10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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C u l i n a ry A est h e t ic s a n d P r ac t ic es i n Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry A m e r ic a n L i t e r at u r e
Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters The nineteenth century invented major figures: gifted, productive, and influential writers and artists in English, European, and American public life who captured and expressed what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age.” Their achievements summarize, reflect, and shape the cultural traditions they inherited and influence the quality of life that followed. Before radio, film, and journalism deflected the energies of authors and audiences alike, literary forms such as popular verse, song lyrics, biographies, memoirs, letters, novels, reviews, essays, children’s books, and drama generated a golden age of letters incomparable in Western history. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters presents a series of original biographical, critical, and scholarly studies of major figures evoking their energies, achievements, and their impact on the character of this age. Projects to be included range from works on Blake to Hardy, Erasmus Darwin to Charles Darwin, Wordsworth to Yeats, Coleridge and J. S. Mill, Joanna Baillie, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats to Dickens, Tennyson, George Eliot, Browning, Hopkins, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and their contemporaries. The series editor is Marilyn Gaull, PhD from Indiana University. She has served on the faculty at Temple University, New York University, and is now Research Professor at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. She brings to the series decades of experience as editor of books on nineteenth century literature and culture. She is the founder and editor of The Wordsworth Circle, author of English Romanticism: The Human Context, publishes editions, essays, and reviews in numerous journals and lectures internationally on British Romanticism, folklore, and narrative theory.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Shelley’s German Afterlives, by Susanne Schmid Romantic Literature, Race, and Colonial Encounter, by Peter J. Kitson Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, by Jeffrey W. Barbeau Byron: Heritage and Legacy, edited by Cheryl A. Wilson The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, by Matthew Schneider British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, by Mark Schoenfield Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, by Clare Broome Saunders British Victorian Women’s Periodicals, by Kathryn Ledbetter Romantic Diasporas, by Toby R. Benis Romantic Literary Families, by Scott Krawczyk Victorian Christmas in Print, by Tara Moore Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
FORTHCOMING TITLES: Poetics en passant, by Anne Jamison Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print, by Alberto Gabriele Romanticism and the Object, Edited by Larry H. Peer From Song to Print, by Terence Hoagwood Populism, Gender, and Sympathy in the Romantic Novel, by James P. Carson Victorian Medicine and Social Reform, by Louise Penner Byron and the Rhetoric of Italian Nationalism, by Arnold A. Schmidt Gothic Romanticism, by Tom Duggett Regions of Sara Coleridge’s Thought, by Peter Swaab Royal Romances, by Kristin Samuelian The Poetry of Mary Robinson, by Daniel Robinson
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Series Editor: Marilyn Gaull
Edited by
Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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C u l i n a ry A est h e t ic s a n d P r ac t ic e s i n Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry A m e r ic a n L i t e r at u r e
CULINARY AESTHETICS AND PRACTICES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Copyright © Monika Elbert and Marie Drews, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61628–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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All rights reserved.
whose culinary talents nourished us and helped us thrive
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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To our mothers and grandmothers,
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Introduction Monika Elbert and Marie Drews
Part I
1
Culinary Etiquette and Capitalist Appetites: Consumption and Economies of Food
1 Suburban Men at the Table: Culinary Aesthetics in the Mid-Century Country Book Maura D’Amore
21
2 Conspicuous Consumption: Howells, James, and the Gilded Age Restaurant Mark McWilliams
35
3 “Bonbons in Abundance”: The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin’s Fiction Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti
53
Part II
Confrontations and Negotiations: Power Dynamics at the American Table
4 Whale as a Dish: Culinary Rhetoric and the Discourse of Power in Moby-Dick Robert T. Tally Jr.
73
5 Catharine Beecher, Harriet E. Wilson, and Domestic Discomfort at the Northern Table Marie Drews
89
6 “True and Faithful in Everything”: Recipes for Servant and Class Reform in Catherine Owen’s Cookbook Novels Kim Cohen
107
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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C on t e n t s
Contents
Part III
Palatable Virtues: Models of Citizenship and the National Cuisine
7 Doughnuts and Gingerbread, Apples and Pears: Boyhood Food Economies in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals for Children Lorinda B. Cohoon
125
8 The Edible Book: White Female Pleasure and Novel Reading Cree LeFavour
139
9 The Perfect Dinner: Hawthorne’s Ruminations on Old and New England Monika Elbert
153
Part IV
Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone: The Paradox of Nourishment
10 Hunger, Panic, Refusal: The Gift of Food in Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World Hildegard Hoeller
173
11 Strawberries and Salt: Culinary Hazards and Moral Education in Little Women Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier
189
12 “This Foreshadowed Food”: Representations of Food and Hunger in Emily Dickinson’s American Gothic Elizabeth Andrews
205
13 Consumption and Cannibalism in the Altrurian Romances of William Dean Howells Lance Rubin
221
Works Cited
237
Contributors
257
Index
261
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viii
Monika Elber t and Marie Dre ws
. . . the American table, taken as a whole, is inferior to that of England or France. It presents a fine abundance of material, carelessly and poorly treated. The management of food is nowhere in the world, perhaps, more slovenly and wasteful. Everything betokens that want of care that waits on abundance; there are great capabilities and poor execution. —Harriet Beecher Stowe, House and Home Papers, 1865 (229)
T
he burgeoning American republic of the nineteenth century saw many aesthetic movements aimed at distinguishing U.S. culture from that of its English and Continental cultural forebears. While Ralph Waldo Emerson’s declaration of literary and philosophical independence from Europe was most emphatically announced in his “The American Scholar” (1837), American authors were also proclaiming a culinary declaration of independence, articulating national ideologies of consumption unique to the nation’s plenitude. As novelists, poets, essayists, letter correspondents, diarists, and domestic manual writers considered the manner in which Americans might best cultivate their harvest, the idea of taste developed in relation to a vast set of palates, and as observed by recent critics of food culture, transferred aesthetic deliberation from the sublime (of art and artfulness) to the more commonplace (of cooking and eating).1 These homegrown American writers’ various social and sensory perceptions of how food was served and savored—namely, their estimations of culinary aesthetics—reflected the multifaceted and idiosyncratic practices of American cookery. But their culinary manifestos, promoting the idea of national culinary superiority, could boost confidence in an emerging American culture. During the nineteenth century, abundance and plenty were key words that defined American foodways, for good or for ill.2 One of the most exuberant cataloguings of foodstuffs and crops comes from,
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I n t roduc t ion
2
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Interlink’d, food-yielding lands! Land of coal and iron! land of gold! land of cotton, sugar, rice! Land of wheat, beef, pork! land of wool and hemp! land of the apple and the grape! (Leaves of Grass l.194–200)
Whitman saw in American produce a promise for the future, and in his inimitable style of inventorying ad infinitum, he illustrated overabundance, even as he celebrated variety and surplus. The contrast between Whitman, who saw no shortcomings of America’s bounty, and Stowe, who upon her return to the United States from a Continental tour saw clearly the country’s abundance mismanaged, its “capabilities” marred by “poor execution,” illuminates the fluctuations of culinary conversation, particularly the deliberation over how Americans across social classes might celebrate their bounty, either cautiously or with abandon, in order to achieve gustatory pleasure rather than gastronomic peril. In the vein of Whitman and Stowe, other nineteenth-century American writers’ exchanges and ruminations on food and eating reflected interest in the relationship between physiological experiences of nourishment and satiation and the social valuations of preparation, service, and dining. From the “food-yielding lands” to “the American table,” literary investigations of culinary practices—as indulgent or as moderate as they may be—represent a valuable spectrum of aesthetic expression indicative of a multifaceted national identity.
Introspective American Culinary Critics Several writers within the American literary tradition contributed to the discussions of eating habits appropriate for the developing nation. Writers of domestic fiction (who also, not coincidentally, penned cookbooks) were aware of the choices afforded by the varieties of food grown, harvested, and prepared in the United States. The vast array of eatables was at once exhilarating and stupefying, yet bounty, as Stowe remarked, did not necessarily give way to beneficial culinary practices. Women writers preached domestic economy, simplicity, and frugality as a way to counter the culture of excess—and, in doing so, declared their independence from what they considered to be the overrefined European cuisine. Lydia Maria Child, one of the first American cookbook writers, advocates a modest diet based upon
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not surprisingly, Walt Whitman, who celebrates all that is American on a grand scale. In his poem “Starting from Paumanok,” he extols the virtues—and provisions—of the American landscape.
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indigenous ingredients. In her best-selling The American Frugal Housewife (1829), “Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy,” she immediately differentiates her method from a British cookbook with a similar title: “It has become necessary to change the title of this work to the ‘American Frugal Housewife,’ because there is an English work of the same name, not adapted to the wants of this country” (frontispiece, emphasis Child’s). With a defiant flourish of her pen, she made a calculated effort to situate her American cookbook in opposition to the British cookbook “of the same name” and to instill pride in American housewives. Child’s instructions for thrifty living influenced Catharine Beecher, another diva of the advice manual genre, whose Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (1841) further articulated American “wants,” both in the context of kitchen preparation and dining room presentation. Beyond the image of a table of plenty that represented the crudeness of American excess and anticipated the possibility of want, alternate contemplations of nourishment became evident in conversations about national health and well-being. Catharine Beecher was, like her more illustrious sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, concerned about the dangers of the unhealthy, unmonitored American diet, and its insidious effect on not only the individual body but also on the social core of the American family. She believed that most “medical men” would not recommend the predominantly vegetable diet she promoted; yet, they would, in fact, agree “that, in America, far too large a portion of the diet consists of animal food” (Treatise 77). Beecher chides such overindulgence and recommends a more wholesome diet: “As a nation, the Americans are proverbial for the gross and luxurious diet with which they load their tables; and there can be no doubt that the general health of the nation would be increased, by a change in our customs . . .” (77). She advises partaking of meat only once a day to reduce the many incidences of “fevers, eruptions, headaches and the many ailments that come from too gross a mode of diet” (77). Beecher’s contemporary, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the long-running Godey’s Lady’s Book, probably would have agreed with Beecher’s pronouncements on food and health. Hale’s own cookbook, The Good Housekeeper (1841), warns of the “great danger of excess in all indulgence of the appetites” (22) and decries the overuse of “animal food,” especially among young children and delicate constitutions.3 Extending her aunts’ call for self-restraint and temperance in the consumption of certain foods, Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrated that refinement of the American appetite and a reform in dining
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Introduction
Monik a El bert a nd M a r ie Dr ews
habits would shape not only the nation’s culinary habits, but also its social practices. For Gilman, what individuals ate was not only of physiological significance; it also served as a signifier of social expression and comportment that could very well damage the American national exterior. Gilman moves away from the sentimentality of the era to foster a more scientific, less emotional way of viewing the feeding process: “Less devotion and more knowledge, less affection, and a higher grade of skill are needed in this great business of feeding the world. We cater to the appetite continuously” (Man-Made World 66). She insists that women be more intelligent and detached in responding to their husbands’ neediness, considering their overall health rather than simply reproducing the “Mother’s cooking” their husbands desire (67). “We know what John likes,” Gilman writes, “but we do not know in the least what the various chemicals we daily present to him do to his unhappy inside” (67). Gilman anticipates a time when women would become more informed and selective consumers and embrace “the art and science of cooking” and its associated “knowledge of nutritive value and of the laws of physiology and hygiene” (Women and Economics 230). While Gilman laments that with all “our power and skill in the production and preparation of food, we [Americans] remain ‘the sickest beast alive’ in the matter of eating” (226), she argues that cooking, when considered “[a]s a science . . . verges on preventive medicine” (230). She blames many of the ills of society on “our morbid tastes and appetites” (226), which develop as a result of “personal appetite and caprice” (250), and finds fault with “the limitless unhealthy folly of high living” that emanates from overdeveloped appetites and “the rambling excess called ‘fine cookery’ ” (232). Like modern food theorists, Gilman equates civilization with good taste in food, which affords variety, novelty, and simplicity: “As we learn to appreciate a wider and higher range of cooking, we shall also learn to care for simplicity in this art” (251). The attention writers paid to the ways in which food was a source of bodily and, often times, social sustenance should not be overshadowed by the possibilities of culinary practice as an art form that did allow those within the kitchen to participate in and share an aesthetic experience of their own. For those serving in food preparation roles, this offered a possible means of exerting social and communal power, even for those who were denied such power otherwise. In her dictated cookbook What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking (1881), Abby Fisher, an African-American caterer and former slave known for her Southern food specialties, published a compendium of recipes, namely, “a complete instructor, so that a child can understand
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it and learn the art of cooking” (3; emphasis added). While Fisher expressed concern in her preface that “without the advantages of education,” namely, her inability to read or write, she was skeptical of her propensity to “present a work that would give perfect satisfaction,” she mentions no concern of the value of her “experience of upwards of thirty-five years” nor the merit of her cookery, which had been lauded by her “lady friends and patrons” and awarded medals at the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Fair (3). As Fisher shared her “art of cooking” in what has been recognized as the first cookbook to be published by an African American, she demonstrated her access to forms of expression, aesthetic practice, and social power denied to her in her illiteracy.4 American writers of domestic literatures—often women whose primary work took place in the home—were one of several groups that took American cookery and national appetites to task. Prominent male writers on the American scene ultimately promoted a simple, healthy diet to the reading public, though, in their personal lives, they veered between a hedonistic celebration of food and an equally ascetic attitude toward nourishment. Already in the eighteenth century, the pragmatic Benjamin Franklin, under the guise of Poor Richard, advocated moderation and frugality, but tellingly asserted, “Tim moderate fare and abstinence much prizes, / In publick [sic], but in private gormandizes [sic]” (Poor Richard’s Almanack, 1734, 458). Franklin, like Beecher after him, promoted eating “for Necessity, not Pleasure” (485), and anticipating Transcendentalist asceticism, encouraged fasting as a means “to be well again” (486) and endorsed vegetarian living. Yet, while he advocated an apple a day for one’s health, in his own life, his complex appetites posed a study in contradictions, particularly as he became a true gourmand and epicure (of food and of women) in France (Brands 567). But the reasonable Franklin was not the only American literary man of stature who wrestled with his appetite—and worried about the belly of the nation. The nineteenth-century Romantic Henry David Thoreau, who veered more toward the spiritual than the physical, had to conquer his hunger pangs. More so than Franklin, however, Thoreau saw closely monitored consumption as befitting an enlightened, even transcendent consciousness and higher mental wellness. Thoreau, tormented by his “savage” urge, in the “Higher Laws” chapter of Walden (1854), to sometimes “devour a woodchuck raw” (490), preached a Transcendentalist diet of moderation, akin to Child’s invectives on domestic economy, which, at the highest level, excluded animal food and fish (perceived as “unclean” [493])
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Introduction
Monik a El bert a nd M a r ie Dr ews
and prohibited the use of stimulating beverages, such as coffee, tea, or alcohol. Like fellow Transcendentalist thinker Emerson, in “The Poet,” Thoreau believed that “every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind” (493–94). Thoreau is repelled by a too strong appetite and at times feels thrilled to think he could be inspired by the palate—“that some berries which I have eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius” (496). This abstemious attitude and predilection for a vegetable diet was shared by many in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. In House and Home Papers, Stowe preached the doctrine of vegetarianism: Verily, the thought that has often impressed itself on my mind that the vegetarian doctrine preached in America left a man quite as much as he had capacity to eat or enjoy, and that in the midst of such tantalizing abundance, he really lost the apology which elsewhere bears him out in preying upon his less gifted and accomplished animal neighbors. (229)
Certainly, Stowe and Thoreau were not the first or last to preach the benefits of this diet. The eccentric Sylvester Graham (founder of the Graham cracker) and his followers, the Grahamites, earlier in the nineteenth century, and John Harvey Kellogg, who promoted grains and cereals as part of an austere diet, later in the nineteenth century, would have been in agreement with the vegetarian diet.5 Thoreau also warns about the national dangers inherent in excessive eating (a sign of capitalism gone wrong), as he compares the gluttonous man to a gluttonous nation: “The gross feeder is a man in the larva state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them” (494). Sounding almost like Franklin’s Poor Richard, Thoreau suggests that it was “the true savor of his food” that might prevent man’s gluttony (496). Thoreau’s comparisons were not unique. Editorials about the progress of mankind through his eating habits abound in mid-nineteenth-century periodical essays. Carl Benson in his Knickerbocker essay “Table Aesthetics” (1848) asserts, “It is notorious that the most barbarous nations, those among whom tableaesthetics, as well as other arts, have made the least progress, are the most voracious feeders” (292). Like Thoreau, Benson claims that the unthinking person eats more and “at random.” Paraphrasing from the Frenchman Brillat-Savarin’s 1825 treatise The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, Benson endorses the
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axiom, “The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are nourished” (296). Thoreau’s critique of American eating patterns and his idealized vision of life prevent him from enjoying food on a strictly physical level: “The wonder is . . . how you and I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking” (496). His abstemious traits reinforce his rebellion against the American culture of excess, typified by oppressive capitalist practices robbing man of dignity. As Massimo Montanari asserts, “Cuisine is the very symbol of civilization and of culture,” and so ascetics often challenge culture through a rejection of food (43). In late-nineteenth-century America, this attitude of feast or famine was shared by Mark Twain, though more with tongue in cheek. In his 1899 “My Debut as a Literary Person,” he recalls his earlier 1866 article about the shipwrecked sailors of The Hornet who benefited, ironically enough, from starving: “Twenty-five days of pitiless starvation . . . followed, and . . . : ‘All the men are hearty and strong; even the ones that were down sick are well . . .’ ” (83). Twain insists that he is quite “in earnest” (though previously accused of jesting) about the merits of fasting in his own life. “A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors. I do not mean a restricted diet; I mean total abstention from food for one or two days. I speak from experience; starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years . . .” (“My Debut” 83). Twain also had his hedonistic side. Like Franklin and Child before him, he relished American locally grown produce, and like Whitman, he delighted in the American cornucopia of food. In A Tramp Abroad (1880), he waxes nostalgically about the food he has missed on his extended visit to Europe. The wish list, a true celebration of regionalist cooking, contains fifty-eight lines of what were for Twain quintessential American beverages and foods, among them, American coffee, “with real cream”; baked apples; Southern fried chicken; buckwheat cakes; maple syrup; porter-house steak; catsup; Virginia bacon; oysters; Baltimore perch; San Francisco mussels; Philadelphia Terapin soup; Black bass from the Mississippi; American roast beef; Missouri partridges; duck from Baltimore; American toast; roast turkey, “Thanksgiving style”; cranberry sauce; Boston bacon and beans; hominy; corn on the cob; squash; turnips; Southern style potatoes; ice-water; plenty of strawberries; apple pie; pumpkin pie; and “all sorts of American pastry” (224–25). Twain yearns for all that is American and unavailable in Europe, after having described European cuisine as a travesty: the menu is monotonous, and nothing is good enough—not the milk, the bread, the beefsteak, the “insipid”
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Introduction
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Culinary Crossings With his generous listing of American fare, one that he suggests might appease the hungry American traveler while abroad, Twain offered a description of what American cookery meant to him as he laid out a table of sumptuous foods he considered indicative of American national culture, and therefore taste. Yet, in such a culturally and geographically diverse landscape, the concept distinguishing a definite American food tradition is one with which food scholars and writers have grappled. In his discussion of the possibility of an American cuisine, historian and anthropologist Sidney Mintz suggests that multiple U.S. food traditions resulted from the possibilities made available through immigration, economic and occupational mobility, and access to land and resources. For Mintz, there is no definitive American cuisine, a wearisome statement for those who see cuisine as an expression of culture; rather, he suggests that “eating American” embodies a series of regional food practices that may be shared and adapted as learned sociological behaviors but not necessarily as transmuted, and therefore unifying, cultural practices (111–14). Likewise, for Donna Gabaccia, who analyzes nineteenthand early-twentieth-century American regional and ethnic foodways, “culinary nationalism would not characterize the age of American nationalism” (35). However, due to industrialization and the rise of food manufacturing, unifying elements of American cookery developed as they were reproduced and circulated within a national marketplace (55). Yet, shared and adapted ethnic and regional foods were not standardized—and to choose a singular meal, a singular custom as indicative of the American culinary tradition, was as difficult as specifying a singular literary tradition. Within a cultural climate that offered boundless choices even as it departed from well-founded European ways, the United States faced a curious condition of locating its own culinary aesthetics. American food seemed to lack the refinement of European fare and thus was in a continual state of measuring its food—in the same way that it measured its literature—against European and British repasts. For instance, American pie, the food Twain relished in a variety of forms
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lentils, the rotten fruit, nor even the butter, which he described as “the sham and tasteless butter; no salt in it, and made of goodness knows what” (221).6 He advises American tourists “to copy this bill and carry it along” so that they can reinvigorate an appetite, “in the dispiriting presence of the squalid table d’hôte” (226).
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(apple, peach pie, American mince, pumpkin, and squash) was called in American papers the greatest of “the horrors of American cuisine,” as it was viewed in the context of a Paris pie shop (“Table Talk” 217) and yet a food whose absence in certain regions of the U.S. “would be more noticed than a scarcity of the Bible even” (Warner, “Thoughts” 100). European travelers to America, in the battle for culinary superiority, would also have their revenge, with biting commentary on the American table and its lack of culinary sophistication, even as they at times recognized its possibilities. English traveler Fanny Trollope observes the lack of camaraderie at the American dinner table: “they eat with the greatest possible rapidity, and in total silence” (41). At a Cincinnati dinner party, guests find relief from dismal conversation by stuffing themselves with a hodgepodge of food, “by taking more tea, coffee, hot cake and custard, hoe cake, johny cake, waffle cake, and dodger cake, pickled peaches, and preserved cucumbers, ham, turkey, hung beef, apple sauce, and pickled oysters than ever were prepared in any other country of the known world” (50; almost an anti-list to Twain’s wish list). Charles Dickens critiques the fellow travelers’ churlish table manners he witnesses on the western steamboat The Messenger: they “suck their knives and forks meditatively, until they have decided what to take next” (158). All the passengers seem depressed and “[t]here is no conversation, no laughter, no cheerfulness, no sociality, except in spitting.” They drink massive jugs of “cold water” and the “dyspeptic ladies and gentlemen . . . eat unheard quantities of hot corn bread (almost as good for the digestion as a kneaded pin-cushion), for breakfast, and for supper” (158). And like Trollope before him, he ridicules the common fare: “fancy slices of beet-root, shreds of dried beef, complicated entanglements of yellow pickle; maize, Indian corn, apple-sauce, and pumpkin” (158)— recalling many of the selfsame foodstuffs Twain yearned for during his sojourn abroad! Dickens predicts a catastrophic future for Americans based on their national diet. Disease might be averted if the American people would have better hygiene, eat more nutritiously, and exercise more vigorously: more specifically, “the custom of hastily swallowing large quantities of animal food, three times a-day, and rushing back to sedentary pursuits after each meal, must be changed” (251). As we have seen, this is not only a British critique: Gilman also envisions a time that will counter “[t]he contented grossness of today,” with so many diseases emanating from “the persistent self-indulgence of otherwise intelligent adults” and resulting in “the fatness and leanness and feebleness, the whole train of food-made disorders . . .” (254). And
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Introduction
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Swedish tourist Fredrika Bremer felt the ramifications of Dickens’ critique. She took ill on her visit to New York (in 1850) and blamed her malady on the American diet: “The great quantity of pork and greasy food, the hot bread, the highly spiced dishes, preserves at supper, and oyster dishes” (85). While criticism of American foodways was rife, English writer Harriet Martineau seems fascinated by the abundance that America has to offer, and sounds much like Whitman in her praise: “The United States are not only vast in extent; they are inestimably rich in material wealth” (Society 130). She compiles a litany of geographical landscapes and of food: There is unlimited wealth of corn, sugar-cane and beet, hemp, flax, tobacco, and rice. There are regions of pasture land. There are varieties of grape for wine, and mulberries for silk. There is salt. There are mineral springs . . . Never was a country more gifted by nature. (131)
And Austrian ballerina Fanny Elssler was effusive in her praise of the American table, after she had imagined the worst. She was astonished by the American graciousness, the fine linen, the beautiful glasses, and was surprised by the presence of napkins, which, she had heard, were not available in America (Nickisson 51). Within the indecipherability of what was truly American and what was worth eating—for nourishment or for pleasure—one scene from an 1868 Harper’s periodical illustrated the ideal character of American foodways. After 1865, ice cream became more popular and available to a range of consumers. The cover images of our book depict two locales engraved by Thomas Hogan for Harper’s—one, a sophisticated Broadway ice cream parlor where finely dressed customers indulge in elegant cold dishes, and another, a ragged ice cream stand in the Bowery where a group of street urchins are gathered. (The latter scene might well have looked forward to the squalid cityscapes of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives [1891] ). The accompanying sketch, “Up Among the Nineties,” suggests that though a “fatal heat . . . penetrated everywhere, and all classes were affected by it,” ice cream presents itself as the panacea for all (521). The complicated culinary aesthetics of nineteenth-century America allowed for ice cream to be enjoyed across class lines, affirming the endless possibilities provided by American markets. However, the sketch ends on an ominous note as if to suggest that the classes should never mingle but enjoy their cool treats separately in their own sites of leisure: “you never see the Broadway character in the Bowery, and the Bowery waifs do not deign to lunch
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on Broadway” (521). Though this “frill” food is available to all social classes, the place in which to enjoy it is quite different.
The themes of abundance and scarcity recognizable in the lived experiences and fictional worlds of nineteenth-century American writers, as well as the quest to identify a national culinary sensibility, carry over into critical circles. While scholarly deliberation of food studies topics has thrived on the whole, within particular areas of specialization—regarding food dynamics in nineteenth-century American literature—its conversation remains on the horizon and thus conditions the arrival of this collection. Writers and critics have long been interested in depictions of food; its centricity as a social and cultural practice, engages multiple disciplines and academic communities, specifically within the humanities.7 Literary food studies encourages scholars to take interest not only in scenes of eating and dining, food production and preparation, but also in the application of culinary metaphors and the rhetoric of consumption.8 Because reading food imagery in fiction, poetry, and personal narrative often relies on the integration of anthropological, historical, and theoretical conversations, literary food studies offers an impetus for cross-disciplinary, cultural studies approaches. Much work in these food studies conversations bears directly on discussions of nineteenth-century culinary contexts. However, existing scholarship on this century seems to emphasize European foods and eating practices. Not only did the century see Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin publish The Physiology of Taste (1825) and the French chef extraordinaire Auguste Escoffier (renowned chef to Napoleon) assume his role as benefactor of a timeless culinary tradition, but the integration of colonial foods, tastes, and practices allowed for multifarious and exuberant European culinary experiences. Moreover, the lengthy and grounded European literary tradition offered a rich artistic past in which to examine the appearance of such a seemingly ordinary theme of food and eating. Historians such as Stephen Mennell and Wolfgang Schivelbusch and literary critics such as Denise Gigante, known for her prominent Taste: A Literary History (2005), have undoubtedly played an important role in developing conversations about nineteenth-century culinary habits.9 Conversely, scholarship on U.S. foodways has emphasized twentieth-century literary and social investigations and has embraced American culinary regionalism indicative of the nation’s multiethnic
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Conversations and Criticisms
Monik a El bert a nd M a r ie Dr ews
food traditions. Emphasis on gender, too, has played an important role in the development of American cultural food studies. Sherrie Inness’s multiple explorations of kitchen practices and gender roles as well as Arlene Avakian and Barbara Haber’s collection From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (2005) take into account the ways women’s identity formation is influenced by food practices. So, too, have literary investigations emphasized women’s domestic positioning as an organizing feature of their investigations, specifically in the works of Tamar Heller and Patricia Moran, Diane McGee, and Sarah Sceats. Several scholars have traced the cultural history of American culinary traditions and habits, providing a framework on which literary examinations of nineteenth-century texts can develop. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking (2004) and Trudy Eden’s The Early American Table: Food and Society in the New World (2008) provide a colonial backdrop. Susan Williams’s recent Food in the United States, 1820s –1890 (2006), as well as her earlier Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts: Dining in Victorian America (1985), have provided a valuable historical groundwork that underlies investigations of nineteenth-century foodways. Along with Kathryn Grover’s Dining in America 1850–1900 (1987), Harvey Levenstein, Waverly Root and Richard de Rochmont, Karen L. Hess and John Hess, Barbara Haber, and Laura Shapiro have also sought to understand American cultural history through exploring the social and cultural implications of food history. Culinary Aesthetics focuses on nineteenth-century literary readings of American foodways and culinary interactions as they are presented in novels, short fiction, poetry, advice manuals, letters and journal writings. The collection interrogates the variety of ways in which writers consider culinary aesthetics and their associated practices within the context of a developing national identity. The works examined vary in their intended readerships, and while gender roles and differences inherently factor into the ways that authors conceive of their characters and plotlines, the collection explores male and female writings across regional lines and age groups manifesting the same anxieties and ambivalence about the national cuisine. Similarly, the collection offers room for discussion of canonical writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and William Dean Howells; more recently recovered authors including Susan Warner, Harriet E. Wilson, and Kate Chopin; but also lesser-known writers such as Robert Barry Coffin and Catherine Owen. Contributors maintain awareness of transatlantic responses to
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food culture yet remain focused on how the variety of discourses on food and eating pertain to the development of an American culinary (and hence national) consciousness. In this way, Culinary Aesthetics complements the most recent exploration of nineteenth-century foodways. Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan’s collection Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption 1700–1900 (2007) provides an interdisciplinary and global reading of food in literature and culture across the long nineteenth century. Their text originates, Wagner explains, from interest in British treatment of food and eating and grows in a self-consciously comparative context. Culinary Aesthetics directs its focus more explicitly on American literature in the nineteenth century proper. Unlike isolated essays on nineteenth-century food and eating published in collections such as Eating in Eden: Food in American Utopias (2006) and You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate (2008), this collection offers a pertinent forum in which a century’s discussion about food and identity—want and plenty, embarrassments and delights—might take place.
Overview of the Chapters In the first cluster of essays, “Culinary Etiquette and Capitalist Appetites: Consumption and Economies of Food,” contributors examine the influence of capitalism and class structure on culinary practice and the value with which differing social groups consider the aesthetics and artfulness of food preparation and consumption. Considering that the shifting economic climate conditioned writers’ responses to the politics of eating, contributors investigate the diets that underlie capitalist acquisitiveness and profit-making and interrogate patriarchal methods of distribution and production. In the first essay, Maura D’Amore explores the phenomenon of country books, semi-autobiographical accounts of masculine domesticity that highlighted men’s control of the domestic sphere, particularly the direction and preparation of elaborate meals. While the suburban experiences chronicled in country books demonstrated the possibilities of culinary enjoyment in the private sphere, the city, too, offered its own version of enlightened consumption. Mark McWilliams looks at Delmonico’s, the New York restaurant famous for its extravagant dinners and heady fare. Restaurant dining necessitated a transition from private eating to public consumption that, as William Dean Howells’s and Henry James’s characters exhibit, demonstrated the larger tensions of the Gilded Age. Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti investigate the
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Introduction
Monik a El bert a nd M a r ie Dr ews
sugar market as a backdrop for Chopin’s gastronomic economy and the marketplace exchange in her Creole Louisiana. Tracing the concept of sweetness in Chopin’s writing allows Dix and Piatti to question Chopin’s complicity in a celebration rather than interrogation of the Creole saccharocracy. Essays included in the second cluster, “Confrontations and Negotiations: Power Dynamics at the American Table,” also investigate the social dynamics of food rituals, nourishment, and etiquette but focus on those individuals marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, or laboring class. These essays explore the imbalance of power felt by impoverished classes and investigate nineteenth-century writers’ attempts to achieve democratic balance between the powerful and the powerless. While the dinner table is often used rhetorically as a site of diplomatic resolve, the texts explored in this section illuminate the complications of dinner table diplomacy, especially between those in positions of domestic service and those considered responsible for its supervision. In his investigation of food scenes in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Robert T. Tally Jr. explores how dining rituals and consumed foods lay symbolic ground for examining the gradations of power on board the Pequod. Moving from the whaling ship to the antebellum dining room, Marie Drews interrogates the delineation of dinner table relationships as they are articulated in Catharine Beecher’s domestic manuals and reconsidered in Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig (1859). While Drews examines fictional responses to the expectations laid out in domestic manuals, Kim Cohen considers how Catherine Owen’s cookbook novels, which encompass domestic writing and fiction, conceptualize the process of learning kitchen practices as one that requires middle-class housewives and white ethnic domestics to share conventional power relationships. In the third section, “Palatable Virtues: Models of Citizenship and the National Cuisine,” authors analyze how one becomes American, or not, through interrogating rituals of diet and deportment, prescribed by middle-class literary production. As discourses of reading and eating become inextricably connected, they are employed to educate readers on the merits of productive citizenship and material success. Thus, nineteenth-century writers, in their discussion of food, dinners, and table etiquette, are able to critique American or foreign values and assert their allegiance to one nationality over the other, thus including culinary habits as invaluable in the processes of nation-making. In her exploration of how this national culinary subtext influences young readers, Lorinda B. Cohoon argues that scenes of food in juvenile periodicals cultivate a sense of moral agency and
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social conscience among boys, particularly through associating their appetites and their finances. While Cohoon focuses on education, Cree LeFavour examines reading as a form of consumption in women’s magazines, a metaphorical relationship that teaches white female readers moderate and virtuous reading habits. Monika Elbert considers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s critique of American and British diets in his letters, notebooks, and short fiction to illustrate his ambivalent attitudes toward both nations’ cultural identities. In the final unit, “Man Does Not Live on Bread Alone: The Paradox of Nourishment,” the essayists address the implications of nonphysical sustenance in a physical world to show how food and eating function on a figurative level to articulate expressions of community, hunger, and excess. These essays illustrate the rhetorical function of culinary practice: in its exchange, its absence, and its abundance, literary incorporation of edible goods illuminates the social and political agendas of nineteenth-century American writers. In her exploration of Susan Warner’s use of food in The Wide, Wide World (1850), Hildegard Hoeller examines how gifts of food can complicate community building in an economically panic-stricken climate. Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier examines how Louisa May Alcott’s accounts of virtuous eating, both in her personal writings and in Little Women (1868–1869), reflect on her own childhood deprivation under the gastronomical education of her father, Bronson Alcott. Elizabeth Andrews explores the hunger pangs expressed by the speakers in several of Emily Dickinson’s poems, feelings of hunger that reveal a type of Gothic anorexia that obviates the need for American excess, yet anticipates a tantalizing side of food repression—namely the desire for the forbidden fruit. In the final essay, Lance Rubin looks to William Dean Howells’s mythical Altrurian traveler for his critique of the American social system as articulated through the gluttonous and wasteful eating practices of the privileged class. One might conclude with a homespun aphorism by Benjamin Franklin: “A full Belly brings forth every Evil” (Poor Richard Improved, 1755, 543). This culinary tidbit serves as a cautionary tale to Americans who have meditated on the meaning of food as the site of cultural independence and as a capitalist tool (e.g., McDonald’s) by which to impress American values upon a global market. Abundance and scarcity continue to plague the American table. As many writers in the collection have noted, there is a danger in this idea of plenty: if someone’s belly is full, then another’s might be empty. Revulsion and revolution have occurred, historically, as a result of someone’s toofull belly—as witnessed by the French Revolution. American culinary
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Introduction
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excess, together with a lack of refinement, has been critiqued by culinary tourists and by American citizens alike, and many American writers have decried the evils of a too-full plate, which they argue may lead to physical disease, intellectual sloth, and spiritual atrophy. The nineteenth-century American obsession with a healthy diet, one not tainted by refined sugar products, or by the overuse of meat, continues to be part of the national headlines on the dangers of obesity within American culture. Roland Barthes in a seminal essay titled “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” (1961) announces a dire fact: “The inhabitants of the United States consume almost twice as much sugar as the French” (20), and then proclaims that the French have a sense of national identity and history emanating from their culinary traditions. Barthes’ assessment is in keeping with the conventional nineteenthcentury attitude that somehow the French were the masters of artistic and culinary taste. American writer John Sanderson declared the natural superiority of French cuisine over Anglo-American cuisine in his 1844 article for the popular Godey’s Lady’s Book and decries the lack of culinary and artistic culture in the United States: “in fine arts generally, and eating in particular, America lags behind the civilization of Europe, a deficiency the more to be deplored that ingenious foreigners who visit us, do not fail to infer from it a low state of morals and intellect” (16). And, it may be that the French still have a monopoly over culinary aesthetics, as recent psychological studies on gastronomy point to their excellent health based on a moderate consumption of food, despite their genuine appreciation of food, in contradistinction to Americans, who obsess about diets, but whose plates are full, and whose pleasure in food recedes as their waistlines continue to grow.10 Yet, there has always been that hope—since the nineteenth-century—that the United States would make its mark in the culinary world. One recalls Stowe’s enthusiastic endorsement that “our [U.S.] resources are greater than those of any other civilized people” but the stern acknowledgment that “our results are comparatively poorer” (House and Home papers 228). In even more promising terms, the Francophile Sanderson conceded that a “silent” revolution was going on stateside: that many urban dwellers were beginning to “show taste in culinary inquiries, and a proper appreciation of the dignity of the subject; and, in some instances, a degree of the enthusiasm which always accompanies and intimates genius, and which leaves the question about capacity for the higher attainments indisputable” (16). Just so, and in similar culinary metaphors about the promise of American ingenuity, Emerson had announced in 1837, “Our day of
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Notes 1. The eighteenth-century sensibility that equated artistic taste with the culinary palate was carried over to the nineteenth century. See studies by Gigante, Korsmeyer, Morton, and Bourdieu. Denise Gigante shows how the British Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge felt that the “gustatory trope” of allying food with aesthetics went too far (Taste 13). 2. Other food historians have noted the theme of “abundance” as what differentiated American cookery from European cuisine; see Levenstein (7–8) and Williams (Food in the United States 4–10). 3. Hale does, however, concede that America’s “generous diet” was necessary to establish a nation, in which “severe . . . labors” were necessary “to subdue and obtain dominion of a wilderness world” (22). American’s expansionism could not have been achieved by “a halfstarved, suffering people” (22). 4. Biographical information references for Abby Fisher are drawn from “Biography: Fisher, Abby.” For those who were held to subservient and slave positions within the home, the ability to compromise the aesthetic value or taste of a master’s meal provided the possibilities of resisting unjust hierarchies within the home. Antislavery writers often placed black women cooks in positions that allowed them the possibility of subverting aesthetic norms for the purpose of political comment. For explorations of how this took place in nineteenth-century texts, see Mary Titus. 5. For the many fads that dominated the nineteenth-century American culinary landscape, see Walter Gratzer’s Terrors of the Table (192–206). There were others, even in nineteenth-century America, who promoted an all-beef and high-protein diet, among them Dr. James H. Salisbury (1823–1905), for whom the Salisbury steak was named (199–201). 6. Americans could be self-critical. Stowe, preferring “creamy” European butter, found American butter atrocious, an example of how Americans were inferior in the culinary department: “America must, I think, have the credit of manufacturing and putting into market more bad butter than all that is made in all the rest of the world together. The varieties of bad tastes and smells which prevail in it are quite a study” (House and Home Papers 242). 7. Carole Counihan suggests that because anthropology is “holistic by definition” its “meaning-centered interpretive approaches, evolutionary and materialist perspectives, and advocacy-oriented critiques” flourished as early as the 1930s and 1940s (1); notable anthropologists publishing on foodways include Sidney Mintz, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
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dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing, into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests” (53).
Monik a El bert a nd M a r ie Dr ews Mary Douglas. Philosophical estimations of food practices have garnered the attention of scholars such as Carolyn Korsmeyer, specifically as the meaning of food extends into discussions about how taste bridges physiological acts and contemplative associations with aesthetic quality. Historians, including Massimo Montanari, have worked across centuries and locales to engage with the dynamics of food production, consumption, and exchange. Theorists including Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu have allied food study with cultural and political analyses. 8. The inclusion of Susan Leonardi’s critical reading of The Joy of Cooking (among other fictional culinary scenes) published in the 1989 PMLA—and its hearty praise—seemed to forge a space for literature scholars to speak about food in even one of the most rigorous “academic” language journals. 9. See also Lane and Hyman. 10. See Rozin et al’s study about the “French paradox,” how the French are healthier despite their seeming lack of concern about diet: Americans worry about health and so eat with less pleasure, whereas the French enjoy their food and don’t worry about health (163). Yet the French are thriving, healthwise, and Rozin’s study suggests that “Americans may have something to learn from the French” (179). Rozin brings up a study by P. Stearns on the French “emphasis on moderation and high quality, and an American emphasis on high quantity” (179). In the battle over good taste, the French seem victorious; in the nineteenth century, the traveler Michel Chevalier already asserted, “No people has been gifted by nature with finer and more acute senses than ours” (387). See also Stowe in House and Home Papers, where she mocks the John Bulls, who would prefer their sirloins of beef to the more wholesome and diverse food of the French, who excel at preparing soups and stews: “An ox roasted whole is dear to John’s soul, . . . But his brother Jean has not ten thousand pounds a year; nothing like it; but he makes up for the slenderness of his purse by boundless fertility of invention and delicacy of practice” (253).
