Constructions of the Fat Child in British Juvenile Fiction (1960-2010)
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Constructions of the Fat Child in British Juvenile Fiction (1960-2010) Kate E. R. Flynn A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the University’s requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2013 University of Worcester ABSTRACT This literary study is an analysis of fat child characters in British juvenile fiction, 1960 to 2010. The argument is that juvenile fiction, with growing frequency, has advanced lay psychological explanations for departures from a culturally sanctioned slender ideal. Detailing the socio-historical basis for changing literary constructions of the fat child comprises an original contribution to knowledge. Protagonists and peripheral characters from eighty-five examples of juvenile fiction are critiqued. At the start of the period, the majority of texts associate fatness with moral failings. By the middle of the period, fatness is predominantly associated with poor emotional health. This association persists until the period’s close, becoming entwined in the final decade with the increasing use of references to body fat as a means of demarcating the child’s position within commodity and celebrity cultures. No text foregrounds associations between fatness and physical health problems. Transitions from one dominant construction of fatness to another are accompanied by changes in how fat characters are gendered, classed and racialised. Issues of Jackie magazine (1964-1994) and contemporaneous psychological abstracts are examined as contextual material. The study concludes that discontinuities in constructions of the fat child express historically specific fears of social, economic, or political transformation in Britain. How child readers might comply with or rework literary constructions of the fat child is suggested as a topic for further research. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Professor Jean Webb, Dr Barbara Mitra and Dr Penney Upton gave excellent support as my supervisory team throughout the writing of this thesis. I am obliged to the Graduate Research School at the University of Worcester, whose administrative efforts kept my studentship running smoothly. At home, all my family provided encouragement. However I am particularly grateful to Matt, who listened to my free associations, ruminations and lamentations with loving patience. Thanks also go to my mother, for introducing me to children’s books in the first place. iii CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................................... iii THE FAT CHILD: NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY .................................................................. 1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................... 3 1. Rationale ......................................................................................................................... 3 2. Relationship to Existing Work ........................................................................................ 5 3. Building a Corpus ......................................................................................................... 18 3.1 Selection Criteria ........................................................................................................ 18 3.2 Selecting Juvenile Fiction ........................................................................................... 18 3.3 Selecting Juvenile Media ............................................................................................ 26 3.4 Selecting Psychology Abstracts .................................................................................. 30 4. Interpreting the Corpus: Critical Framework ................................................................ 32 4.1 New Historicism ......................................................................................................... 32 4.2 Agential Realism ......................................................................................................... 46 MORAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FAT CHILD ............................................................ 52 Chapter One. The Nineteen-Sixties: Fat Conscience ........................................................... 52 Chapter Two. The Nineteen-Seventies: Ripening Fat .......................................................... 77 PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FAT CHILD ....................................... 102 Chapter Three. The Nineteen-Eighties: Common, Yobby, Fat .......................................... 102 Chapter Four. The Nineteen-Nineties: Intransigent Fat ..................................................... 131 Chapter Five. The Nineteen-Nineties: Puppy Fat .............................................................. 161 iv CONSUMERIST CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE FAT CHILD............................................. 197 Chapter Six. The Nineteen-Nineties: Fat Capitalists ......................................................... 197 Chapter Seven. The Two-Thousands: Celebrity Fat .......................................................... 230 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................................... 269 NOTES ................................................................................................................................... 272 LIST OF PRIMARY TEXTS ................................................................................................ 279 LIST OF ISSUES IN THE JACKIE CORPUS ...................................................................... 287 LIST OF ABSTRACTS IN THE BRITISH PSYCHOLOGY CORPUS .............................. 289 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................... 334 APPENDIX 1: TABLES........................................................................................................ 351 APPENDIX 2: CHARTS ....................................................................................................... 388 v THE FAT CHILD: NOTES ON TERMINOLOGY Over the chapters that follow, I will analyse how differing constructions of the body are constituted, in part, through differences in terminology. This appraisal is not limited to primary texts. It includes scrutinising my own word choices: the terms I use when not engaged in textual quotation or paraphrase. I wish to clarify from the outset what assumptions govern my wording. Specifically, I wish to qualify my use of the phrase ‘the fat child’ in the title of this thesis.i I define ‘fat,’ the adjective, as ‘possessing a relativeii abundance of flesh.’ The word fat may disquiet readers because it is ordinarily wielded as an insult (Kulick and Meneley 2005, 2). However I agree with Marilyn Wann’s (1998) argument that the ostensibly more polite term “overweight” naturalises socially-contingent judgements of the correctly sized body (18). Furthermore I accept her ethical point that the use of informal euphemisms, such as “big boned,” proceeds from the assumption that fatness is shameful (18). I therefore emulate Wann in resistantly using “fat” without negative intent (18). Although the word ‘child’ does not exert the same shock value as ‘fat’, its openness to multiple meanings merits acknowledgement here. I follow the sociologist Leena Alanen (2001) in questioning definitions based on a specific age range or discrete biological stage of the life course (20). Drawing age boundaries may have material effects, as when an age of majority is declared in law, but the resultant definition of what it means to be a child remains historically specific and geographically bound. According to Alanen, people are born into a “generational structure” whereby material dependence is the basis for defining them as a “child,” and the dependee as “adult” (132-5). She refers to this process as a “generationing practice” (139). The attribution of age is a 1 mechanism for recurrently generationing people via relationships to institutions, such as schools and workplaces (143). People both actively participate, and are constrained to participate, in everyday generationing regimes such as play (138). However, there is no universal set of practices through which people are generationed on a daily basis. As a starting point, I therefore define ‘child’ as ‘the junior position within a generational structure.’ The relativity of this definition allows me to address, for instance, how teenagers are generationed as children in some texts, and not others. Lastly, I am aware that fixing ‘the fat child,’ rather than ‘fat children,’ as an object for enquiry risks implying that every fat child conforms to a particular template. They do not. My word choice is based on trends in the quantitative representation of particular body types. Slim peers outnumber fat children in every example of fiction and media I cite. Indeed, the modal number of fat children per text is 1. They vary in qualitative ways across the primary material: but each fat child is usually the sole fat child within a given text. Referring to ‘fat children’ in the thesis title would obscure this fact. The project will nevertheless demonstrate that there is no universal construction of the fat child. Hence my title specifies that I will attend to ‘constructions,’ in the plural. 2 INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale This study interrogates variations in how British juvenile fiction