Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter N. Stearns. Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West. New York: New York University Press. 1997. Pp. xvi, 294. $25.95.

We know each other from the outside in. Our bodies show the way to the inner sanctum of character. We slouch in fear that the outside will betray the inside, that it will reveal to everyone the failed interior self. Social historians Peter N. Stearns and Elizabeth Haiken highlight the complicated relationship between character and appearance negotiated by twentieth-century Americans. They point to the 1920s as the time when significant cultural shifts plunged the nation into what became obsessive concern with beauty and slenderness. The 1920s is when consumer culture began to shape the body as yet another sign of achievement. For Haiken, this period marks the transition to a beauty contest culture in which the ugly lose. For Stearns, this when the relationship between overweight and faulty character is consolidated.	1
Stearns argues that the dramatic incompatibility between American diet mania and ever-increasing weight can be better understood if compared to twentieth-century French diet culture. Several factors in American culture guarantee the symbolic resonance of weight and diet. First, the diet regime is meant to function as punishment of sorts for consumerist self-indulgence; the religious fervor attached to weight-loss practices undermines from the outset the practitioner's ability to follow through on overly severe regimens whose rigor is a corrective not for weight but rather for widepread social guilt. In this sense, Stearns observes, dieting cannot work when it is displaced from its ultimate objective. Moreover, the American culture of abundance is ever in conflict with the demand for lean self-denial. Such conflict becomes overt in the case of childrearing, where parents continue to place enormous emphasis on the child's healthy appetite in defiance of adult imperatives. Finally, women especially are punished with bodily restraint for having violated their rightful position as chaste wives and mothers. The payment served up for their sexual freedom is, of course, the interminable diet.	2
In contrast, France, equally invested in a slender aesthetic, has managed to become a relatively slim nation. How so, wonders Stearns, when the United States and France share so many cultural features and concerns. It is because, he tells us, the French do not feel guilty. Without the intensity of the moral guilt/diet connection, diets are likely to be more successful. The self-abasement, the sense that with each furtive bite one is proving oneself unworthy, even socially loathsome, is what makes a diet more than a simple diet—and what makes slenderness an almost unattainable sacrifice instead of a simple shift in aesthetics. French women, in contrast to their transatlantic sisters, wanted to look good in the new fashions. Given an ingrained national diet based on moderation and quality over quantity, as well as the symbolic neutrality of culinary appetites, Stearns points out that losing weight for the French was considerably simpler.	3
Stearns's thesis is amply supported with a wide range of cultural documents, and the comparative study of the United States and France offers an especially compelling perspective on our history of diet and weight gain. Given Stearns's extremely valuable contribution to theories of diet culture, it is surprising that he often justifies his own project by criticizing the work of feminist scholars on this subject as overly narrow and historically uninformed. As many of Stearns's own insights are dependent on just these feminist accounts, his criticisms are both unjustifiable and perplexing.	. . .