A True Victorian Medical Mystery

The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery
by Michelle Stacey

During the Victorian age-a time when even respectable newspapers had a tabloid edge-some of the world's most renowned and controversial celebrities were women who could allegedly abstain from eating for months or even years at a time. In The Fasting Girl, acclaimed journalist Michelle Stacey tells the story of Mollie Fancher, a young Brooklyn woman who became "the most famous sick person in the world" because of her claim to have lived for more than a decade without food.

Lauded by Entertainment Weekly as one of the top ten books of 2002 and compared by the Chicago Tribune to Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman, this elegantly written, compulsively readable cultural history intertwines topics as diverse as eating disorders, Charles Darwin, and the nature of entertainment and celebrity. "Mystic, hysteric, anorexic, or freak, Mollie Fancher was only one thing for sure: a hunger artist who played her audience for decades," wrote The Village Voice. "It took a probing writer like Stacey to give her a riveting second run."

Chapter 1

The Accident

It is better to believe a little than too much.
— The New York Times, December 15, 1878

There is very little as a matter of fact, in the great domain of nature, that we actually understand.
— Abram H. Dailey, Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, 1894

ON JUNE 8, 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie Fancher went shopping in Brooklyn, New York. Two months short of her nineteenth birthday, she was tall, well made, willowy, with light wavy hair and an oval face. Her features were regular, and a photograph made around this time shows eyes with a serious, direct gaze. Mollie was active and energetic, and on this day she took brisk, hearty steps along the bustling sidewalks of Fulton Street-named for the forward-thinking Robert Fulton, who in 1814 had established the first ferry service linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. Her arms were full of packages; her thoughts lingered on an impending journey to Boston, and on her recent engagement to a respectable young man, John Taylor. She was, at that moment, all that mid-Victorian convention could require of a teenage girl.

But on this hot, oppressive June day, amid the chaos of dust and horse traffic and noise that was Brooklyn-then still independent of New York City, and the third-largest city in the United States-Mollie's regular progress along the path of middle-class Victorian propriety was about to come to a halt. That path had, in the sophisticated yet also oddly provincial milieu of Brooklyn society, its accepted stations: graduation from the select Brooklyn Heights Seminary for girls; attendance at the Brooklyn Yacht Club regattas and various strawberry festivals and musical performances that enlivened summer days and evenings; marriage to a suitable young man; the bearing of several children; the grace of middle age. Mollie had already experienced interruptions in this progress, including the early loss of her mother and a horseback accident at fifteen, but now she was back on stride. When that stride was next broken, it would be permanently, and in a way that not only would change her life, but would affect the lives of hundreds, even thousands, of people she would never meet.

Mollie boarded a streetcar, a trolley-like vehicle pulled along railroad tracks by a team of horses. Most of the old horsecars, which would be replaced by electric streetcars in Brooklyn beginning in 1892, traveled, at their swiftest, at a speed of only six miles per hour over the stone-paved thoroughfares. Even so, they could on occasion be lethal. That very day, June 8, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle had published an irate letter to the editor of the newspaper under the heading "Dangers of Railroad Travel." In it the writer, signing himself a "sorely bruised Sufferer," described his misadventures on a DeKalb Avenue car: He "managed to get a foothold on the rear platform" of a very full car, but when the vehicle rounded a corner at top speed, he "without any warning was suddenly landed in the street, to the detriment of his body, clothing, etc., and his watch thrown out of his pocket." The driver did not even stop the car after this unnamed "Sufferer" landed on the paving stones. And a week later, the Eagle reported that a young girl named Henrietta Cook had died of injuries received when she was run over by a streetcar. Again, the driver of the car did not stop after the accident.

Mollie Fancher climbed aboard one of these rollicking vehicles, laden with her packages, the lower half of her body encased in the full, cumbrous crinoline that was the cross borne by every fashionable lady of the Civil War era. When she was ready to descend to the street at her stop, she signaled the conductor. He rang the bell, the car was halted, and Mollie stepped from the rear platform to the pavement. The conductor rang the bell again for the car to move forward, turned away, and walked into the interior of the car. But Mollie had not fully descended, and she was thrown to the ground by the sudden movement of the car. Worse, her crinoline skirt caught in an iron hook at the back of the car, so that instead of simply being dashed to the paving stones she was then dragged over them.

For nearly a block Mollie was pulled behind the horse-drawn streetcar, her body turning around and around as her skirt twisted into a rope. She lost consciousness, as horrified onlookers shouted to the driver to stop. Finally his attention was gained, and Mollie's battered body came to rest. She was disengaged from the hook and carried into the nearest shop-a butcher's. "It was long before she could be removed to her home," wrote Abram Dailey in his biography, Mollie Fancher, the Brooklyn Enigma, published in 1894. Eventually, friends conveyed her to her house, at 160 Gates Avenue, and to the distressed care of her family. She would never leave that house alive again.

In that manner, the Fulton Street car fulfilled its destiny as an agent of careless destruction, and Mollie Fancher began to fulfill hers as a challenge to Victorian thought and belief. She kept the twisted rope of a skirt to the end of her days, a poor rotting symbol of her cataclysm.

In the later nineteenth century, modern urban existence was plagued by risks not altogether unlike those of today, despite that era's apparently slower and less alienated lifestyle. Danger, disease, random violent crime, plain bad luck-the newspapers of Mollie's youth are full of gruesome tales; only in some details is the passage of more than one hundred years discernible. In the Brooklyn of 1865, workmen fell from ladders, scaffolding, and riggings at the Navy Yard and at building construction sites, breaking arms, legs, necks, dying sometimes on the spot, sometimes later at the hospital. A surprising number of people were injured or killed by lightning. Heartbroken young people, men and women alike, committed suicide by arsenic poisoning or other means. Innocent citizens were burned by vitriol thrown on them by persons unknown to them-a puzzling, random crime that enjoyed a brief popularity. Horses did all kinds of damage: pulling wagons over people, especially children; throwing riders to the pavement, often to their deaths. For June 5 through 11, 1865, the week of Mollie Fancher's accident, Brooklyn city records list mortality from cholera, consumption (tuberculosis), typhoid, apoplexy, scarlet fever, premature birth, stillbirth, croup, bowel inflammation, and several other ailments and accidents, for a total of 109 deaths. It was merely a piece of luck that Mollie was not in that number, her death reduced to a three-sentence paragraph in the "City News and Gossip" column of the Eagle (perhaps below "Arrest of a Burglar" and above "Killed by Lightning": "Schoolgirl in Fatal Horsecar Fall").

What marks the difference between these nineteenth-century ills and today's is scale and intensity: twenty-first-century threats are bigger, faster, often deadlier. We are killed not by six-mile-per-hour horses but by seventy-mile-per-hour cars; not scalded by the random terror of vitriol but incinerated, by the thousands, in a massive act of high-rise, airborne, international terrorism. Victorians were beginning to get a hint of a new world, and that awareness gave misfortunes like Mollie's a peculiar resonance. Disease, heartbreak, accidents of childbirth-those were familiar dangers, age-old threats to health and happiness. It was the newfangled perils that frightened Mollie's fellow Brooklynites most; such perils produced a special brand of fear that was only beginning to be labeled or understood. Today we might call it generalized anxiety: a sense of dread, or worry, often brought on by an overload of demands on our abilities and our time, or by an underlying apprehension of our capacity for self-destruction.

Copyright © March 2002, J.P. Tarcher, a member of Penguin Putnam, Inc., used by permission.

About the Author

Michelle Stacey, the author of Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate, and Fear Food, is a journalist who writes extensively for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Allure.