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C u l i na ry Et iqu e t t e a n d C a pi ta l ist A ppe t i t e s: C onsu m p t ion a n d E c onom i es of Food
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Pa rt I
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Su bu r b a n M e n at t h e Ta bl e: C u l i na ry A e st h e t ic s i n t h e M i d - C e n t u ry C ou n t ry B o ok M a u r a D ’A m o r e
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n an episode from Out of Town (1866), American humorist Robert Barry Coffin’s mid-century account of suburban domestic life outside New York City, Barry Gray (Coffin’s pseudonym and the book’s narrator) persuades his wife to have a group of his “artist friends” over for dinner. The prospect throws his wife into a state of nervous excitement as she contemplates what she should serve to the group of “ten hungry men” arriving from the city, knowing that they will not be satisfied with her traditional Saturday meal of “simple salt codfish and potatoes” (50). At the same moment that she exclaims her unwillingness to perform the task of hostess for such an occasion, an express-wagon filled with twelve hampers of food and drink arrives at their doorstep. The arrival of these provisions, ordered ahead of time by Mr. Gray, sets the stage for a banquet orchestrated by a man for his male companions. The delivery even attracts the attention of the local paper, and a journalist is sent to observe the party through a window. The published report (which Mr. Gray shares with his readers) focuses on the meal’s extravagance and wild nature, from the description of the “immense game-pie, composed of ducks, woodcocks, quails, and grouse” at the center of the table to the “jugged hare,” “boned turkey,” and “boiled ham, a round of beef, broiled spring chickens, ducks stuffed with olives, boned sardines, and other appetizing relishes”
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Chapter 1
M a u r a D ’A m o r e
that surround it (59). Both the article and Mr. Gray’s account characterize the event as a success, and the descriptions of food and drink emphasize the writer’s control over his domestic environment—his wife disappears from view as he orchestrates a bachelor feast organized around masculine aesthetic sensibilities. In suburban Fordham, Mr. Gray is able to enjoy marriage without having to relinquish the pleasures of single life, and the fruits of his table reflect the benefits of living a country life within city reach. He has room to grow mint for mint juleps, neighbors who provide fresh eggs and milk for the eggnog with strawberries and cream that he enjoys while reading, and plenty of space to store barrels of ale for impromptu celebrations. At the same time, he doesn’t have to abandon the amenities of New York City: the oyster soup, ice cream, brandy-peaches, turkey, venison, raisins, almonds, and cakes that he loves can appear at a moment’s notice. His physical location allows him to experience the best of both culinary worlds. This essay considers representations of food and scenes of eating in writings by Robert Barry Coffin as a window into suburban masculine domesticity in mid-nineteenth-century American literature. Commenting on the ways in which written representations of food reflect other developments and desires, Carolyn Korsmeyer remarks in Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (1999) that “[o]ne of the most significant roles of food is social: eating is part of the rituals, ceremonies, and practices that knit together communities” (9). Because the act of eating is by nature temporal, she continues, “the temporality of a narrative, whether written, dramatic, or cinematic, permits extended reflection upon the ways eating serves (or severs) communities” (9). In the 1850s and 1860s, a number of popular male authors published semi-autobiographical accounts of domestic life on the edges of American cities, popularizing the suburbs as cheaper, healthier, accessible alternatives to urban areas. Food plays an important role in the idealization of home in these texts, which critics now classify under the genre of the country book.1 Even though most country books from the mid-nineteenth-century depict the lives of married men, women do not figure prominently within the narratives. Instead, men are represented as the connoisseurs of the table, making decisions about the garden, the cook, the arrangement of the kitchen, guest lists at parties, acceptable drinks, and the types of food eaten. The male authors and narrators of country books used culinary aesthetics and practices to assert control over their homes and wives as well as to create a sense of community among men and between author and reader. Their accounts of the produce they grew,
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the ice cream they made, the meats they ordered, the spirits they brewed, and the meals they enjoyed invite new considerations of the relationship between men and the home in the nineteenth century. As Americans imagined and planned suburban communities, print culture registered and shaped a new architecture of domestic consumption. Through depictions of a masculine reclamation of food preparation, the country book genre positioned men as the bearers of aesthetics over simple sustenance and claimed the suburban landscape as a masculine domain devoted to sensory pleasure and selfcultivation beyond the workplace. In Food in the United States, 1820s–1890 (2006), Susan Williams states that “[b]etween 1820 and 1890, American foodways changed in part because the country itself expanded dramatically” (2). New and more reliable transportation options in the forms of railroads, steamships, roads, and canals gave Americans increased variety at the same time that it standardized expectations. That transportation also opened up new spaces for homes, areas previously designated as rural that small farmers had been forced to sell as a result of rising land costs and frequent economic depressions. Members of a rapidly expanding middle class began to search for real estate beyond the city proper in the hopes of obtaining privacy and green space while escaping steep rents and cholera fears.2 As more and more Americans relocated outside cities and commuted to work each day, conceptions of what constituted an ideal home changed. For the individuals who moved to the suburban towns surrounding New York, Boston, and Philadelphia in the 1850s and 1860s, the aesthetics and practices of consumption, especially of foodstuffs, became, in Williams’s words, “increasingly important as a measure of class distinction” (Food in the United States 7). Combining proscriptive advice with entertaining narrative and glimpses into the private lives of public individuals, country books like those written by Coffin participated in the creation of an imagined suburban environment that assumed a very real presence for readers. For scholars today, these texts provide glimpses of what readers might have envisioned as the perfect home, meal, relationship, or hobby in America’s earliest suburbs. Because they were meant to be read as reminiscences of one man’s relocation to a new type of space, they also model the possibilities and options available to middle- and uppermiddle-class Americans. In the introduction to their edited collection Eating Architecture (2004), Paulette Singley and Jamie Horowitz ask: “What can be learned by examining the intersections of the preparation of meals and the production of space?” (5). The authors of country
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books really lived in the locations they described, so the types of fruits and vegetables that they planted as well as the dinners, drinks, and desserts they consumed constitute clues to the ways in which changes in food production and land use, combined with technological innovations such as the railroad, had begun to avail former city dwellers with the amenities of the urban environment minus its hassles. Although books in this genre were not always designated as “country books” at the time in which they were written, the subject, tone, and shape of the narrative were identifiable to mid-century readers, authors, and publishers. Whether written in first or third person, the sketches that comprised a country book told a narrative of relocation to the suburbs from an urban environment. Framed as sanctioned exposés of the domestic lives of the popular writers who penned them, the incidents depicted were intended to be read as a sort of memoir. Authors talked about their real homes and neighborhoods, and conversations with their spouses, children, and friends seemed to be taken from life events. At the same time, they admitted to shaping and pruning their accounts for the sake of interest and humor. The narrators typically compared experiences of suburban life with their idealistic visions prior to relocation from the city and included detailed accounts of the architectural design of the home and grounds. Some focused on house preparation and the outdoor enjoyment almost exclusively, while others also wrote about indoor leisure activities, family time, decorations, housekeeping, and finances. Most country-book authors were well-established periodical writers who first wrote about their domestic lives in magazine and newspaper sketches. Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–67), the most famous magazinist of his day, published essays about his life in the Hudson River Valley in a running column called “Country Life Within City Reach” for his magazine The Home Journal before gathering them into the country book Out-doors at Idlewild; or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson (1855). Frederic S. Cozzens (1818–69), a wine merchant by trade, regularly published sketches in the Knickerbocker and Putnam’s in addition to founding a magazine entitled The Wine Press in 1854, which took wine-making and suburban living as its subject. His country book, The Sparrowgrass Papers; or, Living in the Country (1856), was also originally published serially. Sparrowgrass was Cozzens’s pseudonym, and the humorous account of his family’s move to “Chestnut Cottage” in Yonkers from New York City became so well known that references to the foibles of “Mr. Sparrowgrass” were not uncommon in works by other writers of the day. Donald Grant Mitchell (1822–1908), most famous for his
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best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) published under the pseudonym Ik Marvel, authored numerous country books, including My Farm of Edgewood: A Country Book (1863), Wet Days at Edgewood (1865), and Rural Studies, with Hints for Country Places (1867). His articles on out-of-town living, which focused on landscape gardening and home decoration, were frequently reprinted in newspapers and magazines throughout the 1860s. Finally, George William Curtis (1824–92), a writer who was most famous for his position as editor of the Easy Chair column for Harper’s Monthly, published an unconventional country book in 1856 called Prue and I in which he employed the conventions of the genre in an extended meditation on the role of the imagination in the lives of men like himself who worked in cities but retired to suburban areas each evening (Curtis resided in Staten Island for many years). Although all country books suggested that readers who cared about food should relocate to the suburban environment, I focus on those written by Robert Barry Coffin (1826–86) in this essay for two reasons. First, perhaps with the exception of Frederic Cozzens, he is the least well known among literary critics of the authors listed earlier. Second, the eating habits, taste preferences, and means of obtaining food and drink (what he grows, buys in the city, eats at restaurants, or has delivered to the country) described in his books offer an unusually detailed look into the ways in which social and technological developments affected the gender politics of food preparation and consumption for many Americans in the mid-nineteenth-century. Posing as Barry Gray, Coffin suggests that men are more adept than women at satisfying sensory appetites in the home space. By characterizing mealtime as an artistic event, he argues that middle-class Americans should embrace the small luxuries afforded by suburban domestic life as rewards for their labor in the city each day. Aside from what we learn about him in his own writings, there is little known biographical information on Robert Barry Coffin. Born in the Hudson River Valley in 1826, he started writing anonymously for periodicals immediately after college. After a stint as a bookkeeper for a New York importing house between 1845 and 1849, he left for health reasons and opened a bookstore with his brother in Elmira, New York, in 1852. He briefly considered a career among the Episcopal clergy but returned to the city in 1857 and began to pursue writing in earnest. In 1858, he was named assistant editor at the Home Journal, a magazine edited by N. P. Willis, to which he had contributed anonymously since 1849. At the same time, he assumed the position of art critic for the Evening Post. From 1863 to 1869 and
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from 1875 until shortly before his death in 1886, while publishing his writing in book form and continuing to write for the periodical press, he also worked as an auditor’s clerk in the New York Custom House. In his later years, he edited a monthly publication devoted to gastronomy called The Table (in 1873) and contributed culinarythemed articles to a Philadelphia magazine called The Caterer (from 1882 to 1886) (Appleton’s 626). At the height of his literary career, he was celebrated for the humorous sketches about domestic life that he wrote for various periodicals during the 1850s and 1860s and eventually published as My Married Life at Hillside (1865), Matrimonial Infelicities (1865), Out of Town: A Rural Episode (1866), Cakes and Ale at Woodbine (1868), and Castles in the Air and Other Phantasies (1871). These writings were received by readers as the poetic sketches of a man who had approached marriage with caution, only to become consumed with the ennui of home life, especially upon the discovery that he could retain elements of his former bachelor lifestyle in the country. One advertising note for Out of Town suggested that both married and single men would find humor in Gray’s account of his life story; another review praised its verisimilitude to the lived experience of readers as a breath of fresh air (Round Table 332). Like his fictional counterpart, Coffin moved to Fordham from New York City in the mid-1860s. At the time of his relocation, the area now known as the Bronx had become a popular locale for raising a family outside the city. The completion of the New York and Harlem River Railroad in 1841, along with new road construction, was transforming a rural landscape into a suburban paradise. As Lloyd Ultan and Barbara Unger explain in Bronx Accent (2000), Stations erected in the middle of nowhere attracted businesses and people, and new villages, such as Mott Haven, Tremont, and Williamsbridge, sprouted up around them seemingly overnight. These transformed The Bronx over time to a suburb, with residents commuting by railroad to their jobs in New York City. One of these new settlements was the village of Fordham. (25)
Edgar Allan Poe had relocated to Fordham from Manhattan in 1846 in the hopes of curing his wife’s tuberculosis, and after his death in 1849 the town became especially attractive to the literati. The Irish poet John Savage moved there during the Civil War and soon talked Robert Barry Coffin into moving there as well. Coffin published Out of Town: A Rural Episode in 1866, a text that opens with a discussion between Mr. Gray and his wife about
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whether they should seek “cheaper,” “healthier,” and “pleasanter” domestic accommodations (iv). After visiting “a large number of ‘suburban retreats’ ” in search of the ideal place to live (2), the narrator singles out a particular village about an hour away from business, which he describes as a “a quiet, unpretentious little place, nestled on and among the hills, with sundry picturesque houses, and an air of thrift pervading its people that was delightful to witness” (v). After they move, he designates his new home “Woodbine Cottage” after the vine that grows around the front veranda, even though he later realizes that the namesake might be honeysuckle rather than woodbine. In Out of Town and its sequel, Cakes and Ale at Woodbine, Coffin represents his alter ego settling into a new sort of domestic rhythm as he transforms into a suburban epicure. His unique location offers urban and rural amenities of the sort advertised in Woodward’s Country Homes, a popular architectural pattern book published in 1866 that encouraged readers to move “ten to fifteen miles away from the unceasing noise of the city, where the business of the day is forgotten, and fresh air, fresh milk, butter, eggs, fruit, flowers, birds, etc. are luxuries unknown in town” (38). Outside New York City, Mr. Gray can experiment with growing his own food while easily supplementing his produce with items from the urban market. In his half-acre garden, he allocates space for peas, beans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, melons, beets, lettuce, and radishes, in addition to an orchard with apple trees and grapevines. Although he eventually hires a gardener to help him maintain it, he takes pride in the fact that he can grow his produce in the country “for much less than I could purchase them in town,—besides having the advantage of getting them fresh from the garden” (14). With their chickens’ eggs, his wife makes “custards, puddings, and cakes” and he concocts “noggs and mulls” (14). He buys milk from neighboring milkmaids, and an ice-man delivers ice for the refrigerator every other day in warm weather, which in turn preserves their meats and “fancy dishes” (10). Barrels of ale are obtained in town or delivered by the brewers themselves. And all of it can be enjoyed in the company of good friends. Eventually, Mr. Gray’s passion for food and drink begin to interfere with his business obligations on Wall Street. Even though his job in the city is within an easy commute, he finds himself “continually seeking reasonable excuses for not going into town every day” (12). Initially, the outside of the house attracts his attention; he takes pride in the planning and labor involved in the kitchen garden’s cultivation. After working in the yard, he enjoys “relieving the tedium of the time
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with a book, an iced punch, a saucer of strawberries and cream, and a cigar” (13). Unlike his job as a clerk on Wall Street, domestic work seems important, especially gastronomically. The effort expended in taking care of the chickens and gathering their eggs, after all, yields the special reward of fresh eggnog with his “savage literary friend” (14). While his newfound respect for home duties suggests a novel recognition of his wife’s efforts in that arena, he has no qualms about taking the reins from her, bypassing her focus on nutrition and economy in favor of beauty, taste, and conviviality. As he grows accustomed to life in the suburbs, Mr. Gray contemplates the foundations of good food. The availability of fresh produce and dairy products increases his interest in the taste of what he consumes, and he begins to think more about ingredients. His detailed description of the process of making and presenting the eggnog that he enjoys with John Savage reflects his new awareness: he explains how he locates the “freshest-laid eggs,” brings out “the ancestral punch-bowl” and “a bottle of old Jamaica,” and “a quart of pure milk, with the cream beginning to rise on the surface” (14–15), adding sugar and nutmeg to concoct “a drink worthy of being commemorated in verse . . . while conviviality and good-fellowship ruled the hour” (15). These types of moments, in which a culinary experience creates a mood that is conducive to conversation and reflection, become central to Mr. Gray’s happiness in Fordham. He jokes to his wife that the taste of eggnog made with fresh eggs and milk is reason enough to relocate away from the city. While he laughs at the extreme nature of his comment, his life at Woodbine has given him a different understanding of the ends of domestic organization and labor. For the first time, he begins to view food as a vehicle for community and sympathy as well as of meditation and relaxation. As Mr. Gray manifests increased interest in domestic decisionmaking, his wife does not know whether she should invite or resist his intrusions into her domain. By criticizing her simple dinners and resistance to dinner parties, he calls into question her position as head of the home environment. Remarking, for instance, that although her meal preparation “provided munificently for the family proper,” she “had not laid in a sufficient store of the good things of this life to have satisfied, in a hospitable manner, the additional appetites which gathered around our mahogany,” he insinuates that their daily routine could benefit from a fresh male perspective (50). Mrs. Gray might understand that her husband’s friends who are visiting for a few days would not be satisfied with “simple salt codfish and potatoes,” but she is too paralyzed to think of an adequate alternative (50). By
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ordering a food delivery, Mr. Gray effortlessly procures a week’s worth of food in a way that demonstrates his commitment to satisfying his friends’ culinary desires and preserving his wife’s sanity. Attentive to the smallest details of his guests’ comfort, he “pluck[s] a handful of mint” before the guests arrive, “bruis[ing] it against the gate-posts which command the entrance to [his] possessions” in order to welcome them (53). As the first two men remark upon the pleasant smell, Gray ushers them into his library, where “a dozen goblets gleaming with ice, golden with whiskey, softened with sugar, and fragrant with mint” await them (54). Even as he praises his wife’s planning and labor, his masculine sensory awareness distinguishes his domestic efforts. Because of his ingenuity and foresight, he and his friends do not have to leave the home space in order to entertain themselves. Mr. Gray’s entertaining success prompts him to try his hand at planning Thanksgiving dinner in the hopes of making it a more satisfying celebration for the whole family. Declaring that he would like a spread of the sort that he enjoyed at his grandmother’s house as a child, he tells his wife that they have a duty to supply both quantity and quality for the table. On his menu list are “oysters, soup, fish, turkey, chicken-pie, vegetables innumerable, and pastry and dessert unlimitable” as well as “a roasted pig, . . . a young, succulent, and crisply-cooked morsel, innocent of the sty, and stuffed with sweet smelling and savory herbs” (147–48). Mrs. Gray scoffs at his demands, exclaiming that meals like the ones provided by his grandmother are a thing of the past, but it soon becomes clear that her husband will not take no for an answer. Using their location as an excuse for his seeming extravagance, he argues that the country offers an opportunity to celebrate nature and family in ways that the city prevents. For men who live in the city, holidays like Thanksgiving offer little more than a day away from work, while their property in Fordham is naturally festive. After a magnificent dinner that celebrates the bounty of the earth, he can enjoy conversation with neighbors over tea and a game of whist accompanied by a pipe and mug of ale or cider. In his vision, family prayers and a hymn would end the evening, rounding out a day of rejuvenation and enjoyment by all. His wife relinquishes control, and although she afterward balks at the amount of brandy in the mince-pies and wine in the pudding sauce, it is clear that both she and the children have enjoyed themselves. After Thanksgiving, Mr. Gray is inspired to extend his repertoire from the aesthetics of consumption into the art of food preparation. He details the process of preparing a dish and serving it to others. Styling himself an expert on the subject of the country breakfast,
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with its “buckwheat cakes, country-made sausages, a delicate roll or two, and a cup of Mocha coffee, with cream,” he describes the shape and texture of a perfect pancake and lingers over the perfectly cooked sausage, which is “a little crispy, reminding one just a trifle of the cracklings of roasted pig” (206). His wife and servant become captive assistants to his plans as he decides to oversee the culinary production from start to finish. He even recommends preparing the sausages at home, if at all possible, to ensure satisfactory results. The recipe he provides to his wife and the reader elevate the preparation of an everyday breakfast to the status of an art: Pork, two thirds lean and one third fat, chopped finely, is, of course, the foundation for all sausages; but a boiled beef’s tongue may, with a good result, be added. Salt, pepper, summer-savory, and sage should be the chief seasoning, though curry and spices may be effectively joined thereto. The mixing of these various ingredients—so that no one savor predominates—should be as carefully wrought as in making a salad. It is not everyone who can properly accomplish this, any more than can every one create a salad. It requires judgment in preparing the combinations, skill in putting them together, and an appreciative taste. Then it should be made into small cakes, and fried slowly and kindly in its own fat. (206–207)
While his servant does the actual frying, he supervises the entire procedure, recalling a failed attempt to fry the sausages in olive oil and a subsequent return to sausage fat. His opinions and knowledge on the subject surprise his wife, who asks him if he has been surreptitiously attending a French cooking academy in his spare time. While Gray admits that he has not, he jokingly claims to have “serious intentions of visiting it” in order to “put the professor up to one or two ideas in the preparation of certain new dishes,” such as green corn pudding (207). Although he takes pleasure in amusing his wife with this retort, his instructions are in earnest in the suggestion that the true cook combines discernment, talent, and aesthetic appreciation. Aligning French theories of cooking with a masculine approach to food preparation, he denigrates women’s capacity to create a meal that feeds the soul in addition to the body. While his wife might surprise him with pies or simple meals, he communicates pride in his position as the family’s resident epicure. Coffin’s next country book Cakes and Ale at Woodbine; From Twelfth Night to New Year’s Day centers almost exclusively on food, and, more specifically, on Mr. Gray’s resolution toward the end of Out of Town to gastronomically celebrate as many holidays as possible.
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With a year’s more experience of country living within city reach, the types of food described and served by Gray to his family and friends are increasingly exotic and complicated. He and his male friends, who have similar culinary interests, begin exchanging recipes, which he, in turn, shares with his wife and the reader. A conversation with his friend Tomaso, for example, convinces him that the omelet is the most delicate breakfast one could serve to a house-guest. He explains that proper preparation and presentation is essential to the dish’s success: the pan should be continually agitated during the frying, as “ ‘Ships at Sea,’ to and fro,” and the omelet served on a warm plate, garnished with a sprig of parsley (73–74). It is Tomaso, fresh from cooking classes with an Italian opera-singer-turned-cook, who recommends that Mr. Gray travel to the New York City market to obtain ostrich eggs for the ultimate omelet. Armed with the food options available to him in the country and an understanding and appreciation for meal preparation and taste combinations, he turns to the city for new flavors and techniques. While accounts of variations on ham and eggs in La Mancha, Spain, and other parts of the world fascinate Mr. Gray, his wife tries to slip out of the room whenever he starts talking about food. In the opening pages of Cakes and Ale at Woodbine, Mrs. Gray declares that she has lost interest in his “ ‘deep quaffings’ and ‘hobnobbings’ ” and that she fears that “[his] mind runs too much upon eating and drinking” (10). She bemoans that the pleasant accounts of their domestic life made public in his earlier country books and periodical contributions have been replaced by endless recountings of “breakfasts, dinners, and suppers with your bachelor friends.” She takes particular offense at the title of Cakes and Ale at Woodbine, as it makes it seem as though their entire domestic existence revolves around food, laying forth their home “just for all the world as if our little cottage were a restaurant or a red-latticed ale-house, and you were going to publish the bill of fare” (10). Family time, religious holidays, social gatherings with friends, and domestic labor, she implies derogatorily, have all come to revolve around culinary efforts and the pursuit of certain tastes and sensations. Although Mr. Gray does not defend himself against his wife’s charges, he endeavors to explain the title of his newest book and its subject: “Instead of being everlastingly occupied in talking, as you surmise, about stuffing myself and the children”—I purposely left my wife’s name out of the list—“with sweet cakes, pan-cakes, plum-cakes, short-cakes, johnny-cakes, and indeed, every other kind of cakes under the sun, and
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M a u r a D ’A m o r e pouring down their throats and my own, countless mugs of sparkling, foaming, creamy, October, imperial, pale, X, XX, XXX, old, and new ales, I intend to treat the subject aesthetically; regarding the title simply as meaning the good things of this life, the joys and blessings, the comforts and delights, the smiles and laughter, the soft answer that turneth away wrath, and the soothing word that drieth up tears, the bright glance of the eye, the gentle pressure of the hand, the kiss of love, and, in short, a reflex of the sunny hours and days which you and I, my dear, together with these little ones, and all who may dwell under this rooftree with us, may pass in Woodbine Cottage.” (13)
Defending both his literary and domestic stance to his wife, he argues that whether she chooses to admit it or not, gustatory pleasures are central to domestic contentment. Passages about cakes and ale cannot help but illustrate larger domestic felicities. After this conversation with his wife, Mr. Gray arrives at a radical understanding of the role of food in the domestic environment. When he suggests that they celebrate his sister’s birthday with a pie and his wife doesn’t have time to make one, he proclaims that the mere invocation of pie is enough, that “it is not necessary to actually have a pie on these occasions,—the spirit of the thing is all that is required” (30). Memories of past pies, he insists, can provide the looked-for gratification. To illustrate his point, he tells his wife that he always thinks about delicious pies from his past when he is “participating in some unusually delightful festivity,” so much so that he conceives of a particularly memorable event or moment as an “extra slice of pie of my boyhood” (30–31). Referring to any pleasurable experience as “cutting a pie,” he claims both that a good meal can influence a person’s thoughts and emotions, and less obviously, that certain experiences and feelings can trigger memories or sensations associated with certain foods. While Barry Gray certainly appreciates the taste and appearance of dishes and drinks, he also relishes the opportunities for conversation, education, culture, relaxation, celebration, and meditation that food provides. For him, the pleasures of good eating do not come at the expense of other domestic obligations or experiences. Rather, they help to mark important moments as well as create occasions for them. As he explains to Mrs. Gray on a picnic with their children, the outing itself is the very best cake and ale he could ever ask for. In her introduction to Gusto: Essential Writings in NineteenthCentury Gastronomy (2005), Denise Gigante asserts that “[g]astronomy, as a cultural-material expansion of the philosophy of taste . . . reveals the social nature of the sensus communis, or the aesthetic community
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united through shared ideals of pleasure” (xxxii). Through the countrybook genre, authors such as Robert Barry Coffin articulated a shared aesthetic and identified the suburb as the location for its ideal expression. Over the course of Out of Town and Cake and Ale at Woodbine, Coffin’s narrator embraces the capacity of food to foster connections between friends and family members, and, ultimately, to redefine the domestic experience. As he gradually explores a new home environment that is physically and mentally separate from business concerns, he cultivates an interest that he never would have anticipated prior to his relocation. In the process of planning gatherings for his literary friends, he discovers that the propagation, preparation, and consumption of food can provide pleasure in addition to sustenance. Recognizing the capacity of domestic activities to transform daily life and create community, Gray wrests control of an arena he once considered a woman’s domain. Like other country-book authors, Coffin’s insistence that a masculine perspective and approach would elevate domesticity to an art form gave men a sense of purpose and expertise in the home space. Even if their work lives were unfulfilling, they could return home each evening safe in the knowledge that they were needed, not only as financial providers, but as artistic visionaries and arbiters of taste as well.
Notes 1. For supplemental information on the country book as a nineteenthcentury literary genre, see Stilgoe, especially chapter four, “Borderland Life and Popular Literature.” See also Sweeting and Owings. 2. For the history of American suburbanization, see K. Jackson, Stilgoe, and Hayden. On urban sprawl and the exodus from cities as place of residence, see Blumin’s The Urban Threshold (1976).
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Cul ina ry A esthetics in the Country Book
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C onspic uous C onsu m p t ion: How e l l s, Ja m e s, a n d t h e Gi l de d Age R estau r a n t M a r k M cW i l l i a m s
The financiers are the heroes of gourmandism. —Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin 1825 (Philosopher 145) To lunch, dine, or sup at Delmonico’s is the crowning ambition of those who aspire at notoriety. —Abram C. Dayton, 1897 (qtd. in Trager 267)
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n the 1880s, conduct book author Mary Sherwood encouraged her readers to host more dinner parties. For these “simple little dinners,” Sherwood proposed a series of what now seem quite elaborate menus, including dishes such as Filet de Boeuf aux Champignons and Soupe à la Reine (314).1 Sherwood’s suggestion of such French dishes for middle-class entertaining might come as a shock to those familiar with American political history. Only forty years earlier, Soupe à la Reine helped bring down a president through (now familiar) charges that enjoying French cuisine was somehow un-American. Sherwood’s promotion of Soupe à la Reine encapsulates much larger changes in American food culture as the national taste moved from republican simplicity to cosmopolitan sophistication. Such a fundamental shift challenged Americans struggling to understand how to act—and how to interpret others’ actions—in the turbulent decades following the 10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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Chapter 2
M a r k McWil l i a ms
Civil War. As modern restaurants increasingly replaced the eating houses and taverns common through the middle of the nineteenth century, journalists, conduct book authors, and novelists such as William Dean Howells and Henry James joined in a large-scale negotiation of the cultural meaning of these changes. New kinds of dining establishments demand new forms of behavior, and novels in particular allowed readers to explore various behaviors without facing any consequences themselves. Novels also helped readers understand restaurants’ strange mixture of public and private space: the best of the new establishments were places to be seen as well as places to dine. To a remarkable degree, this dramatic development in American eating habits can be traced to the influence of a single New York City institution: Delmonico’s. Opened as a café in 1827, Delmonico’s became the most important U.S. restaurant of the nineteenth century. Not only did it help change American tastes by popularizing the flavors of classical French cuisine, it also shaped American attitudes by transforming the meal into an aesthetic experience. Although few remember Delmonico’s now—though many know the steak named after it—it dominated the American culinary scene for half a century. Visiting royalty and literary giants alike feasted on its creations; along with Howells and James, customers included Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Edith Wharton. Oscar Wilde craved its famed dishes so much that he reportedly went to the restaurant directly from the dock when he arrived in America. Every president from James Monroe to Theodore Roosevelt ate there. The French cuisine popularized by Delmonico’s had not always been so politically acceptable. In the 1840 presidential election, Whigs used the aristocratic associations of the French cuisine served in the White House to obscure the incumbent’s relatively humble origins— Martin Van Buren was the son of an innkeeper—and, perhaps even more impressively, to associate their own candidate, William Henry Harrison, of one of Virginia’s oldest families, with plain living through claims that he survived on “raw beef without salt.” Meanwhile, Van Buren was portrayed as eating pâté de foie gras “from a silver plate” and soupe à la reine with “a gold spoon” (Root and de Rochemont 113). The Whig attack succeeded as an overt appeal to republican simplicity, the national myth linking plain living with virtue, echoing late-eighteenth-century republican anxieties about luxury’s association with European social decadence.2 As the 1840 election revealed, plain living retained its virtue as the nineteenth century progressed. While the anti-French bias remained strong in American culture—as late as 1869 two of the high priestesses of the cult of domesticity,
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Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, “pleaded that they should be [allowed] to take some leaves from foreign books ‘without accusations of foreign foppery’ ” (190)—remarkable changes were occurring around the American table. What historians have termed the “Food Supply Revolution” was dramatically expanding the variety and quality of foods available.3 At the same time, the massive movement from the farm to the city led “urban Americans [to] redefin[e] the meanings of simplicity and comfort in accordance with new conditions” (Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class 6). What Mary Grace Wall terms the “ethic of spartan usefulness” that had served rural Americans so well “could not accommodate a revolution in consumption” (98). Growing consumerism marked a paradigm shift in values: from need to desire, from economy to extravagance, from conservation to consumption. As claims of republican simplicity became an increasingly nostalgic holding action rather than a politically powerful force, the cultural code through which Americans interpreted the meaning of social behavior had to change as well. One of the most important—and most overlooked—engines of this unprecedented shift was the emergence of the restaurant. Unlike the eating houses and taverns common through the middle of the nineteenth century, restaurants such as Delmonico’s offered a new dining experience to growing numbers of upwardly mobile New Yorkers. The middle of the century saw explosive growth in individual wealth; fewer than twenty American millionaires in 1840 became over four thousand by 1880. To distinguish themselves from average Americans, the rich sought new forms of public display, and the new restaurants proliferated as the numbers of the rich—and of those who sought to emulate them—grew. Such displays of wealth (giving a large dinner at Delmonico’s could cost thousands of dollars) were part of the spiraling conspicuous consumption later theorized by Thorstein Veblen. The press’s awed celebration of such elaborate meals helped cement the association of dining style with social class in the public mind. This public display by the wealthy and ambitious reflected a dramatic shift in American culture. Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that “as one rises in the social hierarchy, life-style is increasingly a matter of what Weber calls the ‘stylization of life.’ ” 4 The wealthy engage in “practices designated by their rarity as distinguished,” while the “easy and common” behavior of the poor is “socially identified as vulgar” (Distinction 174). Bourdieu’s hierarchy leaves the middle class trapped: “In the intermediate position are the practices which are perceived as pretentious, because of the manifest discrepancy between ambition
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and possibilities” (176). In the Gilded Age context of rising prosperity and increasing upward mobility, more and more Americans found themselves in the “intermediate position” between social extremes, desiring to emulate the behavior of those above them in the social scale but often lacking the cultural capital to do so successfully. Indeed, Americans at all levels of society seemed somewhat confused about how to act. In the 1880s, Mary Sherwood noted profound changes in American manners: after the Civil War, “[w]e began all over again; and now there comes up from this newer world a flood of questions: How shall we manage all this? How shall we use a fork? [. . .] How shall we give a dinner-party? [. . .] In fact, there is one great universal question, What is the etiquette of good society?” (6). If the nation building of the Revolutionary period demanded an ethic of republican simplicity, the increasing “stylization of life” in the Gilded Age seemed better suited to a kind of cosmopolitan sophistication. Antebellum American food was often described as simply awful. European visitors complained about overwhelmingly heavy preparations and sauces so fatty as to be inedible. American eating habits were condemned as well, particularly the custom of putting many dishes on the table together in a hodgepodge arrangement, with diners fighting over the best dishes and bolting their food down with unnerving speed. Meals in the United States, Europeans lamented, were valuable only as “the mere business of repletion” (Hamilton 14).5 But after the Civil War, rapid changes in American foodways offered opportunities to those seeking to participate in the “stylization of life.” In this shift, small changes carried increased meaning.6 A plate placed upside-down rather than right-side up, a roast carved by a servant at a sideboard rather than by the host at table, a fork used instead of a knife—each detail has social significance. And in this new context, the quality of the food itself became more important as well. Just before the Civil War, there was a meal that food historians claim changed American eating habits. On October 12, 1860, Delmonico’s catered a spectacular dinner for the Prince of Wales’s visit to the United States. His arrival was a huge event. As many as three hundred thousand people turned out in hopes of catching a royal glimpse, and while the ball that followed was more exclusive, it still included four thousand people from the highest ranks of New York society (Root and de Rochemont 328). Although the event failed to live up to its promised elegance—the guests were hopelessly crammed together—the dinner was a smash success. The Prince found a menu “printed in gold on white satin” (328), and the food
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was similarly exquisite: wave after wave of French dishes that the New York Times called “all the delicacies which the house of Delmonico so justly prides itself on ‘creating’ with the true artistic power” (qtd. in Root and de Rochemont 329).7 With front-page coverage in the Times and other New York papers, the dinner marked the beginning of the dominance of haute cuisine that would last until such opulence became unpopular during World War I. Just twenty years after American politicians had lampooned such dishes, French cookery had become de rigueur for the upper class and for the ambitious middle classes seeking so eagerly to emulate them. The Civil War only partly disrupted these extravagant displays—the Seventh New York marched off to the fight with box lunches prepared by Delmonico—and indeed the extraordinary explosion of industrial capability during the war greatly accelerated the technological developments necessary to support a revolution in American eating habits. After opening in 1827, Delmonico’s quickly outgrew its humble café origins, and its menu—arguably the first printed in the United States—expanded as well.8 By the 1840s, Delmonico’s menu was 12 pages long and offered 371 dishes (Trager 227). As it evolved, the menu became a wonder to those used to the limited dining options of nineteenth-century America: “Printed in English and French in parallel columns [. . .], it offered meats, fish, and game prepared in ways that few New Yorkers had even heard of, and presented vegetables and salads as if they were something to be prized” (Shaplen I 184–85). Delmonico’s began its dominance in the 1840s and 1850s, but it was in the postwar years that the upper class fully discovered what Harvey Levenstein called “the delights of a fare more sophisticated than their national cuisine” (19). By 1884 Harper’s Weekly had no doubt as to why: Many persons who had been in the habit of regarding their dinners as a mere means of sustaining nature, and a scrupulous attention to dinner as unworthy of an earnest mind, learned for the first time at Delmonico’s that dinner was not merely an ingestion, but an observance [. . .]. When we compare the commensalities of our country before the Delmonico period [. . .] with our condition in respect of dinner now, and think, we shall not think it extravagant to call Delmonico’s an agency of civilization. (Qtd. in Shaplen I 172)
Samuel Ward, one of the early regulars, describes his own experience of this learning process: “I remember entering [. . .] with something of awe [. . .]. The dim, religious light soothed the eye, its tranquil
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atmosphere the ear [. . .]. I was struck by the prompt and deferential attendance, unlike the democratic nonchalance of the service” in eating houses of the time (qtd. in Shaplen I 181).9 Ward’s easy rejection of “the democratic nonchalance” found in eating houses speaks volumes about the movement away from republican simplicity; the new measure of civilization, it seems, is not democratic equality but “deferential” hierarchy. But Ward also implies that the function of eating was changing as well, cloaking the needs of biology in the trappings of luxury. Dining, in other words, had become an aesthetic experience. But it was more than the unsurpassed setting and careful service that awed Delmonico’s customers. The food was extraordinary. Lorenzo Delmonico insisted upon the best ingredients, scouring the city’s markets early each morning for that day’s fare. When he could not find fresh fruits and vegetables that met his standards, he bought several hundred acres just outside town to have produce grown specifically for his restaurants. He found the best chefs as well: paying an unprecedented amount to hire Charles Ranhofer in 1861, he secured the talent that dominated the American culinary scene for the next thirty years. This emphasis on high-end French cookery—an 1875 New York Times editorial proclaimed that Delmonico’s “is not to be surpassed in Paris, and there is nothing in London fit to hold a candle to it”—proved not only profitable but remarkably influential (“Editorial”). As Jefferson Williamson explains, “Delmonico’s unquestionably did more than any other institution to change and elevate the standards of American cookery. Its style and menu were imitated everywhere” (217). Delmonico’s success, though based on its attention to the finest cuisine and service, grew largely from its responsiveness to the dramatic social changes in the last third of the nineteenth century. With New York City’s population exploding through parallel increases in immigration and urbanization, the city’s elite felt pressure from the growing ranks of the nouveau riche to further separate itself from the mass of society. In the period of Ward McAllister’s famous codification of the four hundred top members of society, “times were propitious for bringing prosperity to restaurants, particularly pretentious restaurants,” as Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont explain: Hitherto most American eating and most American entertaining had taken place at home; now the rich were seeking a broader playground; and a restaurant like Delmonico’s was prepared to provide it. Delmonico’s [. . .] raised dining out to the status of an event by
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Frequent coverage in the local and national press highlighted Delmonico’s role in changing American dining habits. In 1876, a New York Tribune writer described the newest Delmonico—the family continuously opened larger and grander restaurants and helped lead the city’s growth uptown—as the “new rendezvous of gastronomes [. . .]. The recent great increase of American travel to Europe, and familiarity with the most famous restaurants of the old civilization, have taught our citizens to appreciate their debt to the Delmonico family” (“Delmonico’s Removal”). By 1885, the New York Times could note the changes begun by Delmonico’s with much satisfaction: A decade or two ago [. . .] restaurants—of the right kind—were a rarity. [. . .] But now, between 6 and 8 o’clock the most popular [restaurants] are thronged, in welcome proof of a metropolitan appreciation of better cookery and more refinement in outdoor [public] life than the average American of 20 years ago ever dreamed of. (“The Restaurant System”)
While Delmonico’s French cookery was promoted in the press, increased consumption was celebrated in popular guides such as T.C. Duncan’s How to Be Plump (1878). Dr. Duncan’s claim that “[t]he quieting effect of a few pounds of fat” promotes “the happiness of mankind” provided one rationale for the increasingly fancy dinners being held in the new breed of restaurants (4–5). By the last decades of the century, imitation of Delmonico’s quickly moved public dining toward cosmopolitan sophistication. Hotel menus from the period trace this process: “In the late 1860s and early 1870s they tended to be mainly English/American in their offerings and language, with only an occasional French touch. But by the mid- and late 1870s,” Levenstein notes, “a wholesale invasion of French terms and French dishes was underway” (15). This imitation was hardly limited to New York City, and a wave of fine restaurants swept across the country. From Locke-Obers in Boston to Begué’s and Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, from the Grand Pacific in Chicago to Jack’s in San Francisco, a dazzling array of new establishments catered to the tastes of the newly rich. At the Palmer House in Chicago, diners sopped French sauces from plates bordered in pure gold. Even miners became known for their desire to spend new wealth on lavish dinners; by the late 1870s Denver had six restaurants serving haute cuisine to new silver millionaires.10
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providing the sort of background and the kind of food which made it an adventure. (325–26)
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While these changes in public dining spread, the restaurant scene in New York was expanding rapidly as more Americans sought out fine dining. But as more people became familiar with haute cuisine, the wealthy—especially the newly rich—had to reach for new heights of conspicuous consumption to distinguish themselves from the growing ranks dining in the new restaurants. Though Delmonico’s served exquisite cuisine in elegant settings to extraordinary guests, Lorenzo Delmonico resisted spiraling demands for increasingly elaborate displays from his customers. He had, of course, been instrumental in starting the trend he came to oppose, from the Silver, Gold, and Diamond dinners in 1867 to what came to be known as the Swan Banquet of 1873.11 But soon the demands of the nouveau riche for public showcases grew beyond even Delmonico’s willingness to comply, and a range of new competitors were eager to host such obscene displays of wealth as the infamous Stag Dinner (when Little Egypt’s striptease was disrupted by a police raid) and the Horse Dinner (when thirty members of the New York Riding Club dined mounted upon their horses in a ballroom). Both these meals were hosted by Louis Sherry, who opened Sherry’s in 1890, joining the Hotel Brunswick, the WaldorfAstoria, the Holland House, the Imperial House, and Rector’s in New York’s increasingly crowded dining scene. For the contemporary diner, these restaurants were a new type of establishment. As Rebecca Spang has demonstrated, a revolution in dining habits accompanied the ascendancy of the modern restaurant.12 Unlike the eating house or inn common in earlier periods, where a single meal with a fixed price was served at set times at a common table, restaurants offered what Joanne Finkelstein calls a “diorama of desire”: a menu of individually priced dishes served at any time at private tables (55). Here each difference is crucial. The table d’hôte of the eating house did offer choice to diners willing to brave the competition for the best dishes, but even that troubled choice was limited to the dishes on the table, dishes prepared without input from the diners. The menu of a restaurant, however, offered a large array of options from which diners chose based on their own desires. It promised dishes prepared to meet individual taste rather than communal need. Since all guests shared the same table at an eating house, they were all charged the same fee regardless of what they ate. At a restaurant, though, each dish was priced individually. This practice allowed diners to calibrate their gastronomic desires to their financial means; it permitted either careful frugality or gleeful splurging. And it encouraged
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the linkage of dining habits and class status. With prices known to all, an order became a statement of wealth as well as taste. At an eating house, the communal service dictated by a common meal required set meal times. As European visitors discovered, coming late to table meant missing out on the best parts of some dishes and on all of others. But at a restaurant, diners could order what they wanted when they wanted. The timing of meals had long been connected with social class, with lower class mealtimes set in response to work environments and the upper class frequently distinguishing itself through later dining hours. By allowing individuals to set their own dining times, restaurants encouraged this practice and created another opportunity for ambitious emulation of the upper class. Finally, because eating houses served food to the guests at a common table, individual diners had little choice in their dining companions. Many contemporary commentators complained about the “promiscuity” of the resulting dining experience; one New York Times writer maintained that the “table d’hôte system [. . .] is only endurable where pretty nearly everybody knows everybody else” (“The Restaurant System”). At restaurants, however, diners were seated at individual tables. This change allowed them not only to choose their companions, but also to separate themselves from those perceived as less desirable. The implications of these changes are both obvious and wideranging. Unlike the eating house, which was a public space in every sense, the restaurant became a strange combination of public and private spheres. Scholarship on the restaurant as public space has been heavily influenced by Jürgen Habermas’s analysis in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989). Habermas views cafés, like salons and coffee houses, as models of a new kind of public space in which political and cultural discussions could take place in settings that leveled individuals elsewhere separated by classes of social, political, and intellectual capital.13 However, Spang finds his claims somewhat unrepresentative of the historical development in France. And certainly restaurants, in supplanting the more purely public space of eating houses, reinstated an emphasis on class structures. As Finkelstein puts it, “[i]n the public and crowded context of the restaurant, individuals are acting out privately held desires and needs”; indeed, it is the very public setting that allows “the [private] need to feel distinguished in some way” to be met (63). Everything about a restaurant catered to individual choice and thus provided endless small opportunities for distinction or embarrassment. Dining became an individual act communally visible, and
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even restaurant design (with large windows to attract guests and spacious rooms filled with individual tables) encouraged both voyeurism and performance. At the same time, the space was available to anyone willing to pay. In effect, many of these changes implemented by restaurants emulated luxuries—fine food and wine, careful and deferential service, freedom from domestic management or labor—previously available in the private homes of the upper class, luxuries that could now be rented for an evening. Restaurants quickly became places to be seen as well as places to eat. Indeed, for some social climbers being seen was all that mattered, as one writer complained: “Cheap” fashionables are plenty; they are always in evening clothes; they often give less to the waiters than anyone else; and some of them make it a point, having first equipped themselves with a toothpick, to stroll through Delmonico’s with intent to convince the tenants [. . .] that their appetite has just been appeased within. (“The Restaurant System”)
Novelists quickly joined the press in exploring these profound changes in public dining. As thoughtful observers of a society rushing to embrace industrial capitalism, writers such as William Dean Howells and Henry James not only chronicle the shifts in American eating habits but also help encode these changes with social meaning. In presenting the restaurant as a new arena for public performance in American life, such novelists help their readers understand how to behave—the menu alone offers a bewildering range of potential responses with high stakes for a wrong move, since each individual act is on public display. Indeed, these writers seem particularly concerned with helping readers negotiate the complicated meanings of this new hybrid of public and private space. In A Modern Instance (1882), for example, Howells uses a variety of restaurants to mark Bartley Hubbard’s rise from the ranks of the rural poor. In the process, Howells explores the different types of this new establishment and the range of behavior appropriate—or not—to each type. But far more importantly, by juxtaposing Bartley’s desire for the show of cosmopolitan sophistication with continuing commitments to republican simplicity in other characters—notably Kinney, Squire Gaylord, and even Gaylord’s daughter, Marcia—Howells links the public performance in the new restaurants to his novel’s larger exploration of a kind of dangerous superficiality in Gilded Age upward mobility. The novel opens in a small New England town where Bartley’s college manners impress the local working-class inhabitants. The
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contrast between Bartley’s habits and local ways is very much the subject of an early scene. After courting Marcia Gaylord, a member of the town’s leading family, Bartley returns to his boarding house late at night, missing his supper, and calls to Andy, the stable-boy, for something to eat. Told that nothing remains but “meat-pie”—by which “[h]e meant mince-pie, as Hubbard knew, and not a pasty of meat”—Bartley asks for some anyway, since “[h]e had not been so long out of college but the idea of this irregular supper, when he had once formed it, began to have its fascination” (12–13). We already know enough about Bartley to suspect his need for displaying his newly acquired college ways—the narrator explicitly links higher education and later dining hours—and the local boy provides a suitable audience, as Bartley’s recognition of the difference in dialect reveals. As Andy, at once suspicious and envious, watches Bartley warm his pie over the fire, the boy’s interest in Bartley’s manners stands in for the reader’s: [Andy] was not without his disdain for the palate which must have its mince-pie warm at midnight,—nor without his respect for it, either. This fastidious taste must be part of the splendor which showed itself in Mr. Hubbard’s city-cut clothes, and in his neck-scarves and the perfection of his finger-nails and mustache. The boy had felt the original impression of these facts deepened rather than effaced by custom; they were for every day, and not, as he had at first conjectured, for some great occasion only. (13)
Fascinated by his “unrestricted view of a man who ate his pie with his fork as easily as another would with his knife” (13), Andy shows that he is well behind current fashion. In 1859, Eliza Leslie had dismissed “eat[ing] pie with a fork” alone as “an affectation of ultra-fashion,” but she also advised her readers to adopt the custom of shifting the knife from right to left hands and eating with the fork held in the right; by 1874, according to Harper’s, the fork had fully supplanted the knife for mannered eating in America (Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book 128, 127). Recognizing that Bartley’s use of his fork is an everyday habit, Andy sits and watches “the young man’s skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork” (13) and toasting a piece of cheese as Bartley compliments Andy’s sister (of whom Marcia has already expressed jealousy—rightly so, it soon appears). In this packed scene, Andy’s unthreatening presence allows Howells to establish Bartley’s city ways and to exhibit a side of his nature rarely displayed in the scenes with the Gaylords. At the same time, mince pie becomes the
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organizing principle for the following day, as Bartley’s late-night supper disturbs both head and stomach and leaves him craving female comfort—the catalyst of his decision to ask Marcia to marry him. In the boarding house scene, Howells establishes the way public dining will work to reveal character in his novel and foreshadows its critical role in contrasting rural and urban life. In Boston, to which Bartley and Marcia flee after eloping, we soon learn the difference between boarding house meals, where one merely accepts or declines the food offered, and restaurant dining, where choosing from menu selections becomes part of the ritual of public display. Here Marcia’s ignorance of city ways offers a guide for unknowing readers just as Andy has served as the necessary foil in the boarding house. In the early meals in the city, the food itself is less important than the setting in which it is consumed. At their first hotel, for example, Marcia, still a bit overwhelmed by the “glittering dining-room” of the expensive Revere House, watches as “Bartley ordered their dinner with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with dazzling intelligence” (112). Bartley’s actions are “dazzling” only to her, of course. Completely unaware of city ways, Marcia must rely on his knowledge. But Bartley’s knowledge is shallower than Marcia realizes, and it certainly does not extend to living on a budget. After moving from the expensive Revere House, Bartley and Marcia rely on their new landlady for guidance in making do in a room without board: “Well, I heard the very gentleman that occupied this room sayin’ how they used to go to an eatin’-house, and one’d order one thing, and another another, and then they’d halve it between them, and make out a first-rate meal for about a quarter apiece. Plenty of places now where they give you a cut o’ lamb or rib-beef for a shillin’, and they bring you bread and butter and potato with it; and it’s always enough for two.” (121)
The landlady’s recommendation turns on the dramatic increase in restaurants that accompanied the increases in urbanization; in 1885 a New York Times writer explained that “the restaurant system is now so complete that if [people] live in anything like proximity to the central part of the city they need not fret about a cook—at least insofar as the principal meal of the day is concerned.”14 Even though her vocabulary has yet to adapt, the landlady’s advice explicitly relates this growth as a recent trend, which helps to explain Bartley’s lack of knowledge.
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The scene that follows implies a difference in kind between hotel dining rooms (and boarding houses) and the new establishments. Used to the limited options of boarding-house fare, Marcia is “somewhat bewildered” by the “great show” of prepared foods in the window, and even Bartley seems briefly out of place, despite his “knowing air,” mishandling the menus offered at the door. Inside, the narrator carefully describes the restaurant to distinguish it from both the old elegance of the Revere House and the relative quiet of the rural life the couple has left behind: The table had a marble top, and a silver-plated castor in the center. [. . .] Besides the castor, there was a bottle of Leicestershire sauce on the table, and salt in what Marcia thought a pepper-box [. . .]. The place was hot, and full of confused smells of cooking [. . .]. A great many of the people seemed to be taking hulled corn and milk; baked beans formed another favorite dish, and squash-pie was in large request. Marcia was not critical; roast turkey for Bartley and stewed chicken for herself, with cranberry-pie for both, seemed to her a very good and sufficient dinner, and better than they have ought to have had. She asked Bartley if this were anything like Parker’s; he had always told her about Parker’s. (122–23)
Of course, the restaurant is nothing like the already famous Parker House, Boston’s closest equivalent to New York’s Delmonico’s; here these dishes are more evocative of republican simplicity than of cosmopolitan sophistication. But it is as close as they have yet come. Given the country-style fare they order, Marcia could perhaps be critical— she has been well trained in cookery by her mother—but her awe at dining out at a place “anything like Parker’s” affects her judgment. And indeed even Bartley has not yet developed the city habit of scorning any but the best meals, as we learn when he dines a few days later at a journalists’ club: “All the club united in abusing the dinner, which in his rustic ignorance Bartley had not found so infamous” (139). Soon, however, the young couple begins to adopt city ways. In their early affluence, Bartley and Marcia ascend the culinary heights, dining at Copeland’s, or Weber’s, or Fera’s, or even at Parker’s: they had long since forsaken the humble restaurant with its dollies and its ponderous crockery, and they had so mastered the art of ordering that they could manage a dinner as cheaply at these finer places as anywhere, especially if Marcia pretended not to care much for her half of the portion, and connived at its transfer to Bartley’s plate. (143–44)
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I went into Parker House one night about midnight, and I saw four doctors there eating lobster salad, and deviled crab, and washing it down with champagne; and I made up my mind that the doctors needn’t talk to me any more about what was wholesome. I was going in for what was good. (213; Emphasis in the original)
Here the theater manager clearly rejects what Bourdieu calls “the tastes of necessity” for “the tastes of luxury” (Distinction 177). But Bartley’s own quest for the “stylization of life” seems rooted more in the desire for social status than in that for culinary pleasure; Bartley might be more accurately described as “going in for” what is seen to be good. He craves distinction that can be displayed through consumption. In the end, Howells links Bartley’s downfall to this quest for status; Bartley’s desire for public display shapes his actions throughout the novel. Bartley wants to be, in other words, like Henry Burrage in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886). Brought up in high society, Henry knows how to entertain. He draws on his easy familiarity with the rituals of public display to distinguish himself from Basil Ransom, also born into wealth but now destitute following his family’s losses during the Civil War, as they both court Verena Tarrant. Henry hosts Verena’s visit to “the celebrated restaurant,” Delmonico’s, where he “preside[s], in the brilliant public room of the establishment, where French waiters flitted about on deep carpets and parties at neighbouring tables excited curiosity and conjecture” (301, 304). Henry is a master of the public performance encouraged by restaurants such as Delmonico’s. But while Bartley would fully approve, wellconnected but superficial characters like Henry get little respect in James’s novel. Verena presumably enjoys expensive entertainment— she remains enthralled by “those dear little dishes” she eats at Delmonico’s (307). But we do not see the Delmonico’s meal through Verena’s eyes. Instead, James describes it through the perspective of Olive Chancellor, Verena’s Boston Brahmin guide to the factions of the reform movement, who is as opposed to the rituals of display as Verena is attracted to them. For Olive, Henry is not a gracious host but an “insinuating proselyte” (304); her judgment reflects the disapproval of some elites for the extravagance of the new restaurants.
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In learning to order wisely at these expensive restaurants, they have also learned to recognize the distinctions between establishments that are so crucial to social climbing. Bartley has understood the need for distinction all along, of course. A theater manager he runs into explains,
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Basil Ransom had begun with proposing, strenuously, that she should come somewhere and have luncheon; he had brought her out half an hour before that meal was served in West Tenth Street, and he maintained that he owed her the compensation of seeing that she was properly fed; he knew a very quiet, luxurious French restaurant, near the top of the Fifth Avenue. (334)
Verena refuses, though tempted “immensely to go with him to an eating-house” (334). Verena’s confusion of terminology implies either that she still doesn’t fully comprehend the distinction between “restaurant” and “eating-house” or that her opinion of Basil places him below the socioeconomic level of Delmonico’s patrons. But Basil is quite clear about his own desire to share the rituals of fine restaurant dining with Verena: He knew what he intended about her sharing the noonday repast with him somehow; it had been part of his plan that she should sit opposite him at a little table, taking her napkin out of its curious folds— sit there smiling back at him while he said to her certain things that hummed, like memories of tunes, in his fancy, and they waited till something extremely good, and a little vague, chosen out of a French carte, was brought them. (334)
Basil wants all the advantages of a restaurant: the private table to share with Verena, the opportunity to display his knowledge and taste through ordering and his means through paying, and, of course, “something extremely good” to eat. As James implies, the new restaurants did far more than serve good food. They offered a space both for the public display of a Henry Burrage and for the private courting of a Basil Ransom. Despite their different approaches, both Henry and Basil are, in the end, seeking the same goal—Verena’s hand—in the same kind of space. Both men attempt to use the opportunities a restaurant provides to show off. But what they hope to show seems quite different. Where Henry seeks to draw on the social glory of a popular restaurant to highlight his own status, Basil hopes to use a similar setting to highlight his individual taste. Henry sees the restaurant as public space; Basil sees it as private space. In addition to illuminating aspects of each man’s character,
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Shifting the perspective to Olive effectively hides the meal at Delmonico’s from the reader’s view, and consequently it places greater emphasis on the meal Basil Ransom hopes to share with Verena at another French restaurant:
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their differing desires also highlight the way each views Verena: Henry wants an attractive, popular woman to enhance his social status; Basil seeks a companion. This difference is reflected through the restaurant each chooses and emphasized through James’s careful control of perspective. Olive has no patience for the glitz of Delmonico’s; for her the setting only increases her opinion of Henry’s superficiality. Shifting the point of view to Basil allows a more sympathetic portrayal of his own desires. In effect, despite their deep conflict over the nature of the reform movement in general and Verena’s future in particular, Olive and Basil become allied against the increasing artificiality of American society that James portrays through Henry’s entertaining habits. Indeed, in James’s narrative choices, he seems to endorse the private, individual aspects of restaurants and to disdain the simultaneous public spectacle. In The American (1877), for example, dinner at the Café Anglais—generally considered the best restaurant in Paris by English and American travelers—is dismissed as somehow immodest. The narrator implies that Christopher Newman, the American in Paris introduced as “this undeveloped connoisseur,” would not have chosen to dine there if his tastes had been more developed: “He was by inclination a temperate man; but he had supped the night before his visit to the Louvre at the Café Anglais—some one had told him it was an experience not to be omitted—and he had slept none the less the sleep of the just” (18). The narrator seems to have a higher opinion of the nameless restaurant where Valentin de Bellegarde and Newman dine quietly, sitting “long over their dinner” (99), or even of the “light Parisian” breakfast Valentin’s friends share at the Swiss inn where they wait for him to die of wounds received in the duel (225). Howells seems to share this preference for the private over the public aspects of restaurants. As a few of Marcia’s meals with Bartley suggest, restaurants can provide a space for good conversation, and we see a similar emphasis in Tom Corey’s lunches with Walker in The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Just as the narrator criticizes Bartley’s showiness in taking Marcia’s father or Kinney to dine at fancy restaurants, our view of Silas Lapham’s attempt to impress the West Virginia paint “princes” by taking them to eat at the Astor House in New York City seems less than favorable. By commending the private and criticizing the public aspects of the new restaurants, these authors help to negotiate their cultural meaning. Such negotiation was crucial as Americans sought to understand the rapid developments taking place around their tables. To introduce his 1891 cookbook The Table, Alessandro Filippini reminds his readers of the dramatic changes in American foodways in the decades
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following the Civil War. Emphasizing the many “thousands of persons” who have experienced the pleasures of fine dining in restaurants such as Delmonico’s, he claims, “These ‘gourmands’ (if you please), and their number is legion, have, with the aid of the excellent resources of the American market and the encouragement given to the culinary art of this period, have brought the modern American market to virtual perfection” (1). Filippini commends the improvements in American ingredients (particularly beef, the equal of which he finds nowhere else in the world), but his main interest is in praising the development of American tastes to the point where he can refer to his readers as “gourmands.” While volumes like Filippini’s The Table and Ranhofer’s The Epicurean (1894) offer explicit instruction in cookery, the pleasures they celebrate are those of eating rather than of cooking. As these works suggest, the dominant ethos of the Gilded Age valorized consumption, displacing the emphasis on preparation found in the myth of republican simplicity or in its adaptation in domestic ideology. This fundamental shift changed the cultural resonance of republican simplicity and challenged upper- and middle-class Americans to alter the cultural code through which they interpreted cultural practices. John Kasson argues that the middle class in nineteenth-century America faced a crisis of “self-representation” that “caught middleclass families between conflicting ideals and demands. How indeed were they to represent themselves? As cultivated and fashionable members of society? Or as sincere and comfortable people who refused to put on a special public face?” (176). For conduct book writers such as Mary Sherwood, the choice seemed fairly obvious: public display was more important than private comfort. The attempt to stylize all aspects of life, to gain what Bourdieu terms the “sense of distinction” (Distinction 260), shaped Sherwood’s responses to concerns about how to behave in what she called this “newer world.” But American novelists seemed less certain. From the critique of consumerism in Howells’s A Modern Instance and The Rise of Silas Lapham to James’s conflicted response to the modern restaurant’s new public space in The Bostonians, novels explored tensions in the Gilded Age. These tensions grew considerably larger when Americans looked beyond the social elite and those in a position to emulate them. In this same period, works by Louisa May Alcott and Rebecca Harding Davis force readers to confront the limitations and even brutality of life in American cities; regionalism in books by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain places republican simplicity in opposition to cosmopolitan sophistication to explore the growing
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Notes 1. See also Sherwood, 315. Sherwood devotes a chapter to such “Simple Dinners” (314–19), but far more space to elaborate dinner parties (261–313). 2. For a fuller version of this argument, see my “Distant Tables: Food and the Novel in Early America.” 3. See, e.g., Tannahill, 306–31. 4. Weber’s wonderfully evocative phrase originates in his discussion of “status privileges” in “Class, Status, Party” (191). 5. See also Hamilton, 24–26. 6. See Bourdieu, 196. 7. For the full menu of the dinner, see Robert Shaplen, I: 193. 8. An 1834 Delmonico’s menu has long been cited as the first printed menu in America, but fascinating scholarship by Ellen Steinberg and Jack Prost proves that the seemingly iconic menu actually comes from an 1880s restaurant specializing, ironically, in cheap, simple fare. 9. Shaplen’s citation of the May 14, 1869, Evening Post as the source for Ward’s quotation may be in error; I have been unable to locate Ward’s comment in that issue. 10. For more on the eating habits of the miners, see Levenstein, 11–15. 11. For a full account of this spectacular affair, see McAllister, 233–35. 12. My discussion of the impact of the modern restaurant is influenced by Spang’s important The Invention of the Restaurant (2000). 13. See, e.g., Habermas, 31–38. 14. “The Restaurant System.”
