Wintergirls: A Mythological Fairytale
Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls is packed with figurative language that expresses
Lia’s struggle with anorexia. In an essay in the Alan Review, Linda High states that, “Lia’s
descent into the darkness of anorexia resembles the archetype of a young woman…who becomes
spell-bound or enchanted. Lia reflects a familiarity that’s found in both a mythological and fairytale version of this archetype” (65). The novel begins with two epigrams: one from the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter, and the other from The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods. Anderson utilizes
allusions to these two stories to illustrate Lia’s internal conflict.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter
(goddess of agriculture). Persephone picks flowers and plays with nature. “[Persephone] was
filled with a sense of wonder, and she reached out with both hands to take hold of the pretty
plaything. And the earth, full of roads leading every which way, opened up under her” (lines 1516). Then Hades kidnapped her, and “she cried with a piercing voice…But not one of the
immortal ones, or of human mortals, heard her” (lines 20-22). After searching the world,
Demeter rescues her daughter, but Hades tricks Persephone into eating a pomegranate. Zeus
declares that because Persephone has tasted the food of the Underworld, she is bound to Hades
for a third of every year. During these months, Demeter does not allow anything to grow, in
recognition for her mourning over the loss of her daughter. Thus, as the Greeks believed, winter
was created. The quotes above make up the epigram at the beginning of Wintergirls; these
particular lines emphasize Persephone’s loss of innocence, which is reflected in Lia’s life
through her eating disorder. The three images that Anderson uses as allusions to this myth are the
pomegranate, ghosts, and winter.
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Although Persephone was kidnapped against her will, it was the act of eating the
pomegranate that truly trapped her. Likewise, the problems that led to Lia’s eating disorder were
out of her control, but her actions keep her imprisoned. One of the most crucial scenes in the
novel is when Lia loses the control she’s so strictly maintained, and binges on food. She is
volunteering at a bake sale when she says, “I take the cupcake guaranteed to taste the worst:
pomegranate…I can’t feel these hands, or stop them…until all the red-seeded cupcakes are
gone” (203). Just as the pomegranate serves as a symbol of temptation and entrapment in the
Homeric Hymn, the pomegranate cupcakes adapt that same meaning in Wintergirls.
Not only is the fruit itself symbolic, but the fact that Lia feels that she can’t stop is similar
to Persephone, who was “compelled” by Hades to eat the seeds (line 413). This scene is crucial
because Lia feels the need to regain control, and she does so by taking “emergency laxatives”
and starving herself even more. The act of binging on pomegranate cupcakes traps her in this
self-made prison between the living and the dead.
The place of Persephone’s entrapment—the Underworld—is reflected in the ambiance of
Wintergirls. Lia sees ghosts “waiting in the shadows” at school, wrapping themselves around her
and putting her to sleep (18). The further she goes down her anorexic road, the darker the
metaphors become.
Throughout the novel, Lia is pursued by the ghost of her friend Cassie. The first time she
sees her dead friend is at her wake, when Cassie sits up and gets out of her coffin. After that, Lia
tells her therapist that Cassie “watched me at night…she crawled in my head, haunted every step,
made it snow in the drugstore” (247). Cassie’s ghost represents every fear and regret the Lia has;
she speaks Lia’s thoughts out loud.
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A central quote from the book is when Cassie says, ''You're not dead, but you're not alive,
either. You're a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You're a ghost with a beating
heart. Soon you'll cross the border and be with me” (195). Although others call Lia a “dead girl
walking” from the beginning of the book, Lia doesn’t refer to herself as a ghost until after she
eats the pomegranate cupcakes. She says, “maybe I am one of the undead” and “stares into the
ghost-girl on the other side [of the mirror]” (220, 223). She slips further into the Underworld
with each progression of her disorder. After a self-induced hospital stay, she says “a thousand
fingers are reaching up through my mattress, poking through my skin to scratch my bones”
(238). It is as if a legion of ghosts has joined Cassie in luring Lia into the Underworld.
The ghostly images throughout the novel are closely tied with winter. In the myth,
Persephone’s entrapment is the cause of Demeter’s creation of winter. Likewise, the deeper Lia
digs herself into her personal Underworld, the harsher and colder the winter becomes. The story
begins in November, and Lia frequently mentions snow, ice, and her own cold. This is
emphasized by the fact that she has hardly any fat to keep her warm, so she is constantly
shivering and seeking extra clothing and blankets.
Anderson refers to the weather during particularly important scenes to set the mood: it’s
first mentioned at school, where Lia is isolated, and in the nurse’s office when Lia is made ill
from starvation. Lia notes the cold when she first goes to the hotel where Cassie died, when she
goes to a school counseling session to mourn Cassie, Cassie’s wake, and funeral. She even uses
winter as an excuse to hide her depleting body under layers of clothes. The most important
memory that Lia has is of her and Cassie at a ski resort on New Years. Instead of making
resolutions, they cut their palms and swear an oath to be the skinniest girls in school.
