The path to anorexia
Sisi’s marriage to the Emperor of Austria meant that she was torn abruptly, and unprepared for what was to come, from the security of her surroundings as a very young girl. She was totally lacking in experience of any kind, but for all that she was honest, spontaneous, idealistic and , above all, very shy. Within a few short months she was supposed to become a wife, a mother and the first lady of the Empire at the Imperial Court in Vienna.
Their engagement was announced when she was still in the middle of puberty. The times were such that it is safe to assume she was sent into marriage ignorant of the facts of life. It is unlikely that Franz Joseph, who was already sexually experienced, took this into consideration at all. In any case, their marriage was first consummated in the first night, a source of gossip throughout the palace. Archduchess Sophie made the newly-weds report on their private lives over breakfast, which they had together, also pressing Sisi ‘not to spare herself’ in the bedroom. After all there had to be an heir to the throne as soon as possible.
Sophie also put pressure on the young woman to show herself in public as often as possible during her pregnancy which was , for the times, a most embarrassing thing to do.
The children, and with them a major source of happiness and satisfaction, were taken away from Sisi as soon as they were born. The struggle over their charge was only ended by the death of the little Sophie. Elisabeth tried to gain emotional distance from her second daughter, Gisela ( as she later did to her son Rudolf, too ) to avoid even more suffering. She suddenly admitted defeat in the tug-o-war over the children’s education. The result of all this was that she often felt a yearning for death even when she was still very young.
Added to this was that she was not able to cope with all the intriguing, the gossip, the malicious criticism, the rigorous court ceremony and the perpetual scrutiny. She felt unable to meet the expectations made of her, especially as nobody really helped her to deal with her new station in life.
The worst thing for the despairing young woman was, without doubt, that the man she loved and admired so deeply had no time for her, nor was he really interested, he did not even realise what she was going trough. When she got married she believed in true love, and now she was forced to accept that her mother-in-law was the most influential woman in her husband’s life and that politics and bureaucracy had always been more important to him than she had.
Sisi went about preserving her youthfulness with an obsession. The results were remarkable: at 172cm tall, she never weighter more than 50kilos and had a waist of 50 to 52cm. A statue in the Hofburg Imperial Palace was made using her actual measurements.
Symptoms of Anorexia
Elisabeth’s exaggerated concern with her appearance, her extremely athletic pastimes and her starvation diets were long seen as a sign of her vanity and a lack of fulfilment. Only since the medical profession has begun to take psychosomatic conditions, a close link between the body and one’s state-of-mind, seriously has this view broadened. So today we know that there is an illness called Anorexia Nervosa and that this is caused, like other eating disorders with it, by deep psychological pain. Both the causes are to be found in the experiences she made in the early years of marriage.
Among the symptoms of anorexia are problems with one’s own female identity, a refusal to eat, exceptional physical restlessness and an obsession with movement as well as a cult-like fixation on one’s own appearance. Elisabeth clearly suffered from all of these symptoms.
Any development of a positive attitude to her own female sexuality was obliviously stifled from the outset by a range of different experiences. She had had negative experiences with everything connected to giving birth and small children.
Her rejection of anything relating to female sexuality reached its peak for Elisabeth later in a general repulsion towards motherhood and little babies, even if these were her own daughters and grandchildren.
She tried to combat her physical restlessness, which left her unable to even sit still for long enough to read of learn anything, with excessive sport. She was one of the best horsewoman of her time, an enthusiastic gymnast, swam, could fence and went for long and arduous hikes regardless of the weather conditions.
She not only stressed her extremely slender figure, the results of not eating and so much sport, with tightly bound corsets but also by having herself literally stitched into her clothes. She cared for her floor-length hair in a exhaustive and time-consuming procedure in which she was prepared to sit for hours at a time to have it arranged in what were veritable artworks. She was also given to bathing in donkey’s milk and has whole range of beauty preparations mixed specially for her by the court apothecary.
Sisi’s dressing room at the Hofburg Imperial Palace, which is equipped with gymnastic equipment. She kept fit by exercising here every day. Elisabeth took her meagre meals in a drawing room at the Hofburg. These often consisted of no more than juice pressed from fresh meat, orange juice or a glass of milk.
Elisabeth weighed herself three times a day and kept a tally of her weight in a special book. She liked to emphasise her narrow waist with flattering belts. Sisi was dressed and had her hair done in her dressing room, a process which took several hours every day. She used this time to learn Hungarian and later, to study Greek.
The Empress had long but nevertheless delicate hands and feet. Her shoes were 25cm long ( equivalent to about a continental size 40 ) She also had long, elegant hands.
Her wish for a bathtub caused a scandal at the time but she ignored it. She started each day between 5 and 6 in the morning with a cold bath followed by a massage.
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