The Overactive Nerve

"I doggedly out myself at London dinner parties as a Leave supporter-- though I might skate safely on the chummy assumption that as a halfway sane person, I backed Remain. -- Lionel Shriver, Harpers April 19 issue

Anorexia Nervosa is a shock and awe driven disorder with a symbiotic relationship to the slasher films of Wes Craven which insist on a near fantastical resilience in the face of modern predation. In contrast to the hypervigilance of feminine mystique under threat, anorexia is a grotesque distortion of the hourglass figure torching itself to emaciation, a form of hysteria on overdrive, with hysteria being the speculative conceit that kills Milly Theale. Whatever else The Wings of the Dove imparts to admiring readers, it imparts a certain vacancy in the mist of ostentation and material need, and this is wherein its modernism resides, despite the fact that James is still the eminent Victorian of repressed portents, even at the turn of a fresh new century, in whose second decade, on his deathbed, James has a stream of consciousness moment with Napoleonic emblems. Feminine histrionics aren't that expansive, and conditions like anorexia, or fibromyalgia, which now possibly afflicts a sister middle child as well as the brow beaten novelist Gretchen Laskas, who probably will never engage your dowager on Twitter, are actually conditions of shrinkage, with force enough to liken it to the tornado's funnel. Noa Pothoven wanted to vanish. Both the state and her family allowed her to do so. As a sexual assault victim many times over, I feel more than Douthat's scolding sensibility of concern he expresses in "Dystopia," and in fact, when this piece resonated with me on the phone, I did not know this column was his, but he is right that this is Europe transmitting the wrong moral equivalence on an international scale. Our species is ill equipped to accept human suffering and it's outcry, and so increasingly dispenses with it.

It is entirely possible that continued force feeding and psychotherapy wouldn't have improved Noa's quality of life. Maybe she wouldn't have learned to cease living with her rapists, but Belgian clinical expertise seemed to have folded rather quickly on this point. Anorexia and post-traumatic stress are treatable. She might have flourished as a writer, or something else, just like the Parkland shooting survivor suicides, or the Sandy Hook parent who took his own life. These deaths are microcosms, as opposed to lemmings stampeding an escarpment, but human life was once much harsher, even in the Jamesian era. In Wings, James never spells out what reporting drives Merton Densher's passion, but Linus Roache has a telling little monologue in the opening of the movie about young adolescents driven into prostitution and then having their venereal diseases hidden by cruel cosmetic deceit. Henry James arguably leaves it open ended for Merton to attack his audience in such a fashion. Was he too principled to realize what he might have done with Milly's fortune to end the practice?