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divide between rural and urban America. As changes swept through American culture and permanently altered American foodways, these writers sought to negotiate the meaning of these changes for themselves and their readers.
“Bon bons i n A bu n da nc e”: Th e Pol i t ics of Sw e e t n ess i n K at e C hopi n’s Fic t ion Andrew Dix and Lorna Piatti
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ritical writing on the fiction of Kate Chopin is marked by culinary inattentiveness. Unlike Chopin’s representation of sexuality or urban space or medical practice, her mappings of complex food cultures in Creole and Cajun settlements in late-nineteenth-century Louisiana have failed to generate significant interest. Compared with critical fascination with the vestimentary in her work—there is a veritable hermeneutics of Edna Pontellier’s bathing suit in The Awakening (1899)—the alimentary has fared badly.1 This chapter addresses, therefore, a major deficit in Chopin scholarship. Reserving for another occasion analysis of the politics of jambalaya, gumbo, and other savories mentioned by Chopin, we take sugar consumption as our subject instead and pursue references to sweet foodstuffs across not only The Awakening but also the earlier novel At Fault (1890), the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and several uncollected short fictions. The sugary will be interpreted here as key to Chopin’s negotiation of regional, national, racial, ethnic, gender, and class identities. In claiming such cultural significance for this food type, we follow the example of sugar’s foremost historian, Sidney Mintz: “Studying the varying use of a single ingestible like sugar is rather like using a litmus test on particular environments” (Sweetness and Power 7).
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Chapter 3
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The nineteenth century witnessed, in the United States as elsewhere, the democratization of sugar. No longer monopolized by elite classes, sugar became a staple foodstuff, cherished across social boundaries as both a sweetener of coffee and tea and a highly adaptable ingredient in making cakes, breads, desserts, and confectionery. One scholar records that, by the early 1870s, “the average American consumed almost 41 pounds of (mostly imported) sugar a year, over six times what his or her counterpart had eaten in the 1790s” (Woloson 5). There is evidence in Chopin’s fiction itself of this universalization of sugar intake. Opening a parcel of fish, potatoes, herbs, and butter in the short story “Nég Créol” (1897), Mamzelle Aglaé asks disappointedly: “Pas d’ sucre, Nég?” (Chopin 427).2 While registering sugar’s social dispersal, however, we resist any suggestion that this amounts to the banalization of the substance in Chopin. On the contrary, sugar is still charged here with plural, even antagonistic meanings. It remains what Mintz calls “a versatile, one might say protean, substance,” susceptible not merely to culinary but to complex cultural molding (Sweetness and Power 77). For historian of confectionery Laura Mason, sugar performs a “strange alchemy” (10); and it is precisely the substance’s mutability in Chopin—its ethnic ambiguity, mixed gender signals, Janus-faced nostalgia and progressivism—that this essay explores. Our focus is upon manufactured sweetness, the multiple forms that sucrose takes in Chopin’s fiction after it is subjected to either domestic or industrial processing. Thus we pass over the significance of naturally occurring sweet things: the eponymous fruits in “Ripe Figs” (1893), say, or the peaches central to the undated story “Ti Frère.” Yet at the same time as involving this tactical omission, our approach to sugar in Chopin is inclusive. Jane Dusselier argues that in “the last half of the nineteenth century, America’s primary association with sweetness began a slow, uneven transformation from ‘sweet dishes’ made in the home to candy produced in factories” (15–16). Something of this transformation is witnessed in Chopin: if sweetness has a privileged delivery system in her work, it is indeed confectionery rather than cakes or desserts. While we discuss the increasing importance of confectionery, however, we do not isolate it from other modes of sugar consumption. If there is an ideology of the bonbon in Chopin’s fiction, so too there is a politics of the doughnut.
Bonbons at the French Theatre Reviewing Chopin’s story collection Bayou Folk in 1894, the New York Times described its Louisiana Creole characters as an “exotic,
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not-quite-American species” (Toth 226). Far from asserting idiosyncrasy in Chopin’s writing, however, this remark actually draws upon widespread late-nineteenth-century perceptions of Creoles as set apart from forms of American normality. Social commentators of the period document Creole opposition to such major trends in the United States as urbanization, capitalist agglomeration, technological advance, multicultural immigration, and federal rationalization. In many accounts, indeed, the terms “American” and “Creole” operate as antitheses. Typical is George Washington Cable’s diptych in 1884 of the dynamic, entrepreneurial American and “the unaspiring, satirical Creole” (252). A decade earlier, the journalist Albert Rhodes had similarly evoked unbridgeable cultural and psychological divisions in Louisiana: “The Creole still lingers in the past, dallying with the flowers of love and sentiment, while the American hurries forward with unhappy haste to pluck the thorns of ambition and pelf” (18). If these two communities ostensibly occupied the same geography, their national allegiances were actually distinct; as Rhodes puts it in mapping New Orleans: “Canal Street is the dividing line between France and America” (16). Late-nineteenth-century Creole resistance to Americanization often takes symbolic form. Lacking means of organized political defiance, Louisiana’s Creoles had recourse to cultural modes of communal affirmation in the face of U.S. power. Cable describes how, ten days after going through the motions on the Fourth of July, Creoles commemorated the fall of the Bastille “with far greater enthusiasm” (1). Rhodes offers a still more detailed inventory of the community’s intransigent cultural practices, from attending “the French theatre” in New Orleans to continuing to speak French in disregard of American linguistic standardization. For our purposes, however, it is suggestive that he includes the eating of sweet foodstuffs among forms of Creole cultural dissent. Patrons at the French theatre instantiated their ethnic affiliation not merely by spectatorship of non-Englishlanguage drama but by choices of confectionery: “The eating of bonbons and ices and drinking of light beverages between the acts, is part of the entertainment, as in the minor theaters of the French capital” (Rhodes 17). In 1873, and for some decades afterward, such elegant confections were liable to be imports from France rather than products of a still nascent American candy industry. The very taste and appearance of bonbons thus embodied memories of French history and geography, offering Creoles relief from degraded experiences of U.S. modernity. If this sounds implausibly Proustian, it is nevertheless congruent with a language of memory and nostalgia that
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has frequently been deployed by analysts of sweet foodstuffs. Wendy Woloson describes “sweet things” as “exquisite repositories of sentiments” (4); Mason speaks evocatively of “the sugar archives” (19) and of confectionery as “an edible archive” (15). Here, in a kind of riposte to present-day nutritionists’ anxiety about the deleterious effects of sugar upon memory, sweet foods are conceived as privileged vehicles for the preservation and mobilization of remembrances. Sugary things in Chopin are such an edible archive, storing up memories of France for their Creole consumers. Here we modify Helen Taylor’s suggestion that “[t]hroughout Chopin’s work, France and Frenchness are used as signifiers of desire, the illicit and sexual pleasure” (81). While France and Frenchness indisputably connote desire in Chopin, it is often yearning of a more regressive sort than Taylor allows; sugar tends in her fiction to be charged as much by nostalgia as by a sense of futurity. One way of gauging the strength of Chopin’s recuperation of a traditional Francophone community endangered by American modernity is to compare her treatment of sweet things with their handling by The Creole Cookery Book, a collection of recipes published in 1885 by the Christian Woman’s Exchange of New Orleans. Like Chopin’s fiction, this recipe book attests to the Creole sweet tooth, devoting over half its two hundred pages to a dazzling array of “cakes,” “ices, etc.,” “puddings,” “preserves, etc.,” “confectionery,” and sweetened breads and biscuits (79–193, 207–208). It is notable, however, that most of these foods appear with Anglophone labels (“doughnuts” rather than “beignets” or even “baignés”); thus even a book intended to preserve a distinctive ethnic cuisine contributes inadvertently to Anglo-Saxon standardization. By contrast, sweet things in Chopin generally survive under French nomenclature. The pleasure of being French in her work is doubly experienced—by an act of taxonomy as well as one of gustation. Many possible examples include sirop d’orgeat in the story “Cavanelle” (1895); the pralines nibbled by the title character in “The Godmother” (1901); the bonbons and marron glacé of The Awakening; and the croquignoles—spiced, elaborately twisted doughnuts—that figure not only in At Fault but in the stories “Beyond the Bayou” (1893) and “A No-Account Creole” (1894). The effort of cultural conservation signified in Chopin by Frenchlabeled sweet foods is, however, in a state of crisis. The sirop d’orgeat, a sugary, almond-based drink facing supersession by newer American beverages, is offered in “Cavanelle” in a Creole household that consists only of a brother and mortally ill sister, suggesting, Usher-like, the end of the line for this particular ethnicity; furthermore, the
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drink is served not by an avatar of youth, but by “a limping old black woman” (493). Chopin’s embattled nostalgia also suffuses her croquignoles. These treats often appear in unpropitious social circumstances: in “Beyond the Bayou,” for instance, they take on “the most fantastic and alluring shapes” (217), but are nevertheless fashioned by a mentally unstable woman living in the remote geography specified by the story’s title. Croquignoles are equally ambiguous in At Fault. Offered to the widowed plantation owner Thérèse Lafirme by her former cook, Grosse tante, “the dish of golden brown croquignoles” (82) carries the promise of restitution of the past: a past, moreover, not merely personal—Grosse tante had been “Thérèse’s nurse and attendant from infancy” (80)—but also broadly cultural, since the Creole widow’s domain is threatened by both ethnic unrest and currents of economic change. Yet it turns out there are limits upon this sweet food’s power to redeem history. Thérèse, describing herself as “so tired” (82), leaves the croquignoles untouched; later, Grosse tante’s cabin, with all its nostalgic connotations, will be swept into the Cane River. At this stage, it is important to make some distinctions regarding the provenance of sweet things in Chopin’s fiction. The croquignoles of At Fault, “Beyond the Bayou,” and “A No-Account Creole” are home-baked, denoting a plantation economy that is self-sufficient or, at least, relatively insulated from the market. Yet this is not the case with confectionery itemized by Chopin. The Creole Cookery Book’s inclusion of recipes for “Chocolate Caromels,” “Cocoanut Drops,” and “Brown Taffy” (207–208) indicates that home production of confectionery occurred late in the nineteenth century; more often, however, demand for this type of sweet food was met commercially. Where Chopin describes a seemingly innocuous liking for confectionery, then, she is hinting at the Creole community’s embrace of a capitalistic logic that may ultimately be destructive of its cultural distinctiveness. Its participation in this particular, rapidly expanding market is enough to make unsustainable Rhodes’s claim that to go from the American to the Creole domain was to pass “out of the whizz and whirr of steam and wheels into the bosom of pastoral nature” (17). The sweet products cited by Chopin differ not only in point of origin but in economic prestige. At times, her characters consume the lowest-grade output of the burgeoning U.S. candy industry. Exemplary here would be the young drugstore employee in At Fault, who distracts himself from menial work by “surreptitious abstraction of caramels and chewing gum” (45). Derived from sugar boiled to the maximum without burning, caramels represent a relatively unsubtle,
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easily standardized branch of confectionery that, in Mason’s words, “had great advantages at this early stage of sweet industrialization” (190). Chopin’s secretive candy-eater is positioned, therefore, at the base of the American class hierarchy. The episode is ethnically suggestive also, the newly engineered caramels and chewing gum asserting a powerful Americanism against the nostalgic “Frenchness” connoted by bonbons. Any consolation that this scene occurs in St. Louis, rather than in Creole Louisiana, can only be fleeting: an ominous sense of generational change is evident even in the New Orleans-set “A Sentimental Soul” (1895), where “a little customer . . . came in for chewing gum” (465). But if caramels, chewing gum, and penny candies signify the most serialized commodification of sweetness, other confections in Chopin have high exchange value. The most sumptuous example is the box of “luscious and toothsome bits”—including “delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance” (528)—that Léonce Pontellier sends to Edna in The Awakening. Besides the bonbons, the box, too, is affectively charged: Woloson describes how, throughout the nineteenth century, such containers were themselves “exotic,” typically imported “from Germany and France, because the United States lacked the artisanal structure to support the manufacture in quantity of such fine handmade goods” (53). Both contents and packaging, then, summon up deep memories of Europe and serve The Awakening’s Creole community as means of ethnic reaffirmation. Yet if, positively, “bonbons in abundance” evoke an alternative to banal Americanization, they also carry more troubling associations. With their ostentatious luxury, they resemble the objects of “conspicuous consumption” indulged in by that “leisure class” so lethally anatomized by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 (also the year of The Awakening). Although Veblen devotes more space to clothing and household furnishings as material expressions of affluence, he is also alert to the “ceremonial differentiation of the dietary.” “The consumption of choice articles of food,” he writes, becomes taboo for marginalized social groups, notably for “a base (servile) class of men” (50). From this rigorously demystifying perspective, Chopin’s bonbons signify class stultification and the violence of economic difference. We have no wish to deprive bonbons and other sweet things in Chopin’s work of all their positive political valency. At the same time, however, discussion cannot rest content with assertion of the nostalgic Frenchness of these things. Instead, it is important to darken ethnic and class interrogation of such sweet foodstuffs. Dusselier valuably draws confectionery into the field of material
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culture, treating it not as evanescent triviality but “as a historical document” (14). This can only be adequately done, however, if we also remember Walter Benjamin’s great dictum that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). In noting the socially exclusive ostentation of some confectionery consumed by Chopin’s Creoles, this essay has already registered such barbarism. The next section develops this analysis by showing what Creole sweetness implies for African Americans and Cajuns in Louisiana.
Dark Sugar Roland Barthes includes “ornamental cookery” among the many mythologies of modern bourgeois life. Reflecting primarily upon recipes and food photography in the Paris magazine Elle, Barthes describes a cuisine of subterfuge, one “based on coatings and alibis” and the “persistence of glazing” (“Ornamental” 78). Such cooking “is for ever trying to extenuate and even to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of seafood” (78). As well as concealing from consumers the animal and plant provenance of ingredients—in particular, the cruelties of the meat industry—ornamental cookery has a socially mystifying effect. For Barthes, it is “an openly dream-like cookery,” “a cuisine of advertisement, totally magical” (79), its fetishizing of food’s decorative quality without regard for the labor involved in preparation helping to inhibit consumers from awareness of the differentiated social structure in which they live. Though dating from the mid-1950s, Barthes’s essay still resonates powerfully. Besides making uncomfortable reading for today’s practitioners of culinary alibis, it sounds a warning note for current academic work on food cultures. Studies in this area sometimes succumb themselves to a kind of “ornamentalism,” passing silently over questions of food production in favor of detailed discussion of consumers’ symbolic investments in what they eat. Such broad concerns over the legitimacy of paradigms of contemporary culinary theory are beyond this chapter’s remit. On a smaller scale, however, we take Barthes’s interrogation of a cuisine of disguises to be still instructive for an adequate reading of sugar in Chopin. The obvious differences in culinary regimes of nineteenth-century Creole plantocracy and postwar petitbourgeois France can be set aside here. For the presentation of sweet food in Chopin is indeed, to recall Barthes’s terms, “dream-like” and “magical,” foregrounding the substance’s aesthetic and gustatory
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appeals but tending to repress knowledge of the labor by which these are achieved.3 There are few obvious inscriptions in Chopin’s fiction of what historian Richard Follett calls sugar’s “fatal signature” (78). Follett has described in detail the oppressive social forms of Louisiana’s own sugar industry—forms that merely mutated, rather than withered, during the passage after 1865 from chattel to wage slavery. He evokes a productive mode that constituted “one of the most rapacious and exploitative regimes in the American South” (93). The sugar worker— almost invariably African American—was subject to disciplinization by multiple means, ranging from clocks, bells, and whistles portioning out the day’s labor to the very configuration of plantation spatiality so that his or her squalid quarters fell within the supervisory gaze of the owner’s mansion. At the center of this totalized system was the sugarhouse itself, dominated by the “constant clattering of conveyor belts shuttling canes and semidry sucrose across the mill floor” (104). Lest Follett’s account be thought historical revisionism overly influenced by present-day racial and class sensitivities, it should be noted that descriptions of the hellish sugarhouse are apparent in nineteenth-century documents as well. Cable resorts to Dantean mode in evoking “the battery of huge caldrons, with their yellow juice boiling like a sea, half-hidden in clouds of steam; the half-clad, shining negroes swinging the gigantic utensils with which the seething flood is dipped from kettle to kettle” (112). Such evidence of racial inequality and oppressive labor is hard to find in Chopin’s accounts of Louisiana sugar production. In The Awakening only faint traces survive of the disturbing past of Grand Isle’s playground for the Creole rich; as Michele Birnbaum points out: “The Pontellier’s [sic] place of summer retreat was a sugar plantation prior to 1866—‘the main building’ of which is still called ‘the house’ ” (313). Three stories included in A Night in Acadie— “Caline” (1893), “A Respectable Woman” (1894), and “Athénaïse” (1896)—all convert sugar cultivation and processing into scenes of the picturesque. There is no need to discuss each of these instances of aestheticization of conflicted social space: representative is the moment in “A Respectable Woman” in which a cigar-smoking Creole character masters landscape from the plantation mansion’s “wide portico”: “ ‘This is what I call living,’ he would utter with deep satisfaction, as the air that swept across the sugar field caressed him with its warm and scented velvety touch” (506–507). Although sugarhouses in “Athénaïse” are modified by the adjective “monster” (384), this occurs during the heroine’s admiring focalization of the scene, and
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so figures a vivid pictorial quality rather than Cable-like horror at humans and machines under stress. In turning back to the narratives Chopin gives of sugar consumption itself, does the substance’s traumatic history become any more visible? If not in the fiction’s description of sugarhouses, can black sugar workers’ brutalization be read instead in the dessert plate, or in the box of confectionery? It would be surprising to find socioeconomic frankness here. Woloson recalls that discreet silence was maintained during the nineteenth century by sugar companies and manufacturers of sweet products: “Tellingly, people heard little outcry about the exploitative methods used to produce sugar” (24). One tendency in Chopin’s work that seems to contribute to such contextual repression is the frequent referencing of sugary things that are not locally produced—hardship still palpable in them—but, rather, imported from Europe. In the description of bonbons in The Awakening and elsewhere, sugar’s geography is reduced: what matters implicitly is France where this confectionery favored by Creoles originates, rather than the Caribbean world in which, under onerous conditions, its key ingredient is actually cultivated and refined. Yet privileged sugar consumption in Chopin cannot be so cleanly separated from the primal scene of production itself. Here we draw upon Edward Said’s “contrapuntal” reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). For Said, Sir Thomas Bertram’s oscillations between his Northamptonshire estate and his sugar plantation in Antigua introduce a “global perspective” into the novel (114), a sense of “complementarity and interdependence instead of isolated, venerated, or formalized experience that excludes and forbids the hybridizing intrusions of human history” (115). Lacking any character who moves like Sir Thomas between locales of sugar consumption and production, Chopin’s fiction would seem less subject to what Said calls a “geographical problematic” (115). But reading texts such as The Awakening solicits sensitivity to the entanglement of advanced, confectionerymanufacturing Europe with the zone of Caribbean labor—a sensitivity that, to say the least, complicates evaluation of the pleasure that Chopin’s Creoles take in their French bonbons. From this perspective, political as well as mundanely medical anxieties may be in the air when Madame Ratignolle hesitates in choosing from Edna’s box: she “finally settled upon a stick of nugat, wondering if it were not too rich; whether it could possibly hurt her” (530; emphasis added). In keeping with a proto-modernist aesthetic of obliquity rather than direct statement, it is often figurative turns of this kind in Chopin’s work that disclose the oppressive political economy of sugar. Another
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example is the vanilla ice cream served during the most lavish dance in The Awakening. While American eating of ices was becoming widespread late in the nineteenth century, Chopin’s account hints less at popular custom than at the dancers’ sense of elite entitlement: in particular, ice cream is free here from the taint of mobile, outdoors consumption it was starting to pick up in American metropolises. Equally to the point is the ice cream’s “ethnicity.” The choice of vanilla tacitly reinforces the traditional whiteness of this Creole occasion, differentiating it from ice cream consumption by immigrants elsewhere in the United States. Color symbolism is similarly revealing with respect to the other dessert served during the Grand Isle festivities: “gold and silver cake arranged on platters in alternate slices” (548). The gold and silver additives bring this cake into visual proximity with money itself, correcting any mystification of its rich Creole consumers’ place in the local social structure and hinting at the surplus value they have extracted from others. “Two black women,” under the white Victor’s “supervision,” have made the cake: the allegory of African-American labor converting sugar into Creole money is irresistible. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the greater dynamism of American capital put Creole socioeconomic preeminence of this sort under threat. When Cable lists symptoms of “the Creole’s” crisis—“his levee is dangerous; the plastering is falling in his parlor”—it is suggestive that included among these is the fact “his sugar is dark” (310). In our reading, Creole sugar in Chopin, even before any such decline in chemical purity, is always already dark in the sense of having been produced by bodies of exploited nonwhite labor, whether Louisianan or Caribbean. But where dark sugars of a more literal sort occur in Chopin’s fiction, they are associated not with the dominant ethnic community but with subordinate African American and Cajun populations. While luxurious desserts and confectionery imply Creole use of cane sugar at its whitest and purest, these abjected social groupings in Louisiana sometimes turn to viscous, dirty-colored molasses. The agro-industrial provenance of molasses figures aptly the status of those ethnic and class fractions that consume it. Mason calls it one of “the by-products of sugar refining,” not a finely granulated product but a “semi-liquid” compound of sucrose, fructose, glucose, minerals, and water (43). For Woloson, more baldly still, it is “[l]iterally the dregs of refined sugar” (10). In Chopin’s fiction, molasses connotes degradation of material and cultural kinds. The privileged Creole protagonist of the story, “Charlie,” for example, uses this foodstuff as a sign of the most depleted existence when telling Aurendele, “the ’Cadian girl” (989),
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that she hasn’t got “an idea above corn bread and molasses” (993). Charlie’s linkage of molasses to Cajuns also suggests an affinity between this other, lower-class French grouping in Louisiana and African Americans: in late-nineteenth-century discourses— including advertising—molasses tended to be African-Americanized. At this point, however, it is important to free molasses in Chopin, at least partially, from cultural stigmatization. Woloson describes how, roughly during the period of Chopin’s writing career, this previously abjected food took on positive meanings, its simple origins now revalued as expressing virtuous Southern plainness in contrast to that metropolitan modernity represented by “refined and effete bonbons” (209). Although Chopin’s references to molasses are too slight and infrequent to support a strongly progressive argument, they nevertheless carry something of the “oppositional” charge to which Woloson refers. Particularly relevant is the moment in “A Visit to Avoyelles” (1893) when impoverished, French-speaking characters sit down to a “mid-day dinner of boiled salt pork, corn bread and molasses” (284). Whether, ethnically speaking, these figures are Cajuns or indigent Creoles is beside the point: they inhabit a building that “wore an aspect of poverty and dilapidation” (283), and are socially distinct from the Creoles described in much of Chopin’s fiction. Compared with conspicuous Creole food consumption in texts such as The Awakening, the characters in “A Visit to Avoyelles” practice a cookery of survival. As well as necessity, however, there is creativity in their use of molasses: rather than treating this product simply as an inferior substitute for cane sugar, thereby preserving intact the “syntax” of the dominant group’s cuisine, they reimagine the substance’s possibilities and produce a new kind of meal altogether by combining it instead with savory ingredients. Of course, it is vital not to romanticize this expedient usage; equally, however, we should not neglect the intransigence conveyed by such a reconfiguring of sweet foodstuffs. It remains in this chapter’s final section to consider to what extent subordinate women, too, in Chopin are able to be innovatory with sweet things, to be their radical users rather than their stultified victims.
“A Morbid Craving for Sweets” Jane Dusselier describes a “regendering of candy” in the United States (29), beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century and hitting a peak during World War I. Whereas in the American past confectionery had been almost exclusively feminized, now manufacturers sought to boost sales to male consumers. Before this
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commercial reorientation could succeed, changes in both the physical and ideological structures of candy were essential. In order to evoke a different bodily symbolism, the shapes of confectionery were redesigned, “the dainty, breast-shaped bonbon” giving way to the phallic lines of “manly candy bars” (34): “Candies were being squeezed, pressed, pulled, and stretched into forms with right angles rather than circular shapes” (36). Culturally, too, confectionery had to be made to signify differently. Instead of connoting feminine pleasure—to the point of inwardness, even narcissism—it was repositioned so as to correspond with prevailing tropes of American masculinity. In particular, it was redefined as an aid to martial prowess. Dusselier shows that from 1899 onward, starting with the U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, eating candy gathered associations of “endurance and power” (40). There are few signs in Chopin’s fiction, however, of such imminent gender wars over candy. At Fault’s drugstore employee who eats caramels and chewing gum is a rare example in her work of an adult—or at least adolescent—male venturing into candy consumption (and note the defeminized shapes of his choice of treat). In general, the eating of confectionery here is gendered exactly in accordance with statistics published in the New York Times in 1899: “Three-fourths of the candy made is consumed by women, and half the other fourth by children, leaving men a pitiable fraction of the total amount” (Dusselier 17). But if women consumed bonbons, bonbons also consumed women, with disturbing similarities in the language of qualities felt most desirable in each. Emerging counterhegemonic tendencies—the physical education movement, say, which contested the “idealization of frail, pale, listless femininity” (Theriot 82)—had to contend with forces that continued to promote American women’s delicacy, refinement, in a word their sweetness. As late as 1909, an article counseling against the use of women in advertising makes an exception for confectionery ads precisely because of this presumption of women’s visual and moral equivalence with what they would be used to sell: “Woman is in her realm here and her smiling countenance will at once give the impression of a sweet, delicate, pure, dainty, luscious and winning bonbon” (Bukey 34). Given this discourse of saccharine femininity, it is suggestive that, nearing the end of her tether in The Awakening, Edna should celebrate gustatory sensations wholly distinct from those produced by bonbons: “Take some of the cress with your chop; it’s so biting and crisp” (644; emphasis added). In rejecting the taste of sweetness, Edna also implicitly repudiates prevailing constructions of the American feminine.
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Not all Chopin’s female characters, however, are as resistant to sweet things. Elsewhere in her fiction, sugary products—especially candy— are persuasive in their feminine appeal and figure among the means of transmission of conservative gender ideology. A few examples are useful in showing the sexual politics not only of candy’s taste itself but also of the rituals surrounding its consumption. In “Charlie,” “a box of chocolate creams” (1,008) passed among female seminarians in New Orleans proves almost as enticing as the title character’s poetry recitation to which they are listening: “ ‘Empty! where are all those chocolates gone?’ ” (1,009). Even more alarming is the description of an affluent young woman “munching caramels” (1,035) in another unpublished story, “The Impossible Miss Meadows.” There is a certain automatism about this woman’s activity, its dull repetition indicating a sensibility unlikely to develop any connection with the impoverished figure of the story’s title. Elsewhere in Chopin, female eating of confectionery may connote a similar mindlessness rather than acuity. Suggestively, in some remarks prompted by her lack of reaction when reading Hardy’s supposedly blasphemous Jude the Obscure (1894–95), Chopin, in the book review “As You Like It,” first chooses an image of—presumably female—candy consumption as a figure for mental passivity: “You will just keep on munching a cream chocolate, or wondering if the postman has gone by or if there is coal in the furnace” (qtd. in Toth 277). Eating confectionery also serves at times in Chopin’s work as a key device for infantilizing women. The demographic distinction cited earlier between American females and children as consumers of candy actually masks their ideological congruence during this period: powerful discourses positioned women as equivalent to children in behavioral repertoire and lack of self-determinacy. It is thus significant for our assessment of The Awakening’s female candy-eaters that the product is from the start thoroughly infantilized: the first chapter shows Léonce Pontellier kissing his four- and five-year-old children and promising “to bring them back bonbons and peanuts” (523). The young Pontelliers exhibit a major candy compulsion throughout the narrative: no sooner have they received “a huge box of bonbons” from Edna (615) than young Raoul writes to his mother, “asking her to send him some bonbons” (640). The children’s evident pleasure in the taste of confectionery invites discussion. Is sweetness as such infantile, a sensation most appropriate to a primitive stage of gustatory evolution? Although work on this question from variously anthropological, ethological, psychological, and biological perspectives is often speculative, plausible links have been made between sweetness
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and infancy. Mintz notes that “there is at least some evidence that fetal behavior is intensified by the presence of sucrose, while human newborns apparently show a clear preference for sweetened liquids” (“Time, Sugar, and Sweetness” 362). Elsewhere, Mintz is properly suspicious of attempts by “[o]ne (male) observer after another” to graft a gendered narrative onto this developmental model and to assert that “women will like sweet things more than men” (Sweetness and Power 150). Yet even if this further proposition of women’s sweetness dependency is dubious science, it has had a damaging social circulation (its currency still apparent today in the iconography of the female “chocoholic”). According to such logic, where women value sweet foods such as candy more highly than men, they exhibit regressive taste preferences and, in effect, resemble children. The problem for Chopin’s female consumers of confectionery is that they thereby perform a kind of self-infantilization and so ensure their continued subservience in a society already materially and culturally weighted against them. At this stage, however, we might develop a more politically positive reading of the seemingly retrograde candy-eating undertaken by Chopin’s women. Although candy’s late-nineteenth-century marketers sought to increase female consumption of their product, they were careful to hedge this about with various proprieties (including the desideratum of sharing confectionery with other women rather than eating alone): “Indulging one’s cravings was appropriate if this activity could be carried out in a disciplined, orderly atmosphere” (Dusselier 22). The figure of the self-indulgent female candy consumer was a familiar phobic construction, the anxieties she caused more cultural than straightforwardly medical. Woloson shows how, as with a linkage between “chronic bonbon eating and novel reading” (137), contemporary discourses associated women’s unregulated candy consumption with other types of apparently harmful private indulgence.4 In the most extreme version of this unease, a female mania for sweetness was conflated with specifically sexual misbehaviors: “Later in the century, when manufacturers began making chocolates and bonbons on a grand scale, advisors’ warnings gained stridency as they clarified the interconnection between food, sexual appetite, self-gratification, and ‘self-pollution’ ” (139). From this perspective, the overindulgent woman candy-eater comes close to masturbatory narcissism and thereby thwarts the prevailing logic of acculturation that has the female subject proceeding smoothly from childish inwardness to dependency on the male other, culminating in marriage.
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Chopin’s fiction itself includes some evidence of the synonymity of female tastes for sweetness and for social insubordination. In “The Godmother,” published in 1901, the eponymous character’s spending “the evening in munching pralines” (934) is prophetic of a social estrangement that leads her to conceal a murder committed by her godson and has her, at the story’s end, located outside circuits of communal exchange: “alone in the corner, under the deep shadow of the oaks while the stars came out to keep her company” (951). If this image of an old woman’s solitude negates any thought that progressive gender realignment has occurred, the story nevertheless jams the machinery of conventional social reproduction. Similarly ambiguous is “The Wanton,” the first part of Chopin’s unpublished diptych-story “Two Portraits.” Here the infant Alberta revels in the indulgent attentions of others, including the gift of “a shower of bonbons” (793); the primal narcissism signified by such sweet excess, however, does not pass but is sustained into the state of young womanhood with which the story ends. This trajectory compares with that of Mildred, niece of the eponymous character in “Miss Witherwell’s Mistake” (1891). Early on, Mildred is remembered by her aunt as “a girl of twelve, afflicted with a morbid craving for sweets, which might have survived her young ladyhood” (684). Initially this seems to be the case: though now a “well mannered young lady of nineteen,” Mildred appears stuck in the phase of narcissistic, oral gratification, “spreading a generous layer of delicious peach jam” on her bread and asking for “another lump of sugar” (684–85). Unlike in “Two Portraits,” however, the narrative apparatus here eventually operates according to normative cultural patterns, and delivers Mildred from the dangerous self-indulgence signified by so much sweetness into the condition of marriage. Given that a problematically intensified and prolonged female liking for sweetness is incarnated in these three cases by a lonely grandmother, a near-psychotic, and a young woman on the point of relinquishing it anyway, we should be careful not to overstate Sugar’s power to unsettle gender norms. Nevertheless, such instances hint, however partially, at one mode of dissent against patriarchal fiat. If Edna in The Awakening challenges saccharine femininity by opting for quite different sensations of the abrasive, these other females in Chopin instead undermine it from within, flaunting an excess of sweetness. The situation is analogous to that identified by Dominick LaCapra in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions (1955). Critical of a society dominated by forgery of all kinds, Gaddis’s novel draws multiple forgeries into itself, to the point where, as LaCapra says, the “line between symptomaticity and resistance is often hard to draw” (189).
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The Recognitions is thus like “the antidote which makes use of the sources of illness in combatting its prevalence and spread, recurrently running the risk of mistaking its object or the right dosage in curing it” (178). Chopin’s narratives of female addiction to sugar are similarly unstable, pushing society’s discourse of sweet femininity very far in the hope of producing a curative excess, but at the same time risking a worsening of the disease. For a final sense of blurring “between symptomaticity and resistance” in Chopin’s fictions of women and sugar, episodes from her best-known novel and one of her most frequently anthologized short stories may be compared. The box of bonbons that Léonce sends in The Awakening transmits, as noted earlier, class and ethnic privilege. It is also, of course, an assertion of gender power: Léonce’s gift implicitly boxes up Edna herself, so that she experiences—in admittedly sensuous form—the logic of patriarchal possession that besets her throughout the text. By contrast, “little” Mrs. Sommers in “A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897) is her own seeker after sweetness. After buying the stockings themselves, she enters a restaurant and aspires, among other treats, to “a something sweet—a crème-frappée, perhaps” (819). It is unwise to celebrate the moment uncritically: like all of Mrs. Sommers’s purchases, the sugary treat locks her into an emerging, female-targeted consumption regime that manifested itself in the department store, the plate-glass display window, and the mail order catalogue. The episode is also fleeting, the merest respite from her straitened life. Nevertheless, there is here a suggestion of sweet female liberty from a patriarchal order evidenced, throughout the story, by our never knowing Mrs. Sommers’s own name. Significant, too, is the later moment when she attends a theatrical performance and, moved by “the tragedy,” is passed a “box of candy” by the equally tearful “gaudy woman next to her” (820). Again, caution is needed: both candy and play may only be elegantly packaged commodities, thoughtlessly consumable by the “brilliantly dressed women” comprising the audience. But at the same time there is female solidarity sealed by the exchange of sweet things. The candy belongs with the onstage spectacle in “a dream,” communicating an experience, however transient, of women’s lives transformed and enriched.
Notes 1. For one, small-scale exception to this rule of critical neglect, see Mary L. Morton. 2. All references to Chopin’s fiction are from Chopin, Complete Novels and Stories.
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3. Cf. Mintz’s warning against reliance upon a consumption- rather than production-led analytic model with respect to sugar: “the meanings people gave to sugar arose under conditions prescribed or determined not so much by the consumers as by those who made the product available” (Sweetness and Power 167). 4. By these criteria, Chopin’s female reader of Jude the Obscure, turning a novel’s pages while “munching a cream chocolate,” sins twice at the same time.
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P o l i t i c s o f S w e e t n e s s i n C h o p i n ’s F i c t i o n
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C on f ron tat ions a n d Neg o t i at ions: Pow e r D y n a m ic s at t h e A m e r ic a n Ta bl e
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Pa rt II
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Wh a l e a s a Dish: Cu l i na ry R h e t or ic a n d t h e D is c ou r se of Pow e r i n M O B Y -D I C K R o b e r t T. Ta l l y J r.
O
n June 29, 1851, on the eve of completing the novel for which he would become famous, Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom the book would be dedicated. “Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this” (Correspondence 197). The metaphor, comparing the writing of Moby-Dick to cooking, is a telling sign of things to come, not just inasmuch as the novel will embroil the reader in the hell-fire of its own oven, but also inasmuch as food and cooking play an integral part in establishing certain themes of the novel as a whole. As Edward Said has put it, Moby-Dick is not about Ishmael, Ahab, or a white whale so much as it is about “the whole world” (369), and included in its impossible comprehensiveness is a subtle and ironic use of food to indicate larger themes. Moby-Dick uses culinary rhetoric to establish its analysis of power relations1 in the nineteenth century, and a reading of Moby-Dick’s dining scenes supplements the study of the novel’s themes. As early as “Loomings,” Ishmael indicates the importance of food and cooking to the maritime world he will describe, ascribing to the ship’s cook “considerable glory [. . .] a cook being a sort of
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Chapter 4
R o b e r t T. T a l l y J r .
officer on ship-board” (5). From the first ominous warnings about Ishmael’s unknown bunkmate Queequeg (“He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare” [15]), to his panegyric to the joys of chowder (“Clam or Cod?” [66]), food carries symbolic value. Melville’s detailed picture of the dining ritual of the officers speaks elegantly of political hierarchy, and the contrasting image of the harpooners’ dinner evokes joyous anarchy. The chapter devoted to “Stubb’s Supper” paints a portrait of the ship’s cook, a ninety-year-old African American, who delivers a sermon to a congregation of sharks, and so makes a point about the genealogy of morals. And, the voracious and all-consuming Moby Dick lies in the background as the figure for the all-consuming power of the inscrutable world system. Food plays a symbolic role in Melville’s novel, constantly grounding the metaphysical elaborations of the substance of whaling in a material or physical plane of understanding. Much has been written about Melville’s Romantic contrast between the heart and the head, but it may be the gut, the gastroenterological system, that best combines the base and the sublime in order to figure forth the ideal, but practical world Moby-Dick depicts. This essay examines the symbolic use of food and cooking in MobyDick, focusing especially on three representative dining scenes. First, I look at Ishmael’s meals taken at the Spouter Inn, and I explore how these simple moments serve a larger argument on the dialectic of civilization and barbarism that animates so much of Melville’s earlier work. The chapter devoted to “Chowder” serves as a conclusion and epilogue to the discourse of cultural difference invoked in the Spouter Inn meals. Second, I analyze the dining rituals described in “The Cabin Table,” a chapter that discloses the subtle yet rigid structure of power on board the Pequod, and that suggests the ways in which political power relations are established and maintained in a democratic society. Finally, I provide a reading of the chapter devoted to “Stubb’s Supper,” in which the ship’s cook is introduced and the genealogy of morals is explored. The three scenes reveal aspects of the novel’s playful analysis of cultural, political, and moral power, and provide productive sites for further exploration.2
Steaks and Dumplings The early sections of Moby-Dick, containing numerous references to food, cooking, and eating, establish a metaphorical context for later meditations on power in the novel. In “Loomings,” Ishmael asserts that he goes to sea for therapeutic reasons, to help him overcome
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his depression (or “hypos”) and to prevent his own suicide (“This is my substitute for the pistol and ball” [3]). After explaining the magic of water, Ishmael announces he always goes to sea as a common sailor, not as a passenger, nor as “a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.” Of the latter office, Ishmael concedes that “there is considerable glory in that, a cook being a sort of officer on ship-board,” but that he does not like cooking himself. In the novel’s first allusion to food, Ishmael adds that although he dislikes cooking, he rather enjoys eating: “I never fancied broiling fowls;—though once broiled, judiciously buttered, and judgmatically salted and peppered, there is no one who will speak more respectfully, not to say reverentially, of a broiled fowl than I will.” As if to emphasize such reverence, Ishmael ends the paragraph by reference to the ancient Egyptians and their own “idolatrous dotings” on broiled ibis in “their huge bake-houses the pyramids” (5). Thus, offhandedly, Melville links simple cooking to the grand and exotic. Such admixture of the commonplace and the remarkable, a practice to which readers of Moby-Dick will soon become accustomed, is a central feature of the novel, which after all tells a remarkable story about a seemingly unremarkable business.3 As Ishmael makes his way to New Bedford, he comes upon The Spouter Inn, where much is made of the food, drink, and general lodging. The chapters that follow introduce Queequeg and explore the quick but heartfelt friendship Ishmael strikes up with him, but in chapter three (“The Spouter-Inn”), Ishmael must spend an anxious evening wondering about his would-be bedfellow. In the meantime, he casts a jaundiced eye on the bartender (a “Jonah,” no less) and enjoys a scrumptious repast of dumplings. The scene is reminiscent of the green young sailor’s first voyage in Redburn (1849), and it touches on Melville’s theme connecting the homey with the wild and unfamiliar. This chapter notoriously begins with a meticulous description of a painting on the wall, which has been identified as (or, at least, associated with) J.M.W. Turner’s painting The Whale Ship (see Wallace, Melville and Turner). The “boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted” (12) establishes a mood for the inn, one that announces a spirit of adventure as well as of danger. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the fare of The Spouter Inn also mixes the common with the dangerous. Ishmael notes that the bartender, who already dispenses “delirium and death,” also cheats the thirsty sailor: “Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without—within, the villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom” (14). This explicit reference to looks being deceiving in
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“The Spouter Inn” serves to introduce the most significant figure of appearance-versus-reality in Moby-Dick: Queequeg himself. After reluctantly agreeing to share a bed with an unknown harpooner, Ishmael takes his seat at the dinner table. “Supper?—you want supper?” asks the landlord, “Supper’ll be ready directly” (14). The first of several dining scenes in Moby-Dick, this scene directly associates food with aspects of culture or human nature. Ishmael is delighted to discover that the meal not only includes meat and potatoes, “but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper!” (14–15), and notes that one young sailor was particularly interested in the fare. When Ishmael asks whether that dumpling enthusiast was to be his bedfellow, the landlord (“looking a sort of diabolically funny”) replies that, no, the harpooner is “a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but steaks, and likes ’em rare” (15). The reference to rare steaks is clearly an inside joke for the innkeeper, but the invocation of cannibalism—a topic simmering ominously just beneath the surface of the plot in Melville’s first two works, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847)—colors the interactions with Queequeg to come. The suggestion is that dumplings are homey, familiar, or what we today call “comfort food,” whereas steaks, especially when rare, are savage, dangerous, and unseemly. Whereas Ishmael had previously accepted his sleeping arrangements with good grace, relying on the landlord’s judgment as to the harpooner’s character, Ishmael becomes thoroughly uneasy once he learns of the eating habits of the “dark complexioned” harpooner. The not-always-clear line between barbarism and civilization might be visible here between the steak and the dumpling. Still before Queequeg appears, the landlord jokes with Ishmael about cannibalism, specifically about whether Ishmael himself might be cooked. When an increasingly anxious Ishmael asks where the harpooner could be at that late hour, the landlord explains that the he must be out unsuccessfully trying to sell his head. Perplexed and offended at the landlord’s quip about the market’s being oversaturated with heads, Ishmael indignantly tells the landlord to stop joking, as he’s “not green.” “Maybe not,” responds the innkeeper, “but I rayther guess you’ll be done brown if that ere harpooner hears you a slanderin’ his head” (18; emphasis in the original). Even in jest, the reference to cannibalism and cooking—the cooking of Ishmael—creates a tone of unease, as the commonplace is forced to mingle with the exotic. In a town where cannibals might sell shrunken heads openly on a Saturday evening, a green sailor might well be cooked brown. The tension established in “The Spouter-Inn” is primarily used to play up the humor in the scene to come. Ishmael’s trepidation
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concerning his mysterious bedfellow turns out to be quite justified, as Queequeg appears to be the wildest and most dangerous person imaginable: a South Seas “cannibal,” covered in tattoos and carrying a perilous-looking harpoon. By morning, however, Ishmael has already accepted Queequeg as a boon companion (and, later, as a “bosom friend” and even spouse). Oddly enough, part of the change in Ishmael’s view of his “savage” companion comes at the same dinner table that had been the scene of his most serious misgivings the night before. In “Breakfast,” Ishmael observes the table manners of the sailors, marveling at how such fearless warriors of the sea seemed so nervous and uneasy in the polite company of a morning breakfast table. All, that is, except Queequeg, who was “as cool as an icicle.” Although he used his harpoon to reach over the heads of his table-mates and spear beefsteaks for his own plate, “that was certainly very coolly done by him, and every one knows that in most people’s estimation, to do anything coolly is to do it genteelly” (30; emphasis in the original). Here, the very behavior that most indicates a lack of good breeding— bringing one’s weapon to the table—becomes the sign of gentility. What’s more, the very foodstuff that had earlier caused anxiety in its suggestion of barbarity or cannibalism is now the simple food of the noble Queequeg, who “eschewed coffee and hot rolls, and applied his undivided attention to beefsteaks, done rare” (30).4 Between dinner and breakfast, Melville has used food and dining to present, then reverse, a cultural anthropology to his unsuspecting readers. Such a transvaluation of values typifies much of Moby-Dick’s dialectic of the familiar and the exotic. The eater of rare steaks becomes as soothingly familiar to Ishmael as any humble dumpling eater ever could. Indeed, the savage becomes a figure for the most domesticated and American symbol of all: “Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed” (50).5 Queequeg’s noble qualities will be highlighted throughout the novel, but Melville’s view goes well beyond the typology of the “noble savage.” Rather, Melville insists on showing how the two sides of the civilization/barbarism dyad are unstable, the result of perspective or cultural myopia, rather than being based upon anything inherent in the societies so labeled. Thus, in “Wheelbarrow,” when Ishmael laughs as Queequeg’s apparently ludicrous ignorance of how wheelbarrows are used, Queequeg responds with an anecdote about a Westerner embarrassing himself at a Kokovoko wedding ceremony by washing his hands in the punch bowl (57). The effect of this is to show that neither culture’s practices are superior to the other’s, and hence that one cannot judge a person based on his culture’s norms with respect to table manners.
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R o b e r t T. T a l l y J r .
Queequeg’s “genteel” use of the harpoon at the breakfast table is hardly less odd than the whalers’ strange silence at the same table. Melville uses culinary rhetoric or the discussion of food to introduce and consolidate the “bosom” friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg, easily the most fully fleshed out human relationship in Moby-Dick. From eating dumplings for dinner to eating beefsteaks for breakfast, the two travel together to Nantucket where they then share chowder together. Chapter fifteen (“Chowder”) may be the high water mark in the culinary discourse of Moby-Dick, and I for one can never read it without developing an intense craving for the stuff.6 When the companions “try pot-luck at the Try Pots,” the proprietress Mrs. Hussey gives them the choice, “Clam or Cod?” The risibly naïve Ishmael grows indignant over the prospect of a mere cold clam for dinner, but the reader anticipates the reality to come: a warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favorite fishy food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we dispatched it with expedition. (66–67)
The loving description of the food is not the only selling point of this chapter. In this panegyric to the hearty stew, we learn that clam chowder is Queequeg’s favorite food (at least, his favorite “fishy” food), notwithstanding the earlier depiction of his monotonous, steak-done-rare diet. It appears that the exotic steak-eater and the homey dumpling-eater come together in the meal that combines aspects of both: fresh seafood (clam or cod) done up with salt pork and ship biscuit (dumpling-like enough). From a twenty-first-century perspective, Melville’s salutary multiculturalism can be expressed in the savory symbol. Chowder functions as the blending of civilized and savage, the meal that the Ishmaels and the Queequegs can enjoy with equal relish. Chowder symbolizes Melville’s highest hopes for a deluded and doomed humanity. And in presenting this simple dining scene, Melville has elided the cultural distinctions that had previously evoked such fear and loathing. But the complex relations of power between and among cultures is but one aspect of the analysis of power presented in Moby-Dick.
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The Cabin Table Between chapters fifteen (“Chowder”) and thirty-four (“The Cabin Table”) there is little reference to food, cooking, or eating. The intervening chapters take Ishmael and Queequeg to the ship and launch them on their whaling journey, introducing the mates and the other harpooners along with Ahab himself. Then, with chapter thirty-two (“Cetology”), Moby-Dick suddenly shifts into what Howard Vincent called “the Cetological center” of the novel. If we accept Vincent’s tripartite division of the novel (narrative beginnings, the cetological center, and a narrative conclusion), we must look at the chapters that follow from “Cetology” all the way up to chapter one hundred and six (“Ahab’s Leg”) as cetological and non-narrative. However, these so-called cetological chapters offer a proliferating array of images that color the plot, especially with respect to the dramatis personae involved. Chapter thirty-four’s dinner-table scene, in which the Captain and his mates, followed by the harpooners, dine, falls in this latter category. The descriptive scene serves the narrative inasmuch as it reveals the characteristics of several main characters and outlines the relations of power among them. As with the early (“narrative”) scenes at The Spouter Inn and the Try Pots, the dining scene reveals more than expected. “It is noon; and Dough-Boy, the steward, thrusting his pale loafof-bread face from the cabin-scuttle, announces dinner to his lord and master [Ahab]” (149). The sudden third-person narration opens a chapter in which first Ahab, the Starbuck, Stubb, and Flask will disappear into a cabin to which the common sailor would not normally gain admission, according to the text.7 The depiction of the dining ritual is detailed and telling. Ahab, the mates, and the harpooners had already been introduced in “Ahab” and the two “Knights and Squires” chapters. Readers are familiar with the “sultanism” of Ahab and his prodigious skills, and the idiosyncrasies of the mates, from Starbuck’s pious dignity to Stubb’s jollity to Flask’s mulish temperament, had also been explored. Melville has also described the whaling industry as surprisingly democratic, even giving credit to whalers for democratizing formerly colonized or oppressed lands in “The Advocate.” And, although Ahab is often described as a tyrant, sultan, czar, or king, Melville wants to insist that his grandiose qualities stem
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The novel famously explores the relations of political power, especially in its depiction of Ahab, the most powerful (human) figure in the novel.
