The Fat Girl

Content Warning: This section deals with disordered eating and body shaming.

Dubus’s “The Fat Girl” explores selfhood and self-transformation through the lens of body image. Louise’s disordered eating and body image issues begin when she is only nine years old, but both morph and transform throughout the story like Louise’s body itself. Whenever Louise gains or loses weight, it changes how others view her: For example, she gains either disappointment or praise from her mother and husband. However, Louise’s physical appearance also changes how she sees herself, illustrating The Connections Between Body, Soul, and Selfhood.

The story posits Louise’s mother as the origin of her issues. Her mother does not eat enough, is very thin, and begins lecturing Louise and controlling what she eats at a young age. However, Louise’s mother’s own relationship to her body likely reflects the societal pressure to be thin. Ironically, although Louise’s mother claims being thin is necessary to appeal to men, Louise faces no pressure from her father to lose weight. On the contrary, when Louise is a child, her father often asks her mother to feed her more, but her mother never agrees. Similarly, whereas Louise’s mother withholds physical affection, her father gives it in abundance, along with verbal praise and words of love.

Nevertheless, Louise wants to please her mother, so she at least pretends to go along with her mother’s prescribed diet throughout her years of primary, middle, and high school. However, her hunger is not satisfied, so she begins sneaking snacks in private to avoid being reprimanded or judged. As time goes on, Louise becomes more obsessed with this behavior and also more secretive about it, not even telling her few friends. Although centered around her eating, this secrecy reflects Louise’s deeper discomfort with who she is, and because she hides her true self, she struggles to form meaningful connections. Louise’s high school friendships were superficial, and she has not had any meaningful romantic relationships, associating men with a pressure to not eat and be thin. Louise’s relationship with Carrie seems like a breakthrough because it is the first time Louise has ever trusted anyone enough to share her secret. However, Carrie comes to fulfill the same role as Louise’s mother. The strict diet is Carrie’s project, not Louise’s, just like Louise’s body was her mother’s project when Louise was a child.

Despite the promises of her mother and Carrie, dieting, weight loss, and heterosexual romance do not bring happiness to Louise. Once she is thin, she no longer feels like herself, and she certainly does not feel that her husband knows her. Her thinness is merely one aspect of the inauthentic role she has assumed; she feels “cunning” as a well-off lawyer’s wife because she is figuratively lying and getting away with it, but she does not feel happy. Only once she gets pregnant and gains weight does Louise start to feel like herself again. In the process, she begins to see the truth about others around her, most notably her husband. Sweet and kind to her when she was thin, Richard now becomes cruel and constantly harasses Louise about her weight. Louise realizes that Richard does not love the true her and also that she does not love the true Richard.

Ironically, Louise’s emotional transformation is thus the result of following her mother’s wishes. However, Louise learns different lessons than her mother intended—specifically, that she does not share her mother’s values, especially as they relate to Gender Roles, Female Sexuality, and Motherhood. Although becoming a mother might seem like the ultimate way of conforming to female gender roles, Louise’s experience of motherhood causes her to reject marriage. By gaining weight during pregnancy, Louise learns that her baby will accept her even if she’s fat; in fact, far from being shameful, her body supports and nourishes her child. She also discovers a physical and emotional intimacy that surpasses her sexual relationship with Richard. In the end, she sheds her destructive behavior of eating in secret when she frees herself from caring what other people think of her. This refusal to keep pretending to be someone else opens up the possibility of a healthy relationship in the future: Louise would rather be loved by the few people who accept her for who she is than “loved” by many people who misunderstand her.