Elisabeth of Austria

Elisabeth

Married young into an unhappy royal life, most famous woman of her era, died violently, had an eating disorder. It sounds like Diana, Princess of Wales, and indeed there are many articles on the Internet comparing the two, but this description belongs to Elisabeth, Empress of Austria from 1854 until 1898.

Elisabeth (known from a young age as Sisi) was born on 24th December 1837, in Munich, to Ludovica, from the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, and Duke Max of Bavaria. A shy child, she was catapulted into the limelight at 16, when she married her cousin, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria. From the start, Vienna didn’t suit her – she referred to herself as a ‘caged bird’ in its suppressive court, under the watchful and domineering eye of Franz Joseph’s beloved mother, Sophie. Elisabeth bore three children during the 1859s, all of whom were taken away and raised by her mother-in-law. Franz Joseph was unfaithful to her and seems to have given her a venereal disease, treatment for which ruined Elisabeth’s teeth. It’s no wonder that she began to take long, restorative trips away from court.

Elisabeth’s gym

She was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Europe, and the maintenance of her beauty certainly reads like anorexia. She had no control over her life but she could control the hell out of her food and her beauty regime. As one commenter posted on my earlier piece about nuns: “…[that] sense of control is very satisfying when you are having other issues in your life. Sometimes food is the only thing in this world that you can control”.

Elisabeth ate very little, frequently subjecting herself to starvation diets that consisted of eggs, broth and milk from the cows she took with her wherever she went. She walked for up to 10 hours a day, did rigorous gymnastic routines and went horse-riding, all to retain the (allegedly) 18 inch waist that had, ironically, attracted her husband and condemned her to her miserable life. Her fasting got worse after the death in 1857 of her toddler daughter, and starvation behaviour would reappear following periods of stress for the rest of her life.

One of Elisabeth’s tiny corsets

In obsessive pursuit of physical immortality she also concocted face masks made out of raw veal or slugs (or strawberries, which is less grim), and devoted a whole day once every three weeks to washing her knee-length hair with eggs and cognac. After the age of 32 she refused to have any more portraits made or pictures taken, so the public would always think of her as young and beautiful.

There is no doubt at all that Elisabeth was desperately unhappy, and this obsessive compulsive dedication to her appearance seems to have been the manifestation of her depression. She refused to get pregnant a fourth time, partly to maintain her waistline, until 1867, when she decided a reconciliation with her husband would help her push Hungary’s cause to become an independent nation. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was created that same year, and in 1868 Elisabeth gave birth to Marie Valerie, insisting on bringing this child up herself. Deprived of a close relationship with her other children, she smothered Marie Valerie.

In January 1889 her only son, Crown Prince Rudolf, killed himself in a murder-suicide pact with his teenage mistress. Rudolf, then 30, had been growing increasingly frustrated with his father’s refusal to grant him any responsibility and his own unhappy marriage. Elisabeth, who had lost both her parents and her sister the previous year, was devastated, angry, and terrified that Rudolf’s depression was a family trait that Elisabeth would soon develop. Both her Wittelsbach cousins Ludwig II of Bavaria and his brother Otto had been declared insane – three days after his diagnosis of schizophrenia in 1886, Ludwig and his psychiatrist had been found drowned, officially by suicide.

Elisabeth did not die by her own hand. She was assassinated, in 1898 in Geneva, by an Italian anarchist who stabbed her because he couldn’t find his original intended aristocratic victim. Her corset was so tight that initially no blood could escape from the wound in her heart – when her bodice was loosened, she bled out.

Elisabeth and Franz Joseph

Elisabeth has become an iconic figure – the original beauty in a royal fairytale gone wrong. Because of her political work she has remained especially popular in Hungary, but there are webpages and blogs all over the place dedicated to her beauty secrets and her clothes. She also has her own museum.

 

Holy Anorexia

An idealised image of St Catherine

“The link between women’s sinfulness and food is made at the very start of the Bible, when Eve’s desire for the apple brings about the destruction of paradise.”

This quotation is from a newspaper article about a Carmelite nun, 61 when the piece was written in 2008, who refers to her anorexia as a ‘friend’. Though her illness was not the direct consequence of her religious beliefs, there are plenty of cases through convent history of nuns who starved themselves, to death in some cases, in the name of God.

Religious fervour or a clear-cut case of mental illness?

St Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) was a Dominican tertiary (a tertiary lives according to an Order’s ideals but is not a nun) living in Italy at a time when women’s control over their bodies was seen as a step towards becoming Divine. There are anecdotes from that period of women with what we’d now call anorexia having transcendental experiences, though the practical cynic might suggest these are more to do with lack of food than the presence of God.

When Catherine was 15, her older sister died, followed shortly by her baby sister. Catherine responded to the survivors’ guilt she felt, and to her parents’ suggestions that she marry her sister’s widower, by fasting until she’d lost half her body weight. Her parents sent her to a priest, who couldn’t decide whether she was a saint or mad. He tried to get her to eat, and according to her she did do her best to, but she was sick when she tried: “God did not make me eat to correct the depravity of my throat. I pray in order to return to eat, but it is His wish for my expiation in this way.”

After two years her exhausted family agreed that she could dedicate her life to the Church, helping the sick and needy, which she threw herself into; she remained a public figure for the rest of her life, involving herself in politics and advocacy.

Santa Maria Delle Grazie Dominican convent, Milan. Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ is on the back wall.

Her writings suggest that she felt disillusioned by the political situation in Italy at the time – for a while during the 14th century there were two Popes, resulting from a schism in the Church – and her fasting was a reaction to both these external sins and the sins she felt she committed. She also clearly had a difficult, tempestuous adolescence, which Rudolph Bell, in his book Holy Anorexia, holds partially responsible for her anorexia/bulimia. Her family had let her down, but God never had. To eat was to betray God, because to eat was to yield to temptation and therefore sin.

Catherine continued to refuse food, taking only the Eucharist, and vomiting up anything else that she did eat. She died, aged 33, in April 1380, after a stroke.

There are obvious parallels to be drawn between so-called ‘holy’ anorexia, which at least superficially has its beginnings in genuine religious feeling, and the anorexia most people now recognise as a mental illness. According to a paper from the Royal College of Psychiatrists, anorexia nervosa displays certain features of ‘spirituality’ such as ritualistic behaviours, self-denial and obedience to a higher power, and the ‘Ana Commandments’ (several of which begin ‘Thou Shalt’) and ‘Ana Creed’ that are part of the pro-anorexia community are based on Christian doctrine.

The ex-nun and theologian Karen Armstrong wrote a memoir in which she discussed her own and her fellow sisters’ anorexia – it’s a phenomenon that still apparently haunts nuns with alarming frequency.