SOURCE: "What Some Women Can't Swallow: Hunger as Protest in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley," in Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, edited by Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, pp. 141-52.

In this excerpt, Lashgari discusses images of food, starvation, and eating disorders in Shirley.

Does virtue lie in abnegation of self? I do not believe it. (10:190)

You expected bread, and you have got a stone. (6:105)

—Shirley

Individual eating disorders in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley (1849) are portrayed as part of a much larger picture, in which a dysfunctional society starves women, literally and metaphorically, and women internalize that dis/order as self-starvation. Contrary to some readings of the novel, Brontë is not selling the two heroines out to conventional female passivity, either when she has them stop eating or when she marries them off at the end of the story. Caroline and Shirley...