What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. Laura Shapiro

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СКАЧАТЬ the Grasmere Journal. “I shall be beloved—I want no more.” But in the wake of her first breakdown at Whitwick, she had experienced a novel sensation. As she recuperated, she became aware that her illness had prompted an outpouring of tenderness, sympathy, and worry from numerous friends and family members. She was deeply moved to hear from so many people. For the first time in her life, she was able to bask in the warmth of simultaneous attention from just about everyone she knew. “It drew tears from my eyes to read of your affectionate anxiety concerning me,” she wrote to an old friend. “In fact it is the first time in my life … in which I have had a serious illness, therefore I have never before had an opportunity of knowing how much some distant Friends care about me—Friends abroad—Friends at home—all have been anxious.”

      Selfless devotion to others had long been Dorothy’s vocation. She had taken care of William, she had tended to Coleridge, she had helped raise children, she had poured attention on the lonely and the needy, and whenever it seemed that she might run out of work, she managed to find more—until illness opened up another way to live, and she slipped right in. By 1835 she had discovered self-pity. That year William and Mary made a trip to London, leaving Dorothy and their daughter Dora, who was also chronically sick, in the care of the Rydal Mount servants. Dorothy was still able to write in her diary at that point, so we have an account of her reaction; apparently she had begged them not to go. “Wm & Mary left us to go to London. Both in good spirits till the last parting came—when I was overcome. My spirits much depressed … More than I have done I cannot do therefore shall only state my sorrow that our Friendship is so little prized & that they can so easily part from the helpless invalids.” Never in her life had she expressed herself in those terms—“poor me, poor me” was simply not the way she responded to trouble or deprivation. But she was whining now, feeling sorry for herself as assiduously as if she had decided to make up for lost time.

      “It will please Aunty if one of you will write to her,—for she often tells us nobody takes notice of her,” Mary reported to a niece, adding, “She has been very cross lately.” Dorothy complained often that she was neglected by her family; she said she was “ill-used” and needed protection, and she begged for signs of affection. The arrival of a birthday gift sent her into cries of delight: “You see, I have good friends who care for me, tho’ you do not,” she declared to a Rydal Mount servant who had been attending her faithfully. When the man of letters Henry Crabb Robinson, an old friend, was planning a Christmas visit to Rydal Mount, William wrote to tell him Dorothy was demanding a present. She fancied a box of the winter apples known as “Norfolk Beefins” and had been asking for them over and over, saying “she was sure if Mr Robinson knew how she longed for them, you would send her some.”

      Responding to Dorothy’s pleas and outbursts was a tiring job, and responding to her physical needs was even worse. Dorothy’s symptoms included incontinence and bouts of violent diarrhea, as well as racking pains, chills, fever, and perspiration. She and her bedclothes had to be cleaned up repeatedly. She could not be left alone. Sometimes she moaned, chattered gleefully, or let out a wild shriek; when she was in a fury she struck out wildly at the women caring for her, and on occasion she horrified the family by bursting into profanity. When guests stayed overnight in the house, they had to be given rooms as far as possible from Dorothy’s lest she frighten or unnerve them. Yet there were also periods of clarity when she seemed almost her old self. “If I ask her opinion upon any point of Literature, she answers with all her former acuteness; if I read Milton, or any favourite Author, and pause, she goes on with the passage from memory,” William observed wonderingly. She was able to write a letter occasionally or sit in the garden contentedly. Then suddenly she became a spoiled child again, hurling demands. All year round she insisted on having a fire in her room, saying the warmth was the only thing that made her feel better. In summer her room was so hot nobody else could bear sitting in it, but if the fire was allowed to die down, she went into one of her rages until it was restored to full strength. The ever-sweltering bedroom drove Mary to the edge of her patience. “This is an intolerable experience,” she complained in a rare burst of open frustration. She was thinking in part about the amount of money they were spending on coal in the middle of August.

      Physically dependent, mentally beyond responsibility, the object of constant and devoted care, the center of attention whenever she chose—Dorothy in illness was reborn. Even during the periods when she felt relatively strong, she never objected to the restrictions on her activity imposed by the doctor and her family, and she calmly accepted the pampering. “I have been perfectly well since the first week in January—but go on in the invalidish style,” she reported to a friend in April 1830, two years after her initial breakdown in Whitwick. “Such moderation I shall continue for another year … My spirits are not at all affected.”

      But of course her spirits were affected. They were transformed. She had entered a realm of greed without guilt, insisting on more heat than anyone else could bear, more attention than her weary caregivers could muster, more gestures of love than she had ever received before. And, incessantly, more food. In all the many pages of her diaries and letters over the years, she rarely mentioned an instance of feeling hungry. Now she was never satisfied. One Christmas Jane sent a gift of freshly killed fowl—a turkey and two chickens—and Mary brought them to show Dorothy. “I wish you could have but seen the joy with which that countenance glistened at the sight of your never-to-be-forgotten present,” Mary wrote later. “Every sensation of irritation, or discomfort vanished, and she stroked and hugged the Turkey upon her knee like an overjoyed and happy child—exulting in, and blessing over and over again her dear, dearest friend … The two beautiful lily white Chicken were next the object of her admiration, and when Dora said it was a pity that such lovely creatures should have been killed, she scouted the regret, saying ‘What would they do for her alive … and she should eat them every bit herself.’”

      William fought desperately with her about food. The Dove Cottage days of quietness and harmony over lovingly prepared bowls of broth were long gone. Dorothy was clamoring for all sorts of rich foods, and her anguished brother was terrified to give them to her, certain they would make her “bilious” and bring on another agonizing attack. “I feel my hand-shaking,” he wrote to Robinson after a bout of her screaming and frustration. “I have had so much agitation to-day, in attempting to quiet my poor Sister … She has a great craving for oatmeal porridge principally for the sake of the butter that she eats along with it and butter is sure to bring on a fit of bile sooner or later.”

      “I will not quarrel with myself.” Dorothy held firm to her vow for twenty-nine years, but after her collapse at Whitwick she lost control. Everything came out, unseemly and uncensored. From time to time she experienced intervals of remarkable lucidity, writing letters and remembering her favorite poems in a manner that reminded everyone of the person she used to be. “She is … for a short space her own acute self, retains the power over her fine judgment and discrimination—then, at once, relapses,” Mary reported. “But she has no delusions.” Dorothy did retain a grasp of her environment even when her personality disappeared, so in that sense she had no delusions; yet she was meeting the world afresh. She took to singing when she felt like it; she made friends with a bird that flew in her bedroom window. In 1837, amid some of the worst years of her illness, she woke up one day feeling momentarily clearheaded and wrote a letter to her niece Dora. “Wakened from a wilderness of dreams, & rouzed from Fights & Battles, what can I write, do, or think?—To describe the past СКАЧАТЬ