R o b e r t T. T a l l y J r .
largely from his own intelligence, skills, and achievements, rather than from some undemocratic divine right; indeed, the chief purpose of “The Specksynder” is to show that Ahab combined within himself the imperial authority of a ship’s captain with the practical “supremacy” of a highly skilled worker (thus obviating the need for a second commanding officer, a specksynder, on the Pequod). Ahab did not put on the airs of a captain (i.e., he “was the least given to that sort of shallowest assumption”), but he was also not “unobservant of the paramount forms and usages of the sea” (147). So it is that, in “The Cabin-Table,” the rigid hierarchies and quaint formalities are observed when it comes to eating.8 First, the order of seating itself is noted. Not only are the officers seated in order of rank, but the lower ranking officer must wait until his superior has gone down to the cabin before notifying his own subaltern, and so on. Thus, after Dough-Boy announces that dinner is ready, Ahab tells Starbuck before descending; then Starbuck tells Stubb, and Stubb tells Flask. By the time Flask enters the cabin, the others are seated, and “then, independent, hilarious little Flask enters King Ahab’s presence, in the character of Abjectus, or the Slave” (150). Like Ishmael’s observation of the table manners displayed by the seemingly uncouth sailors at The Spouter Inn, a paragraph exults in showing how humble even a proudly rambunctious upstart behaves at the dinner table; the host in turn becomes, like Ahab, supreme lord and master over his dinner guests. “Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar” (150). The imperial Ahab, first to be seated, also takes command of the serving. Each officer waits his turn to be served, as Ahab carves the meat and metes it out to the others. Although not forbidden, Flask in particular would not presume to serve himself, and denied himself even butter, perhaps feeling that his low rank did not entitle him to such a luxury. “[H]owever it was, Flask alas! was a butterless man” (151). Flask is trebly cursed, it seems, as the order of the seating is strictly observed in reverse at meal’s end. As the last officer to sit, Flask must also be the first to rise, so “Flask’s dinner was badly jammed in point of time” (151). As soon as Stubb shows signs of finishing his meal, Flask must return to the deck, as “it is against holy usage” for the second mate to precede the third. Thus, Flask admitted that since being promoted to the ranks of the officers he has always been hungry, and he often longs for the leisurely meals taken before the mast in his youth. By observing these “usages” strictly, the officers reinforce the hierarchical power relations operating on the ship. The dinner scene both symbolizes and consolidates Ahab’s authority. Although there is never any question of who is in charge aboard
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the Pequod, one wonders why someone, especially Starbuck, does not resist Ahab’s authority to save the ship and its crew. “The CabinTable” provides a clue. The deference with which Starbuck takes his meals and eats is itself a sign of how he functions with the network of power relations on the ship. It is not simply that he holds a lower rank (all would-be mutineers would); rather, Starbuck and the other mates have embraced the role, have consented to the structures of power that determine their position and functioning. Starbuck “received his meat as though receiving alms; and cut it tenderly; and a little started if, perchance, the knife grazed against the plate; and chewed noiselessly; and swallowed it, not without circumspection” (150–51). It seems unlikely that this Starbuck would willingly defy his commanding officer. By the time we see Starbuck’s objections to Ahab’s plan uttered in “The Quarter-Deck,” we already know that they will be ineffectual. And, later, when Starbuck is unable to bring himself to shoot Ahab (“The Musket”), we are also not surprised. A man whose willful deference is such that he disdains the sound of knife on plate is most unlikely to lead a rebellion. The depiction of the officers’ meal in “The Cabin-Table” offers a dramatization of the political hierarchy on the Pequod, and it might be deemed an apt figure for Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Famously, Gramsci argued that hegemony in society combined force with consent, but that consent is essential. Similarly, as “The Specksynder” states and “The Cabin-Table” stages, Ahab’s authority over the mates and the crew is not simply his position as dictator or his legal authority to punish them, but it has much to do with the way the subaltern embraces the system of authority. When effective, as Raymond Williams has explained, hegemony becomes so naturalized within the social body as to constitute reality itself, “a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives” (110). The same hegemony that makes Ahab the indomitable leader of the Pequod on its doomed quest also functions in the micropolitics (as Foucault might say) of the dinner table. Thus, although “Ahab never forbade him,” Flask will not serve himself nor “presume to help himself to butter” (“The Cabin-Table” 151). Thus too will Starbuck eat in deferential silence and shrink from the unpalatable task of resisting Ahab’s authority on deck as well as below. The hegemony dramatized in the dinner scene underscores the relations between Ahab and his mates and serves to make clear why what happens in “The Quarter-Deck” and subsequent chapters unfolds the way it does. The second half of the chapter depicts the
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rather different scene at the same table. Whereas the mates’ “cabin meals were somehow solemn meals, eaten in awful silence” (151), the harpooners seated themselves afterward and enjoyed a raucous Saturnalia of a repast, with “entire care-free and ease” and “almost frantic democracy,” in which they “chewed their food with such a relish that there was a report to it” (152). Terrorizing poor Dough-Boy by mock-threatening to carve him up, the harpooners are also nobly savage in their meals, dining “like lords” with “portentous appetites” (152). The picture calls to mind Queequeg’s use of the harpoon to spear beefsteaks at The Spouter Inn, and it performs a similar function in this part of the novel: to contrast the savage’s table manners with those of his civilized counterparts. As in The Spouter Inn, Melville wants to bring both the barbaric and the civilized together (at the same table, as it were), but he also indicates the different relations among the ship’s company; to wit, the rigid hierarchy of the civilized officers and the raucous egalitarianism among the savage harpooners. The entire dinner romance ends with a brief third act: after the awful silence of the mates’ meal and the frantic democracy of the harpooners’, “The Cabin-Table” concludes by noting that the harpooners and mates are but visitors to the cabin, which remains the isolated domain of Ahab, the “last of the Grisly Bears,” feeding on his own gloom. The lasting image of Ahab’s lone, figurative meal underscores the supreme power of the novel—nature itself.
The Cook’s Sermon The cook—whose office had “considerable glory,” according to the Ishmael of “Loomings”—makes his first appearance in chapter sixty-four (“Stubb’s Supper”). The first-time reader may be shocked to see that the cook is a ninety-year-old black man, originally from “the Roanoke country,” who has apparently spent his entire life at sea (although he passed a church in Cape-Town once). Like so many of Melville’s “isolatoes,” the cook is eccentric. He is summoned to center stage by Stubb, who wishes to register a complaint about the quality of the whale-steak he’d just been served. “Stubb’s Supper” is the culmination of a number of chapters detailing the practice of whaling and, ultimately, the capture of a whale. Stubb’s excitement over killing a whale is heightened by his desire for a whale steak, or, as Melville puts it, “he was intemperately fond of the whale as a flavorish thing to his palate” (292). In the subsequent chapter, “Whale as a Dish,” Melville will vouch for Stubb’s good taste and for the propriety of eating the same substance used to fuel lamps. But “Stubb’s
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Supper” is most notable for the introduction of Fleece, the old cook, his sermon to the sharks, and his interactions with Stubb. Stubb ostensibly calls the cook out to upbraid him for overcooking the steak. At the end of the chapter, Stubb explains the proper way to cook whale steak: “Hold the steak in one hand, and show a live coal to it with the other; that done, dish it” (297).9 Fleece, already unhappy with being ordered out of bed to cook at the “unseasonable hour,” is ordered to deliver a sermon to the sharks that are feasting on the whale carcass below. In a parody of preachers (and perhaps of Father Mapple in particular), Fleece launches into a sermon, delivered in Melville’s own version of African-American vernacular. “Fellowcritters: I’se ordered here to say dat you must stop dat dam noise dare. You hear? Stop dat smackin’ ob de lip! Massa Stubb say dat you can fill your dam bellies up to de hatchings, but by Gor! You must stop dat dam racket!” Melville satirizes the missionaries once again in suggesting that sharks can be converted by Christian teachings. Like Nietzsche, the old cook seems to understand that the essence of Christianity lies in self-abnegation. He acknowledges that sharks are “by natur wery woracious,” but he argues that “to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint.” If the sharks can control their voracious natures, they could become angels, “for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned” (295). Fleece goes on to say that the bigmouthed sharks might spare some extra whale-meat for the smaller ones who cannot help themselves, a sentiment that draws approving words from Stubb. Stubb then asks Fleece to give the closing benediction: “Cussed fellow-critters! Kick up de damndest row as ever you can; fill your dam’ bellies ‘till dey bust—and den die” (295). The sermon over, Stubb becomes restaurant critic once more, demanding that Fleece taste the steak to prove that it is overcooked. To Stubb’s chagrin, Fleece finds it the “Best cooked ’teak I eber taste; joosy, berry joosy” (296). Stubb takes this for “a dreadful lie,” and demands to know where a Christian cook thinks he will go for such a sin. “ ‘Go to bed berry soon,’ mumbled, half-turning as he spoke.” When Stubb explains that he meant the place Fleece will go after death, the old cook says that an angel will come, fetch him, and take him “up dere” (pointing upward). Stubb then taunts Fleece about wanting to climb to the main-top when he dies, a parody of heaven. His metaphor of the easy route to heaven—climbing through the lubber’s hole rather than upon the more dangerous main rigging—is accompanied by another humiliation of the cook, forcing the cook to stand at attention while taking Stubb’s orders. After Stubb’s maltreatment, criticizing his cooking and his religious beliefs, the cook
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gets the final words of the chapter: “ ‘Wish, by gor! whale eat him, ’stead of him eat whale. I’m bressed if he ain’t more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,’ muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock” (297). Melville’s mock sermon subtly lampoons Christian piety—the editors of the British edition of Moby-Dick excised Stubb’s approving “that’s Christianity!” (295) comment—while also introducing the conflict between nature and morality. Both Ahab and Moby Dick represent the pivotal figures of this antagonism, but here we find an example in the shark and his counterpart, the angel. All are inherently sinful but may, through the cleansing or suppressing of that nature, be saved. The cook’s view that angels are merely “sharks well goberned” speaks to this. By denying their own nature, governing the instincts, the evil sharks can become the very embodiments of goodness. But, of course, this is also an absurdity, as the cook’s “benediction” asserts. As with Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, the basis for what is good or evil involves a particular perspective with regard to the object. The sharks are simply being sharkish, and, like Nietzsche’s birds of prey, though they may be labeled evil by the lamb-like humans, their own sense of morality cannot be governed by the same view.10 In “The Shark Massacre,” Queequeg notes that whatever God made the shark, “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god” (302) was very powerful. Although the cook acknowledges that an angel is just a well-governed shark, he readily believes that an angel will take him “up dere” to heaven when he dies. The cook’s final malediction, asserting that Stubb may be “more of shark dan Massa Shark hisself,” is a telling critique (Melville calls it a “sage ejaculation”). He who purports to know the way to heaven becomes the greater evil. The question of sin, morality, and salvation presented in this chapter is not to be taken seriously, of course, but the same question appears with greater pathos elsewhere. In “The Symphony,” for example, Ahab wonders whether he has any agency at all or whether, like the sharks and Nietzsche’s creatures, he proceeds according to his nature. If the latter, then there is no objective basis for morality. “Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? [. . .] Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?” (545). Ahab’s accession to fate calls into question the metaphysics of morality entirely, even as his all-consuming quest for the whale is stirred by the inscrutability of the white whale’s malice (see “The QuarterDeck” 164). It does not matter, in the end, whether the whale is good or evil; it matters only that the whale can be understood.
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Stubb’s digestion of the whale, even if overcooked, is much simpler. The hell-fire in which the entire novel is cooked permeates even these dining scenes, and points to the seemingly deeper topics Melville tried to explore in his own thought. The largely superficial distinctions between human cultures that often lead to tragic results was a lifelong concern of Melville’s. So too was the meditation on the interplay between authority and democratic practice, between governance and egalitarianism, that lay at the foundation of the American political experiment. And the metaphysical underpinnings of a moral life—including the contrast between nature or fate and the problem of the will—obsessed Melville. Even in these unassuming little scenes around a plate or bowl, Melville could not forget the profound questions to which he devoted so much intellectual energy. As with so much else about Moby-Dick, a mere “fin of the whale” provides sustenance for a prolonged study of the world.
Notes 1. In examining “power relations,” I am thinking of Foucault’s usage (especially in Discipline and Punish), where power is understood to be capillary, diffuse, and productive of reality. In other words, power is understood as permeating the most micropolitical levels of social and biological relations, rather than a force imposed from the outside. Seemingly invisible at times, such power relations have the most profound effects. As Foucault aptly noted, “The abrupt increase in quantities of proteins consumed by a population is, in a sense, much more significant than a change in constitutions or the transition from monarchy to a republic” (“Return” 429). Sidney W. Mintz has written on the relations between food and power, noting the ways in which changes in diet are both productive of, and produced by, structural relations of power and meaning. Mintz shows how dramatic changes in diet have transformative effects on a more general system, while also being caused by the systemic conditions: “[I]t is easy to see how structural or tactical (or organizational) power aligns the institutional frameworks that set the terms by which people get food, maintain or change their eating habits, and either perpetuate their eating arrangements and the associated meanings, or build new systems, with new meanings, into those arrangements” (Tasting 29). These underlying relations of power in culinary and dining practices are visible in the cultural, political, and moral implications of the three “dining scenes” in Moby-Dick that I will examine. 2. Beyond the scope of this essay is the topic of cannibalism, and much has been written on the subject of cannibalism and power constructs in Typee. Recent contributions include Samuel Otter’s analysis of
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Th e D i s c ou r s e of Pow e r i n MOBY-D IC K
R o b e r t T. T a l l y J r .
3.
4.
5.
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cannibalism in Typee as a mere “escape” from the far more horrifying taboo of body-marking or tattooing (17–20) and Geoffrey Sanborn’s notion that cannibalism serves as a counterhegemonic practice used to ward off imperialists (33). Mark Edelman Boren, while not focusing on eating or cannibalism directly, notes that Melville uses these images to produce an alternative epistemology in the figure of Ahab, one that thwarts the Ishmael-centered system of meaning, as Ishmael cannot comprehend “this plethoric cannibalistic venture” (10). Compare Hawthorne’s culinary metaphor in his own mixing of the realistic and the fantastic in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851): “He [the Romance-writer] will be wise [. . .] to mingle the Marvellous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as any portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the Public” (1). Using Lévi-Strauss’s ideas about the raw (or natural) versus the cooked (or civilized), one could venture to say that Queequeg craves the raw/ natural meat. However, as Melville complicates dichotomies, one can not simply attribute “natural” or uncivilized qualities to Queequeg, as he turns out to be the most civilized of all. Jonathan Arac has pointed out that one of the features of personal narrative, a genre into which these early chapters of Moby-Dick seem to fit, is the integration of exotic experience into the more familiar fabric of the American national narrative. “A generic appeal of personal narratives in their time and since is their registration of what seems a more archaic way of life, a virtual past achieved by travel in space rather than in time, but from the perspective of a narrator who is, like the readership, part of the modern world, making contact with that ‘other’ world and transforming it while integrating it. Personal narratives may act thereby to colonize places and kinds of experience, which are then appropriated into national narrative” (77). Queequeg’s Washingtonian nobility seems to be an extreme example of this. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald note that chowder—perhaps the emblematic dish of New England—was actually an international hodgepodge of culinary influences. “Dip your ladle into the history of New England chowder, and you are apt to come up with French, English, Basque, and Celtic fishermen, medieval European cooks, a reversal in popularity between fish and seafood [sic], perhaps a few Indian elements, and even one ingredient—the potato—that traveled from the New World to the Old and back again before arriving in the chowder pot via Scots-Irish immigrants” (95). In a sense, then, chowder prefigures the multinational diversity of the Pequod, as well as the multiformal and polyglossic diversity of the text of Moby-Dick itself; as Evert Duyckinck noted in a contemporary review, the novel is “an intellectual chowder of romance, philosophy, natural history, fine writing, bad sayings” (403).
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7. In “The Specksynder,” we are told that the captain, his mates, and the harpooners are quartered near the captain’s cabin and have the privilege of dining there; common sailors remain in the fore of the whaling ship (147). 8. As Susan Williams makes clear, an almost unconscious codification of table manners emerges in the nineteenth century, as middle- and even working-class diners began to adhere to, sometimes unspoken, rules of etiquette that had previously been observed only among the elite (see Savory Suppers, chapter two). Williams makes no mention of Moby-Dick, but the hierarchical structure of the mates’ dining experience comports with the Victorian sensibilities and social rank. 9. Readers are undoubtedly amused to see that, notwithstanding Stubb’s criticism of the cooking job, nearly every sentence uttered during his conversation with the cook is punctuated with his eating another mouthful. 10. “That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: ‘these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?’ there is no reason to find fault with this intuition of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: ‘we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb’ ” (Nietzsche 44–45).
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Th e D i s c ou r s e of Pow e r i n MOBY-D IC K
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C at h a r i n e Be e c h e r, H a r r i e t E . Wil son, a nd Domest ic Discomfort at t h e Nort h e r n Ta bl e Marie Drews
In 1834, George Bourne, a Presbyterian abolitionist living in
Baltimore, published Picture of Slavery in the United States of America, including a series of eleven “engravings [to] illustrate slavery as it may now be seen” (7; emphasis in the original).1 The images of slave auctions and slave beatings extended Bourne’s antislavery agenda and invited Northern readers to consider the sites where the “peculiar institution” was made visible in antebellum America. The third image invited readers to the dinner table: a wealthy white mother and father sit at opposite ends of an oval table; a young woman who looks to be their daughter is seated on one side, two younger sons on the other. In the foreground, a young black servant offers tea to the mother, and a second black servant appears in the background between the father and his sons (facing 91).2 Pointedly titled “Family Amalgamation Among the Men-Stealers,” the picture is included to illuminate and critique racial mixing, specifically miscegenation, which, Bourne argues, “destroy[s] all feminine purity and domestic confidence,” as one of the worst fallouts of slavery (92). It is around the dinner table, Bourne’s illustration suggests, that “amalgamation” takes its fiercest toll.
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Chapter 5
Marie Drews
When Harriet E. Wilson published Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in 1859, she reset Bourne’s Southern dinner scene twenty-five years later in, as the book’s extended title suggests, “a two story white house, North,” where “slavery’s shadows” were not expected to fall. Our Nig tells the story of Frado, a biracial child abandoned by her white mother and left as a servant to the Bellmont family. By relaying Frado’s miserable experiences of servitude, experiences akin to those shared in slave narratives, Wilson questions the idealized vision of life for African Americans in the “free” North, yet she also shares distinct moments in which Frado is able to resist her abusive situation. One of these moments takes place after Frado is invited to the family table to partake of her meals by James, the Bellmonts’ son. Mrs. Bellmont, who opposed her son’s wishes, is livid and instructs Frado to take the dirty plate she had already eaten from. Showing subversive compliance, Frado has her dog lick Mrs. Bellmont’s plate clean before proceeding to eat her meal. Frado is beaten for her actions, but her antics clearly highlight her refusal to accept without question Mrs. Bellmont’s demands. Rather than remaining as the submissive servant in Bourne’s illustration, Frado, the amalgamated child, sits down at the table and makes a ruckus. She is not invited to the Bellmont table again. The implications of the dinner table scene extend beyond the immediate action of the narrative to illustrate the inconsistencies of Northern practices at the local level. Juxtaposing nineteenth-century conversations about the aesthetics of the table most commonly held in domestic manuals with antislavery campaigns’ symbolic dinner table rhetoric enlivens an investigation of domestic expectations and dinner table comportment as they play out in Bourne’s illustration, and more importantly, Frado’s dinner table mischief. The domestic manuals of Catharine Beecher, in particular, provided widely adhered-to prescriptions for how to run the American home and emphasized that a woman’s maintenance of systematic order in her household and at her table would sustain the well-being of the national community. Wilson recognizes the appropriate practices of the dinner table, and while she writes Frado as a resistant servant, she does so to illustrate how it is Mrs. Bellmont’s violations of domestic principles and appropriate manners, not Frado’s, that defile the Bellmonts’ table and, through association, the ideal vision of life in the North. Likewise, Frado’s biracial identity raises the issue of how racial politics will influence a practicable philosophy of domestic management in the North following the legacy of slavery. Ultimately, Wilson uses Frado’s dinner table disobedience
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Figure 5.1 George Bourne’s “Family Amalgamation among the Men-Stealers” was published in Picture of Slavery in the United States in 1834 (facing 91).
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Setting the Table: Symbol, Rhetoric, and Domestic Aesthetics It is not surprising that Bourne and Wilson place their characters around the dinner table, for not only was the table considered a centerpiece of domestic and family life, but it was also considered a site suggestive of civil, diplomatic interaction—all associations that cultivated the table as a rich symbolic locale that could be employed for a variety of rhetorical purposes. America’s national religious sensibility embraced the unifying vision of the Lord’s Table as a prescriptive notion for how the American table might be conceptualized in public culture—namely, as a space open and accepting of all. The usefulness of the table as a space of figurative communion was often overshadowed by the fact that the table also served as a site of invitation-only groupings that defined social and political structures. Margaret Visser suggests that while the table is an emblematic site of “bonding” and familiarity “common to every human society,” it is a highly politicized locale that often serves as a space of “ethnocentric” organization (83), for not all are invited. Historian Massimo Montanari argues that with increasing class disparities and social stratification, the table becomes not a space of “social cohesion centred on the leader, but rather one of separation and exclusion: a few were invited to participate; the rest were left to watch” (92). To invite or to be invited to the table—which, as Visser notes, was to be privy to a “gesture of intimacy,” especially when invited to the family table (83)—served as a socially important display, and thus, the table’s ordering and arrangement demonstrated intrinsic hierarchies. Within the context of antebellum anxiety over slavery, the space of the table, particularly when associated with a shared meal, was used as a rhetorical tool on the part of abolitionist speakers and writers as they critiqued systems of inclusion and exclusion. In March of 1835, a writer for the Anti-Slavery Record implicated the church as a silent participant in the workings of American slave industry for “it embraces in its bosom slaveholders of all sorts,” “abstains from reproof,” and “in its most solemn assemblies, slaveholders are mingled and sit down together at the table of the same Lord” (“What has the Church to Do with Slavery?”). Angelina Grimké (here adding her married name, Weld) concentrated not on the threat of Christian equanimity among abolitionists and slaveholders suggested by Lord’s Table language but asserted that access to a table at which to eat and commune with
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to illustrate the inevitable domestic discomfort the realization of a shared Northern table would require.3
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others was a human right denied to slaves. In an 1838 testimony, she deplores not only slaves’ scant meals but that “[n]o table is provided for them to eat from. They know nothing of the comfort and pleasure of gathering round the social board” (52). Providing a counterimage, Frederick Douglass commented on the slaveholder’s table as a site of excess that took on its own organizational framework, wherein those seated at the table assessed the meaning of its bounteous feast far differently than those responsible for the feast’s preparation. In My Bondage, My Freedom (1855), Douglass writes that his master’s “table groans under the heavy and blood-bought luxuries gathered with pains-taking care, at home and abroad” (190), yet when “[v]iewed from his own table, and not from the field, the colonel was a model of generous hospitality” (192).4 For abolitionist writers to illustrate scenes where African Americans—freed, enslaved, or in positions of servitude—were invited to the table spoke of the possibilities of a free society. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s George Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) first feels visible in his newfound liberation experience when he is invited to join Rachel Halliday and her family for dinner at the Quaker settlement; it marked “the first time that ever George had sat down on equal terms at any white man’s table” (122).5 Douglass uses his own inclusion at the table to illustrate the promising character of the North, a place where he “dine[s] at the same table—and no one is offended” (My Bondage 374); and later in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1893) he recognizes that it was “by no means an insignificant” act for Chief Justice Chase to invite him to “his home and his table when to do so was a strange thing in Washington” (800). In the recently discovered text The Bondwoman’s Narrative (~1850), Hannah Crafts illustrates a scene of welcome and human interaction at a shared table. Hannah, the text’s protagonist, receives respite at the table of Frederick Hawkins and his wife, a white couple, early during her travels northward out of slavery with her ailing mistress. “And, when the table was spread we all sat down together,” Crafts writes, noting that “[i]t was not such a board as [she was] accustomed to see spread at my master’s house”—namely, a board of “luxurious habits” and “epicurean fantasy” similar to that Douglass saw exhibited on his master’s table. At the Hawkins’ table, Hannah saw only a “frugal repast” of “white bread and golden butter, some cherries fresh from the tree, and sweet milk” (60–61). The dinner offers a firsthand had experience of the “quiet air of domestic happiness” Hannah sensed upon her arrival at the home (59). While the table served as a figurative rhetorical site employed for political purposes, within the context of nineteenth-century domestic
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Beecher, Wilson, a nd the Norther n Ta bl e
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space, it was also endowed with an important aesthetic significance. In her 1852 manual The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery, Sarah Josepha Hale writes, “The TABLE, if wisely ordered, with economy, skill and taste, is the central attraction of HOME” (iii). Because of the table’s synonymy with the home, as suggested by Hale’s capitalization, the attention paid to its care on the part of a mistress and her servants was of paramount importance. This was especially true following the lengthy invective of Carl Benson called “Table Aesthetics,” published in the Knickerbocker in 1848, who sees the care of the table, in behavior and consumption, as a marker of civility. “It is notorious that the most barbarous nations, those among whom table-aesthetics, as well as other arts, have made the least progress, are the most voracious feeders” (292). To secure the order, economy, taste, and skill of one’s home secured order, economy, taste, and skill within the nation, and thus, allowed women to support nationalist aims outside the home. Amy Kaplan argues in line with Benson that “conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery” and thus factor into nation building (582). The table, then, and its requisite management operates in domestic manuals and fiction as a prime site for differentiating the civil from the savage; likewise, considering who is invited to the table and who is disallowed offers a useful gauge of how dominant nineteenth-century culture made this distinction.6
Convenience and Comfort at Catharine Beecher’s Table Catharine Beecher took particular interest in prescribing techniques for household workers’ care of the table with the intention that appropriately placed plates and utensils as well as servants and guests made domestic comfort possible. In her 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, Beecher goes into great length outlining rules for setting and waiting on the table (353–56), table manners (129), and the management of servants in relation to the table (201–202). She commends the practices of establishing order at the table and teaching good manners as those that would allow a mistress the possibility of cultivating a properly functioning American home. Along the same lines as Carl Benson’s touted table aesthetics, Beecher writes, “if good-manners are the outward exhibition of the democratic fundamental principle of impartial benevolence and equal rights, surely the nation that adopts this rule, both in social and civil life, is the most likely to secure the desirable exterior” (132). It was important for Beecher to acknowledge that
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within a democracy, consistent practice of good manners was essential across class groups, for while “[t]he aristocrat . . . extends the exterior of impartial benevolence to his own class only; the democratic principle requires it to be extended at all” (132; emphasis in the original). That Beecher’s theories of home and table care were met with such popularity—as early as 1843 it was in use as a home economics manual in Massachusetts schools, and by 1856 the book was in its fifteenth printing and its third edition (Sklar 305n1)—suggested that not only her philosophy, but her social persona specifically, served to direct American women in their domestic managerial pursuits. Beecher affirmed the rhetoric of democracy and advocated the possibility of social elevation, yet she saw that facilitating the manufacture of a “desirable exterior” required that gradations of power within the home be clearly articulated. This was particularly important in regards to how a mistress would preside over those working within her home. To explain, she took readers to the table: just as the table must be properly set, so too must the role and position of all the people in the home be properly defined. Beecher is adamant that “in all classes, different grades of subordination must exist” and provides a rationale: “domestics use a different entrance to the house, and sit at a distinct table, not because they are inferior beings, but because this is the best method of securing neatness and order and convenience” (201). It is important that Beecher chooses to reference the dinner table to explain the maintenance of hierarchies, especially following the rhetorical valuation of the shared table as emblematic of freedom in the North. She argues that many domestics exhibit “pride, insubordination, and a spirit not conformed to their condition,” and thus in some places they desire to “claim a seat, at meals, with the family.” If the mistress is to maintain a power structure that affirms her management role, however, Beecher argues that this is one of many “evils” that must be “met and remedied” (200), for such “experiment[s]” had produced failed results: “although the domestic was treated with studious politeness and kindness, she soon felt that she should be much more comfortable in the kitchen, where she could talk, eat, and dress, as she pleased” (201). Beecher attributes the domestic’s discomfort to her intrusion on the family’s ability to “talk freely of their private affairs,” hindered “by the constant presence of a stranger” (202; emphasis added). Certainly, the domestic was a stranger, not only for lack of shared bloodline but also because her class, ethnicity, or, as we consider Frado, race set her apart as the “other” within the household. If the domestic became too comfortable within the home,
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Beecher, Wilson, a nd the Norther n Ta bl e
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Beecher notes, she might act out, her “manners and address [becoming] rude and disrespectful” (200). When Beecher refers to the domestic class, it is important to iterate that she speaks of the large numbers of white and white ethnic women taking on domestic service roles. Beecher explains early in her Treatise that it is the “poverty-stricken foreigners” who fill the need for domestics “in the non-slaveholding states” (17). She advocates such stringent rules for these domestics because she believes they need to learn their place within the domestic hierarchy, a process that is challenging for those who associated the risks of “the term servant” with “nearly the same as those of a slave,” as well as those who had been “trained to abhor servitude . . . as the greatest of all possible shame and degradation” (200). Aware of the connotations of her language, Beecher alludes to the “care” of household workers rather than their governance or management—and, she uses the word “domestic,” not “servant” (Treatise 207). Faye E. Dudden explains the shifting social and economic values in the North precipitated this distinction among serving classes (5), and although both the “hired girl” or “help” or “servant” and the “domestic” were paid for their duties, a domestic’s duties were more concretely defined and required both a “more stringent work discipline” (7) and a wish to serve that hinged on filling an economic need (8). In spite of the domestic worker population Beecher had in mind when writing her Treatise, she sought first and foremost to train mistresses as efficient and capable household managers—for a mistress is ultimately responsible for the well-being of her home. Beecher is intimately concerned with the appropriate behavior of the mistress, and stresses that because American women face “great hazards and difficulties” (15), including the possibility that a domestic could always leave her post, such challenges required the mistress to monitor her own behavior. Beecher stresses “patience, fortitude, and selfcontrol” (197), and calls the mistress to be consistent in her practice in order to maintain her authority. When she writes in her Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism (1837) that it was a woman’s responsibility to advocate social reform through “exercis[ing] their moral influence in the home,” Beecher calls upon household managers to act nobly and demonstrate equal treatment as a means to supporting antislavery efforts (White 16); for Northern mistresses, this position rejected any cruel or harsh treatment of domestic workers. Through “the manifestation of a friendly and benevolent interest in [her domestic’s] comfort and improvement” a mistress could ensure a worker who would be loyal and respectful (Treatise 199). Regarding a mistress’s
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behavior, in all cases, “it [was] certainly very unlady-like, and in very bad taste, to scold” (154). In her summary of Beecher’s domestic philosophy, Kathryn Kish Sklar explains that for Beecher the American home was “a universally experienced institution recognizing no economic, political, or regional boundaries,” and that the “language of domesticity” could “more easily be universalized than any single dialect of class or region or age” (158). Thus, as Beecher worked from this ideological belief in the existence of “home,” founded on tenets of human equality and freedom and the possibility of comfort and benevolence for all, her delineations for the care of domestics were envisioned, at least rhetorically, as seamlessly transferable across class, ethnic, and racial lines. Yet, as home was defined across regions, this idealism was met with real-life experiences of classism and racism (both toward white ethnics and African Americans) that were neither universal nor receptive to Beecher’s “language of domesticity” in the same manner. Given the popularity of Beecher’s text it is necessary to consider what its directives suggested to those Northern readers who, following the idealism of the Northern table and anticipating the possibility of emancipation, might find themselves coming into community with or employing black and non-white domestics. For these readers, Beecher’s prescriptions of home management and dinner table politics, which required compulsory stratification as a means to achieve domestic comfort, were read within the context of separatism and fear of amalgamation that Bourne illustrated. Out of such a context, Beecher’s call for domestic stratification, even as it was intended nobly, allowed for the rationalization of decidedly un-democratic and exploitative situations of servitude, especially as racism remained active even within the homes of those supporting antislavery measures. Harriet Wilson recognized this possibility and communicated her foresight accordingly. Lois Leveen reads Our Nig as “an indication, a fictional prediction and condemnation, of the conditions of African Americans in the post-slavery society that, by the time of Our Nig’s publication in 1859, many Americans believed was rapidly approaching” (563). Wilson’s narrative illustrated a shattering reality for Northern readers who viewed this “post-slavery” society with the optimism of Frederick Douglass’s shared dinner table experiences. Reading Beecher’s manual prescriptions alongside Wilson’s Our Nig exemplifies the impracticability—and, for the battered Frado, absurdity—of realizing Beecher’s ideal vision of domestic comfort in such a Northern climate. Yet, Wilson’s understanding of the necessity of domestic prescriptions allows her to make an especially biting
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critique that the failure of the American home in the North was due to the inefficiencies of household manager, not her domestic.
In Our Nig, Wilson interprets one reality of Northern domestic servitude in the free North, substituting a “not very black” child into a role that had at one time been occupied by a white ethnic laborer (25)— Frado is “thrust” (26) upon the Bellmonts just after Bridget leaves (28). Through the interactions of Frado and Mrs. Bellmont, Wilson illuminates a relationship between a domestic and a mistress counterintuitive to the aim of domestic management befitting Beecher’s vision.7 Wilson’s critique takes place most vividly at the table, for it is here that several violations occur: not only is a household servant present at the dinner table, but the aesthetics of the table are upset. Frado is first invited to the dinner table by James, the elder son with whom she shares a sympathetic relationship. Upon his return to the Bellmont household following illness, he is adamant that Frado eat at the table after the family is finished: “I’m determined,” he tells his mother, “she is going to sit down here, and eat such food as we eat” (68; emphasis in the original). Prior to this invitation, Frado “was told to eat, standing, by the kitchen table, and must not be over ten minutes about it”; she breakfasted on a “bowl of skimmed milk, with brown bread crusts” (29), harkening Weld’s table remonstrance. Mrs. Bellmont “feared to oppose” James’s demand for “she knew she could not prevail” and replied with only “[a] few sparks from [her] black eyes” as James stayed at the table while Frado ate (68). Wilson does not state how many times Frado dined at the Bellmont table before she is subject to Mrs. Bellmont’s authority and behaves defiantly. Frado’s episode of defiance as summarized at the start of this essay takes place in the following manner. Frado had “seated herself in her mistress’ chair, and was just reaching for a clean dessert plate which was on the table,” when Mrs. Bellmont entered: “Put that plate down; you shall not have a clean one; eat from mine,” continued she. Nig hesitated. To eat after James, his wife or Jack, would have been pleasant; but to be commanded to do what was disagreeable by her mistress, because it was disagreeable, was trying. Quickly looking about, she took the plate, called Fido to wash it, which he did to the best of his ability; then, wiping her knife and fork on the cloth, she proceeded to eat her dinner. (71; Emphasis in the original)
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For Frado, joining the table by James’ admission seems to allow her access to the potential empowerment of inclusion. She chooses to sit in her mistress’s chair, the most powerful seat at the table, and from there, she reaches for a clean dessert plate. That Wilson identifies the plate as such is telling: Frado affords herself a dish that suggested indulgence. When she refuses to eat from Mrs. Bellmont’s plate, she exercises selective resistance and her own civil judgment. Frado knew that to eat off of a dirty plate was “disagreeable,” and thus she appeals to her dog to “wash” her plate first. She “wip[es] her knife and fork on the cloth,” thereby cleaning her silverware, and takes of her supper. Certainly Frado’s move to have her dog lick her plate is comedic and indicative of unacceptable table behavior. Yet, that Frado involves Fido in her dinner table mischief recalls references that related dogs to both laughable service and demonstrations of opposition. In a popular short anecdote called “Household Service of a Dog” that appeared in several humor columns an urchin explains that his dog “saves heaps of work”—“he always licks the plates and dishes so clean, that they never want washing” and is not to be parted with on accounts that the “new dog aint got used to mustard yet” (“Household Service”). The joke that a dog might wash the dishes as Fido is called to do is codified as a more serious act in a short story called “The Embroidered Vest” run in Ballou’s Dollar Monthly in 1857. At one point in the story, a Frenchman offers his “mortal enemy,” the Spaniard, the “gesture” of taking “a place at the table” to eat. “By way of reply, the Spaniard pointed to the empty dish and gave it to his dog to lick,” a refusal “[t]he Frenchman understood” (“Embroidered Vest” 153). When Frado has Fido wash her dish, Jack erupts in a fit of laughter, and readers, too, find her action humorous. But, the more severe implications of the reference suggest that Frado employs Fido in her service to help her dismiss her “mortal enemy,” Mrs. Bellmont. One of the rare references Beecher makes about dogs appears in her Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (1842), a version of her Treatise directed to domestics. While Beecher does not advise that domestics change households frequently, she explains one case in which a worker had moved from one employer to another, and consequently performed more diligently. When asked by the first employer what conditioned the servant’s better work, the man replied of his new employer, “He treats me like a man, and so I behaved like a man; but you treated me like a dog, and so I behaved like a dog” (163). As readers consider what might seem to be Frado’s more vulgar act of eating off a plate her dog has washed—in a later magazine story “A Bad Egg” (1882), a dog licking a plate clean is seen as one of the
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Beecher, Wilson, a nd the Norther n Ta bl e
Marie Drews
marks of a vile, putrid restaurant (“Ladies Department”)—following Beecher’s axiom, they are made to question how Mrs. Bellmont’s treatment of Frado conditions her behavior. R.J. Ellis suggests that not only is Frado’s behavior a “calculated insult” but also “ironically recapitulates her own social situation,” namely that outlined in Beecher’s anecdote: Frado “is literally enduring a dog’s life” (42). In treating Frado as such, Mrs. Bellmont’s position is subject to Wilson’s critique for “Mrs. B. is lower than a dog to Frado just as (and because) Frado is lower than a dog to Mrs. B.” (Ellis 43).8 In the context of Beecher, it is Mrs. Bellmont who conditions Frado’s behavior; she requests disagreeable acts in order to prompt disagreeable behavior in Frado. Accordingly, while Frado’s actions most directly suggest that it is she who violates appropriate table etiquette, upon closer examination of the directions of table design Beecher provides, it is Mrs. Bellmont’s inappropriate oversight and domestic mismanagement that more persuasively proves the degradation of the Bellmont household. When Frado is made to eat after the family, she is seated at a table that defies the orderliness that dinner tables should represent in all other circumstances—namely, she is made to dine with dirty dishes and soiled table clothes. Beecher writes that “to a person of taste and refinement, who has been accustomed to a table set in a proper manner few things are more annoying than to see a table askew” (353) and “[t]o persons of good-breeding, nothing is more annoying, than violating the conventional properties of the table” (129). Thus, when Mrs. Bellmont refuses to allow Frado a clean napkin, a clean plate, or clean utensils as Beecher suggests is necessary, she exhibits both poor hospitality and an abhorrent lack of attention to table aesthetics. For Beecher, even “a stranger”—the same word she uses to describe domestics who want to join the table—“should always have a clean [napkin]” (351). Mrs. Bellmont thus succumbs to what Kyla Wazana Tompkins refers to as “domestic terrorism” in her treatment of Frado at the table (217)—a barbarism that Wilson sees carried out even the North, which Benson would suggest questioned her civility. As Elizabeth Breau notes, through Mrs. Bellmont Wilson “attacks images of white women as angels in the house” (460), and considering Beecher’s manual as a guide that reinforces domestic practices unique to white, native-born families, readers see Mrs. Bellmont become what Leveen calls the “inverse of true womanhood” (569) when she is unable to follow Beecher’s domestic codes. Mrs. Bellmont takes on behaviors uncharacteristic of a middle-class woman, and in her fanatical comportment
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at the table, Mary Titus sees Wilson “forcefully [assign] bestiality to the white woman” (18). Breau notes that Mrs. Bellmont is “a woman devoid of any of the lofty, ‘feminine’ sentiments for which he sex was so praised by Wilson’s white contemporaries” (460) and instead “only her feminine flaws remain: she is irrational, tyrannical, [and] manipulative” (461; emphasis added). Following Beecher, Mrs. Bellmont didn’t just scold, she was described as “a scold, a thorough one” altogether (25; emphasis in the original). Considering her behavior, it is possible to imagine Mrs. Bellmont seated at Bourne’s Southern dinner table, and that she is to berate the black servant ready to serve her tea at any moment.
Domestic Amalgamation in the North Wilson’s placement of Frado at the Bellmont dinner table resonates with discussions in Beecher’s manuals related to management of household help; because Frado is designated “mulatto,” her appearance at the table also raises questions about fears of racial integration that Bourne illustrates as he shows two black servants waiting on the table who, as his surrounding discussion suggests, could very possibly be progeny of the slaveholder they are serving. Bourne’s fear rested specifically on sexual intimacy between slaveholders and slave women, and rightly so, many critics have commented on the possibility of Frado’s rape in Our Nig.9 Considering the idea of the shared table in the free North, amalgamation, or the integration of whites and blacks at a social level was also of concern. The historical reality of miscegenation conditioned larger fears about what it would mean for whites and blacks to sit down to dinner together, especially if a mixed-race or biracial individual’s racial identity was not easily identifiable. In the context of Wilson’s projection that non-white individuals would serve in the homes of White northerners, the confusion of distinct racial signifiers called into question the guarantee that African-American servants would necessarily be better conditioned to their place, and critiqued Mrs. Bellmont’s—and others’—audacity to follow this idea. Mrs. Bellmont reflects on Frado’s race early on in the novel when she is left to the Bellmonts as a child. First, Mrs. Bellmont appreciates that she will be able to train Frado from childhood: “I have so much trouble with the girls I hire, I am almost persuaded if I have one to train up in my own way from a child, I shall be able to keep them awhile” (26). She remarks that she “don’t mind the nigger in the child” (26), following the expectation a black servant would
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Beecher, Wilson, a nd the Norther n Ta bl e
Marie Drews
not give her the “trouble” of her earlier servants. Mrs. Bellmont reads Frado’s race as an indicator that she is already “conformed to [her] condition,” to use Beecher’s words, by virtue of her blackness. Mrs. Bellmont’s thoughts reflect those of Miriam Berry Whitcher, a New York housewife who references her desire to rear a black servant rather than a white ethnic immigrant for similar reasons. Whitcher, known for writing the satirical exploits of the Widow Bedott, writes in a series of personal letters during 1847 about her search for a servant. Because she has had trouble with several hired girls, both white women and an Irish immigrant girl, she hires Jane, a former servant in the South, whom she describes as “25 years old & a very good looking nigger—nothing disagreeable in her appearance—though pretty black” (qtd. in Lawrence 33).10 Whitcher’s satisfaction with Jane—particularly her blackness—reflects an earlier comment from her letters describing her unfaithful white and white-ethnic servants: “I never want another one who expects to be company for me. I want one that will know her place, & be contented to keep it” (32). With Jane, Whitcher was willing to allow her “sable functionary” to, after dinner, “[sit] at the table dining on what remains of a mutton steak & nice mince pie” (34). For Whitcher, to disregard Beecher’s principle and allow her domestic to dine at the table would not compromise Jane’s service position because, Whitcher intuited, this position was already secured through her visible difference. This would indeed not be the case with Frado. Although Frado is “not very black” when she comes to Bellmont household (25), as a youth, what the Bellmonts conceive of as the “benefit” (Leveen 564) of her black inferiority is affirmed by the consistent beratings of Mary, the white Bellmont daughter. As Frado grows older, however, her blackness fades: “She was not many shades darker than Mary now; what a calamity it would be ever to hear the contrast spoken of ” (Wilson 39). The “calamity” of “contrast” of Frado’s light skin color posed a threat to what Mrs. Bellmont saw as a clear delineation of her conditions of servitude—in fact, during the summer months Mrs. Bellmont allowed Frado no shade from the sun, “determined” the exposure might “darken the shade which nature had first bestowed upon her as best befitting” (39). Cultural fears of the inability to distinguish white from black operated fiercely: Bourne worried biracial individuals he called a “third race . . . will soon preponderate over both the resident whites, and the genuine blacks” and would complicate distinction between the two groups (91). Given the placement of his illustration in relation to this discussion, Bourne seems to suggest the probability that either of the servants could be of this third race—their dark
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complexions and servant dress are marks that keep them differentiated. Mrs. Bellmont shared Bourne’s fear that Frado, in her maturation and fair complexion, might blend in, and before the second mention of Frado’s participation in a meal after James’s initial invitation, Mrs. Bellmont takes action: she “shaved [Frado’s] glossy ringlets” (68). Frado is described “in her coarse cloth gown and ancient bonnet”; and while she is “anything but an enticing object,” she is also easily identified as part of a servant class (68–69).11 Mrs. Bellmont makes it so Frado can indeed be told apart, and more importantly, she is made less attractive. Elizabeth Breau notes that Mrs. Bellmont is particularly careful to alter Frado’s appearance because she “sees [Frado’s] beauty (a hallmark of the female mulatto story) as a threat to the desirability of white women” (463). Jack, the younger Bellmont son who is most amused at Frado’s table behavior, immediately criticizes Frado’s appearance—her hair—when he returns home. While Frado was now dressed similarly to the servants in Bourne’s picture, she would proceed to take a seat.12 While Mrs. Bellmont is degraded by her deportment, Frado’s triumph is fleeting. She is severely beaten for her actions. What becomes clear, however, is Wilson’s reenvisioning of the great Northern table of Frederick Douglass and George Harris, or the scene of conviviality at the table shared by Hannah Crafts. Frado does not want to join the white table, if she is to do so under the disagreeable directives of her mistress. Her conscientious disruption ensures that she will not be invited again—and, in acting out, she resists acculturation to abolitionist celebration of the shared table. At the end of the text, Frado recapitulates the story of her free North: “maltreated by professed abolitionists, who didn’t want slaves at the South, nor niggers in their own houses, North. Faugh! to lodge one; to eat with one; to admit one through the front door; to sit next to one; awful!” (129). Frado recognizes that no philosophy—neither that of abolition nor that of Beecher’s domestic practice—can cure the “evil” in individuals like Mrs. Bellmont. And she recognizes the possibility that others who supported abolitionist causes may, too, harbor such proclivities to act out on racist assumptions. After she leaves the Bellmonts, she removes herself from the white household completely; she first seeks employment as a seamstress in order to earn a living and later, after “a friend who, pitying her cheerless lot, kindly provided her with a valuable recipe, from which she might herself manufacture a useful article for her maintenance” (130) begins producing and selling her own “merchandise” (131). It is with this trade that she finds a “more agreeable, and an easier way of sustenance” (130)—and was thus able to provide
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Notes 1. The 1834 edition is an illustrated and historically updated version of Bourne’s 1816 work The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable. 2. The role of this second servant is debatable: readers would assume that the servant, whose hands are holding a plate, is serving the family, however, when read in the context of Wilson, it seems reasonable to suggest that Bourne might have seated this servant at the table. 3. Leveen provides a thorough discussion of the “spatialization of hierarchies of power with the private home”; she discusses at length Frado’s position within the Bellmont household, and acknowledges the tyrannical Mrs. Bellmont’s “spatial authority” over Frado within the home. I extend Leveen’s discussion here and emphasize not Frado’s role of servitude within the home, but rather examine carefully the dinner table scene and expectations of Mrs. Bellmont as suggested by Beecher’s domestic manual tradition, an expectation that Leveen visits in less detail (567, 569). 4. See also Titus’s exploration of dining practices in the plantation South; she affirms similar references to the table and offers brief references to Beecher (13) and Wilson (18). 5. Stowe also uses interaction at the dinner table to dramatize the characters’ humanity in the face of their impending separation as she details Tom and Aunt Chloe’s last supper. 6. See Elias for fascinating historical writings about the development of Western European table manners, which factor in to what he calls the “civilizing process” (Part II, Section IV). 7. Several scholars consider the nature of Frado’s servitude; see Leveen, who also spends much time working with Dudden (564–65). I agree that Frado’s position cannot be equated with that of Beecher’s domestic; however, my interest lies in illustrating not Frado’s position, per se, but how she is received by Mrs. Bellmont, in the context of Beecher’s directives for household managers. 8. In her discussion of the “edible black body” in Our Nig, Tompkins writes that “it is not blackness that occupies a lower place on the food chain than dogs and white women: it is white women, whose cruel appetites place them lower than dogs” (218). 9. See R. Johnson (112), Ellis (113), and Doriani (215) on miscegenation. 10. Brief reference to this scene appears in Dudden (94).
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for her own table. Thus, while she is not again invited to visit the Bellmont table, she does not express a wish to be invited either. Frado exhibits herself most strongly as a free black woman living in the North when she resists the historical implications of sharing the table outlined for her in the “professed abolitionists[’]” domestic sphere.
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11. Bourne is aware of the importance of dress in differentiating those of the “third race.” He writes of the similar countenance of a “tawdrily dressed girl who appears to as [a] tavernkeeper’s daughter” and “two or more waiters nearly or quite naked”—“if you could . . . clothe the girls and boys alike, they could not be known apart” (91–92). 12. Wilson uses Frado’s disruption at the table to mock cultural fears that biracial individuals might try to pass. The only time in the text where Frado can be read to pass as part of the family is on the occasion of James’s funeral when she wears clothes that are not hers: the fact that her dress and her bonnet don’t match all that is remarked (97–98).
