Mental Health Awareness and “Eight Bites” by Carmen Maria Machado

@lineageofqueens (Alex Rushmer). Mental Health Awareness Month Drawing Prompt 2019. Instagram, 1 May 2019, https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw7RDjWFxCf/?igshid=m1wbabp14tb0. Accessed 8 Oct. 2020.

 

I chose this art piece to represent the opening scene of “Eight Bites” where the narrator is under anesthesia for her weight loss surgery, and she feels like she is dying, yet she knows she isn’t going to die. When I read the opening paragraphs, I pictured a calm woman alone in the water. I think the picture above is a close representation of mental health. I think it definitely relates to “Eight Bites” because it’s about a woman’s struggle with an eating disorder.

In “Eight Bites,” the narrator suffers from repression and resistance because she cannot remember where in her family she got her body shape from or when she started starving herself (Machado). The mind is clearly blocking a traumatic memory, so the symptom from the “repressed force” develops into an eating disorder (Freud 2212).  In one scene, the narrator tries to eat just eight bites of her pasta and salad, but her hunger was so strong that she finished the whole plate and became angry at herself for not staying in the same restriction (Machado). The mind was telling her to eat because she was hungry, but she was angry despite it satisfying her hunger. In Freud’s perspective, the wishful impulse was that she wanted to eat the whole meal, but it went against her ideal standard of eating restriction and body weight (Freud 2215). Therefore, the wishful impulse was “activated” by her eating the entire meal, and the negative feeling that was attached to the impulse manifested into the conscious (Freud 2215).