Georges Vigarello maps the evolution of Western
ideas about fat and fat people from the Middle Ages to
the present, paying particular attention to the role of
science, fashion, fitness crazes, and public health
campaigns in shaping these views. While hefty bodies
were once a sign of power, today those who struggle to
lose weight are considered poor in character and weak in
mind. Vigarello traces the eventual equation of fatness
with infirmity and the way we have come to define
ourselves and others in terms of body type. Vigarello
begins with the medieval artists and intellectuals who
treated heavy bodies as symbols of force and prosperity.
He then follows the shift during the Renaissance and
early modern period to courtly, medical, and religious
codes that increasingly favored moderation and
discouraged excess. Scientific advances in the
eighteenth century also brought greater knowledge of
food and the body's processes, recasting fatness as the
"relaxed" antithesis of health. The body-as-mechanism
metaphor intensified in the early nineteenth century,
with the chemistry revolution and heightened attention
to food-as-fuel, which turned the body into a kind of
furnace or engine. During this period, social attitudes
toward fat became conflicted, with the bourgeois male
belly operating as a sign of prestige but also as a
symbol of greed and exploitation, while the overweight
female was admired only if she was working class.
Vigarello concludes with the fitness and body-conscious
movements of the twentieth century and the proliferation
of personal confessions about obesity, which tied fat
more closely to notions of personality, politics, taste,
and class.
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