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Beecher, Wilson, a nd the Norther n Ta bl e
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“Tru e a n d Fa i t h f u l i n Ev e ry t h i ng”: R e c i pes for Se rva n t a n d Cl a ss R e for m i n C at h e r i n e O w e n’s C ook book Nov e l s Kim Cohen
C
ookbook author, home journalist, and sometime novelist, Catherine Owen1 begins her first novel, Ten Dollars Enough (1885), with a morning’s bill of fare, glibly rattled off by the neat boarding house waitress: “Beef steak, cod steak, mutton chop, and hash!” supplemented by an abundance of cream-of-tartar biscuits and potatoes (1). However, Mrs. Bishop, the main character, would have gladly exchanged all for just a fine cup of coffee and fresh bread. For her, the abundant boarding house menu often meant a sacrifice in flavor, freshness, and quality. Her hope to own their own home recalls the subtitle of the novel, “Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week, How It Has Been Done, How It May Be Done Again.” Though instructional, the novel does far more than what the subtitle suggests. Along with her later novels Molly Bishop’s Family (1887) and Gentle Breadwinners (1888), Owen offers contemporary readers an entry into the complex cultural milieu that cooking, food, instruction, and housekeeping raised for late-nineteenth-century readers through the vehicle of a novel.2 Owen’s novels, like others serialized within the pages of Good Housekeeping, draw from several genres, including cookbooks, fiction,
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Chapter 6
K im Cohen
household manuals, etiquette guides, housekeeping and child rearing treatises, and reform literature. In deference to the domestic science movement, the texts multitask and offer an efficient and economical alternative to buying many texts, when one would do the trick. These texts also reflect the “scrapbookish” nature of many household journals such as Good Housekeeping, with poetry and fiction set beside nonfiction columns on cookery or layout designs for kitchens and parlors. Still, only a few critics, usually social historians such as Susan Strasser in Never Done (1982), Laura Shapiro in Perfection Salad (2001), and Wendy Gamber in The Boardinghouse in NineteenthCentury America (2007), have mentioned Ten Dollars Enough, and even fewer engage her later novels, Molly Bishop’s Family or Gentle Breadwinners.3 In making their larger points regarding household management, the domestic science movement, or home ownership trends, they have unfortunately oversimplified the purpose, plot, and significance of Owen’s novels, both in their serialization and their publication. But these texts’ unwieldy and unusual use of multiple genres, including fiction, to instruct readers offers a compelling reason for their reconsideration. The participatory nature of both serials and reference books, such as cookery manuals, allows these novels to use the “popular guise of a story” to achieve the larger social goals of addressing the servant and immigrant “problem,” while also providing readers with the most up-to-date information on domestic economy and progressive-era housekeeping (“Literary” 296). Ten Dollars Enough chronicles Molly Bishop’s personal efforts to apply her domestic science knowledge to her own household to increase efficiency, live on less income, and assist in her and her husband’s one-year goal to go from boarding to owning their own home after his family disowns him for marrying dowry-less Molly. In her later novel, while still remaining aware of domestic hierarchies between the mistress and servant, Owen shifts the narrative focus to the “other” domestic hierarchy between man and woman, both familial and marital. She redresses the misdirected education of middle-classed women that would preclude them from securing their own financial independence. Beginning with the twin losses of death and financial insolvency, Gentle Breadwinners recounts the multiple attempts of two sisters to make their way in the world without becoming dependent on the charity of family or organizations. In linking the narrative thread of loss with improved education and professionalization, Owen proposes a path toward female self-sufficiency that recognizes the inherent instability in the U.S. class structure and
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of a masculine political economy that does not foster feminine independence, financial or otherwise. Owen’s cookbook novels reveal the middle classes as at best tenuous and ambiguous: her characters both create situations where they appear to have more money than they do and streamline their finances to create more wealth and opportunity for luxury than they previously thought possible. Her readers learn more than how to keep house well; they learn that they have a certain measure of control over the performance of class identity, even if it is complicated by economic anxiety. Owen positions these uncertainties in life as unavoidable; she approaches these matters with pragmatism and common sense, drawing on realism rather than melodrama to help her readers negotiate situations that would likely be familiar to them. While Owen’s narratives offer advice on class matters, they are also at their center cookbooks. This dual purpose further allows Owen to tease out the often conflated ethnic and class implications coded in food and construct a kitchen where cooking practices can be translated for the reader. Food, while sustaining in nature, becomes a source of anxiety and contention—questions abound: What should be made for dinner? Why did the cake fall? Why does Harry feel that cabbage is so offensive to his palate? What can Molly make when the in-laws drop by unexpectedly? However, food is more than an object to be obsessed with or mulled over. It is governed by a corresponding practice (technology) of cookery, a knowable art, which Owen consistently maintains can be perfected. She advocates for precise measurements, standardization, and the chemistry of cookery, bringing industrialization into the kitchen of her readers. She aims not only to help housewives reproduce their results, but also find their skills and efforts professionalized and valued, based on their self-education. Her work offers women training in the technology of cooking through the technology of print, as not all women could attend formal cookery classes for reasons of finances or convenience. As a technology, cooking reflects the culture that practices it. Food and cooking become vehicles for Owen to reveal the symbolic markers of middle-class identity and to propose a more democratic understanding of social order. Through food, its preparation and plating, she encourages readers to recognize their shared social conditions, rather than to focus on exaggerated claims of differences.4 Importantly for cultural, social, and literary historians, Owen translates the gestures of cooking and nuanced French culinary techniques, and concomitantly she offers the performative gestures of a middle-classed
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C a t h e r i n e O w e n ’s C o o k b o o k N o v e l s
K im Cohen
identity: these “recipes” force contemporary scholars to reconsider the current place of commonplace cookbooks and serialized domestic fiction. Owen’s work, then, constructs an alternate way to understand ethnicity and class hierarchies, to imagine opportunities for women in the Gilded Age beyond dependency, and to articulate the monetary value of feminine labor.
The Paper Housekeeper As with many of her novels and manuals, Owen strives to reduce stress, overexertion, and anxiety in homemaking through streamlining tasks, efficient planning, and living a lifestyle appropriate to one’s income, and both Molly and Dorothy epitomize the application of these goals. Good Housekeeping, while echoing these objectives, also intended to capitalize on the growing consumer power of women in the nineteenth century and promote a socially encouraged desire for perfection throughout the home—a trend well documented by Laura Shapiro in her domestic social history Perfection Salad. In the premier issue on May 2, 1885, Clark W. Bryan wrote in his “Editor’s Portfolio” that “our homes are what we make them—good, bad, or indifferent,” and it was, therefore, the periodical’s mission to produce and perpetuate an example of “perfection—or as near unto perfection as may be attained in the household” (23). Significantly, the desire to know how to keep house well is one that Molly, Owen’s housewife, defends to her skeptical husband, Harry. She demurely protests that she did not go to cooking school for nothing and that much will come of her “paper-housekeeping,” a term Harry coined for her constant perusal of household manuals and magazines while they were only boarding. Responding to his skepticism, Molly testifies, “You don’t know what a good manager I should be,” and no one, especially Harry, should be “ashamed” of her housekeeping (2). Such defenses of paper-housekeeping reveal much about the income of the magazine’s general readership, as well as the faith that women had in such reference guides to make the most of their husbands’ income (Ten 66). Situated within a domestic manual and household journal, Owen’s novel outwardly works to dispel the commonly held stereotype that casts married women boarders as “selfish, lazy, extravagant, and poorly trained in the art of domestic management” (Gamber 117); instead Molly cannot wait to reveal herself fit to be Harry’s “helpmeet” (Ten 5). Furthermore, Owen’s work implicitly addresses the often unbearable costs of homeownership, particularly in urban areas; for example, the Bishops relocate to the outermost
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Jersey suburbs to begin their housekeeping experiment, rather than live in the city. The inquiry department and the Cozy Corner sections of Good Housekeeping largely confirm Frank Luther Mott’s estimation that the average readership of the magazine was lower-middle class, though many were able to employ one servant (130).5 One reading housewife noted that the novel resulted in “several radical [kitchen] reforms” and contributed to her “bright young servant” putting into “practice the new ideas with great enthusiasm” (“Ten” 149). One “Hired Girl” wrote that although she did not belong to “a class of society” that could often “read a magazine,” her mistress had Good Housekeeping bound and kept in the dining room, “where, as she says, I can see it as well as she can” (“Comments” 57). While these letters note that the magazine interested “both mistress and maid,” subscription lists do not necessarily reflect who reads the magazine, due to lending or sharing practices (“Ten” 149). Though the subscription price of $2.50 might not have been met with ease in 1886, women readers in growing numbers budgeted for such an expense or found their own ways to access the magazine, perhaps discovering as Molly did that the gains made by their increased knowledge more than compensated for their investment. Following Robert Darnton’s communication circuit, Owen developed an intimate relationship with readers through the serialization process that helped to blur further the relative distinction between the servant, who received instruction from Molly, and the readers, who received instruction from the author. Readers regularly wrote in with questions regarding Molly’s recipes or issues raised by the novel, and Owen usually responded in the next issue. One subscriber from Lawrence, Massachusetts wanted a recipe for the “Almond Paste,” while another wanted instruction on the English manner of “Making Tea at the Table” (“How” 18; “Making” 288). These inquiries parallel the way in which Marta, Molly’s servant, requests further instruction. When impressed by the showiness of frying, Marta remarks, “how often she had seen cooks in Germany bread cutlets, and they came out of the pan only breaded here and there. Never had she seen them all over alike . . . except at the restaurant . . . where there was a man cook” (38). Molly provides her student with the “science” behind the technique of frying, gleaned from both attentive paper-housekeeping and enrollment in cooking schools. Molly allays Marta’s doubts regarding her ability to duplicate the “man cook’s” technique. By juxtaposing Marta’s questions with those of the readers and Molly’s responses with those of Owen’s, the narrative slippage between Marta and the reader at the reception level becomes obvious.
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C a t h e r i n e O w e n ’s C o o k b o o k N o v e l s
K im Cohen
Both Marta and the reader are portrayed as curious, semiexperienced cooks who desire the skills necessary to command a kitchen, rivaling either the expertise of Molly or the man cook. Whether the reader is a self-appointed student or not, she is figured as one needing to be taught (or figured as one who should be taught) and, thus, requiring Molly’s tutelage. However, the “hired girl,” discussed earlier, realized far more than how to be a better servant: she learned that her social position may not be as fixed as she once thought, and that her mistress had learned the same lesson. While neither Good Housekeeping nor Owen’s novels were meant for those who had little need to be frugal, they were instead designed for those who aspired to appear otherwise—an aspiration that reveals the middle classes as a constructed social marker and as a particularly tenuous one at best.
The Servant (Immigrant) Girl Question For Owen, retaining a servant not only marks one as within the middle classes, but also serves to maintain a woman’s position within it by not overburdening her with difficult or strenuous labor. Harvey Levenstein in Revolution at the Table (1988) argues that the middle classes became markedly more self-conscious throughout the 1880s, but “domestic service still posed the greatest barrier between upperclass habits and the life of the class below them” (60). Through the end of the century, servants were expected to cook and serve scaled down versions of upper-class menus with attention paid to the order of the courses and carving of dishes.6 Molly’s servant, Marta, represents a population of women working as domestics during a time of shifting notions of class, but she also reveals the connection between the “servant girl question” and “the immigrant question.” Owen strategically employs Marta to level the differences between native and immigrant within the home and among her readership. To answer the “servant question,” Molly proposed much needed reforms within the domestic service system: educating women using progressive household methods while professionalizing servants and housework in general. According to Glenna Matthews in Just a Housewife (1987), schools were formed, usually by middle- and upper-class women for the education of potential domestics and later for both mistresses and maids. However, Matthews also suggests that such impulses usually reflected “invidious assumptions” about immigrants, in particular the Irish, since many schools were assimilative in nature (97). Owen’s closing paragraph in Ten Dollars Enough reveals her commitment
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to servant and housewife education, saying that it was as if Marta had been enrolled in school “daily for many months,” under Molly’s experienced tutelage, unlike the more typical “twelve or twenty-four lessons” that most domestics received (274). Molly avoided the pressures of assimilation by permitting Marta to keep her own language, rather than trying to Americanize her. Owen only qualified the servant’s skills by saying that she was a “treasure because she was true and faithful in everything” (274). Such reliability recalls the most practical reform approach: the professionalization of housework and a concurrent acceptance of technological breakthroughs meant to alleviate the backbreaking toil that first led women to be interested in reform (Matthews 98, 97). Owen carefully outlined the positive effects that professionalization and servant education would have for the housewives and their employees throughout her novel, including pragmatic, material, and emotional gains. She balances these calls for reform with her protagonist’s recognition of her servant’s talents, and allows for moments of hierarchical flexibility. For instance, Marta instructs Molly on the preparation of a traditional dish of German fried noodles, leaving Marta “delighted with her accomplishment, [. . .] so much appreciated [that] her face fairly beamed as she found herself giving instead of taking instruction” (57, emphasis mine). Though traditional educational models expect instruction to flow from teacher to student, the noodle exchange reveals flexibility in this hierarchy. The lesson does more than provide Molly with Marta’s secret for their preparation: the servant’s skill as teacher opens up the possibility for other hierarchical slippages. The basic structure of the novel sets up an experience in which readers peer over Molly’s shoulder as she instructs Marta, her newly hired (and newly arrived) German servant. Readers too are being taught how to cook, how to set the table, how to get the best prices for their vegetables, and how to do it all with efficiency—in short, they are learning that they are as “green” as the newly arrived German immigrant. While Wendy Gamber reads Molly as an unsympathetic mistress and Owen as yet another author perpetuating the mistress/maid divide, she misses the nuances in Owen’s language and in her narrative framework that call these same domestic hierarchies into question. While the readers may want to “peer” over Molly’s shoulder as her figurative equal, Owen instead aligns them as the student with the immigrant servant, who as is depicted in the noodle instruction, has important skills of her own even if they too are somewhat “green.” With this deft shift in perspective, Owen calls into question the hierarchical relationship between housewife and servant, native and immigrant, as well as middle and lower classes.
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For Owen, reforms also needed to include a shift in the social perception of servants, while ensuring their professionalization through an improved education and training process. Each would help to avoid the typical complaint voiced by one of Molly’s neighbors who does “dread green girls” for they are generally so “stupid” (150). Domestic service, Susan Strasser notes in Never Done, “implied social inferiority” (170). She cites a shop girl who declared that a teacher or cashier, or anybody in a store, no matter if they have got common sense, don’t want to associate with servants . . . Young men think and say, “Oh, she can’t be much if she hasn’t got brains enough to make her living outside a kitchen.” You’re just down, once for all, if you go into one. (170)
By elevating the respect labor deserves, Owen aims to eradicate the social ostracism and stigma associated with domestic service. Owen heightens this potential disgrace for Dorothy, in the Gentle Breadwinners, who must find suitable employment to support herself and her sister. May, with exasperation cries, “ ‘You don’t mean to tell us, Dorothy, that you’re going to cook for a living?’. . . This was even worse than dressmaking” (33). Ever practical, Dorothy knows that she can bake cakes better than most, and what she does not know, she can learn. But May cannot see past the social stigma, even if Dorothy’s labor would be hidden by her work in her aunt’s kitchen, rather than a stranger’s kitchen. Dorothy, on the other hand, understood that the alternative—dependence on the charity of others—would be far more costly to their status. Owen wants servants to be seen as professionals and to find similar esteem that many of their European counterparts enjoy. Molly suggested that slighting ambition was “one of the conditions of service” in the United States and that “makes the great difference between our English servants and those here” (Ten 215). Harvey Levenstein found that while “grousing” about servants’ incompetence seemed to be “the rule” in middle-classed homes, “the wealthy seemed hardly affected by the problem,” suggesting that “[t]he obvious solution was to pay higher wages, improve working conditions, and hire betterskilled and more highly motivated servants” (63). Owen’s systemic approach for resolving servant difficulties takes all these factors into account. In a conversation with her English friend Mrs. Welles, Molly proposes, “Young girls must learn that high wages and lighter work are to be attained by proficiency” (215). For Molly, a servant ought to be “respectable and clean” and from “thorough good stock” and not
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like the “good-for-nothing girls . . . from thriftless stock” (150, 252). Noticeably absent from Molly’s discussion is any parallel between ethnicity or class and aptitude. In the sequel, Molly Bishop’s Family, Molly hires Anna, another German, as a nurse for baby Meg. But Molly finds her to have one flaw that even she could not rectify: “she was not clean; and Molly was puzzled, for the girl was obedient, more than willing, anxious even, to work. Dirty habits had always, in Molly’s experience hitherto, seemed if not caused by, at least allied to, laziness” (Molly 57). Though Anna was dirty when she hired her in Castle Garden, Molly did not assume that it was a permanent quality; instead she reasoned that some dirt could be forgiven since the young woman had just landed from a long voyage, with her younger brother in tow and with a terrible headache. Owen’s theories about servants show her philosophy that careful teaching and patience on the part of the mistress will not only make for an easier working relationship, but will better the opportunities of the servant through her development of transferable skills: Owen does not propose as many of her contemporaries have that servant difficulties come with being a middle-classed housewife, nor does she believe that mistresses ought to have a “missionary relationship” with their servants, a model popularized by Catharine Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Instead, Molly preferred to hire “green girls” so that she would not have to un-teach them from previous poor training. In response to higher populations of immigrants and dwindling native servants, many household journalists, such as Stowe and Beecher, sought to acculturate those workers who might bring a foreign influence into the home and nation as part of the housewife’s domestic and national obligation. Owen, on the other hand, invites the “foreign” into Molly’s home. Employed immigrants, like Marta, often find that language barriers become a site for assimilative pressures. However, Molly spoke German and purposefully chose Marta so that she might better her own fluency in the language, even writing the recipe cards in German. Simplifying Marta’s adjustment, Molly would only need to train Marta in housekeeping and cooking, not in acquiring English as well. A fear of isolation, according to Faye E. Dudden in Serving Women (1983), often encouraged German domestics to seek out German-speaking employers, or at the very least work “together in pairs” or stay “in metropolitan areas with German speaking communities” (198). In Marta’s case, since her life outside the kitchen remains undocumented, only Molly alleviates her isolation. Realistically, this relationship does not replace ones with Marta’s own peers—even if it
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does force Molly to speak in a language not her own and privilege the foreign tongue in the domestic space. Figuratively, however, Marta and Molly’s shared common language stands in for the language of scientific cookery, which standardizes the imprecise wording of “pinches” or of butter knobs about the “size of an egg.” This shared discourse standardizes recipes and immerses readers in a new way to cook and think about cooking—including becoming more comfortable with technological advances for the home.
All the Goodness is Sealed Up in the Can The shift in the commercialization of food and home products fundamentally altered how they were prepared both within and without the home: women were no longer beleaguered by making soap, candles, preserves, and bread unless they wanted to. This change, as Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont point out in Eating in America (1995), began before the Civil War, with “the improvement of refrigeration, the increased speed of transportation, and the industrialization of food processing,” and added to a heightened awareness and preoccupation with “the healthiness of the American diet” (146). Decades later, Molly continued to tackle these new foodways with the grace and faith of a nineteenth-century Martha Stewart. Her Delmonico-like salad impresses Harry on move-in day: she improved her cooking school recipe by using “canned chicken,” not only saving herself “all the trouble of preparing” but has “far better flavor, for the jelly and all the goodness is sealed up in the can” (Ten 17). In wading through technological advances such as canned chicken and store-bought seasoning, Molly shows Marta and thus Owen’s readers how such advances can be both efficient and economical, assuaging fears that readers may have about new-fangled products. In many ways making bottled walnut sauce or canned chicken accessible to readers as both a consumable product and one that could be trusted to stand in for a homemade version, Owen alleviates anxieties readers may harbor toward new commercial products. This impulse is in part paralleled by Owen’s situation of servants and the position of immigrants within the United States. While she obviously resists exploiting them as a consumable source of labor, she does want her readers to be confident in the labor performed by their servants. She offers housewives a way to treat servants that does not necessarily conflict with their own class position or to assert control over their servants for the sake of a socially acceptable way for them to feel power. Owen uses the kitchen as the preferred site to explore this
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conception of social “translation.” Over simmering pots and roasting meats, servant and mistress come to better understand each other. The kitchen that Owen constructs in her narrative bridges educational, linguistic, economic, and ethnic gaps in the established social order by translating “pinches” into recipes and skills into rungs on the social ladder. Just as Molly does not demand that Marta learn or know English, she also does not expect Marta to know what she has not taught her. For example, since Molly did not explain to Marta the causal relationship between slamming an oven door and the cake falling or heating the yeast so much that the sponge for the bread does not prove, Molly could not justify reprimanding her. More importantly, Molly recognizes that Marta has not had experience with refined service or dainty items. This sympathetic recognition allows Molly—and thus the readers—to recognize that Marta might not immediately understand why each meal has a different table setting, but her “inattention” does not mark a lack in skill, intelligence, or ambition. More likely, Marta’s difficulty translating these “idiomatic” markers results from her not having grown up with such service. Therefore, in a week, she cannot become accustomed to practices Molly had learned over a lifetime, but she can, like the reader, if given time. Molly similarly realizes her own shortcomings as a housewife and mistress: she always looked “hopelessly on the piles of sewing,” comforting herself with “the thought that her abilities did not lie in that direction, and that she could only do the best that was in her” (Ten 276). Her self-reflectiveness modeled for readers the importance of recognizing such knowledge as learned and culture-bound, rather than necessarily linked to class or ethnicity. The cumulative nature of learning how to cook parallels the way that housewife and servant can be elevated from the “basics” into “fancier fare.” Owen outlines these constructed class markers as performable—a reassuring thought to readers, mistress and maid alike, hoping to improve their situations or appear as though they have. However, Owen educates servants to set them on a path for higher paying jobs, but also shows them that the difference between them and their employer can be bridged, suggested also by their shared democratic standing as magazine readers.
Cabbage for the “Cultured Palate” Showing readers the transformative power of education, Owen uses the instruction of cooking and the structure of her narrative to help them negotiate a cooperative relationship between housewife and
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domestic. Furthermore, Owen uses specific foods to undermine culturally prevalent stereotypes regarding immigrants and foreign cuisine. The contents of Good Housekeeping also serve to educate readers on the foodways of other countries and, therefore, to gain a global perspective that U.S. cookery is only one food culture in a very large world. Though the novel and magazine are chock-full of examples illustrating this point, cabbage will be the food of choice—that homely vegetable blamed for many gastric disturbances. Molly, the ever-diligent housewife, proselytized the merits of cabbage, demanding that readers reexamine their understood hierarchy of appropriate and palatable food. Owen compels readers to own up to their unfair associations of cabbage with immigrant tenement dwellers. When Molly reveals to Harry that she “long[s] to taste nice cabbage” and plans on making it for dinner, he exclaims, “You vulgar little person!” (Ten 20). Harry’s response reveals Molly’s longing as inappropriate, both in that she longs and in what she longs for. However, Molly’s cabbage longing challenges contemporary codes that prescribe dainty foods for women’s dainty appetites. Rather than engaging his biased judgment of her tastes, she challenges him, saying, “You won’t say so when you eat it” (20). Speaking for doubtful readers, Harry claims to have “too much respect for his digestion” and fears that he would be “choked” by the smell (20, 28). At the end of dinner, Harry naturally announced that he no longer “looked on cabbage as unfit for a ‘cultured palate’ ” (28). Molly prepared it in within an ambitious bill of fare: “Lamb and Mint Sauce. Browned Potatoes. Boiled Cabbage. Italian Macaroni. Tomato Salad. Peaches and Cream” (Ten 19; emphasis in the original). The cabbage accompanies the main meat entree along with several sides. However, it is served under a white sauce—a symbolic culinary move to hide any ethnic markers that the vegetable might have retained before being served up. In this way, cabbage could be eaten without compromising the all-important middle-classed signifier of meat. The recuperation of cabbage—as being fit for a “cultured palate”—also serves to redeem those who prepare the economical vegetable most often. Given Owen’s advice that the unpleasant smell comes from lengthy cooking time, surely everyone—immigrant and native alike—could enjoy cabbage with newfound pleasure. Unlike Molly’s consistently meat-centered menus, the menus of Dorothy’s Aunt Bevan in the Gentle Breadwinners were not. Out of a need for frugality after a loss of fortune, Aunt Bevan must prepare mostly vegetarian meals. Owen calls into question the legitimacy of the stigma placed on vegetarian cuisine with the following disclaimer: “Those for whom happily no necessity for such extreme economy
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exists may pass them by and wait for better things” (Gentle 19). This authorial interjection does more than offer a clue as to the variety of recipes to be included. It also serves as a reminder to readers that if they are not in Dorothy’s position, they should feel privileged: but more importantly, given that one week before Dorothy and May themselves were not either, Owen forces readers to come to terms with the instability of their economic standing and dependence. Moreover, she makes an example of Dorothy’s self-education and plucky perseverance to encourage readers to follow her path to provide for themselves. By the novel’s end, Dorothy has helped to secure more financial freedom for her aunt, and she no longer needs to sell eggs or chickens, “nor were they vegetarian in their diet” (163). While their graduation to eating meat reveals a greater disposable income, Owen is careful not to undermine the culinary gains made. She does not give many meat dishes, other than the ones that the women make for sale, and the recipes that follow the last chapter are all of the economical meatless dishes in Dorothy’s notebook. This resistance to rehearse the status of meat shows Owen’s resolve that meatless dishes can be savory on their own—and with a woman with the “instincts of a lady to hide her extreme poverty” having eaten them for years, she reveals that not just the immigrant poor had these dishes on their tables out of necessity (165). Good Housekeeping, in alignment with Owen’s tolerant view of ethnic foodways, frequently included culturally pluralist entries on worldwide culinary traditions. During the late 1880s, entries ranged in topic from the West African diet centered around yams or “foo foo,” which the editor explained was not unlike the Irish potato to formal tea service in Japan (“West,” 49; “Making,” 288). Editors also included a selection on “Housekeeping in Japan,” designed to teach readers that “servant difficulty” was not a global problem as not all countries underrated their servants’ abilities (52). Entries such as these—though bordering on touristic—do provide readers with a better sense that food appreciation is culturally specific, that is, accompanied by a value system. The novel and the magazine together illustrate that immigrant food customs could not be devalued solely on the basis of their difference from U.S. customs. In order to help facilitate this realization, Good Housekeeping included sections on U.S. foodways as points of comparison, such as “Wastes of Cooking” and “American Manners.” In detailing a variety of cultures—U.S. included—Good Housekeeping invited readers to feel that both immigrant and foreign cultures were approachable, rather than something to be objectified or assimilated.
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C a t h e r i n e O w e n ’s C o o k b o o k N o v e l s
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Owen’s cabbage mission has a similarly wide-reaching effect and extends beyond the confines of the novel. One new Good Housekeeping subscriber suggested that the editors reprint Owen’s recipe for the “odorless cooking of cabbage,” which they did in the chapter’s entirety in April 1887, long after the novel was serialized (“Odorless” 254). Responding to janitors in the French Flats of New Jersey, who wanted to implement a cabbage ordinance restricting boiled cabbage to only “one day in the week,” the editors offered Owen’s less olfactory-offending preparation method as an olive branch (“One” 288). Mr. Stephens, a janitor of York Street, noted that “if this promiscuous boiling of cabbage isn’t stopped, there’ll be murder in our flat” (288). The editors humorously point out that had any of the afflicted parties read Owen’s recipe, they would have realized that cabbage could be cooked “in a manner that will not leave the smell of that vegetable on the frills of their garments, that will not be perceptible even, in the room where it is cooked, the odors of which will not ‘ascend to heaven,’ nor down to—Jersey City” (288). The playful, and diplomatic, response deflects both the articulated concern about the smell and the implied concerns about the growing immigrant population “promiscuously” preparing the vegetable, and it enacts Good Housekeeping’s flag of being “for the homes of the world.” Attending to both, Owen offers more efficient cooking methods, while showing that readers need not perpetuate provincial attitudes toward immigrants nor the food they eat. Catherine Owen, throughout her cookbook novels and household manuals, strives to offer her middle-classed readers options for becoming more self-reliant and self-sufficient, particularly during stringent financial times. Her work, alone and in its serialized contexts, offers insights into the way that women might have experienced the tenuous nature of their classed identities. Using food, scientific cookery language, and the space of the kitchen, Owen forwards her democratic vision and exposes the limitation of current mistress-maid hierarchies and reveals the performative markers accompanying those identities. With Good Housekeeping as her venue, Owen makes it possible for readers to recognize the way in which all countries have culturally specific foods and to question whether there is one right way to prepare food and by extension whether there is only a select set of people living within the United States who are “green.” Owen evidences that being green marks only a lack of training and education; she reminds readers that in many ways they too are green, and their relationship to so-called green as grass immigrants is not as distinguishable as
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Notes 1. Catherine Owen wrote consistently under the pseudonym of Helen Alice Matthews Nitsch for all of her work, cookbooks, domestic journalism, and novels alike. See Seaton. 2. The serialization run for Ten Dollars Enough began in October 1885 and ran until July 1886, and it was released as book in 1887. Perhaps in direct response to reader interest and request, Owen wrote the sequel, Molly Bishop’s Family, which ran from May 1887 to November 1887 also under the title of “Helps to Young Housekeepers Over the Hill of Difficulty,” and this was published as book in 1888. Gentle Breadwinners was a “syndicate serial,” but was sold as a stand-alone volume in 1888. All of Owen’s novels were published as 16MO. with Good Housekeeping’s printer, Houghton-Mifflin for one dollar. 3. Importantly, despite the fact that Molly Bishop’s Family chronicles her entrepreneurial venture as a boardinghouse owner to remain financially solvent after her husband’s death, Wendy Gamber makes no mention of this text at all in her analysis on nineteenth-century boardinghouse trends in the United States, perhaps due to the previous inaccessibility of many of these primary sources in special collections or on microfiche. However, now many early editions of Good Housekeeping have been digitized by GoogleTM, dramatically and democratically opening up recovery opportunities for serialized fiction and scholarship on nineteenth-century culture and society. 4. For example, Stuart Blumin in The Emergence of the Middle Class (1989) bases his argument that the middle classes congealed with respect to a culturally perceived division between manual and nonmanual labor. However, this distinction as other literary and cultural historians have noted, such as Amy Schranger Lang in The Syntax of Class (2003), is rooted in social and cultural attempts to perpetuate a dominant hierarchy that works to disenfranchise all but white men. Even more problematic is that way in which unremunerated feminine household labor does not easily fit into models of class analysis. And there is less attention to the way in which, if applied shrewdly, feminine labor can extend all paychecks, manual or otherwise, perhaps enough to retain a servant and blur class lines even further. 5. Good Housekeeping’s Cozy Corner afforded readers an opportunity to become involved in a larger community when technology and
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they might like it to be. Moreover, in revising housewife and servant relations to include mutual respect and an understanding of cultural differences, readers might be surprised, and even delighted, by a plate of dainty German noodles or a side of cabbage and everything that those dishes, their preparation, and their recipes represent.
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social expectations were changing the responsibilities of both housewives and servants. For more on the way that participatory spaces in nineteenth-century serials function, see Hayward, 29–40. 6. For more on shifting middle-class dining expectations and the problem of retaining and training domestic servants, see Levenstein, 60–71.
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Pa l ata bl e Vi rt u es: Mode l s of C i t i z e nsh i p a n d t h e Nat iona l C u isi n e
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Pa rt III
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Dough n u t s a n d Gi nge r br e a d, A ppl es a n d P e a r s: Boy hood Food E c onom i e s i n Ni n e t e e n t h- C e n t u ry P e r iodic a l s for C h i l dr e n Lorinda B. Cohoon
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n The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon, facing financial difficulties that put her in the position of having to “earn her own food, or starve,” opens her house to sell gingerbread and other inexpensive baked goods to boys who are on their way to school (38).1 In this way, she ekes out a subsistence living and supplies a regular demand, shaped by schoolboy hunger and small amounts of pocket money. Nathaniel Hawthorne writes about the absurdity of economies that bring women and boys together, especially women who are associated with an “old gentility”: a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing her stiff and somber intellect with the question how to tempt little boys into her premises! Yet such is undoubtedly her object! Now, she places a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with so tremulous a touch that it tumbles upon the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it has ceased to be an elephant, and has become a few bits of musty gingerbread. (37)
While Hawthorne uses Hepzibah’s shop window to critique the corruption of New England’s “first” families, discussions of boyhood food
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Chapter 7
Lor inda B. Cohoon
culture published elsewhere for children serve a variety of purposes, including inculcating a sense of moral agency and social conscience in child readers.2 As the Hepzibah Pyncheons of periodical culture, women writers and editors of children’s magazines peddled stories about food and boys eating food to the child readers of the nineteenth century.3 This essay examines stories published in children’s periodicals that focus on how boys’ food use reflects citizenship and membership in communities and also on how money boys spend on food might lead to waste or corruption. These food pieces serve both the women invested in the culture of letters as well as the child readers, and function as representations of and participants in complex economic and cultural exchanges that connect women and boys.4 In addition to linking the economics of women and boys, the stories about the foods that boys buy and exchange also connect to issues of national identity in significant ways. Gingerbread, for example, began to be used in America during the 1790s in ways that set it apart from its previous uses in Europe. Mary Tolford Wilson writes about this in “Amelia Simmons Fills a Need: American Cookery, 1796”: For centuries, gingerbread had been a traditional European pastry, a thin, flat, spiced confection similar to what we call a cooky today and eminently suited to the making of gingerbread men. To achieve the desired results, the dough was rolled thin and cut or printed in molds . . . More than 150 years later the receipts in the manuscript cookbook used by Martha Washington were for this same kind of gingerbread. (24)
In America, the festival gingerbread is transformed into an everyday confection that is inexpensive enough to be purchased by children who find themselves with extra pocket money.5 Thus, foods previously associated with European court traditions are circulated and transformed in the United States so that they are readily available, and therefore representative of those aspects of American identity associated with egalitarianism and opportunity for the common man (or boy).6 In the texts discussed here, foods are frequently used to convey messages about boys’ morality and citizenship within their communities.7 Scenes in periodicals depict boys saving and spending money on foods that are connected to their appetites and finances.8 Women, particularly widows and elderly spinsters, are linked to young boys when exchanges of sweet baked goods are discussed, and periodical pieces about fruit ownership and availability connect land-owning
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men with the education of boys. Examinations of food pieces published in The Youth’s Companion and Merry’s Museum between 1839 and 1848 (years associated with economic shifts as well as political changes that affected boys and women) can offer insights into the economic and cultural meanings of boyhood food and the ways food economies intervene in constructions of boyhood.9 In periodical pieces, children are encouraged to share generously with others, and to practice “self-denial” and “benevolence.” Confections, such as sticks of candy, several stories explain, must not be purchased if the money could be better used to help someone else who is sick and hungry.10 Similarly, children learn that stolen fruit will not be enjoyed, and that it is better to enjoy food that has been earned or offered than to steal apples and pears that fall from trees or from branches that extend across fences.11 The link between responsible citizenship does not always require denial, however, but an awareness of responsibility. “A Hint on Indigestion,” published in The Youth’s Companion in 1843, notes that even rich foods such as fried dumplings will be enjoyed if they are eaten in the right spirit. Children’s periodicals such as The Youth’s Companion (1827–1929) explore everyday choices about food and spending money and connect these choices to citizenship-shaping forces. Between the years 1827 and 1856, Nathaniel Willis was the editor of this Protestant New England periodical. David L. Green writes about the way that Willis’s editorship influenced the Companion’s content and suggests that during the 1830s and 1840s, there was a heavy emphasis on moral and religious education “rooted in the values and concerns of seventeenth-century Puritanism” (508); accordingly, the fiction pieces that comment on food tend to focus on a moral lesson that must be learned. Examples of this can be found in serialized chapters from Abbott’s Rollo and Jonas books, which were published in the Companion; in these pieces, the food that is discussed demonstrates proper behaviors and rules for turn-taking, sharing, and claiming ownership of property. These explorations then provide instances of pieces that connect food use to citizenship within a community. Other texts published in children’s periodicals describe “frivolous” foods, such as sweets, cookies, or cakes. When these indulgent foods are discussed, the texts themselves allow readers to indulge in fanciful or imaginative consumption of the goodies.12 These instances of imaginative indulgence are then contained by carefully written explorations of the dangers of such indulgence or the ways in which a treat might be enjoyed in moderation, especially if it is shared with a person who needs it more or might benefit in some way from the unexpected
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pleasure of a sweet treat.13 Sometimes the treats are made available in spaces or at events that tempt the children to stray from the values of home, church, and family. This occurs especially in pieces about festivals, marketplace scenes, or fairs. In these instances, children are given money to spend on the indulgences, but the message of the texts often conclude that the money would be better spent on charity or saved to benefit the family, church, or community. While the children in the articles are generally discouraged from “wasting” money on frivolous foods, in a few food pieces in the Companion, mothers supply children with “cookeys” [sic] or gingerbread cakes, as in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s story, “The Bantems” [sic]. In this text, a boy decides to share a half-eaten cookie with a widow he visits when his mother sends him on an errand. Here, connections between boys’ consumption and sharing of food with others, including needy or lonely women, is well established. The text describes Willie, a young boy, being taught to be kind to an old woman named Mrs. Bemis who is “quite alone” (81): Willie felt sorry for her and so did Willie’s mother; and if she got a pleasant new book she would send it to Mrs. Bemis, and often when she baked, she would send her a pie or a custard. Willie’s father too, was kind to Mrs. Bemis, and often sent her a basket of strawberries, or a mess of early peas, or some other rarity from his garden. Mrs. Bemis was not poor. She had plenty to eat. But Willie’s parents knew that it is a great pleasure to the old and lonely to be remembered by the young and happy. (81)
In this scene, the economics of the relationship between Willie and Mrs. Bemis are not based on capital used to purchase food, but on capital associated with social wealth. Mrs. Bemis’s area of impoverishment is her lack of children and grandchildren; her solitude causes Willie and his parents to remember her. Although she does not need the food she is brought, the gifts become a sign that she is “remembered.” Significantly, this text focuses on the use of food for which a person is not hungry. The scene with the cookie depicts some of these food functions: “Willie was not hungry, but he began eating, and ate on just because it tasted good. A foolish reason for eating, is it not? When he had eaten half the cake, his father came in with a basket of early lettuces, and asked Willie if he would carry them up to Mrs. Bemis” (81). In the earlier passage, the question, “A foolish reason for eating, is it not?,” addresses the readers of the article and positions these
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readers to critique Willie’s use of food and his subsequent selfishness with the gift of the bantems (Sedgwick’s spelling). This story and other food stories suggest that children can learn to respond to food and use food in ways that please adults and make them respected and admired members of their families and communities. As the piece progresses, Willie’s behaviors alternate between selfishness and generosity. He tells his mother that he plans to give Mrs. Bemis half his cookie: “I will carry her this half of my cookey, and that . . . will be following the rule—doing as I would be done by” (81; emphasis in the original). His mother admonishes him explaining that it is very easy for Willie to give away what he does not want: “I hope you will obey it when there is something which you ought to do for others and do not like it” (81).14 When Mrs. Bemis gives Willie two bantems, one to keep and the other to give to his cousin George, he finds that his willingness to follow the golden rule becomes less pronounced, especially when he accidentally kills one of the bantems by holding it too tightly in his apron. Willie has to decide to give the live bantem to his cousin, despite the fact that he does not really want to “do as he would be done by.” When his mother asks him to consider his actions, she asks him to think about George: “supposing Mrs. Bemis had given George the chickens to bring home instead of you, and supposing he had run carelessly, as you did, and fallen down, and killed the chicken, what would you think he ought to do?” (81). With his mother’s help, Willie makes the “right” decision: “I should think mother, he ought to give me the chicken; and mother, I will do as I would be done by” (81). The rules of giving and taking that are related to foods shown here carry over into other kinds of exchanges that include delivering goods and services without taking unfair profits or shirking duties, and the kinds of consideration given to others in need are also highlighted. Willie learns about generosity to widows and also to his peers. The lesson seems to be that the happiness that comes from doing what is right with food and other possessions is more worthwhile than selfish indulgence. Another way that responsible citizenship and thus moral boyhood are constructed is through discussions of fruit. In texts by Jacob Abbott, boys discuss how the ownership of apples can be established, especially if the apples are similar in appearance. In a piece titled “Possessions,” which is part of the serialized Abbott text Jonas, a Judge (1840), Jonas resolves a dispute over apples. The dispute arises because there are two apples that are similar in appearance, and Jonas has to decide which boy is the owner of the apple when one of the apples is lost. The available apple is in Nathan’s basket, and although Rollo
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claims it is his apple because it looks like his apple, Nathan remembers placing his apple in his basket. Jonas makes a decision and explains how property ownership and rights to property can be established: “It is pretty clear, I think, that Nathan is entitled to the apple. We find it in his possession; and nobody has a right to disturb any one in the possession of property, unless they can show clearly a superior title to it” (118). Jonas explains that Nathan’s title is established in part by his possession of the basket. Jonas uses the law to make his decision, and the text explains that Jonas’s decision is a correct one: “Jonas was right in his decision; for the apple was really Nathan’s. Rollo’s was all the time safe in his mother’s china closet, on a high shelf. He had left it in a chair, and his mother had put it up there, and so it was forgotten” (118). This text, and other episodes from Jonas, a Judge, indicate that childhood disputes can be resolved through understanding the laws that govern property, and in this piece, as well as in others, fruit becomes the focus for teaching the citizenship lesson. Other apple texts focus on how the care of the trees can result either in abundant property or in a dearth of fruit. One piece, titled “The Two Apple Trees,” tells a story of a father who plants trees for his sons and gives the trees to his sons when they are old enough to care for them. One boy, Edmund, gives his tree careful attention: He was all that day busy in clearing his tree of insects that would have hurt it, and he propped up its stem to hinder it from taking an ugly bend. He loosened the earth all round it, that the warmth of the sun and the moisture of the dews might cherish its roots. His mother had not tended him more carefully in his infancy, than he did his young apple tree. (45)
This brother tends the tree as a mother would an infant, and his care helps the tree to flourish. The other brother Moses neglects his tree, “never once [thinking] of it, till one day in autumn [when] he by chance saw Edmund’s tree so full of apples, streaked with purple and gold” (45). Dismayed, Moses asked his father to tell the careful Edmund to share his apples. When it is harvest time, the father chastises Moses severely, both for his neglect and for his request that the fruit be shared: Take what you get; it is the reward of your negligence, and do not think to accuse me of injustice when you see your brother’s rich crop. Your tree was as fruitful and in as good order as his. It bore as many blossoms, and grew in the same soil; only it had not the same usage.
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The father gives Moses’ tree to Edmund, but he offers Moses the chance to choose another tree and rear it. Moses, having learned his lesson, selects a tree and cares for it diligently. The care Moses gives the tree also works a transformation in his character that makes him an improved member of the family and community: “He was never out of humor, now, with his comrades, and still less with himself; for he applied cheerfully to work, and in autumn, he saw his tree fully answer his hopes” (45). In this piece, the father gives and takes away the trees, and he makes decisions about whether the boys have been diligent enough with the trees to have a share in the harvest. Instead of focusing on generosity, this apple story, like many of the other fruit stories, focuses on how ownership and rights to property are established. Boys who carefully tend the plants and trees they have been given prosper from the harvest. Boys who come across apples, plant the seeds, and tend the seedlings are praised as for their industry and foresight. The fruit that grows as a result of proper tending might be shared; however, “The Two Apple Trees” and other texts suggest that the harvest should never be divided with those who are undeserving and are not industrious. In this example of a text that combines commentary about food and moral agency, critiques of improper food use, and also second chances/indulgences for those who misuse food, we find that industry, as well as generosity, can make food more palatable and can influence the character of those who work to become industrious. Improper food use at one point, this piece and the “Bantems” piece suggest, is not necessarily a predictor of poor citizenship; if problems are addressed through indulgent opportunities for revising actions and examples of proper food use are offered, then the boys may reshape their behaviors to fit more closely codes of behavior that are supported by their families and communities. A similar example appears in an article titled “The Peaches,” and focuses on boys’ uses of fruit. A father offers four peaches to his children and gives the fifth peach to the children’s mother. In the evening, the father asks the children to report about how they used the fruit, and he provides assessments of how each child’s use of the fruit was advantageous. The first child eats his peach and saves the stone. His father tells him: “that is acting prudently, and caring for the future as becomes a farmer” (162). The youngest son says, “ ‘I ate mine up at once, and threw away the stone . . . and mother gave me half of hers’ ” (162). In response to this the father draws attention to the son’s childishness
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Edmund has kept his tree clear even of the smallest insects; you have suffered them to eat up yours, in its blossom. (45)
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and his childlikeness: “you have not acted very wisely, but still naturally, and like a child. Wisdom will come by-and-by” (162). Another son describes his use of the fruit: “I picked up the stone which little brother threw away, and cracked it. There was a kernel in it just like a nut. But I sold my peach, and received for it money enough to buy twelve when I go to the city” (162). The father tells this son that his actions have not been very childlike: “It was very wisely done, indeed, but it was not natural nor childlike. I think you are destined to be a merchant” (162). The last son, named Edmund, describes what he has done with the peach: “I carried my peach to our neighbor’s son, the sick George, who is ill of fever. He refused to take it. Then I laid it upon his bed, and came home” (162) The father asks the boys who made the best use of the fruit, and they all declare that it is Edmund. Control over eating and an interest in moderation are food-related emphases that can be found in Merry’s Museum, a periodical that began publication in 1841. Ruth K. MacDonald notes that the fact that “children continued to subscribe and to read the Museum is more a tribute to their own contributions to its pages than anything else” (299). Under Goodrich’s editorship, the focus of the periodical was mainly on facts, partly because of Goodrich’s anxieties about fiction and fantasy stories. MacDonald writes: “Goodrich’s own stories were firmly grounded in fact and in conventional Protestant theology” (294). Frequently, at the end of the page in this magazine was a brief aphorism or proverb. One example is an aphorism that states “Rich mouthfuls make heavy groans” (Merry’s Museum, March 1848, 15.3, 70). Another article titled “The Story of George’s Journey” in the same issue discusses children who stay up late at a grand ball and eat too many rich morsels: “The next morning, when they awoke, they were all three sick and feeble. The mere sight of the things which they had at first so longed for, now gave them nausea, although they were extremely hungry” (76). In this text, the right kinds of foods are plain and wholesome and eaten in moderation and with consideration for those who made the food. Other articles in Merry’s Museum use humor to draw attention to manners related to food. One such example can be found in “Billy Bump in Boston,” an article in a series about “Billy Bump,” a boy from the country who is writing letters home to his mother about his experiences with his more sophisticated aunt and uncle who live in Boston. His aunt corrects him and tries to provide him with lessons about table manners: My aunt told me various other things; she said it was bad manners to eat fast and ravenously, like a dog; that I must not take meat in my
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fingers, for it was filthy; that I must not put my food into my mouth with a knife, for I might cut myself, and besides the taste of the steel blade was disagreeable. She said I must not help myself with my own knife and fork, to meat, or vegetables, or butter, or any thing of the kind. She told me all this very kindly; and though I felt humbled at finding myself so ignorant, I thanked her sincerely, and shall try to follow her advice. (44)
Billy Bump serves as a figure of humor, but, simultaneously, his position is aligned with that of many children, who are frequently corrected by their parents or elders on matters related to food. Thus, in articles like these, children can both laugh at the rube from the country who does not know to use a fork to eat meat, and also learn from the lessons that Billy Bump takes to heart during his visit.15 Food pieces also function to draw attention to issues of race and class. In “George and His Money Box,” published in the Youth’s Companion, George’s sister tells him not to give money to a poor man on the street: “Instead of using the money, if you were to give it to him, for any good purpose, he might spend it at a drinking house. In such a case, it would do him harm, instead of good” (35). Instead, she encourages him to give fruit to “old Mammy Jones”: “[y]ou know how fond she is of fruit, and she is not able to buy it often” (35). This story, which references race when “mammy Jones” kisses George’s “smooth white forehead” to thank him for the fruit, shows a boy being trained in economies that not only convey a moral lesson about caring for less-fortunate older women, but also reinforce a racist paternalism that figures women of color as beneficiaries of white boys who are then rewarded for being generous when the spirit of benevolence strikes them. While some pieces reference race with the paternalistic perspective found in “George and His Money Box,” others are more overtly racist. One of the features of Merry’s Museum is that letters from readers (or supposedly from readers—it is difficult to tell whether these letters are manufactured as fillers by the editor of the magazine) appear near the end of each month in an article titled “Merry’s Monthly Chat with His Friends.” One letter that appears in 1849 contains material that suggests how readers link food to markers of race and class. The writer describes a poverty-stricken family and in a distinctly derogatory tone, suggests that there is a connection between race and what the writer describes as idleness: About two miles from our house there is a thick forest, which covers a large tract of land. In this forest dwells a tribe of people, degraded in the extreme. They are descended from one family, and though
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descendents of whites, betray no small affinity to the African race by their tawny color. They live in wretched huts, lighted only by the door, or crevices in the roofs for chimneys. They sometimes go without eating for two days, and it is only when starvation stares them in the face that they work at all. They then make a few splinter brooms for sale. They eat at every house they stop at, and so get enough to live on for the next two days. (93)
Despite the fact that this excerpt describes the family as making a ware to sell and then traveling to sell it, this article seems to blame the family for poverty and for hunger. The next part of the article also seems to criticize the family for picking “whortleberries” and selling them, perhaps because whortleberries grow in the wild and are not cultivated in the same way as other plants: “When whortleberry time comes, they are all bestirring themselves to get them for sale. In exchange for berries they will take flour, pork, money, or clothes” (93). In some ways, this example of using work to obtain food seems contradictory because the author seems intent on describing the family as idle: “The whole tribe is a picture of wretchedness. And why? Because they are too idle to improve the talents which God has given them” (94). In actuality, the work that the family engages in to obtain food is very similar to the kinds of work that the magazine praises in other articles about industrious (white, upwardly mobile) boys who begin to find work in order to sustain their families. Boys’ work then becomes idleness if when the boys have reached adulthood, they have not improved on their scavenging for fruit and wood crafting skills to use the “talents” they have to make money that will allow them to buy meat instead of trading for it.16 Other pieces published in Merry’s Museum seem invested in encouraging the sympathies of the rich for the poor, and some of these pieces reference race, but they do so by focusing on the “whiteness” or the “paleness” of the deserving poor. A poem published by Caroline Howard in “Merry’s Monthly Chat With His Friends” focuses on the differences between rich and poor children: “Little child, / Can it be that you’re hungry—with want are you cold? / Ah, yes! Poor thing! with my questions bold / I have brought the blush to your pale, pale cheek, / And your lips with pleading earnestness speak— / Tired child!” (126). In this passage there is a connection between external signs of hunger in a poverty-stricken child and the rich child’s ability to fulfill that lack or want. There is also a power relation tied to food—the speaker has the power to make the poor child “blush” through reference to food. The talk of food and the blush that it
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causes serve to emphasize both the physical and cultural power of food to reinforce or change social hierarchies. This piece also provides an example of an article that contains contradictory messages about food. In some ways the rich child narrator “indulges” in talk about food with the poor child without taking any personal action that will make a change for the child. Instead, the rich speaker waits for adults to act on the problem. The next stanza describes what the rich child has to offer: “Little child! / ’Tis a sad, sad tale of woe that you tell! / But my mother with comforts will make all well / Your poor little sister, who sickly lies, / And your brother, who almost of hunger dies, / Famished child!” (126). The poor child is offered “comforts” that the rich child’s mother can provide, while the rich child continues to emphasize the famished state of the poor child in words that contemplate poverty without making any individual sacrifices to change the state of the poor child’s hunger. This imaginative exploration of the hungry state of another is one form of response to food that connects to the child reader’s own position. In other words, by reading articles about food (and by extension exploring issues such as poverty and social intervention), child readers can indulge imaginatively in much the same way that the rich children in the texts indulge imaginatively in the hunger- and food-related needs of the poor, needy, widowed, and orphaned members of their communities. Merry’s Museum articles also emphasize how children’s use of food can indicate character traits that influence work habits and moral characteristics. These traits might extend into adulthood. One such article, titled “Habits Which Concern Ourselves,” explains that food use can be representative of the kind of “self” a child becomes in the world: [f]rom our first days we are much absorbed in the affairs of self. It is necessary we should take food, and we do it for ourselves alone. This leads a very little child to put every thing he can reach into his mouth. Now, here is a habit; and it becomes so easy for him to carry his hand to his lips, that he does not know at length, when and how often he does it. It is, likewise, a habit of a selfish tendency; for the hand goes to the mouth merely to gratify a feeling he himself has. But he soon comes to do many other things; and in all his little actions he thinks of self. James will not give John a part of his apple because he is in the habit of eating apples, and whatever else he can get always by himself. This is wrong; and if he do [sic] not reform his selfish habit, he will be a complete miser when he arrives at manhood. Habit not only effects our impressions, but our active propensities. (117)
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Food habits, then, indicate and generate generous dispositions or miserly ones. These food habits can affect even commonly available items such as apples and pears. One of the “aesthetic” principles related to boyhood food economies is that there is a kind of ugliness that is associated with selfish or greedy food behavior that boys can be trained to avoid prior to manhood. In the texts discussed here, boys gain access to pocket money and to produce because of their social positions, which emerge either from birth, from their ability and willingness to perform small tasks for their parents or other members of the community, and/or their cultural and legal access to land and the materials necessary to cultivate it. When the boys make changes in their behavior, their reforms simplify the lives of those they encounter—the poor, widows, and elderly women, all of those who have less access to the resources readily available to middleclass boys. The boys themselves become men whose selfish tendencies have been curtailed in ways that serve not only themselves but also members of their communities. While cookies and gingerbread provide boys with satisfaction and needy women with subsistence that allows them to be self-sustaining if only in the most meager way, the economies of fruit as they are discussed in children’s periodicals tend to focus on the task of tending the orchard and the potential for increasing the family’s capital and power if the fruit is carefully cultivated and harvested. Boys who indulge too freely in either the sweets that are discussed or in the fruit, whether through gluttony, theft, or waste of resources, are described as both childlike and mischievous. Children who share generously and appropriately are praised, but the “naturalness” of children to eat greedily and selfishly and enjoy the indulgences they buy or are given is acknowledged. These pieces then allow child readers the opportunity to indulge imaginatively in the treats and fruits that the characters enjoy while they also insist on containing and punishing any food-related behaviors that move too far outside of what is considered “natural.” Just as there might be drawn a correlation between the child readers and the child characters, there might also be a connection made between the contributors to the periodicals and the widows and spinsters who make gingerbread to sell to the eager boy consumers.17 The “treats” embedded in the periodicals fulfill both the needs of the writers but also the needs of the readers to indulge their imaginations. Thus, a complex economic exchange that exploits and explores the power of indulgence is set up both in the content that focuses on doughnuts and gingerbread, apples and pears, but also in the recurrent publication of pieces that “indulge”
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Notes 1. The doughnuts in my title references my great-grandmother Viola Driscoll Starkey’s doughnuts, which she sold from her house on 21 Old Morton Street in Dorchester, Massachusetts, at the turn of the century. My interest in the Hawthorne scene arises from its similarities to family stories about my great-grandmother’s business. 2. For example, boys in Oliver Optic’s The Boat Club save money to spend on gingerbread at Independence Day celebrations and decide to give their savings to help a poor widow and her child. For a discussion of this series, see my book Serialized Citizenships. 3. See Cane and Alves. 4. E.N. Anderson discusses how food practices are influenced by gender, class, and other complex combinations of forces. See Denise Gigante’s introduction to Gusto1 which discusses various categories of masculinity and femininity in relationship to food culture (xxxiv– xxxv). Although it focuses on a later period in the United States, Jane Dusselier’s article raises significant questions about how the production and consumption of candy and confections is linked to gender constructions. 5. Cookbooks produced in the 1840s and 1850s and republished during the early 1900s indicate that both doughnuts and gingerbread were used regularly. 6. See Susan Williams’ Food in the United States, 1820s–1890 (2006) for more discussion of gingerbread and its connections to European roots. Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald also discuss the history and significance of gingerbread. 7. The ingredients of gingerbread, which include sugar and molasses, are tied to the economics of slavery, a topic discussed by Sidney W. Mintz in Sweetness and Power (1985). 8. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to fully explore issues related to the ingredients in these boyhood foods and their connection with U.S. trade routes in the Caribbean, these are topics that will be explored in an expanded project on food and the economics of childhood. 9. The economic shifts of the panic in 1839 and the U.S./Mexico War and the gold rush in the 1840s changed the career trajectories of some boys, leading them away from small towns to big cities or to apprenticeships with the shipping industry or careers in the military. Widowed or unmarried women were also affected by economic shifts, especially when economic panics or wars cause changes in their support
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in such content. These indulgences are carefully controlled, but in repeated issues, they permit returns to the indulgences that feed the economies of women writers and boy readers.
