Fat characters in recent young adult fiction.

Imagine someone tells you about a character named Joe, or Josephine. You don't know anything about the character. Then you find out that he, or she, is fat. What images come to mind? Do you feel like you've learned something about this character's soul, morality, or amount of power? Many things in literature are symbolic, but this particular symbol carries a damaging influence that is common but often unnoticed. Fatness is used overwhelmingly to connote corruption of inner character, weakness, immaturity, and flaws that need to be fixed. The message is sent through both fat characters who are two-dimensionally flawed, and fat characters who are complex but lose weight as they gain maturity.

Fat bullies, for example, run rampant through children's literature. In Carl Hiaasen's Hoot, a fat boy named Dana subjects protagonist Roy to regular and full-blown beatings. "[H]usky" Dana (48, 193, 202), a "large, lumpy kid" (190) with "a bulky figure" (193) and a "piggish face" (46), is someone for whom size is specifically and blatantly connected with bullying. This connection is established with phrases that mention the two aspects of Dana (fatness and bullying) together: "Dana clamped a moist, ham-sized hand over Roy's face" (94). "[Roy] glared out from between Dana's pudgy fingers" (94). "This time Dana hit him with the other hand, equally fat and damp" (96). Dana is "a big stupid bully" (29), a "big thug" (287)--the very fatness itself symbolizes the fact that Dana has too much power and is abusive of it.

Dana, as a fat bully, has lots of company. In Catherine Atkins' Alt Ed, Susan receives taunting phone calls from a boy with "sausage fingers" (187); as with Dana, Eddy's size and cruelty are cemented together when he's described as "muscle-fat, shorthaired and mean-eyed" (142). In Tim Kennemore's Circle of Doom, the boy who keeps Max out of soccer games, steals his snacks and drinks, and glares at him as if a punch is imminent has "piggy" eyes (191) and "pudgy" hands (172). In Arthur Slade's Dust, a banker who "lumber[s]" (70) and has a "protruding stomach" (70) abuses his economic hold over farmers and poor townspeople by offering them unrefusable financial relief for aiding an evil stranger. Banker Samuels helps everyone sign up for the project (82); alongside him is Mrs. Juskin, who is "plump" (27, 96). And just think of Harry Potter's relationship with Dudley Dursley.

Sometimes fat bullies get their comeuppance. Dana in Hoot fails to escape from juvenile hall while Mullet Fingers, a skinny, sympathetic environmentalist and owl champion, escapes and goes free. Readers can hardly help being glad: Dana has been tormenting our protagonist Roy for the entire book. But Dana's slide from too much power to no power at all hardly expands the possibilities for fat people. On the contrary, it reveals the limitedness of the options. If someone is not a fat bully anymore, he or she must have lost all power and be, as we cheer, a deserving victim. The same is true with Nathan in Circle of Doom. At the very moment that he holds the drink that will make him sick (and teach him the lesson he will never forget), his fatness comes into play. "Nathan looked at [Max] uncertainly, his pudgy little hand still firmly gripping the bottle" (172). The pudginess reminds readers of two things: that Nathan is about to be punished by becoming weak and powerless; and that he richly deserves this punishment for being a bully for so long. Two archetypes, bully and victim, are simultaneously embodied in fatness to manipulatively eliminate any potential sympathy the reader might have.

Further ensuring that the possibilities remain narrow are fat characters who, rather than sliding from one archetype to another, embody more than one throughout. In Rebecca Fjelland Davis' Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged, Jake is a 9th-grader who bullies a fellow classmate. His threats begin as sexual and progress to a vow of killing her with a .22 gun. Jake is "squatty and has a belly" (2) and a "paunch" (12): in other words, he's "fat" (13, 14). But despite the real danger he poses, Jake is not just another fat bully--he's also a fat victim at the same time. Lainey, the girl he threatens, is scared of him, but she also feels sorry for his sad history, the way he is labeled at school ("irreparably damaged"), and the way no adults step up to help him change. Lainey is caught between fear and pity, and Jake is caught in two fat stereotypes at once.

Other examples of this dual-role phenomenon exist as well. Mrs. Prebyl, Jake's counselor, has "wide hips" (71) that carry plentiful "weight" (47), and although she bullies Jake with her adult power, she is totally ineffectual at helping Lainey out of danger. Lainey scorns her, and Mrs. Prebyl remains both pathetic and too powerful throughout the book. In Dust, two war widows also share both archetypes. They are powerless, pitiful, and lonely. At the same time, they aid the banker in bullying the townspeople, and they're oppressive to protagonist Robert. Like Jake and Mrs. Prebyl, they're "plump" (27), "[f]at" (122) characters who are simultaneously victims and bullies.

Some fat characters have no power to abuse and are simply, irrevocably, victims. In Carl Deuker's Night Hoops, Michael Ushakov is "so fat his flesh jiggled when he walked" (23), and he exists solely to be the victim of two out-of-control teenagers who shoot ducks and then shoot him. In Dust, "heavyset" Reverend Gibbs (52, 74) is the only adult to die during the town's ordeal with a dangerous soulless being. In Alt Ed, fat guidance counselor Mr. Dully, who has "meaty hands" (7) and a "pumpkin face" (18), ends up eliciting only pity, not respect, from the main character as she matures, even though he's the creator of the counseling group that helps her. These characters are at best pitiable, at worst pathetic.

