13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl Analysis

Mona Awad’s novel 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl demonstrates the failure of the main character’s parents and culture. Elizabeth is raised by a single, distant mother and for the most part her father is absentee. Elizabeth thus grew up feeling unloved, and unworthy, and never developed a solid sense of self. This is characterized by her inconsistent name- she keeps changing what she wants to be called, unable to figure out who she is. Being raised in a patriarchal culture, access to healing resources were not readily available, as the patriarchy does not cultivate true healing or growth. So Elizabeth internalized the trauma, taking her parents failings upon herself. Throughout her life Elizabeth looked for other people to fill the hole in

Rather, feelings and talking about feelings are considered feminine and are thus undervalued. For instance, therapy, is not considered as necessary or important as seeing a general practice doctor who deals with the physical body. Instead, people are expected to just “get over” things- which, of course, is not how things work. One cannot simply pull themselves up by the bootstraps to recover from trauma, but must process the trauma. Our culture is full of distractions and replacements- men are taught violence against women, and women are taught violence against themselves. Were our culture not patriarchal, perhaps things would have turned out differently for Elizabeth. Had resources for healing been more readily available, she might have discovered herself and been able to find ways to meet her own needs. Instead, she describes herself as feeling like a gerbil in a cage, struggling but going nowhere (Awad, 193). Instead, what Elizabeth learned from out culture is that she would have to become thin in order to be deserving of love and happiness. “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” (Wolf, 67) And so Elizabeth develops an eating disorder. She exercises and changes her eating not to feel better, but to punish herself into a thinner body. “I can already feel the cupcake half doing its worst and I think of how many Lifecycle minute it will take to atone.” (Awad, 200) This isn’t an issue of even simple weight- it’s an issue of morality. It’s not just how many minutes will it take to burn that fat, but to atone. Elizabeth feels it is in fact evil to eat sweets, which goes back to her feeling that it is in fact a sin to enjoy herself. She doesn’t believe that she deserves to feel good, to enjoy a cupcake or any