Lies we tell

I recently discovered Jean Stafford and am lapping up her short stories like sour candy.  I’d like to use one of them, “The Echo and the Nemesis,” in a dissertation chapter, because it is an absolutely batshit story about food, friendship, and compulsive behavior in both.  This is mainly a story of stories – most of the narrative is of one character’s competing narratives – so a summary is not going to do it justice, but I’ll do my best:
Sue and Ramona, both studying abroad, are completely socially awkward and don’t even like each other that much, but become “friends” by sharing coffee together after class. At one of these meetings, Ramona tells a version of her family history that captivates Sue:  in this version, Ramona is the only ugly child in a family of beautiful accomplished people, including three dashing brothers and one beautiful twin sister who died five years earlier.  In this version, Ramona is beloved by her family but imagines herself an embarrassment to them (she is described as “fat to the point of parody”).  Ramona begs two things of Sue:  first, that she join Ramona on a family ski vacation and meet the dashing brothers;  second, that she join Ramona for lunch daily and basically fat-shame her out of eating.  Sue agrees to the former enthusiastically and the latter half-heartedly, but she plays the role well.
Over the course of their association, Ramona tells many more versions of the story (the family loves her; the family hates her; she’s always been fat; she was skinny as a child; her doctor refuses to let her lose weight; her doctor insists that she is ruining herself with food).  Sue doesn’t know what to believe, but she doggedly hangs onto the hope of a skiing vacation.  Eventually that goes bust too, as Ramona has a kind of meltdown and spins out a wildly contradictory dialogue that suggests she may be traumatized by childhood incest and is certainly mentally unbalanced.  She shows Sue a picture of her thin, beautiful dead twin “Martha”; Sue notes that the photo says “Ramona” on the back, and flees the scene as Ramona throws luxury food goods (caviar, candied fruit) all over the bed and starts eating it.

I know!  Barking mad!

So I looked up some articles about this story to see what other folks have said about it. One says that Ramona’s fake twin is the Echo and her obesity is her Nemesis (a misunderstanding of the mythical Nemesis, but whatever). The other suggests that this is a story about narcissism in the Freudian sense (Narcissus is the third party of the Echo-Nemesis myth, tellingly unmentioned in the title). Both articles cite from a study by a German psychoanalyst named Hilde Bruch who specialized in eating disorders.  Bruch’s work links the “mental symptoms” of obesity to those of schizophrenia: e.g. “flights into fancies and daydreams”, a mechanism to cope with internalized sense of ugliness; low frustration tolerance; sense of rage and helplessness. Bruch also argues that women tend to either experience dissociation and/or put on excessive weight when they experience guilt from sexual trauma, as  may be the case with Ramona.  But Bruch thinks there might be a little causation with this correlation, producing this gem (cited in an article by Clare Hanson):  The obese have ‘an all or nothing attitude toward life; when confronted with the fact that [... ] unlimited knowledge or power is not obtainable [... ] they are apt to give up in sullen despair. Most will resort to more avid overeating and grow still fatter, but some will suffer a schizophrenic break’.

This does seem to describe Ramona’s character as Sue sees her.  So in both articles, Bruch’s theory is presented as an “Oh, that’s why!” bit of information – it all makes sense now! She’s crazy because she’s fat! Or she’s fat because she’s crazy! Either way, fat and crazy have the same symptoms!  That explains Ramona’s extraordinary behavior.

And I find this extremely troubling. The study itself is offensive enough – if you’re not sure why I’m not sure I have enough time to explain it to you.  But I’m also offended that an critical reader of literature would find this study a useful key to a complicated story.  Look, literary criticism is not about finding easy explanations for texts. That’s not useful.  It’s also not about author’s intention.  Frankly, I can imagine Stafford writing a story about a crazy fat woman who was fat because she was crazy or vice versa:  she was a cranky lady with her own mental problems and body issues, and I can imagine this story as an exorcism of her own demons.  Maybe she felt like if she didn’t control her eating then she would eat the whole world, like Ramona does in her nightmares; maybe she just loathed obese people and cast one as a compulsive liar.  Who knows?  I don’t.  I do know, though, that literary criticism should be about examining language, seeing how ideas bigger than the words themselves are carried across, to understand that (for some texts more than others) there can be many ways to read a text.  And it is ideally part of our study to notice what readings of texts say about things larger than the words.    And I think there is something more to be learned from both this text and the interpretations I read.

