Being “Hangry”: Gastrointestinal Health and Emotional Well-Being in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Emilie Taylor-Brown "Shakespeare was not far wrong when he said that an undigested pea might ruin an empire", asserted the author of an article published in the St James' Magazine in 1868. 1 The article, which was entitled "Dyspeptic Saints", argued that the "tyranny of the Inquisition" and Mary the First's burning of Protestants might be attributed to improper attention to the "philosophy of the stomach." Bloody Mary, argued the author, injured her constitution by practising fasting, a fact that explains her political violence and sealed her fate as the unhappy and childless wife of a Spanish prince. "And who, remembering the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots," they continue, "can say that Henry the Eighth's other daughter, the royal Virgin Elizabeth was of digestion sound?" 2 The pairing of emotional violence and poor dietetic practice is a linkage that we might recognise in the twenty-first concept of "hanger": being angry because you are hungryor as dictionary.com puts it, "feeling irritable or irrationally angry as a result of being hungry". 3 This portmanteau appeared on urban dictionary as early as 2003, and has since been added to online dictionaries published by Oxford and Cambridge university presses, Macmillan, Collins, and Random House.Despite the contemporary etymology of the word "hanger", hunger and anger are connected experiences that have a long-standing cultural history, from the political violence of the French revolution-which recalls the famously mistranslated "let them eat cake"-to the devastating protests of the "hungry forties". Peter urney connects these two historical moments by recognising the incendiary role of the failure of a compassionate response to working-class hunger. Marie Antoinette's misattributed words and Robert Bullock Marsham's flippant remark in 1842 that, while workers were unable to buy bread they at least "rejoiced in potatoes", voice a stark class divide. 4 This divide, for urney, as well as for scholars like John Bohstedt and Charlotte Boyce, is underpinned by the reality of hunger as a culturally and discursively constructed phenomenon that has historically had political power in mobilising the disenfranchised. 5 However as Bohstedt argues, in order to provoke food riots, hunger must be accompanied by other socio-political components, such as the ability to deliver collective action and the confidence that the benefits would outweigh the punishments. 6 Hunger alone does not produce political activism.The anger or emotional violence precipitated by hunger is, in these cases then, ideological: a rational and politically inflected response to a larger social problem.However, I want to focus on a more physiologically-embodied form of emotional violence made explicit in the "Dyspeptic Saints" article. This pairing of hunger and anger appeared in debates about the interconnectedness of the gastrointestinal and psychological or neurological systems, and so positioned anger in a complex relationship with digestion and appetite. In this essay, I explore the dynamic 4 Pet...