The most wonderful fat-positive moment in a children’s book is in the classic “Understood Betsey” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The main character is first introduced as “Elizabeth Ann” – thin, shrinking, frightened of the world. When her guardians (also the thin, nervous type) are struck by illness, she is sent to distant relatives on a farm, where she encounters many oddities and terrors – gruff Cousin Ann and taciturn Uncle Henry; the strange little one-room schoolhouse; the big black farm dog Shep – and Aunt Abigail, the fattest woman she has ever seen. Everything here is strange – even her name has changed; they call her “Betsy” – and nightfall finds Elizabeth Ann shivering in a big old fourposter bed, feeling more alone than she has ever felt and ready to cry in despair – and then Aunt Abigail comes in to bed down with her, and in a moment, everything changes. The language of this scene is gently marvelous. At first, Betsy “felt just as cold inside as out, and never was more utterly miserable than in that strange, ugly little room, with that strange, queer, fat old woman.” But snuggled up to Aunt Abigail, the thin, trembling, frightened child feels suddenly enveloped in warmth and protection. She “began to feel a soft, pervasive warmth. Aunt Abigail’s great body was like a stove.” Betsy turns her head “so that she could see the round, rosy old face, full of soft wrinkles, and the calm, steady old eyes which were fixed on the page. And as she lay there in the warm bed, watching that quiet face… She felt as though a tight knot inside her were slowly being untied.” As Aunt Abigail crosses the room, “The floor shook under her great bulk, and the peak of her nightcap made a long, grotesque shadow. But… Elizabeth Ann saw nothing funny in her looks… She blew the light out and moved over a little closer to Elizabeth Ann, who immediately was enveloped in that delicious warmth… Between her and the terrors of the dark room loomed the rampart of Aunt Abigail’s great body.” This lovely paragraph nearly makes me cry every time I read it. It deserves to be read again and again and again.

Haven’t completed it, so I don’t know how the race and body identity politics play out, but indications are that thin is offensive and brown is normalised, eg: ‘Her skin was slightly paler shade of the normal brown colouring and she was pleasantly plump’ (p.16). There is also (unsupported) racism against ‘whites’ and criticism of being not ’shapely’ enough.

Nice to see this in a book that doesn’t have ‘fat’ or ’size’ or ‘bum’ in the title and is not specifically about body politics.

Cheers

Trish

Thanks for the suggestion! It made me think of Peter S. Beagle’s Folk of the Air, which includes a fat goddess with whom the protagonist falls madly in love. I don’t remember whether she’s described as physically beautiful, but she’s certainly fat, and she’s described as irresistible, holy, the impersonation of all that is worthy of love. (Not a main character, exactly, though.)

Rebecca —

Thanks for the fabulous list! I’m going to start pushing these more at my library. Since I teach at a girls’ school, we talk a lot about body image, but the books used to represent that are usually on the anorexia side of things.