Ramona is a wildly unreliable character. She seems to have lied about everything. One thing she definitely lied about is the prospect of a skiing trip; other things, not so clear.
1. Was she or wasn’t she binge-eating during her diet lunches with Sue? Not known; Stafford only shows Ramona eating “excessively” twice.  The first time is when she first tells Sue about her twin; her third piece of cake is accompanied by a dramatic announcement of self-loathing and the plea for Sue’s chaperoning.  The second time is bed feast finale, a theatrical show of consumption (both “devouring” and “purchasing”, since the shameful hidden foods are luxury good) Sue is invited to join so that the uneaten food disappears before Ramona’s father arrives to take her home.  (Will he arrive?  Does he exist?)  Two scenes of highly staged overeating… So, although Sue accepts without question that Ramona’s size is a result of her eating habits, the evidence is not at all conclusive.  She may have had an illness, like the unfortunate Martha (if she existed). She may have inherited the genetic blueprint for fat from a relative – maybe even a member of the beautiful, accomplished immediate family, since it is only according to Ramona that they differ from her in appearance.
2. Is Ramona’s name even Ramona? When Sue finds a photograph of a thin, beautiful Ramona, she assumes that it is an earlier version of the same Ramona she knows and that “Martha” is what Ramona calls this thin self, dead and “buried beneath layers of fat.”  Because of this, Sue thinks she understands Ramona’s wildness; she feels sad about Ramona’s “lost” beauty, assuming that fat is antithetical to beauty and that Ramona would naturally be unhinged from this loss (rather than the loss of her twin, or her childhood).   But this is hardly the only possibility:  it may be that Ramona and Martha are the same person, but that Ramona’s weight gain was the result, not the cause, of trauma or tragedy: it may be, too, that there was a beautiful twin and a fat twin, but that for her own reasons, Ramona switched their names in her story (meaning that the girl in the photo is the twin of the girl Sue knows, and the girl Sue knows is Martha).
3.  In any version of this story, her reasons are nearly inscrutable – but it seems to come back to sexual abuse.  At Ramona’s least sensical moments, she refers to possible incest or abuse – she alludes to a proposition from a cousin, she breaks out in rage over an imagined slight of her doctor’s competence, she vacillates unpredictably between repudiation of her father and brothers and intense desire for their love.  Ramona’s final words to Sue implies a scene of trauma – “Do you know what he said the last night my name was Martha?  The night he came into that room where the anemones were?  He pretended that he was looking for a sheet of music-”  Sue leaves before she finds out who “he” is or what he said, but the implication is that Ramona experiences dissociation as a result of whatever happened when “he” came, lying about music, into that room.  This definitely complicates the above question of who “Ramona” and “Martha” are.  Ramona may have been abused as a fat twin and chose to rename herself by the thin twin’s name; she may have been abused as a thin twin or thin only daughter, and became fat through illness or overeating or deliberate desire to remove herself from a violated body or some combination of all three. Sue chooses not to think about any of these possibilities.

Clearly, I am not arguing for one reading of Ramona’s erratic behavior.  I want to ruminate a little more – maybe there is a way Ramona could shed light on my understanding of how eating habits are integral to identity.  But I’m afraid her motives are indefinable.

Sue, on the other hand?  We can read Sue.  We see this story from Sue’s point of view.  We see her intense loneliness, her empty friendship, her desperate clinging to the hope of a ski trip with dashing brothers.  We see her define Ramona’s obesity as one of her biggest problems from the start.  Sue thinks she understands Ramona when she sees the photograph of a lovely young girl named “Ramona” – for Sue, all of Ramona’s erratic and eccentric behaviors can be drawn back to the tragedy of lost beauty.  And because Sue is the narrating voice, it is tempting to share her realizations. But Sue was wrong about everything else – the skiing trip, the family - so it’s questionable  that she would be right about these.

If Sue’s assumptions fit a little too neatly into our own – and by “our own”, I mean the assumptions about obesity and mental illness accepted so readily by the articles I read – then that is the insight we can gain from a critical reading of this story.