學士後西醫-英文題庫下載題庫

        Good health and a healthy appetite go hand in hand in Austen’s novels. Her heroines—when flourishing—eat in moderation and without worrying too much about what they are eating and what they are not. Catherine Morland, the youthful, zestful heroine of Northanger Abbey, is blessed with “a good appetite” and eats just what she wants to, when she is hungry.

 The heroines good constitutions—and well-regulated appetites—are also conjoined with a taste for fresh air and exercise. Often, they are determined walkers, visiting friends and neighbors on foot, enjoying scenic strolls (Catherine) or traipsing, like the best ofthe Romantics, through the natural world (Marianne Dashwood). Elizabeth Bennet thinks nothing of walking three miles “in [...] dirty weather to see her cold-ridden sister marooned at Netherfield, “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.” We might go so far to claim that appetite, exercise, and mental health are the three points of a Jane Austen “well-being triangle”—if any one of these is lost, the others suffer, too, and overall well-being is compromised. When out of sorts, her heroines begin to display a more problematic relationship with food. 

For example, when Marianne in Sense and Sensibility begins to pine for Willoughby, her appetite dwindles and she becomes thin and wan, losing her youthful bloom. Catherine, too, loses her appetite when she finds she is banished from Northanger Abbey—“She tried to eat [﹒﹒﹒] but she had no appetite, and could not swallow many mouthfuls”—a situation that continues back at home where she appears—from her parents’ point of view—to turn her nose up at their ordinary breakfast: “I am sure I do not care about the bread. It is all the same to me what I eat.” 

While both Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse—both of whom have healthy egos to match their healthy appetites—flourish throughout their respective narratives, two others, Anne Elliot (in Persuasion) and Fanny Price (in Mansfield Park)—cach unhappy and marginalized in her own way 一 have to work their way toward wellbeing， rediscovering their appetites (in the broadest sense) along with their sense of self as they also begin to (re﹣﹚bloom physically and emotionally.