The Fat Girl

“The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips, and then her mother would sit smoking while Louise eyed the bread box, the pantry, the refrigerator. Wasn’t that good, her mother would say. In five years you’ll be in high school and if you’re fat the boys won’t like you; they won’t ask you out.”

This quote establishes that Louise’s mother treats her differently due to her gender. She assumes both that Louise needs to be thin to appeal to men and that appealing to men is what Louise should want. However, the mother apparently does not think it matters what the brother looks like or what he eats. The brother is not named, nor is he specifically mentioned again, suggesting that he mainly functions as a gendered contrast that illustrates the uneven application of ideals of thinness (and attractiveness broadly).

“This is how they would remember her: a girl whose hapless body was destined to be fat. No one saw the sandwiches she made and took to her room when she came home from school. No one saw the store of Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Almond Joys, and Hersheys far back on her closet shelf, behind the stuffed animals of her childhood.”

This quote comes when Louise is losing touch with her high school friends, Joan and Marjorie, who are busy pursuing boys. It illustrates Louise’s Secrecy in Interpersonal Relationships and develops the motif of candy bars, which are not only hidden, but hidden behind Louise’s childhood toys. This suggests that the candy bars are gratifying some sort of need of Louise’s that was not met in childhood—most likely a lack of affection or acceptance from her mother.

“Most of all she liked her long pale blond hair, she liked washing and drying it and lying naked on her bed, smelling of shampoo, and feeling the soft hair at her neck and shoulders and back.”

This quote uses imagery to explore Louise’s emotions and body image while she is at college. Louise does not truly hate her body; she loves her hair and enjoys the sensuous pleasure it provides against her skin. Notably, Louise’s first thought when her mother claimed they share a “slow metabolism” was that they also share their hair color, suggesting that Louise has never fully accepted the importance of weight relative to other physical traits.

“That was her ritual and her diet for the rest of the year, Carrie alternating fish and chicken breasts with the steaks for dinner, and every day was nearly as bad as the first. In the evenings she was irritable. In all her life she had never been afflicted by ill temper and she looked upon it now as a demon which, along with hunger, was taking possession of her soul.”

The diet Carrie implements makes Louise feel terrible both physically and mentally—or even spiritually. Dubus describes the depth of Louise’s emotion by comparing her ill temper and hunger to demons taking possession of her soul. Due to The Connections Between Body, Soul, and Selfhood, Louise feels like someone else when she is thin.

“When she went home at Christmas she weighed a hundred and fifty-five pounds; at the airport her mother marveled. Her father laughed and hugged her and said: ‘But now there’s less of you to love.’ He was troubled by her smoking but only mentioned it once; he told her she was beautiful and, as always, his eyes bathed her in love.”

This quote contrasts Louise’s mother, who is only kind to her when she loses weight, with her father, who is always kind to her and shows actual concern for her health. Louise’s father also seems to sense that Louise’s physical body is tied to her identity because he points out that there is less of “her” to love. This foreshadows Louise’s marriage with Richard, which is based on her superficial appearance rather than her actual self, whom Richard does not even know.

“She felt that somehow she had lost more than pounds of fat, that some time during her dieting she had lost herself too. She tried to remember what it had felt like to be Louise before she had started living on meat and fish, as an unhappy adult may look sadly in the memory of childhood for lost virtues and hopes. She looked down at the earth far below, and it seemed to her that her soul, like her body aboard the plane, was in some rootless flight.”

Louise has already lost a lot of weight as she returns to Massachusetts for her final semester of college. Despite receiving praise from family and acquaintances over break, Louise feels as if she has lost herself by dieting. Dubus uses metaphor to describe how Louise feels that her soul does not have direction and that she is not making meaningful use of her life.

“The new clothes and the photographer made her feel like she was going to another country or becoming a citizen of a new one.”

This quote comes after Louise has finished college and exceeded her goal weight of 115 pounds (set by Carrie), thrilling her mother. Dubus uses figurative language to show how Louise interprets this sudden change in how her mother treats her. She feels she is becoming a citizen of a new country because her mother acts like Louise is now part of a different club and appears to accept her (although what she’s accepting turns out not to be truly Louise). The simile also illustrates how “foreign” Louise’s thinness remains to her.

“She could have been telling him of a childhood illness, or wearing braces, or a broken heart at sixteen. He could not see her as she was when she was fat. She felt as though she were trying to tell a foreign lover about her life in the United States, and if only she could command the language he would know and love all of her and she would feel complete.”

Dubus uses simile to show how Louise feels like her former weight is a foreign concept that Richard simply cannot grasp. The quote suggests that Richard does not know the true Louise, foreshadowing how his feelings for her change after she gains weight during pregnancy.

“In her seventh month, with a delight reminiscent of climbing the stairs to Richard’s apartment before they were married, she returned to her world of secret gratification. She began hiding candy in her underwear drawer. She ate it during the day and at night while Richard slept, and at breakfast she was distracted, waiting for him to leave.”

During Louise’s pregnancy, she starts eating in secret again. Dubus compares the delight Louise gets from her chocolate to the delight she got from losing her virginity. This comparison to premarital sex illuminates certain reasons why Louise enjoys secretly eating chocolate. First, it provides physical pleasure, but more importantly, she gets pleasure from doing something illicit that other people would likely frown upon. That she keeps the chocolate with her underwear underscores the association.

“Richard looked at a soiled plate and glass on the table as if detecting traces of infidelity, and at every dinner they fought.”

Louise has already given birth but continues to gain weight. Dubus again uses a simile comparing Louise’s eating behavior to something sexual, this time infidelity. Richard feels like Louise’s refusal to diet is not only illicit, but somehow a betrayal to Richard and/or to their marriage vows and her role as a wife.

“She remembered when she had weighed a hundred and thirty-six pounds for eight days. Her memory of those eight days was fond and amusing, as though she were recalling an Easter egg hunt when she was six. She stepped off the scales and pushed them under the lavatory and did not stand on them again.”

The motif of scales appears throughout the text to illustrate how Louise feels like Carrie, her mother, and other people are constantly scrutinizing her body. Her rejection of the scale in the aftermath of giving birth shows that she has freed herself from the obsession with her weight and is ready to focus on something that matters more to her (such as being a mother).

“Every day Richard quarreled, and because his rage went no further than her weight and shape, she felt excluded from it, and she remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit, and watched his frustration, his impotence. He truly believed they were arguing about her weight. She knew better: she knew that beneath the argument lay the question of who Richard was.”

This quote comes near the end of the story, after Louise has quietly decided not to start dieting again but is still being pestered by Richard and her mother. Rather than saying that “they” quarreled, as he has before, Dubus remarks that “Richard” quarreled. Louise no longer even participates in the arguments, viewing the issue as entirely Richard’s. Her sense of Richard’s “impotence” again links the issue of her weight to sex, suggesting a victory in the fact that Richard no longer finds her sexually desirable.

“He is angry now. He stands in the center of the living room, raging at her, and he wakes the baby. Beneath Richard’s voice she hears the soft crying, feels it in her heart, and quietly she rises from her chair and goes upstairs to the child’s room and takes him from the crib. She brings him to the living room and sits holding him in her lap, pressing him gently against the folds of fat at her waist.”

This quote comes in the final two pages of the story as Richard is yet again trying to argue with Louise about her weight. The switch to present tense emphasizes the importance of this scene. Not only does Louise not respond to him, but his words are not even shown. Instead, Louise does other tasks and thinks about other topics while Richard yells. This shows how detached she now is from Richard. Additionally, this quote shows how Louise enjoys her body via motherhood.