Fasting Girls and Fairy Tales
Emma Donoghue, The Wonder
Picador, 304pp, £14.99, ISBN 9781509818389
reviewed by Maya Caspari
On 15 July, 1870, the Tivy-side Advertiser reported the death of a Welsh ten-year-old named Sarah Jacob and the subsequent trial of her parents for manslaughter. This was the culmination of a story that had been gaining increasing levels of attention. In the months leading up to her death, Sarah had become renowned for her ability to live without any food. News of her miraculous powers had spread; visitors had flocked to see the ‘little wonder’. A committee of doctors and nurses had been established to keep watch over her for a fortnight and thus test the veracity of the claims. Within two weeks, she was dead.
One of the cases of the so-called ‘fasting girls’ of the Victorian era, Sarah Jacob’s story and others like it inspire Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, The Wonder. Part psychological drama, part thriller, the novel is set in Ireland in the 1850s and tells the story of Anna, a young girl who appears to be able to survive without any food. Lib, an English nurse who served under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, has been employed to watch her. Arriving in a rural area in which religious belief and local myths still hold weight, she is sceptical, determined to get to the bottom of a situation that she is convinced must be a deception. On the surface, the mystery of the novel – and the one that Lib sets out to investigate – is how Anna is getting food to survive. Yet this is superseded by the more fundamental psychosocial questions motivating the plot: why is Anna fasting at all? Why does everyone want to believe it is a miracle?
Donoghue is engaged here with exploring the relationship between psychology and storytelling – the narratives we create to make sense of our realities and identities, and the ways in which these often blur the line between fiction and fact. In this sense, there is a parallel with her earlier, Man Booker-shortlisted novel Room (2010), in which the narrator, a young child locked with his mother in a small room, deals with the trauma of his situation through the stories he tells himself about it. If this book shares Room’s sensitive evocation of its characters’ responses to psychological trauma, its focus is also more explicitly social, exploring how such responses are shaped by the dominant beliefs of the context in which they live.
Donoghue depicts a world at tipping point, in which the religious stories of the past are being challenged by new scientific developments yet nonetheless still hold weight. In rural Ireland, still scarred by the recent potato famine, the desire to believe in miracles is particularly potent. All around Anna, characters cling to the possibility that she is miraculous, that she can defy the laws of modern medicine. Anna herself is obsessively invested in a spiritual narrative, in which she can survive on ‘manna from heaven’ alone. Lib is initially cast in the obviously contrasting role of the scientist, the detective in search of factual evidence, determined to ‘impose something of the systematic on this incongruous situation.’
Yet, while this could end up as a rehashing of a familiar progress narrative in which modern medicine triumphs over blind faith, Donoghue’s well-researched reflection on the era is subtler than this. For, if Anna’s parents’ misplaced faith fails to provide an explanation, Lib’s – sometimes rather overstated – scepticism is also shown to offer no adequate solution. Instead, focalising the novel through her, Donoghue points to the unreliability and prejudices of Lib’s perspective, often hinting at the details of Anna’s symptoms that Lib seems to miss.
Offering a distinctly modern, psychoanalytically tinged reading of the historical context she depicts, Donoghue implies that the answer to what is motivating Anna’s behaviour lies neither in a narrow form of scientific analysis nor in the self-interested faith of her parents and priest. Instead, the novel suggests, to solve the mystery, Lib must look beyond the fact/fiction, science/faith oppositions she initially clings to. She must read Anna’s obsessive prayers and religious stories as a medical symptom, and, concurrently, realise that it is offering her a way to rewrite her identity that can save her. The explanation and the solution to Anna’s situation can, the novel thus implies, be found in storytelling.
It’s satisfying to be reminded of the regenerative power of stories. And yet, this conclusion is also where the book disappoints a bit, building up towards a redemptive ending that ultimately feels a little too neat. Moreover, there’s something a little depressing, if not entirely surprising, in the conventionality of the redemption offered in which we see a return to the flat familiarity of stock figures – the mother, the love interest, the child. In a novel that seems so sensitively committed to psychological detail and roots itself in realism, this feels incongruously like a fairy tale. ‘What really happens next?’ one wants to know.