10. 11. 12.
13.
14. 15. 16. 17.
Lor inda B. Cohoon structure. Of course, all other members of the population would be affected by economic shifts as well, but this study considers how small amounts of money and food affect boys and women. See “The Stick of Candy” and “The Happy Family” for discussions of food regrets and contentment with plain fare. In “Sin Found Out,” e.g., children vomit undigested apples they have stolen. I am indebted to Sage Lambert Graham for suggesting the discussion of language that explores and subsequently contains scenes of food indulgence. My discussion focuses on scenes with boys and “frivolous” foods, but there are certainly examples of girls and food-related behavior in periodicals and children’s texts from the nineteenth century. In Little Women, Amy’s greed for the pickled limes and her subsequent punishment demonstrate one response to girls’ uses of confections and treats. See also Pelletier’s essay in this volume. Sedgwick’s texts frequently demonstrate the ways in which mothers and women can intervene in the education of boys. See Robbins. For a discussion of table manners, see Williams’ Savory Suppers (1985). See Elbert (“Charitable”), Eiselein, and Ryan. Since many children’s periodicals were read by both girls and boys, the child readers mentioned here are certainly not all boys. As Ken Parille and Kenneth Kidd point out independently, boys’ reading habits were a concern for publishers, writers, educators, and parents in the nineteenth century. Periodicals such as the The Youth’s Companion, Our Young Folks, and St. Nicholas frequently alternate articles or entire issues so that in one issue most of the articles are about boys and in the next issue, most focus on girl characters and girls’ concerns.
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Th e E di bl e Book : Wh i t e Fe m a l e P l e a su r e a n d Nov e l R e a di ng Cree L eFavour
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n his 1853 advice book, A Daughter at School, John Todd advises young women and girls to acquire a habit for reading; he emphasizes that the young “need to know how to read to advantage, what to read, and in what proportions [they] may read for improvement and what for entertainment” (106). Todd then cautions: Do not try to read too many books. Some seem to have the notion that if they only read,—read something, and a great deal,—they are on the high way to improvement. You might just as well say, that if you only eat a great deal, keep at it, no matter what you eat, flesh or fish, pies or pork, tomatoes or tom-tits, potatoes or pudding, sausages or sorrel, green apples or green turtle, eels or elfins,—only eat and you will be robust, fair, and in perfect health. (107–108; Emphasis in the original)
In his lengthy analogy, Todd’s fantastic pairing of alliterated edibles stands in for books to convey his opinion on the virtues of selective, moderate female reading. The figuration works broadly as an extended trope that encompasses appetite, digestion, and the health of both body and mind. Moving seamlessly between food and books, Todd asks: “Does not the merest child know that we are nourished most and best by the plain dish, and one dish at a time; that it is not,” he writes in the next sentence, “the amount that is digested and
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incorporated into the system, that gives us health and vigor?” Rather, the mind is fed by carefully moderated reading—the system wants “one dish at a time,” for “[t]he mind that reads a good book slowly is much more likely to be enlightened and fed than if it read ten books in the same time.” The reader is “enlightened,” but also “fed” bodily by reading “a good book slowly” (108). I begin with Todd not because the food metaphors he embraces are unusual in mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American writing about women and reading, but because they are so common. As Alice Jenkins writes, throughout the century, “the reading = eating equation was made again and again, and in ways that invoked numbers of related discourses and social anxieties about the health of the individual body and the nation” (176). The connection of food, reading, and the body in Todd’s advice introduces some of the central points I engage as I unpack what I’ll call the trope of the edible book. I read this trope in the context of a highly diversified, rapidly expanding literary marketplace that had yet to establish legitimate and illegitimate categories for popular books.1 In my analysis, I’ll focus on two principles, each of which shapes and limits the metaphor’s work in the discourse surrounding the edible book during the late 1840s and through the 1850s in the United States. As I see it, “usefulness” is a way of framing the social, moral, and intellectual challenges that reading imaginative literature posed for female education and leisure. If reading was approved, its usefulness was cited as a demonstrable value. The second term, “moderation,” refers to the desire to limit the novel readers’ pleasure and the tendency of that pleasure to foster self-indulgence, delusion, and extravagance. This potential for literary gluttony is at the center of the trope of the edible book as it invokes the powerful symbolic language of food to communicate limits on unmanageable literary consumption. While the English shared American anxiety over women’s reading, the perceived decadence of British and French authors plays a key role in the prevalence of the edible book as a metaphor for American readers. In the United States, the metaphor encompasses the dangers and consequences of exposing the feminine mind and body to old-world temptations—a jaded mind and a dissipated body—in the context of a newly emerging American national identity attached to the purity of republican womanhood. The metaphor is productive because it makes explicit the role of the feminine body in the discourse surrounding women’s education and development, in turn helping to mediate women’s reading choices in the context of a marketplace dominated by reprints of British books (McGill; LeFavour).
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The materiality of the trope of the edible book enables analysis of some of the ways that various social and moral authorities constructed and reconstructed white femininity within Anglo-American culture. Attempts to control what women read in antebellum America play out against a backdrop of autonomous female pleasure, revealing the fault lines in new formations of white middle-class identity. I hope my analysis of the edible book throws into relief what I identify as a profound unease over newly emerging forms of gendered, racially specific individuality. It comes as no surprise that anxiety over female bodies, sexuality, and reproduction are a crucial part of this trope and its prevalence in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and America. As other critics have argued, the control of white, middle-class women’s bodies was central to maintaining a rigid moral and economic order that was understood to be imperiled by the spread of various kinds of “vice,” much of which was associated with female sexuality and the pernicious influence of reading. As Susan Bordo notes, “Anxiety over women’s uncontrollable hungers appears to peak,” figuratively and literally, “during periods when women are . . . asserting themselves politically and socially” (242). Unfortunately for the reform-minded who worked to draw lines around permissible reading, abstaining from books altogether was as unthinkable, and nearly as dangerous, as completely abstaining from food. Echoed again and again in the advice manuals and periodical press of the period is the idea that reading is an activity meant to improve the mind and, through the analogous implication of the metaphor, the body of the reader. As Harriet Martineau writes in her popular Household Education (1849), “Some of the highest interests of English history have been opened to the present generation by the novels of Scott, as to many a preceding one by the Plays of Shakespeare.” Martineau thus endorses the “reading of fiction of a high order” in the interests of picking up historical knowledge. While she describes reading of this sort as “ennob[ling],” she also invokes the metaphor of the edible book, thus emphasizing the physical appetites in her declaration that, of this sort of elevated reading, “no one can question its being better than leaving the craving mind to feed upon itself,—its own dreams of vanity or other selfishness,—or to seek an insufficient nourishment from books of a lower order” (166). For Martineau, reading novels for information is “nourishing” to the mind, a form of figurative language that evokes the body, dragging it into what might reasonably be a discussion of intellect. But by figuring food as books and reading as eating, texts are represented as being taken greedily
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and materially into the body and having various effects there—that is, texts of all kinds are seen as active agents having physical, psychological, and intellectual consequences for consumers. This is significant because, as Pamela Gilbert suggests in her brief discussion of food, drink, and poison as metaphors for reading in the British Victorian context, “In all of these metaphors, the text is a substance that enters the reader and has an effect on him or her. The text is not an inert thing” (Disease 18). Central to the working of the metaphor is not only the idea that the text is active, but that its activity varies according to the reader’s disposition and gender. When the metaphor literalizes reading, making explicit its physiological effects and what is at stake in controlling them, it is the health and control of the sexualized reproductive body that is at stake. Using food as a metaphor for books makes this connection explicit while at the same time pathologizing “inappropriate” female reading as a physical threat to maternity. The metaphor literalizes private reading into transparence, rendering an inscrutable activity of the mind (reading) into a visible activity of the body (eating) whose effects could not only be identified but more readily scrutinized and controlled. In turn, the metaphor transforms an arguably innocent pleasure of the mind into a dangerous pleasure of the flesh—that which touches or comes in contact with the tongue and throat (Foucault, History 39–40). Like many of the paradoxes governing women’s social and political status during this period, at the center of the debate remains an unresolved contradiction. On the one hand, reading of the right sort was understood to improve the female mind by training the intellect and controlling the “natural” female tendency toward highly emotional mental and overly excited physical states. Yet reading of the wrong kind only encouraged the feminine tendency toward the indulgence of those passions and the consequent loss of reason and/ or bodily control, which attended that loss. Perhaps in this context, then, framing prescriptive writing about women’s reading in terms of food enabled critics to articulate what is already central to a JudeoChristian understanding of feminine nature—that it is the feminine appetite, already “saturated with sexuality,” that is most in need of a special diet, and specifically that it is her desire for pleasures of the body (skin, tongue, and throat) that endangers her virtue and purity (Foucault, History 104). The inscription of this discourse on the feminine body in this period reproduced a feminine subject freshly proscribed in the face of a new and potentially liberating form of cultural consumption made possible by literacy and cheap British reprints.
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Attempts to maintain control over readers’ choices in an increasingly crowded Anglo-American literary marketplace reveal a great deal about the expectations placed on white middle-class women in this period and suggest some of the reasons why reading was so frequently expressed in terms of the feminine body. Catharine Beecher complains in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) that “as it is impossible to define what are novels and what are not, so as to include one class of fictitious writings and exclude every other, it is impossible to lay down any rule respecting them” (256). Beecher’s ability to provide a set of rules regarding healthful reading was foiled insofar as novels and romances themselves, as recognizable forms of writing, remained ill-defined. Daniel Eddy echoes Beecher in Lectures to Young Ladies (1848): “Books are found everywhere— good books and bad; Bibles, and novels—tales of murder—tales of lust—tales of love—tales of hate, are in admirable confusion.” Eddy reinforces the idea that “[g]ood reading, like wholesome food, is calculated to strengthen and nourish,” and thus, “wrongly directed it will become a source of terrific evil,” making clear that the direction given to women and youth regarding their choices was of the most urgent order (109). The problem of guiding and supervising women’s reading was complicated in the context of a deeply religious and reform-minded Protestant culture. Despite the relative immorality of so much fiction, even some of the most conservative members of the community refuted the idea that all fiction was immoral. Beecher and others cite “the parables and allegories of Scripture” and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress as examples of fictional books that are “not only lawful, but necessary and useful” (256). Or, as the author Emily Judson writes in 1849, “the innocence or usefulness of fiction, in at least one of its forms, does not lie open to discussion; for the question has been decided by the Savior Himself” (308). Judson admits that she cannot say at what point fiction “degenerates into a vice,” while affirming, like Beecher, that a categorical ban on reading fiction is impossible. Beecher attempts to set some rules for her readers that, not surprisingly, depend on consulting the “character and circumstances” of each individual in deciding appropriate reading. She describes the possible negative and positive effects of “fictitious writings” on the “torpid and phlegmatic” individual as opposed to the “quick and active” individual (257). Beecher drives home her point by linking the character of the mind/body with a final warning that, by invoking food, makes explicit the centrality of the body in her conception of the possibly dangerous mental and physical effects of reading. Against
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“the excitement of the imagination” (257), Beecher warns: “If these stimulating condiments in literature are freely used in youth, in a majority of cases all relish for more solid reading will be destroyed” (258). Beecher here not only raises the possibility of furthering inherent female tendencies, but also suggests that the “stimulating condiments” of fiction make women permanently unfit for more solid, presumably educational fare and its corollary moral and intellectual duties. In a period when texts took such diverse and often overlapping forms—from novels to religious parables, from transcripts to fictions, and, of course, from novels to romances, any of which might be variously described as serious, sensational, silly, learned, or light— explanations of women’s reading and the discourse surrounding that reading must move beyond a debate over the virtues of sentimental verses literary fiction. While the names used to refer to different kinds of writing often overlapped, and while most critics did not agree on how to categorize books, the fact that fictional writing took on such diverse narrative forms and purposes only underlines the confusion and anxiety surrounding the form in a highly diversified literary market. The challenge of educating women and girls while at the same time protecting them from forbidden books grew increasingly difficult as the boundaries surrounding fiction, moral treatises, religious writing, harmless verses, pernicious novels and romances became more difficult to identify and cordon off (Reynolds; Casper). In response to this situation, the period’s leading magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, took up the question of reading in the late 1840s in a series of articles titled “Courses of Reading for Ladies.” The editors did so in a way that allowed a great deal of latitude in recommending appropriate books, for while the magazine was aimed at a white, genteel female audience, it nonetheless largely depended on fiction to fill its pages and pay its bills. Godey’s did allow a wide range of fiction that its editors saw as appropriate to its readers but not of any kind. Rather, the editors are specific and prolific in their recommendations, often attempting to defend American interests over “reprints which we have in vast number,” while nonetheless repeatedly suggesting just these British reprints as singularly appropriate reading choices, including works by Dickens, “Scott, and Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Austen.” They are the authors of “safe” novels that the editors of Godey’s, writing in September 1851, believe “will enlarge your mind, inspire your heart, and improve your manners” (185). Despite Godey’s frequent endorsement of fiction, the author of the magazine’s signature “Editor’s Table” is forthright about the delicacy of the task. Quoting
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Francis Bacon in the April 1847 issue, the editor recommends that: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested—that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to read wholly and with diligence and attention” (220). The notion of the edible book permeates Godey’s recommendations throughout the late 1840s and early 1850s. In one striking early example, the “Editor’s Table” opens its column of recommendations for ladies, appropriately, with the “table” itself, proceeding to further play on the metaphor by invoking the consumption of the food upon it and that food’s proper seasoning. In what seems to be an attempt to stave off criticism, the writer invokes “pies and things” in an effort to convey her opinion about the correct moral tenor of the fiction the magazine recommends. The passage, which appeared in October 1847, begins with food and ends with books and morality in what is a preamble to a long list of permissible reading for ladies, with an effort to “select from the multitude of British poets and novelists”: Even so we flatter ourselves, say the fair readers at our Table, as they rise gratified from their monthly dejeûner—or rather Yankee breakfast, where “pies and things” are mingled with more substantial fare; and where the “salt” that never loses its “savor” may always be found. It may be objected that this “salt” is too profusely sprinkled, that the changes on “moral influence” are too often rung; but we are believers in the Old Testament doctrine, that “line upon line and precept upon precept” is the true way of instruction. (220)
Unraveling this somewhat cryptic passage, the writer represents the readers of Godey’s as consuming their monthly “hearty Yankee breakfast” at Godey’s editor’s table. Invoking the “moral influence” as the vague central principle of providing advice to their readers, the writer defends “substantial fare” (salty, savory food) as a metaphor for educational, morally solid reading as opposed to the insubstantial sweets, or “pies and things” that should be consumed in moderation in order for the reader to “rise” from the table “gratified” by a meal’s balance. The movement from food to books takes place seamlessly and almost invisibly, rendering the passage somewhat inscrutable as the French “dejeuner” is displaced by the “Yankee breakfast.” Various kinds of food are made to stand in for different kinds of reading, an effect that forms allegiances and links between morality, food, books, and gender, which fall prey to a kind of effortless slippage. In turn, these linkages correspond neatly to what Pamela Gilbert identifies as a clear
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hierarchy of reading material corresponding to a hierarchy of foods. In this hierarchy, sweets belong to a lower order, identified with novels and romances, or broadly female-identified forms of writing and reading (Disease 20). This makes sense, for as Wendy Woloson points out in Refined Tastes (2002), sugar, sweets, and candy of all kinds were closely linked to the moral and physical well-being of children and women. The pleasure of a novel that is difficult to put down was akin to the sweets that women and children gobbled as they turned the pages in a kind of rapturous self-indulgence. It is not far from this seemingly innocent pleasure of eating and reading to the dangers of private sexual indulgence in its most pernicious form—masturbation. In sum, fears about women’s pleasure, whether found in a bag of sweets or in the pages of a French novel, encapsulate the dangers of female autonomy in a culture that coded white femininity as subservient and sacrificial. As the self-appointed overseers of women’s virtue seemed to agree, “gobbling a book” was a manifestation of desire that threatened to breach the somatic boundaries proscribing white femininity. In July 1849 The National Era published an invective against novel readers under the title “Fiction—Its Abuses.” The writer classes novels precisely according to a hierarchy of edibles and their effects, with sweets standing for novels that have no nutritional value, or “no character at all.” The dangers of such books result not from simply ingesting them, but from a lusty breach of moderation that is suggested as an implicit effect of the text itself: “They gulp them down as children cram stolen sweetmeats, finishing off a volume at a single sitting.” The writer describes the result of this kind of compulsive reading with an emphasis on the body’s loss of control and the resulting grotesque spectacle. As he writes, this kind of reading “affected them in body and mind very much as the whooping cough affects a child—the nerves vehemently shaken, the muscles in an earthquake, the lungs worked to exhaustion, flushed cheeks, boiled eyes, and a sharp appetite for bread and butter” (117). As with Beecher, but more explicitly, the metaphor brings the focus of reading’s effects to the body, suggesting the lack of containment and control Bahktin has associated with its earthly, reproductive capacity and sexual stimulation. Linking the unquenchable desire for “sweetmeats” to the nature of the powerfully addictive writing itself, the reader is sickened, losing control over her bodily functions, her nerves, and her appetite. Beecher’s invective against the popular author Edward Lytton Bulwer makes a similar connection between immorality and sweets, but carries the metaphor even further by invoking poison. While
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Beecher might seem to hold fairly moderate views on the dangers of fiction as evidenced by her likening of fiction to “condiments,” which reason would indicate might be used in moderation to heighten the flavor of savory food, her food metaphor gains strength in her discussion of Bulwer, to the point of unpalatability. Of Bulwer and other “highly-wrought fictions,” Beecher calls on “all virtuous persons in the community” to “rise in indignation, not only against the writers, but the vendors of such poison” (234). Beecher’s invocation of poison as a metaphor for immoral fiction thus abruptly raises the stakes, while introducing the problem of individual agency and its problematic relation to fictional choice. In her formulation, the text is an active agent, the reader its passive victim. Likening what she calls these “licentious works” (234) to poison relies on a metaphorical form distinct from that of likening this sort of reading to “sweets,” with the degree of agency and the role of desire differentiating the metaphors, separating them not by their sickening effects, but by the process and culpability of the consumer and the transformative powers of the text itself. The metaphor signals the point where the principle of moderation inadequately defines and limits the consumption of certain kinds of fiction. Eddy, for example, includes Bulwer with Eugène Sue and, surprisingly, Dickens when he writes: “That class of books commonly termed ‘novels,’ are as a whole, pernicious and destructive to the best interests of society. They are filled up with abomination, and are no more fit for the young to read, than is arsenic fit for an article of food” (114). The construction here, which places a remove between arsenic as a metaphor for books by comparing it to food, emphasizes the common acceptance of food as a metaphor for books, calling on the logic that governs poisonous substances to do its work. As for Beecher, poison serves to label objectionable fiction as an inedible substance that must be absolutely avoided. There is neither pleasure nor health to be gained by ingesting poison, while sweets and condiments bring pleasure but raise the dangerous specter of selfindulgence. The text’s agency is figured then as central and all powerful; the reader is its dupe. As Gilbert notes in her study of British literary consumption, the identification of books as “food and poison” was based in part on the very real problem of food and penny candy adulterated with arsenic, toxic dyes, and other contaminants. The problem of pure food and water and their equation with literary consumption underlines the link between the two as they are figured as “potentially deceptive, slippery substances that could affect the reader without the reader’s
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knowledge or consent, like a poison—or a disease” (“Ingestion, Contagion, Seduction” 69). Like sweets and poison, the frequent use of alcohol as a metaphor for books underlies the feminine body’s susceptibility to addiction and the loss of control. A novel, or “a book of falsehood” as Todd describes it, is irresistible, allowing the reader no control over her habit, leaving in its wake “a fearful passion” and, worse, a woman whose loss of control is captured by the phrase “drunken with excitement.” Thus the “charm” or pleasure of reading cannot be trusted to be taken moderately by the naturally impulsive female—rather, her “passion” overcomes her and she becomes “intoxicated” and “addicted.” The text takes on the moral weight of true inequity, highlighting the clash between idealized American femininity and the pleasures of private reading. As female novel reading expanded, with women comprising a large portion of the buyers and readers in a complex Anglo-American marketplace, the need to contain and control this consumption grew more urgent. While reading practices were at the forefront of this change, anxiety over the expanding role of female writers was also a critical factor in explaining the desire to contain women’s use of literacy—in all forms. Complaining about the flood of women’s writing and comparing them unfavorably with the careful prose of Maria Edgeworth, a writer for Godey’s in June 1856 laments: We feel the warmest wish to see the genius of American writers worthily exalted, and we take sweet pleasure in the hope that we have done a little to advance the cause of mental improvement. But we cannot be blind to the evils which this fast literature is inflicting, not only on us editorially, but on society, on our country, and on the age. (557; Emphasis in the original)
Framed not only as a matter affecting the “improvement” of women but of the society and nation, the proliferation of women’s writing and their consumption was not taken lightly. Thus while “American literature” was of great import, British fiction remains the standard to which the Americans must aspire, with “fast” denoting not only the speed and recklessness with which American novels were produced in contrast to Edgeworth’s professed caution in her productions, but with an undesirable moral and sexual looseness. Female novel readers thus violated the boundaries of the domestic, both in the sense of figuratively leaving the home and leaving the nation, as it were, through their consumption of foreign books and by recklessly reading the less genteel American fiction of the 1850s.
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As an anonymous writer for the New york Daily Times wrote in an advertisement for Washington Irving’s Works: “Few among the present readers of light literature—those omnivorous swallowers, who bolt everything warm and reeking from the dregs—have enjoyed the privilege of reading a new work from the pen of Washington Irving.” Instead, this new “rabid class of readers,” “forty thousand to a book” gobble the “unctuous mélange” whose supply continues with “unbated malignancy” (“Notices,” 27 February 1855, 3). To engage in these activities constituted a threat to the still nascent values and ideals that distinguished the emerging republic’s identity from England, ideals based on the evolving construct of “American” as simple, hardworking, and abstemious as opposed to the overwrought dangers of the unctuous mélange described here. Weak, women were particularly susceptible to these influences, incapable “of thought separated from all external things, of trains of connected ideas, and of connected modes of reasoning” (Flint 55; emphasis in the original). These attributes are, of course, also linked in the antebellum iconography to black men and women and to children of any race. A racially specific gendered personhood (white femininity) was under attack during this period as the struggle over universal white male suffrage shifted from a class-based system (defined by property ownership and therefore in certain instances inclusive of women) to a more systemic exclusion based on distinctions of race and gender. This meant that the visibility of women’s identity increased. As Kathleen McHugh argues, “the criterion for the franchise shifted from exclusions based on unequal distribution of property to exclusions that legally constituted identity itself as the premise for inequality” (39; emphasis in the original). Women’s roles as wives (legally subordinate to their husbands) and mothers (culturally and socially defined by the domestic sphere) constrained them and yet reading expanded their boundaries. This was perceived by many as both a danger to women’s health (perhaps her reproductive capacity) and a threat to the nation’s health that depended upon women’s labor and her virtue to maintain and strengthen the republic. Books and reading, as figured in terms of food, drink, and alcohol, undermined the domestic role women were expected to fulfill. Books were represented as a pleasure that encouraged a dangerous tendency toward self-indulgence, driving women from their proper station—making them unsatisfied with their role and their prospects. As Daniel Eddy describes this problem: her thoughts are far away in an ideal world, whither she has been transported . . . She revolves over and over in her mind the scenes through
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Her domestic “work neglected” and her “stern duties” forgotten, the dissatisfaction Eddy describes is striking. There is no question that the loss of mindfulness and attention to household “work” and “duty” is resented. It is not the body that is lost—the body does its duty: “[h]er fingers move, but she knows not what she is about. Her body is beside her loom—her fingers hold the needle, and her hand is turned to various useful employments, but her thoughts are far away in an ideal world” (118). This may be understood not only in terms of the way reading tended to be a pleasure that, like all pleasures of the lower senses (not those of sight or hearing, but those of the body), tended to exaggeration and excess as evidenced by the metaphor of the edible book; because it was constructed as a bodily pleasure, its “hyperbolic” potential infused the body and mind with dissatisfaction, the drive toward more in contrast to the ideal domestic female’s emotional and material self-sufficiency. Stronger language and the mixing of metaphors of food and drink underline what is at stake in controlling the consumption of novels that, as the writer for The National Era notes, “are injudicious in their plan, absurd and extravagant in execution, useless or dangerous in their issue” (“Fiction” 117). The writer complains not so much of the pernicious moral effect of this sort of fiction—that is, the corruption of innocent morals and the introduction of vice into the impressionable female mind; rather, he warns of the dangers of fueling myriad desires: [They] do terrible mischief to their silly devourers, by rendering them callous to the plain, unvarnished misery which everywhere solicits their regards in actual life—as extravagant cookery blunts the palate to wholesome food—rendering their sensibilities irritable, morbid, feeble, approaching to exhaustion . . . Moreover, the victims of this trashy extravagance are kept regularly drunk upon the small beer of sentimentalism, which they mistake for the very wine of life, and have their fancies juggled into imbecility by highly-wrought daubings of preposterous refinement and impossible fortune. (117)
Not only do novels of this kind harm the reader physically, rendering her mind and body “feeble” and “morbid,” it is the “extravagance” of the experience of reading itself and of the content of that reading that is dangerous, leaving the “silly devourer” a drunken imbecile.
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which she has been led, and every hour becomes more dissatisfied with things as they are, and she turns from this cold world, and its stern duties, to hide herself in the contemplation of the extravagant picture which some “Eugene Sue” has spread out before her. (118)
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Reading renders the consumer unfit for her role and more important, dissatisfied with that role. At play here is not only the feminine tendency to excess, but also the suggestion of a foreign refinement and extravagance as opposed to the implied simplicity identified with American republican values, with the key to this link being the use of the phrase “preposterous refinement.” As a writer for Godey’s complains in June 1856, “[b]adly written, and foolish books” are objectionable because: They describe people in the lowest stations, rising, not by industry, sobriety, and merit, but by wonderful and impossible circumstances, and obtaining, not knowledge and virtue, not the natural rewards of thrift, industry, and good conduct, but the hand of some wonderfully rich, grand, beautiful, and fashionable man or woman as the case may be! (557; Emphasis in the original)
The dangers of fiction are physical and sexual, but as this passage indicates, they are also material. Reading fiction expanded, dangerously, women’s expectations, “distorting” the Protestant work ethic and modest expectations. Tract No. 493, “Beware of Bad Books,” issued by the American Tract Society explains how fiction acts as a “poison,” then explains how “[f]amiliarity with popular fiction gives . . . false views of the perfectibility of human nature, thus leading to disappointments in the relations of life” (59). The tract goes on to advise: “Beware of bad books . . . Beware, because good books are plenty and cheap, and it is folly to feed on chaff or poison, when substantial, healthful food may as well be obtained” (61; emphasis in the original). In other words, there is no excuse for indulging in the bad when the good is there to be had. In a period of rising cultural nationalism and in conjunction with the long-awaited explosion of American fiction, the metaphor of the edible book locates anxiety over Americans’ failed attempts to construct an avowedly simple identity in contrast to European excess and corruption. Pointing to the stealthy effects of Eugène Sue and Balzac, a writer for Putnam’s in July 1857 claims that “French novels are like brandy and water and cigars. They reach and irritate a brain which is impervious to finer influences” (93). Numbing the mind and body, fiction of the wrong kind renders Americans unfit for the more suitable, solid, republican pursuits. Critics, by representing reading as a pleasure of the flesh, subject to the dangers of self-indulgence and exaggeration, no less than overindulgence in sex, food, or alcohol, join reading with the internal
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Fem a le Ple asur e a nd Nov el R e a ding
C r e e L e F av o u r
logic that governs these pleasures and their attendant dangers. By metaphorically replacing books with food in discussions and representations of women reading, the policing of the feminine intellect is displaced by, or in the least included in, the policing of the feminine body and the capacity of women for autonomous pleasure. In passage after passage, this slippage reveals one key source of the anxiety surrounding novel-reading, desire, and, most centrally, the specter of female pleasure as a private indulgence in urgent need of containment and supervision. The attempts to police this pleasure alert us to the subversion of officially sanctioned uses of print on the part of women and others for whom negotiations of power were most intensely mediated in mid-nineteenth-century culture. The glorious freedom white American women enjoyed—to curl up on a sofa to read an English novel while popping French bonbons—was unmistakably dangerous. Books were figured as “edible” not because they went so well with bonbons, but because the practice of consuming them was heady with potential for staking out fresh lines of identity based on gender, race, and class—lines that were not necessarily in keeping with a pious republican ideal.
Note 1. Before I continue, I want to give credit to the article that originally alerted me to the workings of the edible book as a dominant trope during this period, Steven Mailloux’s “Cultural Rhetoric Studies: Eating Books in Nineteenth-Century America.” Mailloux’s treatment is less historical than rhetorical, with a focus on postbellum male and female descriptions of novel reading. On reading and eating, see also the chapter “Addictive Reading and Professional Authorship” in Glazener. Holland takes up the psychological connection between reading and eating (75–77). Additional scholarship, published since I completed the first draft of this essay, includes articles by Gilbert (“Ingestion, Contagion, Seduction”) and Jenkins.
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Th e P e r f ec t Di n n e r : H aw t hor n e’s Ru m i nat ions on O l d a n d Ne w E ngl a n d Monika Elber t
. . . abundantly as Nature has provided us with most of the material requisites, the highest possible dinner has never yet been eaten in America. It is the consummate flower of civilization and refinement; and our inability to produce it, or to appreciate its admirable beauty if a happy inspiration should bring it into bloom, marks fatally the limit of culture which we have attained. —Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home, 1863 (V: 311–12)
N
athaniel Hawthorne had a lifelong fascination, perhaps even an obsession, with food. His journal jottings show, early on, an everyday interest in food, in his capacity as a gardener, as a sometimes cook, and as a traveler,1 and later, a sociological interest in food, in his role as U.S. Consul to Liverpool and observer of European ways. In his early fiction, he often uses food in an allegorical way—to show the shortcomings of mankind through his relationship to food. Thus, the protagonist of “Egotism; Or, the Bosom Serpent” (1843) has a snake gnawing away inside: what appears to be gastrointestinal discomfort is a manifestation of a spiritual malady, namely solipsism or self-consumption. In “The Christmas Banquet” (1844) sinful guests are bidden to a sumptuous table, but remain hungry and empty. Hawthorne’s New England novels rely upon food imagery at
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Chapter 9
Monik a Elbert
moments fraught with conflict, as when Dimmesdale, in The Scarlet Letter (1850), eats with “ravenous appetite” (I: 225) upon his return to the study, after his final encounter with Hester in the forest leaves him frenzied and momentarily unable to write a pious sermon for the governor’s election. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the vicious Pyncheon males are depicted as having excessive, animalistic appetites, and redemption comes in the form of Phoebe Pyncheon, who knows how to cook the right stuff to bring together feuding families.2 And, in The Blithedale Romance (1852), Coverdale’s earlier musings about ideal, utopian food end in his disenchantment with the actual work needed to produce a real harvest.3 Hawthorne himself often uses food metaphors to define the art of writing—its pleasures and travails. Describing his favorite summer squashes he grows in the Old Manse garden during his honeymoon years in Concord, he declares, “Art has never invented anything more beautiful” (X: “Preface,” Mosses from an Old Manse [1846], 14); he even insists, somewhat hyperbolically, that a sculptor should be inspired to copy their many shapes. Hawthorne, who forever is caught between the desire for the real and the ideal, finds that the squash in his garden satisfies his “squeamish love for the Beautiful” as well as his desire for “hearty enjoyment” (15). As the romancer who searches for a perfect blending of the two realms (of the “Actual and the Imaginary,” as he calls it in “The Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter), this cultivation of his garden, which he deems Edenlike (X: 13), gives him a sense of accomplishment and perfection: “They were real and tangible existences, which the mind could seize hold of and rejoice in” (X: 15). And, in an instance of merging his nurturing and artistic abilities, he declares, “the hugest pleasure is reserved, until these vegetable children of ours are smoking on the table, and we, like Saturn, make a meal of them” (X: 15). This might seem a most solipsistic (and cannibalistic) moment—of celebrating one’s ability to create, and then indulging oneself in the final product; in a sense, Hawthorne has his cake and eats it, too. Hawthorne’s search for the perfect food mirrors his search for the ideal reader who will understand him (whom he longingly but futilely describes in the introduction to The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun). But he refuses to give himself up to his audience, as a “tidbit” to a cannibalistic reader. In his preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, Hawthorne, figuratively invites the reader into his abode, but will only go so far in his hospitality, for he asserts he is not “one of those supremely hospitable people, who serve up their own hearts delicately fried, with brain-sauce, as a tidbit for their beloved public” (33). This strange conflagration of head and heart, in
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a most unappetizing context, shows Hawthorne’s reserve, his distrust of his reader, and his distaste for public attention. Hawthorne, ever the Romantic, searches for the sublime, even in the mundane, and his travels, through new England as well as old England, give him a sense of hope that he will find that exquisite landscape. Dennis Berthold, in a different context, comments on Hawthorne’s earlier sketches about Niagara Falls: “Hawthorne’s traveler . . . came prepared for sublimity; but as the iconographic record shows, he seldom found it” (128). Just so, Hawthorne is forever seeking the consummate experience, of the self-contained moment, of the sublime landscape, of the ideal reader, of the perfect meal, and, on the national level, of the civilized dinner. As discussed in the introduction, nineteenth-century American culinary tourists, searching for a national identity, were compelled to make comparisons between the art and the food of New and Old England. Defining culinary aesthetics, food theorist Pierre Bourdieu looks at the “antithesis between quantity and quality, belly and palate, matter and manners, substance and form” (“Taste” 73). Deferring the pleasure of consumption to savor the aesthetic refinement of the meal’s visual presentation and to enjoy the meal as a social ceremony is deemed the mark of a cultured individual and nation (73). Well-traveled writers such as Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe would probably have agreed with Bourdieu’s modern notion of good taste, though certain middle-class biases were part of the equation. As Carolyn Korsmeyer observes about Kant’s eighteenth-century notions of aesthetic taste (in contradistinction to the more mundane “gustatory taste”), and those philosophies of taste that followed, the basis of evaluation is often classist and elitist: they “generaliz[e] about an ideal member of a privileged, educated class, who is held to represent the whole of human nature, or human nature at its ‘best’ ” (63). There was something exciting about the prospect that America was the tasteless (tantamount to classless?) society, but bourgeois values reinforced by a Protestant work ethic and a sense of decency were hard to avoid. Stowe and Hawthorne were sure Americans had the raw materials, the abundance of food, but not (yet) the know-how or experience to produce a respectable national cuisine. Stowe remarks, “considering that our resources are greater than those of any other civilized people, our results are comparatively poorer” (HHP 228). It is a land of opportunity, but like Hawthorne creating beauty in his private garden, the nation had to work at discovering a culinary (and artistic) tradition. Still, with its abundance and myriad possibilities of food varieties, America was on the upswing: food was as much an uncharted territory as the West.
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H a w t h o r n e ’s R u m i n a t i o n s
Monik a Elbert
As Hawthorne expresses it in the introductory epigraph, the highest mark of civilization would come to the United States once they had achieved the perfect dinner, which he calls the “consummate flower of civilization.” Indeed, the idea of the perfect dinner as a consummate sign of civilization was shared by many: John Sanderson, author of The American in Paris (1838), lamented that Americans could not be taken seriously by their European counterparts, “How, indeed, entertain a favourable opinion of a nation which gives us bad dinners” (16). However, Hawthorne also insists that it is not as if the British had a monopoly on good dinners, for he could only remember “one single dinner” he had partaken in England which could have been considered “a perfect work of art” (V: Our Old Home, 312). This one perfect dinner sounds so idyllic that it is hard to imagine what it would look or taste like—in fact, it transcends the senses (the level of “animal enjoyment”), as he evokes a more spiritual meaning (“a dreamlike development of spiritual happiness”). The taste is so fleeting, so evanescent, that one cannot be sure it was real: “As in the master-pieces of painting and poetry, there was a something intangible, a final deliciousness that only fluttered about your comprehension, vanishing whenever you tried to detain it” (312). In this fleeting state of ethereal bliss, Hawthorne also feels a camaraderie not often shared with his fellow diners: the eight banquet guests, imbued with the divine, “were becoming so educated, polished, and softened, by the delicate influences of what they ate and drank, as to be now a little more than mortal for the nonce” (312). This is one of the few instances where Hawthorne does not comment on beastly eating habits of the English dinner guests, and one wonders whether the group of invitees were of such a high moral fiber that any dinner would have been splendid, or whether the dinner was so divine that the guests were transformed into “more than mortal.” In the excursive passages of his European notebooks, Hawthorne reevaluates the position of New and Old World customs, morals, and democratic impulses in a discussion of “taste.” Like many culinary tourists and food theorists, Hawthorne equated good taste as much with a country’s artistic heritage as with its national diet. As a contemporary observer of manners noted, “table-aesthetics is a branch of the fine arts”: “the man who has a good taste in poetry, painting and music, will also have a good taste in all things pertaining to the management of the table” (Benson 294). In attempting to establish a stable national identity, Hawthorne evaluates the differences between European nations and young America: his comparisons about national character focus on their art as much as they do on
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their food (progressively even more so on their food, especially in his English Notebooks). His musings on art are as critical and as strident as his ruminations on food, and he can be as critical of American as of European culture. In French and Italian Notebooks, for example, he laments, in a way with which de Tocqueville would probably concur, the underdeveloped taste in American art: “I wish our great Republic had the spirit to do as much, according to our vast means, as Florence did for sculpture and architecture, when it was a Republic, but we have the meanest government, and the shabbiest—and, if truly represented by it, are the meanest and shabbiest people—known in history” (XIV: 29 September 1858, 431).4 In fact, in discussing American tastes in art, Hawthorne is very harsh, suggesting it best if Americans leave off from producing such brazen art objects as “the equestrian statue of General Jackson”—for he feels there is “something false and affected in our highest taste for arts . . .[and] we are the only people who seek to decorate their public institutions, not by the highest taste among them, but by the average at best” (432). At first glance, it would seem that Hawthorne is privileging European taste over American, but ultimately, as is always the case with Hawthorne, he critiques the weaknesses and applauds the strengths of both traditions. In sizing up Continental cuisine, Hawthorne often prefers the modest and simple homely fare of the countryside, which is similar to plain New England rustic cooking (like Phoebe’s simple, unaffected, and hearty home-style cooking in The House of the Seven Gables). In the environs of the Lake of Thrasimene, near Florence, he is surprised by an abundant meal after sizing up the dour exterior of the inn: The dinner made its appearance after a long while, and was most plentiful; a rice-soup, a large dish of fried fish, some chops, and some chickens, besides, I think, a pudding, maccaroons [sic], and fruit; so that, having measured our appetites in anticipation of a paucity of food, we had to make more room for such overflowing abundance. (XIV: French and Italian Notebooks, 2 June 1858, 265)
At another point, in his Italian travels, in Radicofani, he describes another simple but adequate and pleasing meal: “Our dejeuner . . . consisted of an omelette, some boiled beef, a couple of roast chickens, grapes, and roasted chickens, with abundance of thin red wine; a very satisfactory meal” (XIV: 13 October 1858, 467). Italian cookery that is unostentatious and hearty appeals to Hawthorne’s homebody side.
