SOURCE: Nettels, Elsa. “New England Indigestion and Its Victims.” In Disorderly Eaters: Texts in Self-Empowerment, edited by Lilian R. Furst and Peter W. Graham, pp. 167-84. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Nettels discusses the consumption or rejection of food and its relationship to self-assertion and manipulative behavior in New England novels.

Prominent in American realistic fiction is the victim of what William Dean Howells called “New England indigestion,”¹ a morbid physical and psychological condition manifested in eating disorders such as dyspepsia, willed starvation, and secret gorging. In novels of New England life by Howells, Elizabeth Stoddard, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Edith Wharton, among others, characters seek through the rejection or consumption of food to assert themselves and manipulate others in the face of perceived indifference or rejection. Victims of eating disorders were not confined to New England. In Howells's view, dyspepsia and...