42 pages • 1 hour read
Clare B. Dunkle, Elena DunkleElena Vanishing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaIndex of Terms
Food
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating (anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa), self-harm, and pregnancy loss.
Food is the central motif in Elena Vanishing and the tangible mechanism through which Elena’s trauma and shattered self-image manifest. Elena’s self-hatred expresses itself in the forms of fear and anger, which express themselves in the form of restricted eating. Elena explains how losing weight feels like a cleansing process to her: “Even at my lowest weight, I didn’t like my body. I wanted it slimmer, smaller, finer, until it erased itself completely. I wanted my body to melt away like mud sliding off a sheet of glass, until the clarity of my soul could shine through” (193). By shedding weight, she hopes she can also shed the memories and trauma of her past. Food is therefore a constant thought in Elena’s mind, right alongside thoughts of her appearance and weight. She refrains from eating as much as possible, and when she does eat, she often purges afterward. Elena’s struggle with food began in her early adolescence and, she suspects, will continue throughout her life. While she is now healthy, she still battles with a voice in her mind telling her that she shouldn’t eat.
Tattoos
Tattoos represent various aspects of Elena’s personality and life experiences. Elena starts getting tattoos when she decides that she wants a reminder of her experience with anorexia somewhere on her body where she can’t always see it. Elena chooses to get a mermaid tattoo on her back, and she looks at it in the mirror only when she wants to confront her anorexia: “But the tattooed face staring at me right now isn’t a mermaid. It’s anorexia nervosa. It’s the face that I can never touch” (130). Elena knows that she will be in recovery for the rest of her life and that The Physical and Psychological Experiences of Living with an Eating Disorder have largely shaped the person she has become.
Other tattoos are no less symbolic. Elena also gets a tattoo of Rupert Brooke on her arm because she is deeply moved by his poetry and how he died in exactly the manner he wrote about dying. Elena gets a tattoo with her sister Valerie and Valerie’s husband to symbolize their bond. She also gets a tattoo on her back of a skull with wings to symbolize the breaking down of walls in her life as she starts to recover and accept love from people around her. Elena’s tattoos are her way of remembering who she is and where she came from, serving as reminders of the truth of her reality.
Doors
The imagery of doors is a motif that supports the physical and psychological experiences of living with an eating disorder. For Elena, doors represent blockades in her life and the feeling of being trapped within her eating disorder. They also represent access points into areas of Elena’s life and past that are painful to her and that she does not wish to acknowledge for many years. For instance, Elena’s memories of her time spent in the hospital are characterized by a broader sense of confinement: Elena is caught in a cyclical disease that feeds upon itself, and each time she returns to the hospital, it could be her last.
Elena also mentions the door to her sister Valerie’s room, which acts as a reminder of the abandonment Elena experienced when Valerie left the family home and distanced herself from the family: “Images of her hang in my mind, framed by the strong wooden doorposts like pictures in an art gallery” (102). Elena relied on her sister, and losing her, even for a few years, was a detriment to her well-being. Doors begin to open up in Elena’s life only when her attitude toward her disorder changes and she becomes willing to accept that anorexia is not “a lifestyle. It’s suicide” (169).