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The other epigram at the beginning of Wintergirls comes from The Sleeping Beauty in the
Woods. It is a fairytale about a princess—named Briar Rose in the Grimm version—put under a
spell to sleep for 100 years until she is awakened by a prince. The princess is frozen in her
perfect beauty, the castle is put to sleep, and a great forest springs up around the castle to guard
her. “The King gave orders that they should let her sleep quietly till the time came for her to
awake” (Perrault). Anderson selected this quote as her epigram to emphasize the stasis that Lia is
trapped in. The images that allude to this story in Wintergirls are needles, sleep, and roses.
Just as Persephone ate the pomegranate to trap herself in the Underworld, Briar Rose
trapped herself in 100 years’ slumber by pricking her finger on the spinning wheel. The modernday equivalent of a spinning wheel that Anderson uses is knitting needles. Lia mentions at the
beginning that her knitting project is the only thing that she unpacked when she moved in with
her dad. Throughout the novel she mentions knitting a “scarf/shawl/blanket” because she doesn’t
really know what she’s making. This image is most explicitly mentioned when Lia is closest to
death: “I pick up my knitting needles…I could stab myself in a vein…Hypothermia and blood
loss is like going to sleep, like pricking my finger on a thorn or a spindle” (265). Lia seems to
view death itself as a type of hibernation; she says, “I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I
don’t want to die” (202). The state of being a “wintergirl” discussed earlier in the context of the
Underworld is also applicable to the hibernation of Briar Rose. The deep sleep of the princess is
also a place between the worlds of the living and the dead. In a review of the book on Teenreads,
Sarah Wood says, “Lia has put herself in a state of hibernation; she is refusing not just food, but
the growth it will enact on her body… [Cassie] offers perfection in the form of stasis.” This
stasis is reflected in Lia’s unchanging thought patterns, especially those reflected in her therapy
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sessions. Although her body continues to diminish, her spirit remains frozen. She separates
herself from her family, and has no friends to speak of.
In the fairytale, “there grew up all round the park so vast a quantity of trees big and small,
with interlacing brambles and thorns, that neither man nor beast could penetrate them” (Perrault).
Isolation comes with barriers; Briar Rose is trapped in a castle surrounded by a forest, or roses in
other versions. The thorns of the forest are referred to throughout the novel, and refer to Lia’s
defense mechanisms to keep people from realizing how serious her problems are. They are also
associated with her ghostly hallucinations: “Thorn-covered vines creep across the floor,
crackling like a bonfire. Black roses bloom in the moonlight, born dead and brittle…Cassie steps
out of the shadows, briars twining up her legs…” (43). Just as Persephone was surrounded by
death in the Underworld, Briar Rose is surrounded by thorns. Lia sees both in her hallucinations,
and they symbolize her entrapment.
Another way the roses are used in Wintergirls is as a physical setting for one of Lia’s
most important memories. The Parrish rose garden is where Lia first saw Cassie puke, and where
the spark of her own eating disorder began. When Lia sees it after Cassie’s death, she says it “has
spread out along both sides of the house and taken over the front yard. The bushes are pruned
down to thorny spikes for winter…dreams of fat blossoms pulled deep into the roots” (146). In
the same way, Lia has pruned her own life of any significance, thorns out to keep others away,
and all dreams of a future buried underground.
During one of Lia’s hospital stays, she says, “I lie down in a glass-coffin dream where
rosebushes climb the walls to weave me a thorny fortress” (227). Although Lia is trapped in the
hibernation-like state throughout the novel, her physical sleep does not come until the end of the
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book. Her overdose on sleeping medications is the first step of this, but her true rest comes when
she falls into a ten-day coma in the hospital.
After Lia is brought back to life in the spring, she is taken to New Seasons—the
appropriately-named care facility for girls with eating disorders. As Wood states, “stories about
sleep or the underworld…are not just about descent. They are also about the return. Hades has no
hold on the living. As long as Persephone lives, she returns. Sleeping Princesses wake.” Lia’s
long sleep has ended along with the winter, and she has been brought out of the Underworld and
into the land of the living.
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Bibliography
Anderson, Laurie Halse. Wintergirls. New York, New York: Penguin Group, 2009. Print.
Feinberg, Barbara. "Skin and Bone." The New York Times Book Review 10 May 2009: 19(L).
Literature Resource Center. Web. 21 Oct. 2013.
"Homeric Hymn to Demeter." Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Trans. Gregory Nagy. University of
Houtson, n.d. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.
High, Linda O. "Cracks of Light in the Darkness: Images of Hope in the Work of Laurie Halse
Anderson and an Interview with the Author " The Alan Review 38.1 (2010): VirginaTech
Digital Library and Archives. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
Perrault, Charles. "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood." Trans. A.E. Johnson. Perrault's Fairy
Tales. New York: Dover Publications, 1969. 3-21. The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.
University of Pittsburg, 15 Sept. 2003. Web. 6 Nov. 2013.
Wood, Sarah A. "Wintergirls." Teenreads. The Book Report Network, 23 Feb. 2010. Web. 22
Oct. 2013.
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