Sometimes there are fat characters who are more complex and fully realized than those mentioned so far. This is the case for Susan in Alt Ed and Virginia in Carolyn Mackler's The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Each girl is the main character of her book, each tells the story in first-person perspective, and each is likeable. Each follows a familiar story arc of learning strength and sense of self. But each also loses weight along the way. Virginia begins with timidity, pain, and no self-esteem; she ends as a Web site-founder and proud sporter of purple hair and an eyebrow ring. But near the end, as the result of a kickboxing class, she notes "I'm starting to feel stronger, to see my stomach and arms tightening up" (237). The kickboxing class is an excellent choice for her, but the tightening up of her stomach and arms--and the linking of it with her growing "strength," which is physical in this sentence but is true overall in a profound emotional way--means that once again, fatness is inherently linked with weakness and lack of self-knowledge. Lose weight, gain strength--all kinds of strength.

Susan in Alt Ed is an even deeper example of this phenomenon. Tormented for being fat, she learns over the course of the book to value herself. At the same time, she loses weight, which is mentioned several times. Her fatness is connected in an essentialized way with her victimhood. Fatness causes victimhood or victimhood causes fatness--it doesn't matter which. As Susan loses weight, she learns to "say stuff" (196) and show people she's "real" (197). She sees herself move "[o]ut of my role of Outraged. Pathetic. Scared. Victim" (155); she stands "tall, not hunched" and looks "straight into [her] own eyes" in the mirror (161). The weight she loses is used as a narrative tool to epitomize these emotional changes.

Why is fatness allowed to be this tool, though? What other types of physical attributes would we allow to exist purely as symbolic of an inner flaw? Shortness? Blindness? In other eras, disability and left-handedness were considered signs of sin (think of Colin in Secret Garden and how his physical healing depends on moral/emotional redemption). Why can fatness be used so today? In Alt Ed, Susan makes friends with a gay boy named Brendan. Brendan is tormented by his peers in much the same way as Susan is: fiercely, soul-crushingly, and incessantly. But while Susan realizes that mistreatment of Brendan is homophobia and therefore undeserved, there is no similar realization about her fatness, on her own part or anyone else's. "'Brendan isn't the problem. It's the other guys who are. The ones who make petitions against him'" (184), she announces confidently. Unfortunately, Susan's burden of change is on her own shoulders. Susan is forced to change where Brendan (thankfully) is not. The harshness she endures is certainly portrayed as cruel, but it's never seen in a way that relates to broad social discrimination. Our pervasive cultural myths about fatness and health are used to justify her change, much as similar myths about homosexuality and health (moral, spiritual, physical) have been used destructively for eons.

With so many examples of fatness equaling flawedness, fatness slips easily into shorthand for anything negative. Skinny characters are sometimes bad or weak, but they are surrounded by other skinny characters who are good or strong or understandable; fat characters epitomized by flaws have few counter-examples. Some are Santa-jolly, but these are often stock characters, unreliable or entertaining, rarely heroes. Fatness is enough reason to be the subject of mocking laughter, the only comic relief in a somber book like Dust. It can be a quick code for unlikeability, as when Jacob in Postcards From No Man's Land explains that he can't relate to his father, one reason for which is his father's "roly-poly midriff hanging over his factory-distressed jeans that show off his slumpy bum" (131). This reason gets no further explanation; fatness is simply uncool and helps justify emotional distance. It can even be an excuse for pure hatred: Michael Ushakov in Night Hoops, the fat boy shot with a BB gun, is repulsive enough to supposedly justify the protagonist's attitude toward him, which is barely even sympathetic.

Please make no mistake: I love these books. They're high quality, nuanced, and full of sparks and flavors. I am not saying to throw them out the window. But prejudice against fat people--myriad misguided assumptions about fat people's supposed weaknesses--rules the playground in our culture today. Fat readers of these books are prodded to consider themselves worth fundamentally less than thin people (unless they lose weight). Thin readers are conditioned to see fat people as inevitably flawed. Such messages run rampant through our culture; young adults of all sizes already receive them from peers, family, media, clothing manufacturers, and the institution of medicine. It's sad, and damaging, for books supporting this prejudice to slide by unnoticed. A few of these books do have sprinklings of the idea that fat people are actually real people (see especially Alt Ed and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, which show complex protagonists demanding that their fathers stop mentioning and judging them by their weight). But all of these books have fierce, unexamined fatphobia too.

So although these stellar books should of course not be discarded, neither should their prejudice against fatness be ignored, Noticing the phenomenon is a powerful first step. Discussing it with young adults can empower them enormously and help them develop a critical awareness. Find a narratively respected, fully realized fat character who doesn't lose weight and you've found a rare gem. (Rodzina, by Newbery-winner Karen Cushman, is a nice recent example, and brilliant illustrator Trina Schart Hyman, who's been known to draw willowy heroines, wonderfully shifts gears to create a fat Rodzina on the cover.) The author who writes a complex, compelling fat character who doesn't lose weight--and whose flaws are not essentialized as weight-related--is taking a tiny step that could be revolutionary.

Works Cited

Atkins, Catherine. Alt Ed. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson. The Secret Garden. New York: Dell, 1911.

Chambers, Aidan. Postcards from No Man's Land. New York: Dutton, 1999.

Cushman, Karen. Rodzina. New York: Clarion, 2003.

Davis, Rebecca Fjelland. Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

Deuker, Carl. Night Hoops. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Hiaasen, Carl. Hoot. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Kennemore, Tim. Circle of Doom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2003.

Mackler, Carolyn. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, Cambridge, MA.: Candlewick, 2003.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New York: Scholastic, 1997.

Slade, Arthur. Dust, New York: Random House, 2003.

Rebecca Rabinowitz has a Master's degree in children's literature. She reviews for Kirkus Reviews and KLIATT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.