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H a w t h o r n e ’s R u m i n a t i o n s
Monik a Elbert
The story is different when Hawthorne ruminates about English cuisine and traits. France, which always upheld its culinary superiority to Anglo nations, was of little culinary interest, in the sociological sense, to Hawthorne. He spent less time in France than he had in England, and he was in less competition with a non-Anglo culture—and would even use French cuisine with which to belittle England further. Noting the delicacy of French food in comparison to English “gross” food, he concludes that both are dangerous: gorging oneself on English food makes one realize, guiltily, that one’s animal needs are being satisfied, whereas dining on “French delicacies” gives the illusion of “cultivating your taste while filling your belly” (XIV: 11). Hawthorne privileges the savory French cuisine over the English: another meal is quite abundant, but “we respected ourselves far more than if we had gorged a quantity of red roast-beef” (XIV: 26). Hawthorne would always have a “beef” about the British, as a result of their too-close proximity to American culture. In Oxford, England, Hawthorne describes another ample meal, but its excess induces queasiness in the reader, if not in Hawthorne: “The dinner being ready, we sat down and ate as if we had been twice as many, though it was early for a dinner, and we had lunched so recently;—cold ham, cold fowl, cold pigeon-pie, cold beef, and tarts, and cakes, and pears and plums” (XXI: EN, 143). This amplitude is excessive in comparison to the rustic fare described in the passages about Italian cuisine, but Hawthorne does show vivacity and merriment in his reaction to the ample sherry, port, stout, and bitter ale (143). The cold meats, lacking in warmth, seem less appetizing than the food that pleases him most. Elsewhere, he gives a long bill of fare but complains that the roast pig “tasted of swill—had a flavor of the pig-stye” (XXI: 402). Hawthorne is forever ambivalent in his attitude toward old and new England, especially about their diet, table manners, and national cuisine, and some of this ambivalence reflects his desire to be like the English, on the one hand, and his need to assert American independence and deflect the anxiety of influence of the mother country, on the other.5 The upshot of his ambivalence is a peculiar tone in his letters from England, in his English Notebooks as well as in his essays about England, in Our Old Home: it alternates between envy and rancor. Most vehemently, Hawthorne declares, The more I see of the world, the better I think of my own country (not that I like it very enthusiastically, either) and, thank God England’s day is past forever. I have such a conviction of the decline and fall of
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Strange discourse for the American Consul to Liverpool, but after blasting England in this letter to his editor, he adds, almost apologetically and even nostalgically, “And yet I like John Bull too.” In his essay, “Near Oxford,” in Our Old Home, an extended version of his Oxford journal entry, Hawthorne is eager to show similarities between the English and American taste—but also to note the potentially baneful influence of England on America: a table had been laid . . . and spread with cold ham, cold fowl, cold pigeon-pie, cold beef, and other substantial cheer, such as the English love and Yankees too; besides tarts, and cakes, and pears, and plums; not forgetting, of course, a goodly provision of port, sherry, and champagne, and bitter ale, which is like mother’s milk to an Englishman, and soon grows equally acceptable to his American cousin. (190)
In a December 1855 English Notebook entry, Hawthorne observes, “[The English] are still a nation of beastly eaters and beastly drinkers; this tendency manifests itself at holiday time” (404). To be fair, Hawthorne is also critical of Americans, calling them “reckless devourers,” who unfortunately (and unlike the English) lose their ability to enjoy a “vigorous appetite” at midlife and find little pleasure in any dining experience (V: “Civic Banquets,” 311). In his journals, Hawthorne, more candid than in his public essays, is, at times, disagreeable and misogynistic. In September 1853, shortly after his arrival in England, he notes that the English diet has ravaged the beauty of English women: they become “perfectly grotesque after middle-age;—so massive, not seemingly with pure fat, but with solid beef, making an awful ponderosity of frame. You think of them as composed of sirloins, and with broad and thick steaks on their immense rears” (41).6 Moreover, he accuses even the Ladies of England of looking as “dowdy” as “cooks and housemaids,” although on closer “inspection,” they might project a “kind of dignity” (XVII: 24 September 1853, 41). Even more caustic is an entry of September 1854, where he calls the women “grim, red-faced monsters” and would exonerate husbands for “murdering them”—in “taking a sharp knife and cutting away their mountainous flesh, until he had brought them into reasonable shape, as a sculptor seeks for the beautiful woman in a shapeless block of marble” (133). Hawthorne’s earlier idea of turning food into art is transformed into turning flesh
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England, that I am about as well satisfied as if it had already taken place. (XVII: “Letter to William D. Ticknor,” 12 October 1855, 388)
Monik a Elbert
into art—and reflects the type of thinking that has his fictional artist/scientist protagonists deface women for the sake of aesthetic perfection: “The husband must feel that something alien has grown over and incrusted the slender creature he married, and that he is horribly wronged by having all that flabby flesh imposed upon his wife” (133). He blames such “ugliness” on the national diet, “a life of gross-feeding—of much ale-guzzling and beef-eating” (133) and callously asserts that such physical creatures should be slaughtered to have their souls released. Hawthorne, as always the critic of both nationalities, feels that American women of similar age are less selfreliant, and also appear to look “worn, care-begone [sic],” past their prime; he prefers them, though he finds it a pity he must choose “between a greasy animal and an anxious skeleton” (134). Hawthorne, appalled by the appetites of the British, is also quick to critique the artwork of English painter William Etty (who had a predilection for painting rotund nudes). Hawthorne sounds almost intimidated by the fleshiness of his subjects: The most disagreeable of English painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for woman’s flesh, and spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously developed bosoms and bottoms. I do not mind nudity, in a modest and natural way; but Etty’s women really thrust their nakedness upon you with malice aforethought, and especially to enhance their posteriors, that one feels inclined to kick them. (XXII: EN, August 1857, 357)
Though Hawthorne could glamorize the size of his pumpkins at his Old Manse garden in Concord, this roundness on humans seemed excessive.7 Nor is Hawthorne much kinder in his descriptions of elderly John Bull, whom he describes as rough, paunchy, and double-chinned on various occasions, at various banquets and dinners. Certainly, no reader past his or her prime appreciates these excursions into the ugliness of middle age, but Hawthorne might have been self-reflective at these moments as well—as a man in his mid-fifties, and as a stranger in England having, as a U.S. Consul, to represent American culture (or lack of it). In a letter to friend and editor James T. Fields, Hawthorne writes of his expanding waistline, “I am afraid the ale and port wine have me a little too jolly in aspect, and that I assimilate too closely to the rubicund and rotund figures around me” (XVII: 13 September 1855, 380-81).8 In mock humor, he fears that Americans will reject the now paunchy Hawthorne: “America will not
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own me when I come back.” In this same letter, where Hawthorne feels assimilated with the British on account of his belly, Hawthorne suggests an increased familiarity and comfort with Englishmen, but only because familiarity has bred a modicum of contempt and because he has lost some respect for the venerable culture: “I find that my liking for him [John Bull] grows stronger, the more I see of him, but that my admiration and respect have constantly decreased.” In respecting the British culture of the past and devaluing the contemporary British scene, Hawthorne himself often takes on old aristocratic airs and becomes elitist: “I have grown woefully aristocratic, in my tastes, I fear, since coming to England; at all events, I am conscious of a certain disgust at going to dine in a house with a small entrancehall, and narrow staircase” (XXI: EN, 28 November 1855, 402). If proximity had made the English ancestors seem too close for comfort, Hawthorne feels that one could idealize the AmericanEnglish relationship from afar, recording in his Notebooks (December 1855), “there is not the same union between us, as if they were Americans . . . Perhaps if I were at home, I might feel differently, but in this foreign land, I can never forget the distinction between English and American” (404). This would seem to suggest that Hawthorne was better as an armchair diplomat—that he could appreciate England, but only from a distance. It is the celebrated English dinner, the famous institution, that makes Hawthorne feel most uncomfortable among the English—and it is not just the food, it is the dinner table banter and forced manners. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who similarly waxed hot and cold about the British, had the most vituperative comments about ghastly formal English dinners, making them seem like the last place one would want to be invited. She discovers that interesting people are invited to breakfasts and dullards to dinners: this may be why Hawthorne was not so enchanted by the guests he met or the table talk he endured at English dinners. Stowe remarks upon the pleasure she has at English breakfast parties, which she laments not having in America. The host informs her: “dinner parties are mere formalities. You invite a man to dinner because you must invite him; because you are acquainted with his grandfather, or it is proper you should; but you invite a man to breakfast because you want to see him. You may be sure, if you are invited to breakfast, there is something agreeable about you” (Sunny Memories II: 2–3). In comparison, Carl Benson, the nineteenth-century American observer of manners, in his “Table Aesthetics” promotes a good dinner as the basis of all civilization and sociability: it is deemed “the parent of good feeling, peace with oneself and with the world, benevolence and
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H a w t h o r n e ’s R u m i n a t i o n s
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liberality” (293).9 But a “bad” dinner brings with it “mortification, discomfort, and misanthropy” (293). Hawthorne must have attended some of those bad stodgy dinners. At many of the mayor’s or other government banquets that Hawthorne was forced to attend (in his position as American Consul), Hawthorne shows his own fear of public speaking, which must have given him as much indigestion as any beef and ale dinner he might have decried. Dinner engagements became an ordeal, as Hawthorne had to come up with toasts and short speeches; the English Notebooks are filled with such nerve-racking occasions, and Hawthorne admits, “it is the most awful part of my official duty; this necessity of making dinner speeches, at the Mayor’s and other public or semi-public tables” (135). Even though he is applauded and complimented, he feels a fraud, as if his speech is neither a success nor a failure, for “I had aimed at nothing, and had exactly hit it” (XXI: EN, October 1854, 136). He also talks about a kind of “high” he gets after performing in this fashion, “after sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment of speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise again; it is something like being under fire—a sort of excitement, not exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures” (October 1854). At another public dinner, he had described his public speaking in a similar self-conscious fashion: “My speech was no more than two or three inches long . . .[and though] I had nothing to say, it was quite successful . . . once on my legs, I felt no embarrassment, and went through it as coolly as if I were going to be hanged” (18). Although he gets through these occasions apparently unscathed, he does complain about incorrect reporting of his speeches. And he makes a point of attacking the unpolished English dinner table oratory: “Englishmen would avoid eloquence or neatness of after-dinner speeches, even if they were capable of it. At any rate, it seems to be no part of their object” (XXI: EN, 5 October 1854, 137). Hawthorne feels that the dinnertable audience prefers the rough and rude manner of such speakers to the slick mannerisms of the glib speaker. At another dinner function, he tries to evoke an image of the distant aristocratic past to make up for what he sees is the shabby present, as evidenced in the lack of formality at dinner events. He evokes the image of the mayor and other dignitaries dressed up in finery, in their state dresses, “and then the dinner would have been really a magnificent spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the powdered and gold-lace servitors” (XXI: EN, February 1855, 155). So oddly, for every time Hawthorne evokes the image of the presentday crude English ways, he tries to recreate the image of a noble past, even though the image of aristocracy or privilege is also attacked at
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the same time. For instance, after describing the civic banquet, where he ate “turtle-soup, salmon, woodcock, oyster-patties, and I know not what else—and might have eaten twenty other things” (156), Hawthorne notes the sad contrast of the dirty, ragged paupers waiting very patiently in a soup-line, “I don’t know that they have a right to be impatient of starvation; but still there does seem to be an insolence of riches and prosperity, which one day or another will have a downfall” (156).10 And perversely, Hawthorne adds, “And this will be a pity, too,” as if to favor the prosperous over the working or impoverished class. Ultimately, Hawthorne’s views of national character and national cuisine are never fixed; if he compliments one aspect of the national appetite, he critiques another. He never, in fact, resolves the differences between old and new England—but sees the folly and strengths of each in its cuisine and table manners. It is not simply that America can be construed as more democratic, less aristocratic (and hence superior), but that England, with its culinary epicureanism, has certain qualities that make it more palatable (at times). However, by the time Hawthorne gains distance from his English experience and writes the last sketch of Our Old Home (1863), “Civic Banquets” (based on various observations from his English Notebooks, and first published as a sketch in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1863), he is not as apt to condone the American character, even as he makes light of the English. It is a satirical sketch that exposes the folly of both nations, through their appetites, cuisine, manners, and table-talk. “Civic Banquets” shows Hawthorne’s parting glance at England, in his life and as his final assessment of his prolonged stay in England. In this last sketch of Our Home, he dispenses with discussion of architecture, art, and history (as he described earlier in the volume), in favor of this basic human need, food, which had become an increasingly favorite theme for Hawthorne in his English Notebooks. Throughout the sketch, Hawthorne gives a detailed description of the English appetite and the English dinner of which he partakes at the “Civic Banquet,” but he is ultimately more favorable in his description than he has been in his private jottings. He suggests that the original superior English character (of the past) is now wanting, and something is amiss with the dinner. He shows the upshot of the overdeveloped English appetite—in the “red and mottled” face of the Englishman, who develops a double chin. “The animal part” in him was far more developed than the spiritual and intellectual parts. Indeed, Hawthorne, measuring national levels of flab, deems the Englishman the victor but proclaims the American the more superior
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or spiritualized (or at least gaunt) specimen of mankind. He concludes about national aesthetics, “Comparing him [the Englishman] with an American, I really thought that our national paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly the advantage in an aesthetic point of view” (319). Hawthorne does decide that the Englishman is wanting in spiritual refinement: “It is not to be supposed, however, that the mob of cultivated Englishmen know how to dine in the elevated sense. The unpolished ruggedness of the national character is still an impediment to them, even in that particular line where they are best qualified to excel” (312). Yet Hawthorne knows that Americans have taken after the English beefeater, and there is also an apocalyptic sigh of anxiety, as he seems to predict the world of McDonald’s in the United States: “The world, and especially our part of it, being the rough, ill-assorted, and tumultuous place we find it, a beef-steak is about as good as any other dinner” (313). The democratic discourse (or sometimes the lack of it, as well as the superficiality of dinner table chatter) at the civic banquet table shows Hawthorne’s concern about the disintegration of Anglo culture (as manifest in its cuisine). Hawthorne regrets the passing of an era, “a few hundred years ago,” when people came to the Civic Banquet “for the sake of being jolly”—in his day, in contrast, “they come . . . with an odd notion of pouring sober wisdom into their wine, by way of wormwood bitters, and thus make a mess of it that the wine and wisdom reciprocally spoil each one another” (340). He attempts to raise both American and English consciousness to a higher level in “Civic Banquets,” and he appears to recant, or at least he makes a dramatic move to recant, his earlier biased treatment of the British, although somewhat tongue in cheek: “I came to the conclusion that Englishmen of all ages are a rather good-looking people, dress in admirable taste from their own point of view, and under a surface never silken to the touch, have a refinement of manners too thorough and genuine to be though of as a separate endowment” (320). Always aware of class lineage in England, he adds here, with a disclaimer—“that is to say, if the individual himself be a man of station, and has had gentlemen for his father and grandfather. The sturdy Anglo-Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the third generation” (320). Hawthorne also states that he has only been so critical of the English, because English writers have done the same with Americans: “[They] invariably measure us, and take upon themselves, to be disgusted accordingly, instead of trying to find out some principle of beauty with which we may be in conformity” (V: “Civic Banquets,” 320)—and he points out that the English have viewed
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Americans as “wild beasts” with “savage fury” (342).11 He describes the dinner guests next to him in a not entirely insulting way, but perhaps ironically: the lawyer next to him, “with a glow of professional complacency,” seems full of himself, and the meaty man next to him, who “ate with resolute appetite, and [who] let slip few opportunities of imbibing whatever liquids happened to be passing by” was a salt-of-the-earth type of military man, whom Hawthorne praises for his “Manhood” (324). He imagines Americans making light of the English singing “God Save the Queen” after someone proposes a toast, but then critiques Americans for not having the same kind of loyalty—or royal ceremony, “We Americans smile superior, as I did at the Mayor’s table; and yet, I fancy, we lose some very agreeable titillations of the heart in consequence or our proud prerogative of caring no more about our President than for a man of straw” (325). But, ultimately, Hawthorne feels that the heyday of English supremacy is over. Their state of spiritual bankruptcy is described in terms of their earthly appetites—so much so, that they have lost sight of the possibility of a more ethereal future: “It has often perplexed me to imagine how an Englishman will be able to reconcile himself to any further state of existence, from which the earthly institutions of Dinner shall be excluded” (310). In a type of volley between the critique of English and countercritique of Americans, Hawthorne never takes sides, finally. In “Civic Banquets,” in Our Old Home, he rewrites the more vituperative passages of his notebooks, so we are convinced that English oratory at banquet events is admirable: “When an English speaker sits down, you feel that you have been listening to a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely this apparent naturalness is as much an art as what we expend in rounding a sentence or elaborating a peroration” (327). However, Hawthorne still gets in a gibe at the Englishman’s veneer of civility, as he is able to recognize John Bull’s sense of art as artfulness or artifice. Hawthorne does reminisce nostalgically about the “red mullet, a plate of mushrooms exquisitely stewed, and part of a ptarmigan, a bird of the same family of the grouse” (336), but there too, his commentary detracts from the English, as he attributes the success of the meal to the grouse, which feeds “high up towards the summit of the Scotch mountains, whence its gets a wild delicacy of flavor very superior to that of the artificially nurtured gamefowl” (336). It appears that England’s culinary tradition is based on artificial refinement, whereas the Scottish tradition is based on the purity of nature. Hawthorne also cannot refrain from critiquing the
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English who would do better to “estimate the aesthetic gourmandism of devouring the whole dinner with their eyesight” (336). In the battle of gourmands, Hawthorne, in this final sketch, sees himself as a peacemaker between the two sides, the two national cuisines, and ends his sketch by talking about his coming to the podium to give a conciliatory speech (“to save both countries” 345), which the Lord Mayor would have wanted, on patching up the discord between England and America: the sketch, “Civic Banquets,” serves as that speech he may never, in fact, have made.
Notes All citations to Hawthorne are to the Centenary edition; I include volume and page numbers. 1. The fruits of Hawthorne’s labors as a gardener are manifest in his journals and in the preface to Mosses from an Old Manse, where Hawthorne proudly enumerates and lovingly describes the fruits of his labors: apples, cherries and currants, beans and peas, cabbages, and his favorite, the summer squashes. And he favors the homegrown vegetables over those purchased in the market: “the light toil, requisite to cultivate a moderately sized garden, imparts such zest to kitchen-vegetables as in never found in those of the market-gardener” (X: 13). Hawthorne, however, seemed to do better as a self-reliant American gardener than as the perfect American guest at an English dinner party. Rita Gollin points to Hawthorne’s American Notebooks entry (31 May 1844), where he describes his new (temporary) role as a cook, in his wife’s absence (82): he tries to cook corned beef, using a recipe from Sarah Josepha Hale’s cookbook, The Good Housekeeper (1841; mentioned in our introduction). Even in his journeys as a young man, Hawthorne is aware of food. Traveling to Niagara Falls, he is aware of the sublime destination, but ultimately shows more interest in the dinner hour. In the sketch “My Visit to Niagara,” he does not do the touristy thing: he says he did not run “like a madman, to the falls, and plunge . . . into the thickset of the spray, never stopping to breathe, till breathing was impossible” (281). He does not ask about the “nearest way” to the landmark, but inquires instead about dinner time. Sometimes even the poetic soul needs more than spiritual sustenance. 2. In my earlier essay on Hawthorne and food, I focus on Puritan repression rearing its nasty head through intensely charged food episodes in The House of the Seven Gables. Hepzibah’s and Phoebe’s different notions of cooking (English or American) are displayed in their preferred cookbooks (with Phoebe most likely choosing Lydia Maria Child’s or Sarah Josepha Hale’s recipes); in the battle for control of
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the household, Phoebe, with her modest fare (made from wholesome local ingredients) and with her domestic household skills, wins. See Rita Gollin, who also looks at the animal nature of the Pyncheon males. 3. Zenobia offers the utopians fine tea (prohibited in Transcendentalist circles) upon their arrival, but promises them buttermilk thereafter. Coverdale, the idealist, imagines a life without domestic labor and insists that “Eve had no dinner-pot”: “the kind of life which falls to the lot of woman is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life—the life of degenerated mortals—from the life of Paradise” (III: 16). His notion of cooking as a mark of the fall is the exact antithesis of what Lévi-Strauss sees as the mark of civilization; though Lévi-Strauss privileges the cultured and the cooked, Coverdale idealizes the natural, and the raw. As if to subvert further notions about primitive versus civilized eating, Hawthorne depicts Silas Foster, the farmer, as more cannibalistic than Christian (and he may be seen as the antithesis to Melville’s Queequeg). His table manners are replete with faux pas: he pours his own tea and then gulps it down noisily, uses the wrong eating utensils, grabs too much ham, drops food on the tablecloth, and perpetrates “terrible enormities with the butter-plate” (III: 30). Coverdale sizes him up as “behaving less like a civilized Christian than the worst kind of ogre.” As Susan Williams points out, the niceties at the nineteenthcentury American table were important, as they indicated refinement and gentility—the more brutish eaters were deemed less civilized (Food in the United States 153–55). Cf. also Coverdale’s temporary escape to the city saloon (chapter 21), which he describes as “fitted up with a good deal of taste” (175). The “taste” is meant ironically, as the “high art” painted on the walls is incongruous with the setting. The still-life food images on the paintings seem “visionary”: the tender beefsteak, the sirloin, the venison, salmon, duck, cheese, and sardines, though all very real, take on an ethereal quality. Coverdale speculates that the hungry artist “wrought these subjects of still life, heightening his imagination with his appetite” (176). In the battle between the ideal and real, Coverdale, echoing the early Hawthorne, maintains that the art, though “perfectly imitated,” possessed “an indescribable, ideal charm [which] took away the grossness from what was fleshiest and fattest” (176) and thus helped even the earthy part of man strive for nobility, warmth, and substance. 4. Cf. Stowe’s differing view of European aesthetics. After a visit to a French art gallery, she critiques the artifice she perceives: “It seems to be the work of a race whose senses and perceptions have been cultivated more than the deep inward emotions” (Sunny Memories II: 89). 5. Frederick Newberry has written the most comprehensive study about Hawthorne’s vacillating allegiance to old England. On the one hand,
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6.
7.
8. 9.
Monik a Elbert Hawthorne feels drawn to the beauty wrought by aristocratic English culture (in its art, architecture, and rituals); on the other, he believes, though at times skeptically, in the promise of the American democracy for creating a more equitable society (even as he lamented the passing of the English aesthetic tradition). Hawthorne already observes differences between English and American women in the early “Market-place” chapter of The Scarlet Letter, and, there too, Hawthorne has issues with the English diet, the too earthy (but robust) Englishwomen (brought up on beef and ale) and the too ethereal American women who have descended from them in the colonies: in the course of seven generations, “every successive mother has transmitted . . . a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty” to her child, “if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own” (I: 50). Hawthorne would have had much to learn from Jean Anthelme BrillatSavarin, the Frenchman who wrote the authoritative book on good taste (in gastronomy and in beauty). He discusses the “terrible misfortune” of women being thin, as feminine beauty “consists in roundness of form and graceful curving lines” (Physiology of Taste 191). Hawthorne is much less acerbic about the English tendency to put on pounds in his final conciliatory remarks about his English experience in the more formal writing, “Civic Banquets,” in Our Old Home. He regrets his earlier “transatlantic newness and rawness,” and looking back at the experience, admits that his “dear countrywomen” now appear “meagre,” even scrawny, whereas the English ladies, though less “ethereal,” were perhaps “a little finer animals than they” (334), a rather back-handed compliment. Harriet Beecher Stowe, less hesitatingly, celebrates the Englishwoman’s preponderance toward roundness. She laments in her 1854 publication Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands that English women “keep their beauty much later and longer . . . one meets ladies past fifty, glowing, radiant, and blooming, with a freshness of complexion and fullness of outline refreshing to contemplate . . . How comes it that our [American] ladies dwindle, fade, and grow thin—that their noses incline to sharpness, and their elbows to angularity, just at the time of life when their island sisters round out into a comfortable amplitude and fulness” (II: 10). I thank Fred Newberry for referring me to this passage on Hawthorne’s weight. Benson also observes that the calculating English give “sumptuous banquets” at charity events, so that the “purse is more open” (293). Stowe feels inevitably more comfortable with midday luncheons, which seem less pretentious and somewhat equivalent to less formal and simple American meals. She remarks upon their cozy quality: “The meal, called lunch, is with the English quite an institution, being apparently a less elaborate and ceremonious dinner . . . the most social and family meal of the day” (Sunny Memories I: 208).
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10. For an in-depth analysis of Hawthorne’s view of abject poverty he witnesses in England, as described in Our Old Home, see James Wallace’s “Hawthorne’s Glimpses of English Poverty.” 11. See the book’s introduction for examples of the gibes the English (most notably Dickens) took at American cuisine.
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M a n Does No t L i v e on Br e a d A l on e: Th e Pa r a dox of Nou r ish m e n t
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Pa rt I V
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Hu nge r, Pa n ic , R e f us a l : Th e Gi f t of Food i n Sus a n Wa r n e r’s T H E W I D E , W I D E W O R L D Hildegard Hoeller
I
f an anorexic is someone who thinks about food in great detail and refuses to eat it, then Susan Warner’s novel The Wide, Wide World (1850) could be called an “anorexic” text.1 As it describes the journey of Ellen Montgomery to find a new home, the novel abounds with depictions of food and drinks: from tea to coffee, from candy to pork, from eating toast in a drawing room to making hearty meals in a country-kitchen. Warner’s attention to food is wide-ranging, idiosyncratic, and ambivalent. She focuses not on eating or preparing food—even though those are described in detail—but on giving it away. In her novel, Warner explores the gift of food and the way in which it creates bonds and communities. Warner’s interest in the gift of food can be illuminated by theories of gift exchange. In his book The Gift (1983), Lewis Hyde explains the most important differences between gift and commodity exchange; the former builds community while the latter leaves those involved in the exchange free and alienated.2 In a monetary system, we can negotiate, compute, and pay back our exact debt, and no bond remains. Reciprocity is an element of the gift exchange system, but it does not annul the initial gift because its value cannot be exactly assessed and repaid. Gift exchanges leave bonds and obligations, and
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Chapter 10
Hildega r d Hoeller
gifts gain their power from the transaction of being given rather than from their value as distinct objects. “The gift is property that perishes,” Hyde explains, and thus “food is one of [its] most common images . . . because it is so obviously consumed” (8). Accordingly, “many of the most famous of the gift systems we know about center on food and treat durable goods as if they were food” (9). Food is one language with which we can express and define an economic exchange system that lies outside of the logic of capitalism since it begins with nourishing others rather than enriching oneself.3 This sense of gift exchange lies at the core of Susan Warner’s novel The Wide, Wide World; through food Warner envisions human bonds and nourishing non-capitalist communities that are both life-sustaining and meaningful. It is hardly surprising that Warner would try to imagine such communities during the composition of The Wide, Wide World. Her once well-to-do family had been badly stricken by the 1837 panic, in which her father had lost most of the family’s property. Instead of coming out as a wealthy eighteen-year-old debutante in New York City, Warner had to think about daily survival in a house on Constitution Island. Most likely, she never got married as a result of such a move and therefore might have begun to envision alternative bonds outside of the wealthy lives of New Yorkers and outside of marriage. The family’s economic situation worsened after 1837, and by 1850 the Warners were in such straits that they lacked “necessities such as candles and sugar” (Weiss 453). In order to survive, Susan—as well as her sister Anna—became the breadwinners of the family, and Susan set about writing The Wide, Wide World. The novel is deeply marked, even haunted, by the economic crisis that precipitated its creation; we might call it, to use Mary Templin’s term, a piece of “panic fiction” (1).4 Through the production and exchange of food, Warner explores the various ways in which her characters, particularly her women characters, are trying to sustain themselves, connect with others, and survive outside of the capitalist market from which they are excluded or by which they—as their author—have been betrayed. Warner explores the gift of food in search of an alternative economy that would free her characters from the volatile and morally meaningless movements of the stock market. Yet, precisely when Warner depicts such a functioning community based on food and gift exchange, her text panics, recoils, and moves toward its anorexic ending. If the gift of food is central in Warner’s text, then its refusal remains one of the novel’s ultimate prerogatives.
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Warner begins her novel with the detailed description of a food exchange that strongly resonates with Warner’s family’s financial losses after the 1837 panic. Ellen Montgomery and her ailing mother are reduced to meager circumstances because the father lost the family’s money.5 Due to the father’s inability to provide, the family will be torn apart, the parents going to Europe (ostensibly to cure the consumptive mother) and Ellen being sent to live with her father’s sister, Aunt Fortune Emerson. The opening scene depicts Ellen preparing tea for her mother in a dark and cold space. In this scene, in a reversal of the most basic mother-daughter relationship, the daughter becomes the maternal nourishing figure to her dying mother. Ellen’s preparation of tea and toast speaks to the power of the gift of food to express love and affection. However, Warner’s description also implies that such a food exchange cannot keep either mother or daughter alive. The scene, in its minute details, speaks carefully to the economic, psychological, social, and physical predicament of both mother and daughter. To make her mother’s tea was Ellen’s regular business. She treated it as a very grave affair and loved it as one of the pleasantest in the course of the day. [. . .] She knew exactly how much tea to put into the tiny little tea-pot, which was just big enough to hold two cups of tea, and having poured a very little boiling water to it, she used to set it by the side of the fire while she made half a slice of toast. How careful Ellen was about that toast! The bread must not be cut too thick, nor too thin; the fire must, if possible, burn clear and bright, while she herself held the bread on the fork, just at the right distance from the coals to get nicely browned without burning. When this was done to her satisfaction (and if the piece failed she would take another), she filled up the little tea-pot from the boiling kettle, and proceeded to make a cup of tea. She knew, and was very careful to put in, just the quantity of milk and sugar that her mother liked; and she used to carry the tea and toast on a little tray to her mother’s side, and very often held it there for her while she eat. [. . .] It was a real pleasure; she had the greatest satisfaction in seeing the little her mother could eat was prepared for her in the nicest possible way; she knew her hands made it taste better; her mother often said so. (13; Emphasis added)
Paralleling the consumptive body of the mother and the dwindling fortunes of the family, everything in this passage is diminutive: the
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Mother and Daughter: Consumption and Death
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“tiny little” teapot that holds only two cups, the “very little” water, the “little” tray and the “little” her mother can eat. The smallness of everything is juxtaposed with the extreme care of Ellen’s preparation. Such care is a sign of love, but it also speaks to a sense of fastidiousness and waste ill-suited to their current situation. Ultimately, neither Ellen nor her mother ends up eating anything. Mrs. Montgomery is too overcome by grief; “she swallowed a cup of tea, but no toast could be eaten that night” (14). The gift of food in this scene lies in the preparation and offering rather than in the substance and eating of the food. It also implies a “sick” reversal of the normal order of nurturing since Ellen takes on the role of a mother, or even of a nurse and her “regular business,” and her mother that of a patient, or perhaps even a child. For the reader, there is no doubt that the mother is dying and that tea and toast, even given with love, cannot save her. This idea is reinforced with Ellen’s relationship to Alice Humphreys, who later takes on the role of Ellen’s mother or sister, and with whom Ellen frequently shares tea. Alice, too, dies of consumption. Tea and toast also hint at larger class-based and national communities. The afternoon tea and its elaborate preparation rituals, after “the servant had brought in the tea-things”(13), place Ellen and her mother within middle-class culture. In the introduction to Dining in America (1987), Susan Williams describes the surge of tea-drinking in America’s middle-class culture after 1833, when the “British East India Company’s stranglehold on the production and importation of tea to the West” ended (7). By the 1850s, various forms of tea were available in cities and small towns (8). An American middle-class culture of “having tea” emerged that was formalized and described in great detail in cook books, etiquette books, and domestic advice books. Afternoon teas demanded not only the careful preparation Warner describes, but teas, as Williams asserts, were “one of the most important forms of social activity for women and helped counteract the isolation of the strictly defined confines of the ‘woman’s sphere’ in nineteenth-century America” (10). Ellen and her mother still adhere to the ritualized preparation of tea, but their afternoon tea is not a social occasion. The smallness of their teapot is a sign of their isolation and impoverishment, their exclusion from the social sphere of middle-class life. Warner also adds postcolonial echoes to the scene, since Ellen’s mother—like Alice Humphreys—is British, and her particularity about her tea and toast link her to Britain. Mark McWilliams notes that discourses about British nationality and American class identity were interwoven: “In late eighteenth-century America, revolutionary
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rhetoric aligned ‘the tastes of luxury’ not with the upper classes as such, but rather with British imperialism; such rhetoric explicitly split out this political aspect that, until then, had been implicitly conflated with the idea of upper class America” (4). What resulted was a debate between “European sophistication and republican simplicity” (8). Warner uses food to engage in such a debate. In this early scene, Warner shows that Ellen’s mother’s European sophistication is increasingly incongruous with their economic status; it becomes almost absurdly reduced to a cup of tea and a half slice of a perfectly prepared toast. She also connects it to consumptive illness: Ellen’s mother returns to Europe to die. Warner later contrasts this European sophistication with the homegrown “republican simplicity” of Aunt Fortune Emerson and her rigorous food production. But before Ellen arrives at her aunt’s household, the novel explores the gift of food in a different context— not inside the family but among strangers, as charity.
“Anorexic” Charity While Warner begins her novel with the giving of food in the intimate relationship between mother and daughter, immediately after she offers two (and, in an initial manuscript version of the novel, three) examples of gifts of food that speak to the importance not of eating but of giving in the spirit of charity and forgiveness. With each example, Warner moves further away from the literalness of food and toward its function as a token or sign, a meaning that is enhanced or even enabled when we refuse to eat food ourselves and give it to others despite our own hunger and appetite. First, as a foil to Mr. Montgomery who depletes and impoverishes his family, a kind gentleman takes Ellen and her mother under his wing. Initially, he helps Ellen when a sales clerk treats her unkindly in a department store. Then the old gentleman provides the two women with daily gifts of food, but he never reveals his name. However, he expresses his pleasure in giving his gifts: “Will Mrs. Montgomery permit an old man to please himself in his own way, by showing his regard for her little daughter, and not feel he is taking a liberty? The birds are for Miss Ellen” (53; emphasis in the original). This emphasis is important since the gentleman’s gift is such that Ellen can, in turn, give the birds to her mother. In her gratitude, Ellen writes to acknowledge the double pleasure of giving food and eating it: Ellen Montgomery does not know how to thank the old gentleman who is so kind to her. Mamma enjoys the birds very much, and I think
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In accordance with gift-exchange as Hyde describes it, these gifts create abundant satisfaction as well as a network of social and emotional relations by being both circulated and consumed. But the bonds that are being created are tenuous. The gentleman feeds mother and daughter, and they respond with gratitude, but he remains anonymous and therefore does not allow for real reciprocity, interdependence, or equality. In an episode immediately following, but later cut from the manuscript, Warner reverses this episode, now making Ellen and her mother the charitable givers rather than the recipients of gifts of food. Ellen has just received figs and grapes as a gift to her mother, but she is overcome by her own appetite and almost begins eating the figs herself. At that moment she sees Rebecca, a small black girl, approaching: after a struggle she gives the figs to the little girl and watches her eat them instead. “She [Ellen] was at that moment tasting the first
of her figs. & she could not help drawing a comparison between her own condition & that of her less favored fellow creature. Her heart smote her as she did so” (qtd. in Roberson 19).6 This passage shows both Warner’s care in her depiction of food and eating and her ambivalence about having her heroine eat at all. The angled brackets indicate Warner’s revisions, suggesting that she wavered between having the first fig just “at her lips” or having her “taste” it. In either case, Warner stops short of showing Ellen “eating” the figs rather than giving them away. Ellen at first hesitates but then feels that “some token [. . .] of kindness was due from the more happy to the less—from the full to the hungry” (qtd. in Roberson 19). Thus, Ellen overcomes her own hunger or appetite by redefining hunger as unhappiness, and fullness as happiness. After some deliberation, she runs after Rebecca and asks her whether she is hungry. “ ‘Hungry?—I guess not,’ she answered. ‘But wouldn’t you like some figs?’ said Ellen with a smile. <&> as she put two good handfuls into her hands” (19). The girl gladly takes the figs, and she puts some of them “[t]o her mouth with very evident marks of approbation” (20). The narrative voice emphasizes the actual moment of eating, of putting the figs to her mouth, as if to suggest that Ellen herself is watching the process of ingestion. This narrative focus is repeated when Ellen brings the grapes to her mother.
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I do more; for I have the double pleasure of giving them to mamma and of eating them afterwards; but your kindness is the best of all. I can’t tell you how much I am obliged to you, sir . . . (55)
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Ellen presented her open paper of grapes as she spoke. And indeed it seemed a well-timed present, for they were evidently most grateful to Mrs. Montgomery’s parched lips & fevered tongue. Ellen saw it, & watched every grape that went to her mother’s lips with far more <eagerness> delight that if it had been for her own; & she truly tasted more of their sweetness by sympathy than her mother did by actual relish. (20)7
Ellen learns to overcome her own appetite by recognizing the “hunger” of others: of the sick and “parched” or “poor.” These exchanges highlight the literal and metaphorical meaning of hunger that also, to some degree, was underlying the gifts of the old gentleman. While Rebecca is not immediately hungry, she is hungry in a larger sense. That becomes clear when she gives back—first by showing Ellen how to pick coals out of ashes, and then by returning her purse to her. While Mrs. Montgomery praises her morals, the girl makes clear that is not morals but the gift of food that made her return the purse. Had Ellen not been kind to her she would have kept the purse and the money contained in it since her mother could have bought “victuals” with it (220). From there a brief charitable relationship develops between Rebecca and her mother, Mrs. Richardson, and Ellen and her mother. Ellen and her mother visit the Richardsons, see their abject poverty, and offer to help further. Ellen’s mother brings food and materials but also preaches to Mrs. Richardson to serve God. Mrs. Richardson reminds Mrs. Montgomery of her real life situation, her real needs and hungers, even as she finally agrees to Mrs. Montgomery’s preaching. While Ellen’s gift of food came from a perceived gap between the conditions of Rebecca and herself, her mother turns the gift into a spiritual lesson, moving it away from food. Thus, the gift of food leads to charitable relations across class and race lines, but it cannot create a community since Mrs. Montgomery is not truly able to see Mrs. Richardson’s point of view. Here, too, the charitable gift of food creates a tenuous bond, one that does not allow for reciprocity, equality, and interdependence. While this episode initially stresses the relation between literal hunger and the need for kindness, and then connects the gift of food to spirituality, the next example—published in the final version— connects giving food entirely to spirituality and forgiving and moves away from issues of class and race. On her boat trip to her aunt, Ellen encounters an old gentleman who tries to convince Ellen, as her mother had before him, that Ellen’s love really is owed to God who gave Ellen her mother as a gift (72). He gives Ellen a hymnbook as a
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gift, and she reciprocates by offering him sweet sugar plums. The gentleman accepts but asks her to do more: she should give the candy to the Dunscombe girls who had mocked and taunted her earlier. Ellen initially refuses, but the gentleman insists on the connection between giving and forgiving: “ ‘If ye forgive unto men their trespasses, my Heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will my father forgive your trespasses!’ ” (80). After some struggle Ellen finally understands and decides to be charitable toward the girls and give them the sugar plums (81).8 In all three instances, food exchange creates tenuous bonds of charity, kindness, forgiveness, but these bonds cannot be relied upon or extended to create an interdependent community.9 At the core, though, lies a kind of anorexic logic: food needs to be given away rather than eaten. Others need to eat it; refusing food is a matter of social, spiritual, and moral superiority.
The Power of Food, Gift Economies, and Republican Simplicity When Ellen finally arrives at her Aunt Fortune Emerson’s house, she finds herself both preoccupied and filled with food. In her aunt, Ellen encounters the very opposite of her mother: an independent, strongminded, skilled food producer and cook. Aunt Fortune’s house and home appear to be the ideal domestic space. The house is neat and sunny, and the new home “could not help but seem cheerful” (101). Aunt Fortune is a very competent housewife, keeping order, making good food, and tending to the entire household with care and efficiency. Yet, when Ellen enters the kitchen she is somewhat repulsed by the immediacy of the food’s production: “The noise of hissing and sputtering now became quite violent, and the smell of cooking, to Ellen’s fancy, rather too strong to be pleasant” (103). Warner describes the cooking in detail, showing how Aunt Fortune is completely absorbed in her task, more like a stoker in a boiler room than a nurturing mother: Before a good fire stood Miss Fortune, holding the end of a very long iron handle by which she kept in communication with a flat vessel sitting on the fire, in which Ellen soon discovered all this noisy and odorous cooking was going on. A tall tin coffee-pot stood on some coals in the corner of the fireplace, and another little iron vessel in front also claimed a share of Miss Fortune’s attention, for she every now and then leaned forward to give a stir to whatever was in it, making each
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This scene parallels the opening scene between Ellen and her mother. While Ellen makes tea in a tiny teapot, Aunt Fortune has a “tall” coffee pot going and holds a vessel through a long iron handle.10 And, while the tea preparation is about the bonds between mother and daughter, Aunt Fortune “communicates” with her vessels rather than with Ellen since they “claim her attention.” The description of the kitchen and cooking as noisy and odorous and the emphasis on the metal instruments place this food production within the context of machinery and even industrial capitalism rather than domestic cooking; as a worker in (as well as an owner of) a factory, Aunt Fortune communicates with her machinery rather than with her family.11 While Ellen’s mother consumes, spends, and wastes away, Aunt Fortune produces with efficiency and rationality, preserves and hoards with a passion, and later exploits Ellen’s labor without emotional nurturing. Initially, Ellen is amazed at her Aunt’s frugality and her ability to make something out of all materials. When Ellen sees some fat left in a pan “she had settled in her own mind that certainly this would be thrown out, being fit for nothing but the pigs” (103). But Aunt Fortune adds heavy cream to it and flour and prepares a delicious gravy, a “thick, stiff, white froth” (103). Ellen is delighted with the results: “never was any cookery so entirely satisfactory as Miss Fortune’s fried pork and potatoes” (106). Here, the very “republican simplicity” is contrasted with the “European sophistication” of the previous scene: coffee versus tea, pork versus toast, frugality versus waste, preservation versus consumption, and health versus sickness. But to Ellen there is something lacking in Aunt Fortune’s “healthy” housewifery. Aunt Emerson’s food is nourishing but not nurturing; it is never given as a true gift or sacrifice. Food here comes without love, without generosity, without gift-giving. Miss Fortune very, very seldom was known to take a bit from her own comforts to add to those of another. The ruling passion of his lady was thrift; her next, good housewifery. First to gather to herself and heap up of what the world most esteems; after that, to be known as the most thorough housekeeper and the smartest woman in Thirlwall. (338–39)
While Ellen’s mother wastes away, and also spends her last economic resources, Aunt Fortune Emerson produces, hoards, and preserves
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time quite a spasmodic effort to do so without quitting her hold of the end of the long handle. (103)
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in a competitive way. And, unlike Ellen’s mother, she literally feeds Ellen. Warner tests the power of the gift exchange against Aunt Fortune’s frugality at great length in her description of the bee Aunt Fortune organizes when she finds herself unable to do all the work in her household because she has to make sausages and has all her apples to preserve. It is a battle between self-interest and community. Mr. Van Brunt suggests a bee (228), but Aunt Fortune initially doubts that it will be worth her while: “I ain’t a going to have all the bother of a bee without some thing to show for’t” (228). In stark contrast to Ellen’s mother and Alice who preferably share tea, Aunt Fortune decides merely to offer supper but not tea—and to invite only as many people as she needs to do the work; “I won’t have just as many on ’em as’ll do what I want done” (229), she asserts. As she considers inviting the Lawsons, Aunt Fortune argues: “there’s a good many hands of ’em; they can turn off a good lot of work in an evening; and they always take care to get me to their bees. I may as well get something out of them in return if I can” (229; emphasis in the original). On the other hand, Miss Fortune refuses to invite Alice because she does not want charity: “I don’t want to see any body that thinks she’s going to do me a great favour by coming” (230). Aunt Fortune hopes to control the bee and the bonds it may create. In the spirit of the frugal housewife,12 she preserves both her economic and her emotional independence, and she tries to limit and preserve her social context as well. But the bee is not pure business; the power of the gift of food asserts itself against Aunt Fortune’s iron will. The preparation and exchange of food takes on a life of its own, creating a spirited community and the exchange of other gifts as well: Now it would be hard to say whether talking or working went on best. Not faster moved the tongues than the fingers; not smoother went the knives than the flow of talk; while there was a constant leaping of quarters of apples from the hands that had prepared them into the bowls, trays, or what-not, that stood on the hearth to receive them. [. . .] Laughing and talking went on merrily; stories were told; anecdotes, gossip, jokes, passed from mouth to mouth. (253)
The company grows kinder, and the community closer. Preparing food, eating food, talking, sharing stories, and giving gifts all end up intertwined as delicious parts of each other: “The circle was a very large one now, and the buzz of tongues grew quite furious. [. . .] ‘they are all so kind to me’ [said Ellen]” (254–55). The talking and eating become
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uncontrollable, and Ellen is entirely caught up in the spirit of the bee: “The company were all crowded around the table, eating and talking and helping themselves; and ham and bread and butter, pumpkin pies and mice pies and apple pies, cake of various kinds, and glasses of eggnogg [sic] and cider were in everybody’s hand” (263). Even Ellen gets to taste the delicious food. Mr. Van Brunt rescues a piece of a favorite dessert for her and gives it to her. “It was sweet and cold and rich. Ellen told her mother afterwards it was the best thing she had ever tasted except the ice-cream she once gave her in New York” (263). The narrative has reached its highest point; even Warner’s writing seems to partake of the spirit of the bee, reveling in descriptions of abundance, goodwill, spirit, community, and the consumption of rich food. But Warner halts the moment, not letting her heroine indulge in food for more than a second. “She had taken, however, but one spoonful,” the narrator quickly intervenes, “when her eye fell upon Nancy, standing back of all the company and forgotten. [. . .] Ellen’s eye went once or twice from her plate to Nancy, and then she crossed and offered it to her” (263). Ellen wins her struggle with her own appetite, stops eating the delicious food, and gives it away. Ellen’s gift of food also tightens the bonds between her and Nancy, and her gift returns to her in the end. The bee has a life of its own and everyone is in its spell, creating an overall spirit of inclusion and generosity. Both Alice and Nancy participate in the bee even though Aunt Fortune tried to exclude them. Similarly, despite the fact that Aunt Fortune had “managed it so” that Ellen was excluded from the work (253), Warner shows that there is a second, secret gift-circle at work that escapes Aunt Fortune’s control. When Ellen comes into the cellar, Miss Janet no sooner spied Ellen standing in the chimney-corner than she called her to her side, kissed her, and talked to her a long time, and finally fumbling in her pocket brought forth an odd little threecornered pin-cushion which she gave her for a keepsake. (254)
Food preparation and exchange create a viable and pleasant community. The gift exchange of labor and food brings people together and turns into a celebration of a nourishing community. The gift of food even brings peace and reconciliation, for-giving, to those who were in conflict with each other. In the middle of the bee, Father Swaim arrives with letters; Aunt Fortune receives a letter with another enclosed for Ellen but does not give it to the girl. Nancy, on the other hand, has told Mr. Van Brunt about Ellen’s letter that the aunt withholds. In the end, Nancy is moved by Ellen’s gift of the
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dessert and asks for a “kiss of peace” (264). Ellen gives it, and when she retires to her room her mother’s letter is on the bed: “And with tears Ellen kneeled down and gave earnest thanks for this blessing, and that she had been able to gain Nancy’s good-will” (264). Warner’s elaborate description of this bee depicts the power of gift-giving and community; the ritual is stronger than Aunt Fortune’s self-interested and business-like intent.13 It has a life of its own; its power includes everyone. While Aunt Fortune’s self-reliance is linked to a form of alienated and purely material economic perspective on life that is secular, relentlessly practical, alienating, and ultimately meaningless, the bee depicts a community that is warm, giving, and economically viable. In the bee, Warner has found an alternative economy that begins with gift-giving, is local, and is not at the mercy of a volatile capitalist market. It is so strong that it can overrule Aunt Fortune’s controlling self-interest. Here, one might surmise, Warner finds the answer to the yearning, the hunger, of her panic fiction. But Warner panics and recoils from this vision by refusing food and the gift of food. She quickly extricates Ellen from the community, as if afraid that Ellen might be eaten up by it, and puts her safely back in a place that recoils from food. Just as Ellen is repulsed by the smell and noise of Aunt Fortune Emerson’s kitchen, Alice Humphreys draws a line between tea time and the coarser realities of food production—the butchering and churning that are explicitly portrayed in Aunt Fortune’s household. When in the parlour together for tea, Alice points out to Ellen that “beyond this is a lower kitchen where Margery does all her rough work; nothing comes up the steps that leads from that to this but the very nicest and daintiest of kitchen matters” (167).14 Warner concludes that despite its powers to unite and nourish, food in that elemental sense—apart from the “nicest and daintiest”—is not compatible with a meaningful, Christian,15 middle-class existence. Food in the “lower kitchen” can only create and anchor a secular, rural, “simple” community, while tokens of food given as charitable gifts or as signs of love cannot be life-sustaining. Faced with this dilemma, Warner abandons her explorations of food and economies. The very economy she found is both viable und unimaginable to her in terms of class and faith. Ellen would lose her class, her Christian faith,16 and her individuality. Paradoxically then, Ellen has to refuse food and the warm community she encountered in order to preserve herself. Abandoning its economic and food explorations, the novel then restores to Ellen a middle-class life through inheritance and marriage, two options the actual author did not have. Rather than making it on her own, as Warner did, Ellen replaces the dying Alice Humphreys
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in the Humphreys household and thus gains a financially viable and Christian family; later she discovers rich relatives in Scotland, and finally she marries Alice’s brother John. In another unpublished concluding chapter, Warner has Ellen find everything she wanted when John shows her the home he has provided for her. Here all of her needs are met, and she can live the middle-class and religious life she dreamt of throughout the novel.17 It is the dream that follows the impossibility of imagining in the novel how to eat and live in a way that is both life-sustaining and meaningful. One can only imagine what must have gone on in Warner’s head when she came to this moment in her narrative.18 Her refusal to proceed further speaks loudly to the traumatic experience of her family’s loss of fortune and the fundamental values at stake in that loss. Warner’s novel is a panic fiction that panics when it has found an economic solution to her predicament because the solution comes at too high a price.
Warner’s Refusal of Food Warner’s refusal of food, her anorexic ending, is as important for an understanding of her novel as her exploration of the gift of food. Ironically, writing the novel literally to put food on the table, Warner makes the refusal of food its ultimate prerogative. Templin shows that while panic fictions try to imagine alternative economies to the volatile markets, “one of the great anxieties that underlies panic fiction is that financial failure may threaten the social identity of middle-class women as it destroys the economic underpinnings of their life-style” (84). This fear is deeply visible throughout the novel, and it would have been apparent in the very space in which Warner composed her novel. By 1848 the Warner family had been forced to sell virtually all luxury items in their home: “china, oil-paintings, furniture, and Susan’s cherished piano” (Weiss 453). Templin also notes that charity was one way in which panic fictions tried to stabilize a threatened middle-class identity. “Charity does figure as a solution to the effects of panic, but primarily for the giver rather than for the receiver” (82). Giving to the poor allowed middle-class women to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and thus to reassert their own threatened class identity. For that reason, it is remarkable that Warner begins with Ellen and her mother being recipients of food, and that she agrees to cut—for reasons of excessive length of the manuscript—the scene in which Ellen and her mother act charitably toward the Richardsons. Leaving one scene and cutting the other destabilizes, rather than reinstates, Ellen and her mother as part of the middle class.
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Refusing food, in a time of hunger, is Warner’s last resort to hold onto middle-class identity when all other trappings of it have been removed. But, as Alice Humphreys asserts at one point in the novel after having starved the whole day: “I feel one cannot live without eating” (170). Faced with this paradox, Warner panics. She must abandon her exploration of the gift of food—otherwise, her heroine must either lose herself or starve to death. And she must finish her novel—otherwise she might.
Notes I would like to thank the editors, my academic writing group (Jeff Allred, Sophie Bell, Sarah Chinn, Anna-Mae Duane, Joseph Entin, and Jennifer Travis), and my other writing group (Joe Leo and Mark Dane) for their help with earlier drafts. 1. I am using the term here in the definition offered in the sentence. This essay does not aim to analyze the novel’s heroine or its author within the complex pathology of anorexia nervosa. For such work, see Thomas. 2. The conversation about gift exchange is complex and wide-ranging, spanning from anthropology to philosophy. Building on Marcel Mauss, Hyde’s book takes a folkloric approach; his fundamental observations about gift-exchange concur with most examinations of the gift and with my reading of the gift. 3. Of course, gift exchange also involves self-interest, namely that by giving we gain influence or a bond or incur an obligation, but it begins with a gesture of giving to and nourishing the other. 4. Templin identifies “panic fiction” as fiction written in response to the volatility of the stock market that offered readers alternative models of economy. She discusses Anna Warner’s novel Dollars and Cents (1852), which deals with the Warner’s financial losses. 5. The novel just mentions a lawsuit without further details. As Roberson notes: “Henry Warner had lost much of his fortune in the Panic of 1837, and his losses continued in a legal battle over a dam he proposed on Constitution Island” (14). 6. The episode is reprinted in Susan Roberson’s “Ellen Montgomery’s Other Friend: Race Relations in an Expunged Episode of Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World,” which contains an excellent discussion of that episode but does not focus on food. 7. This scene is repeated later when Ellen only eats two grapes and gives the rest to Alice (Roberson 306). 8. Ironically, we never see that transfer, but instead the Dunscombe family offers Ellen hardly any food, and Ms. Timmins, a servant, provides ample food for her with the help of other servants (85–87)—just as Mrs. Forbes in Thirwall feeds Ellen when she first arrives (92).
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9. Lewis Hyde notes that charity, unlike the gift, maintains class boundaries. “It is a form of foreign trade, a way of having some commerce without including the stranger in the group” (138). 10. Wolfgang Schivelbusch notes that “late seventeenth-century middle classes welcomed coffee as a great soberer” and connected the coffee drinker with “good sense and business efficiency” (19). 11. Aunt Fortune’s butter production also places her at a transition point between housewifery and capitalist production. According to Williams, butter “began the nineteenth century as a product handchurned by women and ended the century as the factory made product of a commercial marketplace” (Food in the United States 21) with a transition around 1850. 12. Aunt Fortune Emerson can be compared to Lydia Maria Child’s frugal housewife. For a discussion, see my article, “A Quilt for Life: Lydia Maria Child’s The American Frugal Housewife,” where I argue that Child infuses the household economy with capitalist values. 13. Warner hints at the role of food in the fate of another independent woman, the Swiss woman Mrs. Vawse. Having lost all of her family, Mrs. Vawse lives alone in a mountain cottage and sustains herself by offering services and receiving counter-services—many in the form of food such as “flour, and sugar, and Indian meal, and pork, and ham, and vegetables” (195). Mrs. Vawse, however, herself admits that she is only waiting to die and join her loved ones. 14. In this moment, Alice actually makes cakes with Ellen, but the first cake made is claimed by the cat and the narrative stops before the two girls actually eat. 15. The Christianity associated with middle-class life is interesting in so far as Warner converts in 1840 (Weiss 453), three years after the panic and potentially as a response to the loss. 16. My reading differs substantially from the only other essay devoted to food in Warner’s novel, Linda Naranjo-Huebl’s essay, “ ‘Take, Eat’: Food Imagery, The Nurturing Ethic, and Christian Identity in The Wide, Wide World, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” She argues that the “good Christians in these narratives will be found feeding others as they would feed Christ himself” (602). In my view the non-Christian characters feed each other, whereas the Christian characters tend to be middle-class and not as concerned with food, at least not that of the “lower kitchen.” 17. See Tompkins, 601. Tompkins also notes that “the final treasure John bestows on Ellen is a drawerful of cash totally at Ellen’s disposal” (601). 18. The theme remained important to Warner. In Queechy (1852), Warner stays focused on food and communities. In the end, Fleda, unlike Ellen, is quite happily part of the rural community and, as she puts it, “of an agricultural turn perforce” (408).