But perhaps this is to misunderstand a book that consistently asks us to look beyond simple oppositions and refuses to fully exclude some form of ‘wonder’ from its apparently realist frame. Rather than reading it only in terms of its relation to the past, we could take our cue from the novel itself and also understand it as a story about what we, as modern readers, want to hear. Perhaps we, like Lib, are being encouraged to read differently, to hold back our scepticism, to enjoy the ending that history could not offer.
One of the cases of the so-called ‘fasting girls’ of the Victorian era, Sarah Jacob’s story and others like it inspire Emma Donoghue’s latest novel, The Wonder. Part psychological drama, part thriller, the novel is set in Ireland in the 1850s and tells the story of Anna, a young girl who appears to be able to survive without any food. Lib, an English nurse who served under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War, has been employed to watch her. Arriving in a rural area in which religious belief and local myths still hold weight, she is sceptical, determined to get to the bottom of a situation that she is convinced must be a deception. On the surface, the mystery of the novel – and the one that Lib sets out to investigate – is how Anna is getting food to survive. Yet this is superseded by the more fundamental psychosocial questions motivating the plot: why is Anna fasting at all? Why does everyone want to believe it is a miracle?
Donoghue is engaged here with exploring the relationship between psychology and storytelling – the narratives we create to make sense of our realities and identities, and the ways in which these often blur the line between fiction and fact. In this sense, there is a parallel with her earlier, Man Booker-shortlisted novel Room (2010), in which the narrator, a young child locked with his mother in a small room, deals with the trauma of his situation through the stories he tells himself about it. If this book shares Room’s sensitive evocation of its characters’ responses to psychological trauma, its focus is also more explicitly social, exploring how such responses are shaped by the dominant beliefs of the context in which they live.
Donoghue depicts a world at tipping point, in which the religious stories of the past are being challenged by new scientific developments yet nonetheless still hold weight. In rural Ireland, still scarred by the recent potato famine, the desire to believe in miracles is particularly potent. All around Anna, characters cling to the possibility that she is miraculous, that she can defy the laws of modern medicine. Anna herself is obsessively invested in a spiritual narrative, in which she can survive on ‘manna from heaven’ alone. Lib is initially cast in the obviously contrasting role of the scientist, the detective in search of factual evidence, determined to ‘impose something of the systematic on this incongruous situation.’
Yet, while this could end up as a rehashing of a familiar progress narrative in which modern medicine triumphs over blind faith, Donoghue’s well-researched reflection on the era is subtler than this. For, if Anna’s parents’ misplaced faith fails to provide an explanation, Lib’s – sometimes rather overstated – scepticism is also shown to offer no adequate solution. Instead, focalising the novel through her, Donoghue points to the unreliability and prejudices of Lib’s perspective, often hinting at the details of Anna’s symptoms that Lib seems to miss.
Offering a distinctly modern, psychoanalytically tinged reading of the historical context she depicts, Donoghue implies that the answer to what is motivating Anna’s behaviour lies neither in a narrow form of scientific analysis nor in the self-interested faith of her parents and priest. Instead, the novel suggests, to solve the mystery, Lib must look beyond the fact/fiction, science/faith oppositions she initially clings to. She must read Anna’s obsessive prayers and religious stories as a medical symptom, and, concurrently, realise that it is offering her a way to rewrite her identity that can save her. The explanation and the solution to Anna’s situation can, the novel thus implies, be found in storytelling.
It’s satisfying to be reminded of the regenerative power of stories. And yet, this conclusion is also where the book disappoints a bit, building up towards a redemptive ending that ultimately feels a little too neat. Moreover, there’s something a little depressing, if not entirely surprising, in the conventionality of the redemption offered in which we see a return to the flat familiarity of stock figures – the mother, the love interest, the child. In a novel that seems so sensitively committed to psychological detail and roots itself in realism, this feels incongruously like a fairy tale. ‘What really happens next?’ one wants to know.
But perhaps this is to misunderstand a book that consistently asks us to look beyond simple oppositions and refuses to fully exclude some form of ‘wonder’ from its apparently realist frame. Rather than reading it only in terms of its relation to the past, we could take our cue from the novel itself and also understand it as a story about what we, as modern readers, want to hear. Perhaps we, like Lib, are being encouraged to read differently, to hold back our scepticism, to enjoy the ending that history could not offer.