food denial and eating control in the early Victorian mind. That foundation was to be confronted by the new medicine, and by the coming men of the revolution of the 1850s when medicine and its practitioners became established and regulated.
When Sarah’s case broke into the national media, some readers would have read the tale as a spiritual example, while others would have seen the spectacle only, yet beneath all this there is something deeper, and whether it is a mental illness is open to discussion: Sarah controlled her eating and her entire relationship to food within her family. As the daughter of a hard-working farmer she would have lived her daily life through the year in a relationship with food. The preparation, the understanding of cooking, the knowledge of food in the raw and its extraction and preservation, would have been her natural province. In addition, she would have been expected to eat as a woman should eat: to have a regimen which related in a certain way to the male diet.
As recent feminist writing has explained and explored, the subject I am warming to is the notion of the female subversion of the dietary and the conventions of eating and consuming food. Sarah chose, we might argue, as her protest and assertion of herself, to regulate food and then to make that denial a spectacle, an aspect of wonder. Why? The answer is that there is no point in having a demonstration unless there is a public to take it all in. She may have begun by not wanting food, during the period of the scarlet fever and the onset of some other disease when she was immunocompromised; but whatever the root of the spectacle, her body was the site of the subversion, it was where others saw, in puberty, the emergence of the young woman, and she was out to prevent that normal course of things.
In a sense, she stopped time. In controlling her relation to food, she began to see her actions as controlling the relentless march of time as it transmuted the body from girl to woman, so fixing her in a role, perhaps in collusion with Evan, (in the above, Laingian sense) but maybe also as no more than a jeu d’esprit that turned into something powerful, something that began to shape and influence the adult world around her.
Sarah, in her wide reading, would have been aware of the effects of the food control practised by the medieval saints, who wrote and spoke of the ‘nourishment of the soul’ while living on very small amounts of food. The tracts and spiritual biographies she read would have taught the lesson that, as the life of Saint Therese of Lisieux also wrote of her texts, ‘again and again, there is no doubt that there was something above normal nature for all of us to understand in what they wrote…’
In looking more deeply into the social context of the 1860s, discoveries which help to explain the subject of women and food continually crop up. A seminal work in this respect, and one in which the idea of self-starvation has a perspective linked to female identity and representation, is Christina Rosetti’s poem, Goblin Market (1862). In the poem two sisters, Laura and Lizzie are out shopping when they hear the cries of goblins selling luscious fruits. Laura succumbs to temptation, longing to have some of the fruits they describe in rich sensuous ways: ‘Rare pears and greengages/ damsons and bilberries/ taste them and try…’. Laura has no money but the goblins accept a lock of her golden hair. But then Laura falls sick, and we have the redemptive refusal to eat from Lizzie, in order that she may save her languishing sister.
The goblins want to force food into her, but then we have these lines:
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in:
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syrupped all her face…
This is an image to create a beating heart and a wringing of hands to those who have an eating disorder which exists for some deep, complex reason, but it also carries a potent symbolism in an age when the languishing female was a stock of poetry and ideology.
Clearly we have a poem crammed with symbolic interpretations, and critical appreciation of the poem has been vast over the years. Whatever the meaning might be in terms of women in Victorian society, at the core we have the resistance to temptation, and the sensual, delicious food embodies the temptations from the male goblins. Of course, even their name is a pun on ‘gobbling’ as if they represent the coarse, predatory and greedy side of male elements in society, explained in the last lines with: ‘Their fruits like honey to the throat/ but poison in the blood’. In critical terms, the poem has, as Angela Leighton puts it, a ‘transgressive playfulness’ and that surely is a part of one interpretation we could give to Sarah’s ‘bed games’ as she colludes (plays with) others.
In 1862 readers could have extracted from Rosetti’s poem a parable about the saintly, spiritual attitude, encouraged in the tracts of the Oxford Movement and in the religious publications discussed in chapter 2. It is almost as if the plenitude of enticing food was one of the Devil’s best weapons. It has often been remarked by literary historians that the Victorians had a problem with food – a profound ambivalence. Time and again in the middle decades of the century in particular, self-denial of food is a wonderful virtue, perhaps most widely known by readers in the passages in Dickens’ Great Expectations in which Miss Havisham at Satis House, sits while her wedding food rots, as if time were frozen on her long-ago nuptial day. She herself has starved too – ‘shrunk to skin and bone’. Perhaps, as my discussion of the widespread starvation across the poorer classes at the time shows, there was guilt running through those who had money, resources and food to waste, when they constantly read about starvation. Whatever the trut
h in that, the fact is that one of the main repercussions of the industrial revolution was deprivation in the new towns, and indeed in rural areas during the period of the corn laws and of rural discontent.
In contrast, the Jacobs apparently had plenty of wholesome food, and there was easy access to it. Sarah’s reading of the religious propaganda would make it clear to her that abstinence from food was the route to heaven as well as to spiritual fulfilment on earth. She certainly acted the part of the pilgrim coming to the shrine.
The relation between spiritual fasting before the modern period and today’s anorexia has created much debate; one writer, Susan Bordo, has called for us to understand anorexia outside a medical model, and Sarah’s case shows how hard it is to do that. The main point about Sarah is that she wanted to be seen to be undergoing a fast. That invariably means that there is something to be communicated, but there are no words available to do so. I have no wish to follow Freud’s assertion that there is an aspect of ‘self reproach about acts of sexual aggression in childhood’ and it would be futile to speculate on the father/daughter closeness in the Jacob household; that was surely, as the facts show, typical and understood in terms of protectiveness on the surface, though I do think that collusion explains what happened in accounting for Evan’s subservience and neurotic control.