Marion Wallace-Dunlop and the Origins of the Hunger Strike
In my talk last March at the Albert Lepage Center, I discussed my research for my forthcoming book on the origins of the first modern hunger strike in 1909 by Scottish artist and suffragette Marion Wallace-Dunlop. Her hunger strike occurred in Holloway Gaol where she was imprisoned following her militant actions for the women’s suffrage movement.
For the past fifteen years, I have been poking around the idea of origins. I have sought to understand the origins of the modern hunger strike, its innovation typically attributed to Marion Wallace-Dunlop, who refused food in prison during the women’s campaign for the vote. Several scholars have suggested that the Russian prison fast, golodófka, translated as famine fast, was the main influence on her. But fasting protests have other traditions in India, Ireland, and Great Britain, and cultural nationalists there claim the hunger strike emerged as part of their own native traditions. Indeed, Wallace-Dunlop’s new political spectacle, replete with media coverage with the goal of shaping public opinion, had cultural ties to all of these traditions.
My talk focused on my research for my forthcoming book, “Marion Wallace-Dunlop and the Origins of the Hunger Strike.” My process has been to trace the varied meanings of fasting protests over time — and discover the life of this significant, if relatively little-known, artist. The book, therefore, has two main sections: the first, a cultural history of fasting protests, and the second, a biography of Marion Wallace-Dunlop. The book closes with her 1909 hunger strike but explores her development as an artist intent on shaping the public mind. Although hunger protests have been with us since early written texts, this project focused on representations closer to her time — those of nineteenth-century England, Ireland, India (Gujarat), and Russia, all of which touched her life or entered her sphere.
The project began with an essay about the questions of hunger strike origins in 2007 and with a second article in the TLS in 2009 at the centenary of her 1909 hunger strike. The cover of that publication carried a painting by Marion Wallace-Dunlop of her sister Constance — a painting that many considered ugly or shocking at the time. Wallace-Dunlop was a Scottish-born fine-arts painter and children’s author and lived in London with her mother and siblings in the years leading up to her strike. For generations previously, her family had lived and worked in India, however, largely in the “Bombay Presidency.” Following the death of her father, she matured as a writer and artist, she became enamored of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Theosophy, and the Celtic Twilight, especially the writings of W.B. Yeats. These are relevant because of the fasting protest traditions in both western India, particularly Gujarat, north of Mumbai (then Bombay), and the fasting traditions in Ireland, which Yeats had written about in the 1903 play, The King’s Threshold.
The term hunger strike came into English in the 1880s through the translations of Russian autobiographies in England, such as that of Sergie Stepniak (or Kravchinsky), Russia under the Tzars (1885), translated by William Westall and stories in the periodical, Free Russia. In my longer project, I discuss these texts and influences and others before turning to Wallace-Dunlop’s biography. Behind all of this was my central research question — what are the origins of the hunger strike?
Historiography is often concerned with causation, with how one set of circumstances led to another. Origin stories, similarly, tend to look for cause and effect. In doing so, they over-simplify the story and often cater to an agenda. To understand the beginnings of a global phenomenon such as the hunger strike, I had to first examine the root-ball assemblage of meanings that inspired fasting protests — including the many representations of hunger in nineteenth-century London. For a hunger strike to work, the audience must sympathize with the striker’s hunger. But how does that sympathy work?
Because our first sense of hunger occurs within our bodies, we also may miss how hunger speaks to others. So, for a moment, imagine that you do not know the meaning of hunger. How would you learn what it is? Hunger is one of our most primal and deeply felt experiences, and we typically assume that our experience of hunger — with its attendant associations — is how everyone experiences it. For some, hunger brings panic while for others anticipation. As researchers our assumptions may cloak meanings that cling to hunger without our realizing. This is one reason why it is crucial for us to pay attention to other people’s stories of hunger.
My goal has not been to create a timeline of the origins of the hunger strike, pointing back to single events. Instead I read this textual history as rhizomatic, having multiple origins, multiple influences, and multiple offshoots that reinforce branches that later cross or even merge. The philosophers and cultural theorists, Deleuze and Guattari, suggest that cultural assemblages or rhizomes (in botany: lateral root structures that sends out both roots and shoots) are not mere metaphors to help us trace the complex influence networks of history and culture. Rather rhizomes can serve as maps, with no single entryway or point of origin — “the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing.” To understand the hunger strike we must map its paths, usages, and networks.
In 1909 London, before Marion Wallace-Dunlop’s strike, a hunger protest conveyed a complex assemblage of meanings for the reading public as well as for Marion herself. Hunger, then as now, means more than rumblings and fatigue — it can suggest desire, fear, suffering, laziness, illness, exhaustion, spirituality, emptiness, dreaminess, acceptance, idealism, conscientiousness, determination, perseverance, and more. The tenor of hunger, also is particular to various times, places, and cultures. For some it can evoke historical events and catastrophes — wars, famines, enslavements, droughts. For others, it can prick consciences, particularly if there is a history of seeing or witnessing hunger rather than feeling it. Marion Wallace-Dunlop, who herself created powerful images, chose to represent hunger as a form of determination.
Today, no one can be perilously hungry without the implied inaction of others — starvation does not exist in isolation or disconnection. In this sense, it takes a company, a corporation, an army, or a government to starve someone. Marion Wallace-Dunlop saw it similarly, and her hunger strike did more than plead to prison guards or reference by-gone traditions. Her hunger strike conveyed both her determination for the vote and implicated a government unwilling to grant it.
This project does not merely seek to trace intellectual and political influences. Rather it treats fasting protests as cultural phenomena. It reads how (and what) hunger communicates. It considers the “articulation” of hunger in the dual senses of that term — and I’m borrowing from Ann Rigney here — that is, both as a narrative expression and as the series of meanings brought in tow by that expression. Just like articulated train cars, hunger pulls a train of different meanings. To trace the origins of the hunger strike has been to discover both distinct cultural histories and a personal message of hunger.
Citations:
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987), trans Brian Massumi (U of Minnesota P), p. 2.
[2] Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory Circulation, Articulation, Scales (Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), p.15.
