Florence Pugh as Lib Wright in The Wonder. Photo / Supplied
Florence Pugh as Lib Wright in The Wonder. Photo / Supplied
The ‘fasting girls’ were a disturbing historical phenomenon. Emma Donoghue explains why she wrote a book about them which is now a hit film.
In 1867 a miracle seemed to take place at a thatched farm in the tiny Carmarthenshire village of Llanfihangel-ar-Arth. Sarah Jacob, the nine-year-old daughter of tenantfarmers, fell ill. After a few months she seemed better, but her appetite vanished and eventually she stopped eating and drinking entirely.
The bizarre thing was that Sarah looked well. The hair she had lost while ill grew back and her adult teeth came through. Pilgrims flocked to the cottage to touch her hands as she recited verses from the Bible. Visitors left money in a collection box. Her parents overexcitedly proclaimed she hadn’t eaten in two years.
Newspapers went wild for the “miracle” story of “The Welsh Fasting Girl”. Sarah’s body became the site of a nasty Victorian collision between faith and science. Doctors were desperate to debunk the religious “superstition” that she could live without food. Priests were equally keen to see the hand of God at work. Doctors from Guy’s Hospital in London set up a watch to determine whether she was a hoax. Nurses were instructed to keep a 24-hour vigil and not to feed her unless she asked.
When the bestselling novelist Emma Donoghue came across Sarah’s story, she thought she was one of a kind. Further research led her to about 60 similar cases of women and girls from between the 16th and 20th centuries who claimed to live without food for months, sometimes years.
“They were too spread apart to be copycat cases, but they had weird similarities,” says Donoghue, who is best known for Room, her novel inspired by the Austrian Josef Fritzl abduction case. “Ultimately everyone is wildly excited by this idea of a girl who doesn’t need food. It’s a cultural fantasy that pops up again and again without a clear pattern, an archetypal Hansel and Gretel story, the idea of a child who doesn’t need to eat, particularly a female child.”
The fasting girls became the inspiration for Donoghue’s 2016 novel The Wonder, which she has co-adapted into a critically acclaimed film with Sebastián Lelio (A Fantastic Woman; Gloria) as director. Florence Pugh stars as Lib Wright, an English nurse called on to set up a watch over Anna O’Donnell, a religious 11-year-old in rural Ireland who has refused to eat for four months. It is 1862 and the country is still reeling from the famine, but “manna from heaven” is what O’Donnell lives on.
The phenomenon of fasting girls spanned from Brooklyn to Ireland. Some were imprisoned; some exposed as hoaxers. Others were sent to hospital and force-fed. Many died, and many others carried out their “fast” for years. Scientific theories as to how they managed to live abounded. One idea was that they were able to dial down metabolism and become reptilian, hibernating creatures. Even Charles Dickens was drawn to them. When he covered the case of Sarah Jacob in the magazine All the Year Round he wrote: “It seems to be little known how frequent the instances of a similar kind have been, in the past years.”
Sarah died of starvation in 1869, ten days after the watch had begun. Her parents were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to hard labour. Still they denied that food had been sneaked to their daughter. Did they really believe she was a miracle?
“The modern scientific world came to look at Sarah Jacob and she starved to death as they were all watching,” Donoghue says. “It was only when she died that they said, ‘Duh, I guess we shouldn’t have let that happen.’ No one seemed to have thought how the visitors and presents they brought to Jacob were basically rewards for not eating.”
Christianity is one binding thread. Many of the fasting girls were seen in the martyrdom tradition of Catherine of Siena, the medieval saint who was an early anorexic, refusing food as an expression of devotion and an act of penance. On another level there was a thirst for celebrity. Visitors from different continents flocked to witness the miraculous. The girls would have remained nobodies were it not for this feat. “You can connect it with things like the ice bucket challenge, the idea that you do something extraordinary and become famous for it,” Donoghue says. But it wasn’t just a cynical trick: the girls were sincere; this was the paradox. “With a lot of young patients they’re caught up in situations where they’re not telling the exact truth but they’re not cold-blooded liars.”
For Donoghue, what it all points to is the cultural idea of a pure girl. The feminine refusal of food in literature has always been a big theme. Take Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, where a girl gorging on food is seen as an appalling taboo — clearly a stand-in for sex. “There is a strong association between femininity and not eating, a deep idea that if you don’t give in to your bodily urges you rise above them.”
While the fasting girls’ piety and pureness were celebrated, their thinness wasn’t mentioned. But they were the predecessors of modern-day anorexics, a term that wasn’t coined until the 1870s. “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s eerie and unnerving what similarities there are,” Donoghue says. Autonomy was often at play, just as the typical profile of an anorexic is this high-achieving, perfectionist girl.
Children, she says, are driven by seeming latent cultural pressures. “They take an idea like ‘It’s good not to want to have seconds of dessert’ and say, ‘Well, I will be even better and won’t have anything at all. And where did we get this idea of Snow White or Sleeping Beauty as the ultimate desirable girl? It’s really necrophilia and in some early versions of Sleeping Beauty the prince impregnates her while she is asleep. We are sickos. Our culture is full of these bizarre fantasies about girls. The fasting girls were making that literal.”
