![]() With eight bites, the mother could maintain her slender frame and never risk social deviance, still able to “compliment the hostess” (152). The extremity of the eating practice stresses that the characters’ conflicts with their size was one concerning their appearance and not their well-being, significant when popular culture disguises many of its beauty standards as health claims. ![]() ![]() In the story, the protagonist’s mother only consumed eight bites of any meal, regardless of her hunger or the food’s content. Machado’s surrealist blurring of realities rejects the possibility for any universal ideals, including a woman’s thin frame as the standard beauty model. Thanks to Sam Risak, a 2018 Harrison Middleton University Fellow in Ideas recipient, for today's post.Īn unnamed narrator sheds weight but not her past in Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites.” After a gastric bypass surgery, old flesh is personified into a “body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth” that lingers in the protagonist’s house (165). ![]()
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