Appetites and consumption: designing the self in Jenefer Shute's fiction

Abstract

The common denominator in Jenefer Shute's four novels is their female characters' concern with the construction of a meaningful sense of identity. Although every Shute protagonist seems to be informed by a similar existential ethos, the scope of this essay is limited to Life-Size and User I.D. for they significantly engage in two different yet related explorations of the intricate connections between corporeality and the female self: anorexia nervosa on the one hand, consumerism and cosmetics on the other. Drawing on Dominick LaCapra's notion of structural trauma and on approaches to the female body like those expounded by Julia Kristeva and Susan Bordo among others, my main contention is that the above-mentioned novels expose the dangers of the culture-induced rejection of the female body as a requisite for achieving a satisfactory sense of self, while unraveling the search for the meaning of one's life as an ongoing process inherent to human existence.