Upon meeting Mrs. Catherick, Mr. Hartright narrates her physical appearance, describing her as having dark eyes that \u201clook straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare. She had full square cheeks; a long, firm chin; and thick, sensual, colourless lips. Her figure was stout and sturdy, and her manner aggressively self-possessed\u201d (Collins 484). As Mrs. Catherick guarding her position and reputation she has carefully constructed within her community against a foreigner investigating the identity she wants to remain stable, her personality exudes hostility.<\/p>\n
The attention towards her \u201csensual\u201d lips assume a more stereotypical female trait as compared to Marian\u2019s \u201cmasculine form and masculine look\u201d (Collins 35). Marian and Mrs. Catherick remain a complex duo as they are both female characters who are assertive and protective of their identities. Though as Marian defends her identity in relation to the safety of her sister\u2019s emotional and legal well-being, Mrs. Catherick is \u201cself-possessed\u201d in safeguarding her own persona and its perception to others. While her \u201cmanner\u201d is \u201caggressive\u201d and inwardly obsessed with maintaining the perfect \u201chigh\u201d standing amongst other assumed low standing community members, her physical appearance is \u201cstout and sturdy\u201d (Collins 487). The combination of those words reveals the linkage between Mrs. Catherick\u2019s fatness and her immovable and \u201cdefiant\u201d nature. Her logic connects the benefits of remaining stagnant in her community positioning and physical home to stability and sturdiness. And yet, that sturdiness is coupled with her fatness\u2014a quality describing the other defiant, male character, Count Fosco.<\/p>\n
Fatness in the nineteenth century was often female coded as it signified both the ability to maternally \u201cnurture\u201d with appeasing sexual appetites (Huff 408). Mrs. Catherick represents a mixture of sensualness and fatness. While at this time fatness was stigmatized and led to hostile responses from the public despite being in a consumer culture urging people to spend money, Mrs. Catherick seems to disregard the negativity of her body by being hostile towards others. Perhaps, Collins suggests that her \u201caggressively self-possessed\u201d manner is so full of excess that the fatness trickles out as hostility towards others instead of others responding with hostility towards her stoutness. She, in turn, reverses the ills of her fatness as she uses her sturdiness and size to her advantage as both a feminine coded \u201csensual\u201d seductor and a \u201cstout and sturdy\u201d aggressive self-protector.<\/p>\n
While her bourgeois body is considered \u201cimproper\u201d and therefore an inefficient \u201cmachine,\u201d she has spent her whole life with her unforgiving \u201cstare\u201d and \u201cdefiant\u201d personality to prove herself as an effective turning machine, successfully defying what fatness should mean for her Victorian existence and challenging it (Huff 408). Though, alternatively, Collins presents Mrs. Catherick as a \u201cstout\u201d woman effectively hiding behind a secret, lacking the agency she supposedly has. Perhaps, her fatness instead symbolically weighs her total freedom down as achieving that freedom in stability and remaining known and liked in the community is her sole focus. Hartright\u2019s investigation into this secret damages the body and therefore reputation management she has built. Her \u201cbourgeois body management,\u201d in this instance, falls short of securing the individual security she seeks as her physical stoutness masks the control she actually has (Huff 409).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Upon meeting Mrs. Catherick, Mr. Hartright narrates her physical appearance, describing her as having dark eyes that \u201clook straight forward, with a hard, defiant, implacable stare. She had full square cheeks; a long, firm chin; and thick, sensual, colourless lips. Her figure was stout and sturdy, and her manner aggressively self-possessed\u201d (Collins 484). As Mrs. … Continue reading Sturdiness and Fatness: A Gatekeeping Victorian Body<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2084\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}