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S u s a n W a r n e r ’s T H E W I D E , W I D E W O R L D
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St r aw be r r i e s a n d S a lt: C u l i n a ry H a z a r ds a n d Mor a l E duc at ion i n L I T T L E W O M E N Y vonne Elizabeth Pelletier
C
oncerned primarily with the theme of moral education, Little Women (1868–69) depicts four sisters who must learn the virtues of self-sacrifice and hard work to meet the standards of the cult of domesticity and ideal womanhood. Food preparation and mealtimes, the management of which is central to the domestic operations of successful femininity, would appear to provide key instances of moral instruction; however, Louisa May Alcott’s own complicated relationship to the preparation and consumption of food and drink is revealed through an examination of the lessons related to them in Little Women. In scenes where eating is made central, the moral lessons provided deviate from those expected in a didactic novel targeted at young readers. Involvement in culinary activities instead leads to loss, humiliation, and embarrassment. These crises are motivated by a disjunction between her representation of the March family as normal, middle-class omnivores and her own traumatic childhood experience of enforced ascetism. She must reshape her memories of hunger to fit the narrative expectations of her more conventional middle-class readers. Ultimately, the lessons associated with food prove unrelated to domestic improvement or moral maturation: rather they show how the lessons to be learned are specific to Alcott family values, which
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Chapter 11
Yvonne Eliz a beth Pelletier
were shaped by unique encounters with dietary restriction, poverty, and parental manipulation. Culinary events in Little Women show the extent to which Bronson Alcott, her father, shaped Alcott’s approach to food generally: a committed dietary reformer, he viewed eating as a moral statement, rather than physical or social activity. Bronson’s utopianism, his inability to provide materially for his children, and Abba Alcott’s philanthropic justifications for deprivation shaped Louisa’s sense of family relationships, social involvement, and subjective identity, as well as her often confused representation of material consumption generally. Alcott’s fictional representations of gustatory activities suggest her unresolved anxieties about the hunger she experienced in childhood and her questioning of its ostensibly moral purpose.1 For the Alcotts, food was especially meaningful. Fascinated by Sylvester Graham’s theories of nutrition as morality, Bronson believed that certain foods could affect the state of one’s soul, alter one’s relationship to the world, and help one attain a state of divinity: he ate only grains, vegetables, and fruit; and abstained from animal products, which were thought to cause destructive physical desires. He also believed that promoting such habits on a larger scale would help to perfect society as a whole.2 Bronson’s inability to provide for his family is also justified morally by such dietary restrictions: the family often “ate only two meals a day, commonly bread, and water” because they were poor; however, at Fruitlands, this is a rule (Dahlstrand 187). Bronson believed that his lack of regular employment was due to the highest moral ideals, as “[he] was more firmly committed than ever to refusing any work that offended his moral principles” regardless of its impact on his family (Matteson 96). As Abba wrote: “ ‘No one will employ him . . . he will starve and freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort. In this, I and my children are implicated’ ” (qtd. in Matteson 96). Bronson’s fascination with the connection between eating and spiritual progress, in conjunction with the need to escape his debts, eventually led him to establish a consociate utopian community with Charles Lane, a like-minded reformer he’d met in England. Fruitlands was an “experiment in human culture” that was to become a “second Eden” (Dahlstrand 190–91). Calling themselves “disciples of Newness,” they hoped their experiment would lead to large-scale reform: private property, and government and legal institutions, would be abolished. This would lead to the “development of a ‘new race of persons,’ ” which would require the “cultivation of a ‘fertile mind’ and a chaste, healthful body as a means of removing all hindrances
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to the ‘influx of Deity’ ” (191).3 In addition to following a limited vegetarian diet of whatever they could grow themselves, participants were forbidden to consume stimulants or alcohol, and were required to avoid all animal products and labor, as well as anything produced by slave labor. Fruitlands collapsed in its first year, however, because it was unable to provide sufficient food to its members over the winter: the family and remaining members were reduced to subsisting on just apples near the end.4 Tellingly, Alcott’s entries in the childhood journals she kept at Fruitlands often revolve around mealtimes. While she does not specify what she ate—this omission hinting at the restricted menu—her descriptions of daily activities are frequently organized around both the anticipation and recollection of eating: the phrases “after breakfast,” “until supper,” “until dinner,” and “after dinner” are sprinkled liberally throughout, especially in the earliest entries (Journals 1843 43–46). In later Fruitlands entries, when food must have become more scarce, she uses fewer and fewer mealtime demarcations, as if to gloss over the absence of food and related activities. In Alcott’s fictional account of the Fruitlands experience in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” the absence of food continues to define her memories of the experience. A group of eccentrics and suffering family members nearly starve to death because of their excessive idealism and failure to consider such practical realities as eating; the story concludes with Abel, her father’s counterpart, deliberately starving himself in a nearsuicidal depression before recognizing his familial obligations and abandoning his utopian project. Alcott’s struggle to reconcile the traumatic reality of Fruitlands with her desire to see her father as a well-intentioned and caring parent is concealed beneath dry observations and sympathetic depictions of the group’s utopian intentions and agricultural efforts. The humor veils the grim reality of the experience, which was based on a series of notably traumatic incidents: the introduction of the strict Charles Lane into the Alcott family dynamics, their abrupt removal from Concord (as the impoverished Bronson fled angry creditors), the girls’ isolation on a remote farm, constant hunger and physical labor, which culminated in Abba and Bronson’s near divorce (instigated by Lane’s consociate suspicions of marriage), and finally Bronson’s nervous breakdown. The emotional aftermath of this experience, aside from the description of her father’s reaction, is left unaddressed both in her journals and in “Transcendental Wild Oats,” but can be adduced from her complicated representations of the causes and effects of privation and self-denial in Little Women.
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L I T T L E WO M E N
Yvonne Eliz a beth Pelletier
Also informing her understanding of the relationship between dietary privation and moral worth is her education by Bronson, whose intellectual interest in childhood education naturally contributed to the moral and intellectual development of his daughters. Bronson often used food as temptation and reward, which forged a firm link between eating and morality for Louisa at a very young age. On one occasion, Bronson recreated the lesson of Eden for his two eldest daughters, both of whom were under the age of five at the time, to test their virtue: after explaining that it was his, he left an apple in May and Louisa’s bedroom and forbade them to eat it. Louisa, who was hungry, ate some of it and then convinced her older sister to do so as well. The discovery of the core confirmed Bronson’s suspicions that two-year-old Louisa was either an “Eve” or a “Serpent” who corrupted others (rather than a hungry child willing to share food with her sister).5 Louisa failed a similar test the next day, probably because she was still hungry. For Bronson, such “experiments” demonstrated that she was too headstrong and independent, and in need of close monitoring (Bedell 81–82; Matteson 90). Similarly, during mealtimes, Bronson would forgo dinner whenever the girls misbehaved; by abstaining from food while they ate, he further established hunger as saintly and its gratification as carnal (Matteson 90).6 Louisa, singled out as needing special attention, struggled to meet his expectations of moral perfection. Even when she satisfied him, however, he suspected that this was due more to fear than a “love of yielding” to him (Bedell 81).7 Her mother’s philanthropy, regardless of the family’s poverty, further confirmed the relationship between spiritual perfection and the joyful rejection of personal possessions, material desires, and inconvenient emotions. While Alcott seems to draw directly from her life in Little Women, the reality of her childhood was too unusual to describe fully in a novel targeted at conventional middle-class readers; her defining experiences had to be reshaped to accommodate the generic expectations of a bourgeois audience. Although financially challenged, the Marches remain solidly middle-class. She makes the fictional father figure a more recognizable Victorian patriarch and provider, which she mostly accomplishes by simply absenting him from much of the narrative, and providing a more palatable explanation for his poverty.8 The Marches also become conventional omnivores with a full larder: not only do they keep a cook, there is plenty of food, including meat, eggs, and dairy products, available. The Marches also never suffer the extremes of deprivation experienced by the Alcotts. Even so, Bronson’s dietary morality and Louisa’s reactions to it inform almost
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every aspect of the moral universe occupied by the Marches. Given Bronson’s guilt-inducing use of food and hunger to teach moral values, it is unsurprising that episodes involving eating in Little Women often end in hunger and loss, even in otherwise innocuous or comical contexts. Although plentiful, food is constantly criticized, given away, wasted, or destroyed: eating seems an indulgent, even risky, luxury, and the gratification of appetite is likely to result in humiliation and embarrassment. The Christmas breakfast, Amy’s limes, Jo’s and Amy’s attempts to provide meals for others, the starvation of Beth’s bird, and even the temperance enforced at Meg’s wedding reveal Alcott’s culinary anxieties.9
Merry Breakfast! The Gift of Hunger The first lesson in the novel involves the girls’ sacrifice of a celebratory Christmas meal to a poor family, which establishes the novel’s didactic intent and its generic sentimentality. Marmee’s altruism is immediately apparent: when she is introduced, she has already missed dinner the previous night, Christmas Eve, and has been absent all morning, because of her commitment to helping any “ ‘poor creeter[s] [who] come a-beggin’, ’ ” as Hannah observes (Little Women 20). Upon her late return Christmas morning the girls rush “to the table, eager for breakfast” because “they are all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour”; they no doubt would have also missed their mother (21). As they thank her for their small gifts, copies of Pilgrim’s Progress, and prepare to eat their breakfast, Marmee does not apologize leaving them waiting, alone, and hungry; instead she tells the guilt-inducing story of the Hummels, their desperately poor neighbors: “Not far from here lies a poor woman with a little-new-born baby. Six children are huddled into one bed to keep from freezing, for they have no fire. There is nothing to eat over there; and the oldest boy came over to tell me they were suffering hunger and cold. My girls, will you give them your breakfast as a Christmas present?” (21)
The girls’ initial response is silence, as “for a minute no one spoke,” suggesting a reluctance to comply. Jo then “impetuously” saves them from moral recrimination by exclaiming that she is “ ‘glad [Marmee] came before we began.’ ” The rest of the sisters follow suit, Beth asking to help carry things to the “poor little children”; Amy “heroically” sacrificing “the cream and muffins . . . the articles she most liked”; and Meg packing the “buckwheats, and piling the bread into one big
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That was a very happy breakfast, though they didn’t get any of it; and when they went away, leaving comfort behind . . . there were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts, and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning. (22)
No physical sensation other than delight is depicted, illustrating the Fruitlands adage that “outward abstinence is a sign of inward fullness” (qtd. in Dahlstrand 197). They return home to celebrate Marmee’s generosity with small, but relatively extravagant, gifts for which they have all sacrificed, as if to project their own loss on to her—which Marmee happily accepts: the generosity she extends to the Hummels is gleefully reciprocated by her own hungry children.10 Marmee’s request that they sacrifice something so early exposes the degree of deprivation that the girls are expected to tolerate in order to become good little women. The sustained hunger necessitated here lays ground for later encounters with food, and establishes eating as morally complicated. On the surface, the girls’ self-sacrifice models charitable behavior for the novel’s young female readers, showing how a scanty meal of bread and milk can prove satisfying when accompanied by moral righteousness. However, this episode also draws upon possibly bitter memories of genuine deprivation and withholding, as well the painful ascetic ethos of Fruitlands. The Christmas episode recalls Abba and Bronson’s regular practice of donating food and performing acts of service for the “less fortunate” even while very poor themselves; such acts required that they deprive their own daughters of food, clothing, and parental care. Just as the March girls must sacrifice Marmee’s attention and food to the Hummels, the Alcott girls came second to the indigent families that Abba sought to help. Hannah Robie, a relative of Abba’s, describes how the Alcotts had limited themselves to two meals a day “so that the children might have the pleasure of carrying, once a week, a basket of something from their humble savings to the poor family” (qtd. in Bedell 164).11 That such sacrifices were made at the cost of her own children’s needs suggests a maternal carelessness about their welfare bordering on abuse, whatever the moral “pleasures” such activities
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plate” (21). Marmee also makes them wait for their breakfast of bread and milk until after their visit to the Hummels, as if to amplify the hunger they should suffer. They proceed to watch “blue-lipped” children eat with “purple hands” and endeavor to derive satisfaction from being called “good angels.” The episode concludes:
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were believed to provide. By the Alcott parents’ logic, this deprivation made the girls spiritually purer; concomitantly, the desire to keep clothes or food for oneself was sinful, even when such things were desperately needed. In addition to spiritual elevation, however, such charitable acts also allowed the Alcotts to maintain a sense of middleclass status, separating them from the underclass poor.12 The practice of sacrificing food would have engendered envy and bitterness in “hungry little girls.” Expressing or feeling resentment would have been anathema, however, as is made clear in Bronson’s “Eden” lesson. Aside from the silence that greets Marmee’s request, the girls’ real feelings are left unrepresented; such uncharitable sentiments could cause such tremendous guilt and self-loathing that it was easier to go hungry. Jo’s “impetuous” agreement is not a concurrence, but rather an attempt to aver the sense of sinfulness and guilt that would ensue should the girls refuse. Only housekeeper Hannah evinces overt concern about Marmee’s request, when she—a bit sardonically—observes “ ‘[t]here never was such a woman for givin’ away vittles and drink, clothes and firin’ ’ ” (20). Hannah also calls Mr. Laurence’s attention to the girls’ sacrifice. When the sisters discover a surprise feast—so elaborate that it “quite took their breath away” (26)—they automatically assume it is a “little treat” arranged by Marmee, as if in hopes of her recognizing their need for food and care. However, it is a wealthy neighbor who has materially compensated for their generosity.13 This displaces Marmee’s power over the girls and the source of their emotional pleasure. Hannah and Mr. Laurence become caring surrogates who do not require sacrifice: Hannah’s “gossip” hints at quasi-motherly worry about their welfare, while Mr. Laurence’s gift restores the missing celebration.14 In the process, he also becomes a patriarchal provider in Mr. March’s stead. Mr. Laurence’s generosity repositions the Marches as a needy family akin to the Hummels. As recipients of his charity, they are potentially relocated within different, less desirable class lines. This disrupting reconfiguration and its implicit comment on Bronson’s failures as a provider are redressed later in Little Women, however: despite their poverty, the Marches remain firmly at the apex of a moral hierarchy that aligns with specifically Alcottian values. First, after the Christmas party, Laurie is adopted by the Marches: immense wealth and lavish spreads cannot compensate for his lack of family (significantly, he watches the Marches’ filial interactions with “hungry eyes”). The implication is that his grandfather, Mr. Laurence, is not real family because he cannot provide the spiritual guidance offered by the Marches. Their assumption
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L I T T L E WO M E N
Yvonne Eliz a beth Pelletier
of responsibility for Laurie’s moral education restores them to a state of moral superiority that has been jeopardized by Mr. Laurence’s charity. The Marches again affirm their moral class status as superior to Mr. Laurence’s at Meg’s wedding, when expensive wines provided by Mr. Laurence are donated by Mr. March to the Soldier’s Home. Meg explains to Laurie, “[my father] thinks wine should only be used in illness, and mother says that neither she nor her daughters will ever offer it to any young man under her roof ” (201). She then asks Laurie to take a temperance pledge as a wedding gift, “ ‘for the sake of others, if not your own’ ” even though Laurie admits that he “ ‘doesn’t care for [wine],’ ” having been “ ‘brought up where wine is as common as water, and almost as harmless.’ ” The girls’ insistence that Laurie nonetheless stop drinking tacitly condemns Mr. Laurence, rendering his generous gift as corrupt: he is again robbed of his authority as a provider and Laurie’s moral guide. The rudeness of the Marches’ rejection of his gift is justified by their moral sanctimoniousness, which, along with Laurie’s conversion to abstinence, resituates Mr. March as the dominant patriarch who controls the family’s eating and drinking rituals, as well as Laurie’s. Similarly, the Marches’ act of Christmas charity does not go unpunished. It too is negatively reciprocated, albeit accidentally and yet more harshly, when the Hummels infect Beth with scarlet fever. Taking Marmee’s Christmas lesson to heart, Beth visits them even though they are known to be ill. Because her sisters delay going in her stead for selfish reasons, they feel personally responsible for her infection. Jo, the sister most affected by guilt, dedicates herself to Beth’s care as penance, and even tries to transform herself into a passive, domestic “angel” like Beth. This episode’s origin offers some insight into Jo’s twisted assumption of guilt for something over which she has no control, as well as for its complicated representation of the consequences of charity: Lizzie Alcott became severely ill and eventually died after Abba invited a sick family in need of care into the Alcott home (Journals 1856 79). Alcott, unable to conceive of Abba’s charity as dangerous to herself and her sisters, in fiction allows Jo to assume responsibility for the infection. Regardless of her own unwillingness to see Abba’s culpability, however, in Beth’s death the lethal nature of such extremes of charity is shown.
The Canary in the Kitchen The collision between culinary endeavors and demoralizing or dangerous consequences occurs again in “Experiments,” in which the
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girls spend a week playing instead of working. Marmee hopes to teach them the value of routine housework by demonstrating the perils of unlimited leisure. At the end of the week, possibly concerned that the girls have yet to appreciate her intended lesson, Marmee places them in charge of the kitchen, to show “ ‘what happens when every one thinks only of herself ’ ” (99). The experiment in leisure then becomes one of pointless, dissatisfying “work,” as they abandon their hobbies in order to feed themselves. Ultimately, the ensuing culinary pursuits seem unrelated to the point of the experiment.15 The relevance of culinary practices to the chapter’s larger “experiment” in leisure seems contradictory, as the girls are suddenly expected to engage in housework. However, its outcome, considered in relation to the Fruitlands experience, suggests that it is a comment on the causes and effects of Bronson’s disastrous “experiment” with utopianism. The problematic character issues enumerated here—Jo’s ignorance, her foolish optimism, and her commitment to an impossible task—more aptly describe Bronson. As such, Bronson, with his intensely focused interests and inability to feed his family, seems both source and object of this chapter’s lesson “that something more than energy and good-will is necessary to make a cook”(97). Once again, however, responsibility for a negative outcome is again shifted from parent to child, albeit in a more innocent, comical way: Jo’s culinary failure leaves everyone hungry, as she destroys what might be good through the confident misapplication of theory. First, Meg cooks a breakfast so awful that Marmee must discreetly throw it out. Meg then abandons the kitchen to Jo who, “with goodwill and energy,” assumes responsibility for next meal. “[W]ith perfect faith in her own powers,” she insists on a rather extensive menu: “ ‘there’s corned beef, and plenty of potatoes, and . . . some asparagus, and a lobster . . . We’ll have lettuce, and make a salad; I don’t know how, but the book tells. I’ll have blanc-mange and strawberries for dessert; and coffee, too . . .’ ” (95). Meg reminds Jo that she cannot really cook, but Jo stubbornly persists in her “rash” plan—even though it is not clear how the girls might feed themselves. The ensuing catalogue of errors highlights Jo’s culinary ignorance: She boiled the asparagus hard for an hour and . . . the heads cooked off, and the stalks harder than ever. The bread burnt black;. . . the salad dressing so aggravated her . . .; the lobster was a scarlet mystery . . . The potatoes had to be hurried . . . and were not done at last. The blanc-mange was lumpy, and the strawberries not as ripe as they looked . . . (97)
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L I T T L E WO M E N
Yvonne Eliz a beth Pelletier
At dinner, “poor Jo” watches “one thing after another [being]. . . tasted and left” (97). However, everyone still looks forward to the strawberries and cream: “Jo’s one strong point . . . the fruit, for she had sugared it well.” This also proves comically inedible because Jo, mistaking salt for sugar, has destroyed the fruit (and let the cream go sour, for good measure). The humiliation initially makes her tearful; catching Laurie’s “merry” eyes, however, she starts laughing instead, “till the tears ran down her cheeks” (98). Her ineptitude is made a “standing joke” for which hunger is the punch line. However, the tears palpably recall the stress and the emotional despair the Alcott girls must have felt when making do with very little, and fearing that any culinary error would make it less. The death of Beth’s bird just before this very meal also comically, if darkly, augments the message of the destroyed meal, and alludes to the consequences of egotism. Pip, who experiences the “ ‘worst of the experiment,’ ” as Jo observes, is found “with his little claws pathetically extended, as if imploring for food, for want of which he had died” (96) because Beth, so absorbed by her dolls, had forgotten to feed it. Marmee blithely promises Beth another bird and overlooks her carelessness, recalling Abba’s part in excusing the neglect engendered by Bronson’s impractical and dangerous plans. The bird illustrates that eating is more than a moral act: it is necessary to physical survival and goodwill cannot sustain the body nor satisfy its hunger.
Limes and Lobsters Individual encounters with food are connected to each girl’s personal challenges: where Jo and Meg destroy food and Beth forgets it, Amy suffers for using food to become part of the world beyond her family.16 The outcomes of Amy’s efforts show her to be increasingly isolated from the society she craves, confined by her family and her independence corralled; the food she uses is also consumed by the needy, as if in parody of Marmee’s altruism. When Amy borrows a quarter from Meg to buy some pickled limes in order to repay “debts of honor” at school, she shows herself willing to put friends before family. By indebting herself to please her friends, she is able to expand socially. As she explains: “unless you want to be thought mean, you must do it . . . It’s nothing but limes now, for every one is sucking them in their desks at schooltime, and trading them off for pencils, bead-rings, paper dolls . . . at recess. If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime; if she’s mad with
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Her use of the limes reveals her skill at negotiating the socioeconomic terrain of the classroom, as well as her desire to fortify her place in its hierarchy. Her “delicious limes” get her invited to a party, lent a watch, and given the answers to the math problems; however, when she uses their power to punish a girl who insults her, she is punished harshly in return. The scorned girl tattles to Mr. Davis, a “nervous gentleman with a tyrannical temper” who “particularly detested the odor of the fashionable pickle,” and so has declared limes “contraband,” promising to “publicly ferule the first person found breaking the law”: he makes Amy throw the “ ‘disgusting things, two by two . . . out of the window” (59), where they are caught by the students’ “sworn enemies,” poor Irish children. He also hits her hand with a ruler, which she “bore without flinching” but “the disgrace . . . was as deep as if he had knocked her down” (60). She is then forced to stand in front of the class, during which she “suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot.” This exceptional public humiliation begins a process by which Amy is isolated, by her family, from the social contact that she enjoys, which is for her is greater punishment than the beating. Her removal from a site of potential growth and interpersonal connection is a long-term loss for which the short-term relief of escaping shame cannot compensate. Amy is barely admonished for the limes or the debt. Rather, Marmee is furious at the teacher for using corporal punishment, her strong response drawing upon the Alcotts’ reformist disapproval of this practice. Bronson’s progressive ideas about education rightly condemned school beatings; however, in the context of nineteenthcentury educational discipline, it would have been considered normal, and the average reader would have witnessed or been the recipient of such treatment at school and at home. However, Marmee’s outraged reaction also shows that, to the Marches (like the Alcotts), rules made by institutions are irrelevant: hence, she is focused solely on Amy’s systemic punishment, not her behavior nor her social needs. The limes that express Amy’s social currency are not incidental to this episode. Amy could have broken any rule with similar consequences, but this particular fruit implicates Amy in a different kind of rule breaking. The ban on specific foods by a strict schoolteacher recalls Charles Lane, her tutor at Fruitlands, who rigidly enforced the community’s dietary laws, which the girls in turn defied when they could. For Bronson and Lane, limes would have been highly suspect
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her, she eats one before her face . . . they treat by turns; and I’ve had ever so many, but haven’t returned them, and I ought, for they are ‘debts of honor.’ ” (57)
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as an exotic, tropical, and non-native fruit that would have been cultivated by slave labor.17 The lime-trading and Mr. Davis’s response paradoxically conflate Fruitlands’ absurd strictness with institutional practices and systems associated with worldly corruption. Amy’s use of this morally compromised fruit to abet her social ambition suggests a damning complicity with the corrupt world of physical discipline, gross commercial exchange, and slavery; from this she must be and is saved. At the same time, the episode parodies education at Fruitlands. It also concludes with a sudden removal akin to the family’s move from Concord to Fruitlands, which also proved a punitive and socially isolating event. Amy struggles to maintain her social relevance however: she later arranges to have some friends over for a “fete” for which she has saved her money. Here, her normal adolescent desire to be a part of a group is again made strange and silly. Her plans for a “ ‘proper and elegant’ ” picnic for her friends might have succeeded were her family less resistant to entertaining outsiders. In keeping with her upwardly mobile social ambitions, she works tirelessly even though her sisters are either too busy, ill or openly hostile to help her; her mother is distracted and Hannah is uncharacteristically resentful. Amy’s plans are actively interfered with by Jo who mocks Amy by calling her guests a “ ‘parcel of girls who don’t care a sixpence’ ” about her because they are too rich and fashionable (206).18 Although she “would have nothing to do with it at first,” she eventually gets involved, but complains continually while making “mistakes” and causing “accidents” as if to derail Amy’s plan. Interestingly, Mr. March also “helps,” but with as little purpose as Jo: sent to buy a lobster, he returns empty handed. With “an expression of placid despair,” he explains that he couldn’t “ ‘get any lobsters’ ” and Amy would “ ‘have to do without salad today’ ” (208). Ignoring Jo’s sarcastic offer to “ ‘rush into town and demand one’ ” and refusing to “do without,” Amy quickly finds one herself. Mr. March’s experience directly belies Amy’s, and seems a point of narrative illogic, but his failure to “get” a lobster seems to recall Bronson’s objection to animal products, as well as his habit of forgetting intended purchases. While most of Alcott’s readers would have found lobster palatable, it would have proved repulsive to a vegetarian. That Bronson’s “placid” alter ego is unable to get one (rather than not find one) hints at the reformer’s passive-aggressive resistance to such. Mr. March, like his family, is not a vegetarian, so this behavior only makes him seem ineffectual; this episode, however, also evokes Bronson’s failure at food-getting and his placid expectation that his children “do without.”
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Amy is immediately punished for taking initiative: while riding home on a public carriage, the lobster crawls out of her bag and spills dressing on her while she flirts with a young man. This humiliation confirms that her interest in such trivial things as friends, fine foods, and flirting will earn her comeuppance, and anticipates the looming disaster of the picnic. Confusion regarding the date because of potentially bad weather leads the luxurious meal to be postponed for a day, which “forces” her family to eat the perishables. Only one of twelve guests attends the second day, the sight of which alone in Mr. Laurence’s “cherry-bounce” prompts the mocking laughter of her family (even Marmee suppresses a smile). Afterward, frustrated, Amy insists that they “ ‘[bundle] everything into a basket, and send it to the Hummels [because] Germans like messes” and admits that she is “ ‘sick of the sight of this, and there’s no reason you should all die of surfeit because I’ve been a fool’ ” (210). How Amy might have done things differently or better, other than not at all, is left unexplained. She wisely ignores “learning” from the experience, however, by declaring herself “satisfied” because the picnic’s failure was not her fault. She also asks that they avoid mentioning it “ ‘for a month, at least’ ” so that her humiliation will not be the “joke of the season” (207). Nevertheless, mocking reminders remain in “the word ‘fete’ [which] always produced a general smile” and Laurie’s gift of a coral lobster charm.
Conclusion: A Dessert of Milk and Honey In the final chapter of Little Women, Alcott presents a truly paradisiacal vision of family, as well as a filling meal that is consumed without recrimination. The extended March families, as well Jo’s students, have gathered at Plumfield for the annual “fruitful festival”—an apple harvest modeled on a Fruitlands ritual. Plumfield recasts Bronson’s most ambitious, if failed, endeavors—Fruitlands and the Temple School—as a prosperous and successful experiment.19 Accordingly, Plumfield is a utopia free of restriction and privation, where Alcott’s fictional family and friends may eat as much as they want. Without incident, Jo and Meg “set forth the supper on the grass—for an outof-door tea was always the crowning joy of the day”: The land literally flowed with milk and honey on such occasions,— for the lads were . . . allowed to partake of refreshment as they liked,— freedom being the sauce best beloved by the boyish soul . . . drinking milk while standing on their heads . . . eating pie in the pauses of the
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When “no one could eat any more,” the ensuing toasts prove “hard to stop.” The food is plentiful and does not seem to require work: the apple baskets remain unfilled while more tempting foods are offered because apples are not the main course, as they might have been at Fruitlands. This happy land of plenty controlled by Alcott’s literary counterpart is a culinary fantasy, one without the sacrifice or pointless waste required of earlier feasts. The narrative finally overcomes its anorexic resistance to eating and frees itself from dietary morality. That this chapter was written after the immense commercial success of the first book, which left Alcott wealthy enough to support herself and her family financially, is significant. The popularity of the novel ensured that its creator could give her family all that her father was unwilling and unable to provide. Her poverty behind her, she is able to recognize, without ambivalence, that physical hunger is not expressive of spiritual purity but the result of material privation.
Notes 1. See Jenkins for a sustained analysis of the relationship between eating, social engagement, and sexual maturation in this novel. 2. Harper (76–77) and the essays on “Communal Utopia” in Madden and Finch offer further insights into different dietary reform movements in mid-nineteenth-century America: Bronson’s faith that diet could change the world was not unique. 3. Thomas Carlyle referred Bronson’s utopianism as a “potatoe [sic] philosophy.” While visiting England, Bronson lectured, unbidden, several prominent English authors on the evils of meat-eating at dinner; he also appalled Carlyle when he mixed strawberries into his potatoes. 4. Apples loom large in the Alcott mythology. Bronson maintained that, as the food of Eden, it represented culinary perfection; Jo famously eats large piles of russets while writing, recalling the desperate Fruitlands experience in a happy, creative way. See Jenkins on possible meanings of Jo’s solitary apple eating (179). 5. This anecdote emphasizes how hungry the girls must have been, because raw apples are not typically irresistible to very young children. 6. A Socratic dialogue in Alcott’s journal further indicates the relationship between appetite, self-denial, and parental approval: What are the most valuable kinds of self-denial? Appetite, temper. . . .
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game [of leap-frog]. . . cookies were sown broadcast over the field, and apple turnovers roosted in the trees like a new style of bird . . . and [Jo’s son] roved among the edibles at his own sweet will. (378)
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7. 8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
15. 16.
17.
The conjunction of appetite with temper indicates the intense self-abnegation Louisa was made to practice; enjoying hunger and practicing emotional restraint are made correspondent. For more on the theories behind and effects of Bronson’s educational approach on Louisa, see Keyser (83–84) and Matteson. Mr. March lost his money when he invested it with friend who could not repay; this seems based on Abba’s father, who lost a fortune in similar circumstances. Meg’s culinary humiliations—while drinking champagne at the Moffats and failing to make dinner for her husband and his friend— further amplify the culinary perils of being a March. Auerbach observes that the only “Christmas gift Marmee seems tenderly to offer her girls is hunger” and that “their pilgrimage . . . is significant only because they themselves are hungry” and the food “they renounce is vividly appetizing” (10). During that visit, Bronson admonishes Abba for serving tea; Robie also hides her snack of beef both to avoid reminding the girls of their deprivation, as well as recrimination by Bronson (Bedell 165). Stokeley makes a similar point about the Alcotts’ use of charity to assert their middle class and their moral status: “The rescuing of the Hummel family assures the Marches of their residual powers . . . of recreating the Hummels in March image” even though “at this stage, the Hummels remain ‘dangerous.’ ” Alcott’s fiction thus “redelineate[s] the social boundaries that her real family was in danger of blurring” as they fell further down the economic ladder (27). Mr. Laurence’s charity also recalls the assistance from Abba’s relatives and Emerson that the Alcotts often depended upon. Elbert examines how middle-class Christmas charity emphasized the moral uplift felt by the giver, rather than the solace it afforded the needy. While the girls are generously repaid by Mr. Laurence, their situation seems to differ from that of their middle-class counterparts because of their own hunger and seeming poverty (“Charitable”). Marmee is unwilling to experience the hunger she imposes on the girls, setting aside a “small store of food” for later. See Keyser for an analysis of Amy’s subversive nature and its effect on Jo (91–92); Foote also explores Amy’s punishments and rewards, as well as her conflicts with Jo, as part of a larger discourse about social class and emotional expression. Limes originated in India, but by the nineteenth century were grown in the Caribbean and Florida.
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What is the result of this self-denial? Everyone loves me, and I am happy. Why use self-denial? For the good of myself and others. (Journals 1845, 56)
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18. This insult hints at the class tensions elicited by Amy: she wants to serve cakes and ice-cream, rather like those provided by Mr. Laurence, to assert her upper-class identity, even though it is very expensive for her. 19. That Jo starts a school to help others suggests an implicit critique of Marmee’s inefficient, self-abnegating methods of charity.
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
“Th is For e sh a dow e d Food”: R e pr e se n tat ions of Food a n d Hu nge r i n E m i ly Dic k i nson’s A m e r ic a n G o t h ic Elizabeth Andrews
Enough is so vast a sweetness I suppose it never occurs—only pathetic counterfeits—Fabulous to me as the men of the Revelations who “shall not hunger any more.” —Emily Dickinson, 26 September 1870
E
mily Dickinson’s underlying disbelief in “enough” and her interrogation of such “pathetic counterfeits” of satisfaction in her poetry intersect with the longing integral to the American Gothic mode. In her descriptions of unnatural or sumptuous but inedible food, Dickinson negotiates fears of progress and dissatisfaction, the unknown, newness and new landscapes, as well as devilish temptation in nature and its denial, all of which are American Gothic concerns. Toni Morrison argues that America’s “early and founding literature” is “troubled . . . frightened and haunted” (35). She notes how this Gothic literature explores “Americans’ fear of being outcast, of failing, of powerlessness; their fear of boundarylessness, [and] of Nature unbridled” (37). The fears that haunt American Gothic resonate with the longing to be accepted into this new world and the longing to know and understand its wilderness. The constant interaction between the
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dream of America and the American dream with the reality the land offers is expressed by Dickinson’s de-familiarization of nature. Her poetry engages with what David Mogen, Scott Sanders, and Joanne Karpinski argue is the “fundamental conflict shaping American experience,” that is, “the battle between civilization and nature” (15). In Dickinson’s poems the wilderness, which produces Gothic food, is just “Over the fence” (251, line 1). This wildness is comparable to the unknown land of the frontier, “the shadows surrounding civilized clearings” (Mogen, Sanders, and Karpinski 14). Her patches of wilderness reflect Roderick Nash’s argument in Wilderness and the American Mind (1967) that the “terror of the wild” comes, in part, from the “inability to control or use wilderness” (10), and this terror is intensified since the harnessing of nature is how food is produced. The Gothic has a preoccupation with consumption, being described through metaphors of food. Fred Botting discusses the “staple Gothic ingredients” (44) of the anonymously written “recipe” given in “Terrorist Novel Writing” (229) from The Spirit of the Public Journals, 1797. Although this recipe does not describe literally edible ingredients, it uses Gothic tropes and lists them in the form of food preparation. The author directs: “Take—An old castle . . . Three murdered bodies, quite fresh . . . Assassins and desperadoes, quant. Suff ” and so on, then “Mix them together, in the form of three volumes” (229). The Gothic text also focuses on the appetites of vampires and cannibals, and Gothicized food such as Dracula’s (1897) Harker and his “thirsty” “red pepper” (31). Gothic texts engage with human taboos, and food is a core trigger of both anxiety and pleasure. Considering nineteenth-century food practices and diet, for example, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald’s evocation of “the simple, dignified order of a true New England home” signified by “baked beans, brown bread, and Indian pudding” (63)1 and the notion that “all fruit was held to be dangerous,”2 relayed by Richard Osborn Cummings (43), Dickinson’s poetics of food—her descriptions of wild ingredients, or abstinence—only emphasizes her transgressive and Gothic relationship to food. Eric Savoy discusses the “strange tropes, figures, and rhetorical techniques” that are “central” to the “innovative energy of American Gothic” (“Rise of American Gothic” 168), and Emily Dickinson’s particular use of language is certainly strange. While Nash writes of how the “wild forest seemed animated” with “Fantastic creatures of every description” (11), some “monstrous” or “grotesque” (10), Dickinson populates the wilderness with troubling yet charismatic characters, such as her “Elf of Plants” (1298, 1), the mushroom in
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his “Truffled Hut” (1298, 3). Dickinson’s obsessive return to “the strangeness behind familiar nature,” as Charles Crow defines it (227), exposes the terror concealed by what Hawthorne describes as “the ‘broad and simple day-light’ and ‘common-place prosperity’ of his country” (qtd. in Lloyd-Smith 26). Her juxtapositions of images transform meaning; what appears to be quotidian becomes mysterious through her uncanny metaphors, which magnify the seemingly insignificant forms of berries, vegetables, and mushrooms. Dickinson’s linguistic tricks pepper her images, making them spicy and unfamiliar, exemplified in poem 994 where nature proffers abundance upon those who deny their appetite. “The Rose is an Estate” (994, 3), she writes here, and the well-rehearsed metaphorical vehicle of the “Rose” becomes the tenor. By changing the linguistic position of the rose Dickinson creates the image of a plush labyrinth of sweet velvet expanse; the petals are magnified to become candied acres, walls, and corridors, available, the poem explains, if we resist its tempting nectar and “Partake as doth the Bee, / Abstemiously” (1–2). Dickinson communicates the paradox of sumptuously peculiar nature and the inability to taste its offerings. Her poems, David Reynolds argues, with “their fresh metaphors and associations . . . provide a kind of linguistic redemption from the very trauma they describe” (417). Here the trauma is suffocating restraint and denial, yet Dickinson, through her mastery and condensation of language, allows the emptiness within to bloom in its very negation.
Hunger and the American Way Susan Williams discusses the “theory of progress” espoused by Catharine Beecher in the mid-nineteenth century and the contradiction that “what . . . [Beecher] saw around her was not [the] ‘higher and more refined pleasures’ ” that she argued would replace the “lowest species of enjoyment” (Beecher in Williams, Food in the United States 195) “but increasing levels of gluttony, decadence, and ill health” (195). Such excess is characteristically Gothic. The Gothic “signifies a writing of excess” (Botting 1) where, according to Botting, “cultural limits and boundaries” (2) are transgressed. Perhaps Dickinson engages with the cultural limits and boundaries of appetite because, rather than satisfaction, what Dickinson’s poetic persona craves is hunger itself. M.K. Louis observes that “throughout her poems and letters, even on the most literal level, food is seen rather than tasted” (356).3 Indeed in poem 510 what is “tasted” (9) is “Death . . . Night . . . Frost . . . Fire” (1, 3, 5, 7). The impossible
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non-flavor of these abstract terms paradoxically makes them familiar; Death seems less fearful, Night less threatening, Frost less brittle, and Fire tame since these “Figures” are “Set orderly” (10–11), while food, which should connote comfort and nourishment, is uncontrollable. Food is something desired and denied, its flavor is imagined, but Death, Night, Frost, and Fire have already been sampled; their taste, as acrid, metallic, and sterile as it seems, is known, as the past tense simile in this phrase denotes: “it tasted, like them all” (9). What these flavors are compared to—“it”—is unidentified, its flavor as unknowable as the abstract notions with which it is equated. In this poem what can be consumed are immaterial concepts; Vivian Pollak notes that in Dickinson’s other poems “she describes ‘feeding’ off of improbable substances” (39) while food itself is elevated to the position of the intangible. In poem 439 food becomes tasteless; the promise of indefinite “Spices” is refused because when eaten or “In the Receipt—” (8) the “Spices fly” (7). “Food” is only “Good” from a “Distance” (2, 4, 8). Like depictions of America, this new world dream, the journey, the point that precedes discovery, “Was Savory” (9). Although Dickinson delights in the detail, hope lies in the “Food— / Far off” (439, 2–3). There is promise only in the potential; as Pollak comments, appetite “dies as soon as it is gratified, and satiation, even disgust, then sets in” (38). This deferral of gratification is explicit in poem 1036 where “Satisfaction—is the Agent / Of Satiety—” (1–2). In this poem the “forward-looking American psyche” (Savoy, “Rise of American Gothic” 170) and all the positive connotations such a phrase conjures is inherently insatiable. Such a psyche is continuously looking ahead, looking for more, looking further, dissatisfied with the now and with empty history. For such a psyche “Yesterday is History” (1292, 1) as poem 1292 so eloquently suggests. Reynolds interprets this floating anxiety to reflect “[t]he popular culture . . . [Dickinson] perceives [which] is one that has been torn both from the future (‘Not a Tomorrow to know it’s [sic] name’) and from historical memory (‘Nor a Past to stare—’). It is fluid and ever-changing with the throes of the tumultuous present” (429). Only in the search, in hunger, can immortality and infinity be granted; in the receipt there is only the “pathetic counterfei[t]” (Johnson 479) of satisfaction. In the New World, newness alone has value. Dickinson’s tropes of hunger and denial, of thirst and need within a context of plenty, convey the anxiety beneath the concepts of discovery, progress, and ambition. They disturb the “dream of a new start” that Robert Fossum and John Roth argue was “bound up with a figurative America even
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before that continent was discovered” (8). Susan Williams, discussing food traditions in nineteenth-century America, observes that “[b]y the Victorian era . . . Puritan notions of austerity and aversion to the temptations of the flesh ran up against new consumer offerings imported from afar or shipped in from other parts of the United States” (Food in the United States 103). But Dickinson’s poems, with their Gothicized berries, peas, and mushrooms, see temptation in even homegrown natural bounty. Heather Kirk Thomas writes that “Edward Dickinson’s puritanical temperament would have placed heavy demands upon his daughter’s ability to uphold her Christian ‘duty’—to endure adversity and to practice self-denial” (212). Yet this self-denial does not seem imposed upon her, and Thomas suggests that Emily Dickinson may have achieved “personal gratification by self-inflicted renunciative rituals” (212). Emily Dickinson resists the desire that progress, in the form of farming practices and reinforced foodways through “mass transportation” (S. Williams, Food in the United States 97), has encouraged. What Dickinson seems to convey is that with the delivery of new foods, satisfaction will be even more impossible to attain. As poem 1430 states: “Within it’s [sic] reach, though yet ungrasped / Desire’s perfect Goal— / No nearer—lest the Actual— / Should disenthrall thy soul—” (5–8).
Elfish Mushrooms, Miraculous Strawberries, and Luscious Peas Dickinson’s landscape is Gothic, her food anthropomorphic and inedible. Within an uncanny nature where “A Spider sewed at Night / Without a Light” (1138, 1–2) and “The Wind—tapped like a tired Man—” (436, 1), the image of “The Mushroom” as the “Elf of Plants—” (1298, 1) in a “Truffled Hut” (3) comes as no surprise. This goblin mushroom engages with the sense in American Gothic that nature is dangerous and unpredictable, that beneath the most innocent seeming detail there lurks a devil in disguise. Although dangerous, mushrooms were also considered to be edible in nineteenth-century America. Williams discusses Eliza Leslie’s cookbook from 1851 in which “[t]he vegetable section” lists “eggplant, lettuce, mushrooms, onions, parsnips” (Food in the United States 40; emphasis added), and so on. Williams explains “[c]abbage, mushrooms, onions, potatoes, and tomatoes formed the basis of four recipes each, whereas the rest were used for only one or possibly two recipes” (40; emphasis added). These “multiple recipes” Williams argues, “suggested that they were used more frequently” (40). The mushroom, then, was a familiar ingredient
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in nineteenth-century cookery. The 1844 version of Eliza Leslie’s cookbook, Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches, insists, “Good mushrooms are only found in clear open fields where the air is pure and unconfined” (201). Although the mushroom is cultivated, its wildness, like the strawberry discussed later, is essential; it must be allowed liberty to be of the “proper sort” and not “poisonous or false” (201). This common ingredient is de-familiarized in Dickinson’s poem and as a consequence of this process becomes inedible. The personification of “Vegetation’s Juggler—” (1298, 9) both as the elf that inhabits the toadstool and as the entity itself, the “Truffled Hut” is a confusing paradox common in Dickinson’s impossible representations of everyday foodstuffs. The mushroom from poem 1298 begins as “it” but the poem ends with the affirmation “it is Him!” (20). The bizarre process of denaturalization is complete and the mushroom becomes something Other. It has a “supple Face” (17); it is a sprite being both earthy, as the fungi connotes, but also ethereal, appearing as if by magic “At Morning” (3) since “At Evening, it is not—” (2). Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat describes the mushroom’s magic in its ability to appear almost mythically “as if it had been born of a thunderbolt” (58). Perhaps this unpredictable and thus untrustworthy nature of the mushroom reflects its potential to be used, as Toussaint-Samat again notes, for “homicidal purposes” (57). The mushroom becomes a supernatural entity magically present both in the past, the “antedate,” and in the future: he is “like a Bubble, hie—” (1298, 11–12). This ability to disappear and reappear at will and speed makes an uncanny figure of the mushroom, a character that can no more be eaten than the “Bubble” to which it is compared. The fairy properties of the mushroom detract from its appeal to the taste buds. Yet, Dickinson’s nature can also be dangerous in its ability to seduce the senses. A particularly evocative example is Dickinson’s tempting strawberries. Alan Lloyd-Smith argues that “Dickinson’s poem” (465, “I heard a Fly buzz,” 1) “exemplifies how American writers increasingly came to strike the Gothic note in macabre detailing rather than by invoking the genre in toto” (53; original emphasis), and there can be no more unsettling focus on the minutiae of life than a fly buzzing, or the seemingly innocent desire for the “Strawberries” that grow “Over the fence” (251, 2–3). This detailing helps to distinguish American Gothic from English Gothic as Louis Gross argues: “American Gothic has always made its quests in the present time and place” unlike “the English Gothic novel” that tells “a tale of remote times and foreign locale” (2). Gross seems to argue that until “the late nineteenth-century Gothics,” where “we find terrors making local
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habitation in Victoria’s London” (2), English Gothic texts concentrate on the past, whereas the American Gothic text has always been concerned with the familiar and the present. The everyday detail, described by American Gothic texts, becomes macabre through an intense focus. The memory of the strawberry, representing childlike delight, also promises damnation. The claustrophobic restriction the girl, Dickinson’s poetic persona, suffers is juxtaposed with the free and vibrant strawberry. She wryly comments that God “if He were a Boy— / He’d—climb—if He could!” (251, 8–9), while she must stay clean, avoid the stain and the “scold” (7). Strawberries are, ToussaintSamat explains, “a deliciously scented miracle scrambling over the moss on the outskirts of woods, growing wild” (652). Uncanny, their deliciousness seems out of place: miraculous. The strawberry threatens to displace the speaker, but it also symbolizes unrestrained hope in what seems impossible. It is a symbol of plenty and freedom as the wild berry rambles and spreads. The significance of this fruit’s freedom is clear when comparing this berry to the apple made Gothically unnatural in, for example, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where “ice” incongruously “glazed the ripe apples” (252). Apples are cultivated in what Dickinson calls “lawful Orchards” (1377, 2). The apple is planted and ordered within the orchard and ice further stifles Brontë’s apple, which becomes a fitting symbol for the constrained Jane. For Dickinson, the spontaneous and uncultivated nature of the strawberry is crucial. Stavely and Fitzgerald cite Roger Williams who “declared of the strawberry that it was ‘the wonder of all the Fruits growing naturally’ ”; they go on to state, “Many Europeans were impressed by the abundance of fruits and berries in the New World, especially strawberries” (198) perhaps because they appear to sprout spontaneously or “naturally.” Conversely, apple orchards are described as being planted “from seed” and that apple seeds were “stowed in the first ships” (Stavely and Fitzgerald 200) from Europe. Cummings also writes that “it was noted in 1833, few farmers had many fruit trees” (21), which contrasts with the abundance of berries. The wild strawberry is self-sufficient; it “propagates itself,” freely “putting down roots here and there,” but when cultivated it is restricted, “kept from spreading unchecked” (Toussaint-Samat 652). The strawberry encapsulates in miniature all of the sustenance available from the earth: it “exhausts the soil” (652); although a gift from nature, the berry also signifies selfish greed, and excess, particularly Gothic connotations. The strawberry as a symbol contrasts violently with the poetic persona who is “kept from spreading” and is trapped behind the “fence,” unable to climb and sample this miracle. This
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desire to taste is transgressive since the appetite for berries was considered unhealthy and indulgent in the nineteenth century. In The American and His Food (1940), Cummings writes that in 1830 the New York Mirror warned that “[f]resh fruits . . . should be religiously forbidden to all classes, especially children” (43), and in Dickinson’s poem it is the child persona and the “Boy” who are susceptible to temptation. Cummings also notes, “indulgence in perishable luxuries or refined and carefully prepared foods was looked on as queer” (22).4 The seemingly simple everyday wish to eat strawberries presents the reader with something that is potentially threatening and “sinful” (30).5 The strawberry becomes Gothic in a particularly American way; the temptation it represents is both a prosaic transgression and a metaphysical symbol. The detail of this tiny red “miracle” in the bright clear daylight does indeed become macabre. Although it is prohibited, the poetic voice wants that strawberry just as she explains that “Forbidden Fruit a flavor has / That lawful Orchards mocks—” (1377, 1–2). Her knowledge of its “flavor” tells us she has experienced this illicit freedom. There is a parallel between the food described in the poem and the poetic voice. The “Forbidden Fruit” in this case is a pea: “How luscious lies within the Pod / The Pea that Duty locks” (3–4). Just like the woman (or the child within), the pea is tiny and confined, but it is bursting with promise. Reynolds asserts that Dickinson’s “extraordinary passional and intellectual powers were inevitably repressed and deflected, gaining full expression only in cryptic, loaded metaphors” (415), and the pea conveys this sense of restriction and potential. It is “luscious,” not an adjective often associated with peas, but this pea is forbidden, it is denied and so it becomes idealized. The simple image of this forbidden fruit is transformed into a vivid temptation, a flash of rebellion and an affirmation of denial. The berry and the pea are diminutive parts of life magnified and imbued with significance by a poetic voice stalked by restrictions. Part of the Speaker’s attraction toward the pea is that it is wild, out with the sanctioned cultivation of the “Orchards.” These restrictions, however, allow her to see what most ignore: the motes in the air, the robin, and the butterfly. These are the “Crumb[s]” (579, 10) that feed her and leave her overwhelmed, feeling “ill—and odd—” (14) when presented with “ample Bread” (9).
Disruption in Dickinson’s Gothic Language In poem 579 the terror of displacement is expressed through an engagement with the desire for more and the fear of satisfaction. The
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attraction toward the berry or pea allows a drop of sweetness but does not convey a sense of fulfillment or hearty satisfaction. This tempting but empty promise engages with the American Gothic trope of searching and disappointment of, as Leslie Fiedler puts it, the tension inherent in inhabiting “a country at once the dream of Europe and a fact of history” (27). Fossum and Roth discuss the “European dreamers who saw their fountain of youth, their New Atlantis, their El Dorado as existing somewhere in that Golden West which turned out to be America” yet “the threats of disease and starvation in a supposed land of plenty were never far behind” (8). Such tensions between fantasy and reality are bound together in Dickinson’s images of inedible food and her desire to be hungry rather than disappointed with consumption. In poem 579 the sense of denial and alienation is expressed when the poetic voice exclaims it “had been hungry, all the Years—” (579, 1), excluded from the “Tables I had seen—” (5), viewed from the pressed nose “Of Persons outside Windows—” (19); but what is more strongly conveyed is a feeling of displacement integral to American Gothic. In American Gothic the subject itself is displaced within the reality of an alien and hostile environment. As Savoy writes, there is “a long tradition in American gothic of attributing terrible violence to the muteness of landscape” (“The Face of the Tenant” 9), and in this poem, the unspoken threat of something terrible lurking outside is the poetic voice itself among the “Persons outside Windows.” Just as the pea is incongruously luscious and the strawberry seems out of place, a miracle, here the poetic voice also does not belong. Instead of hunger being satisfied by consuming food to fulfillment, eating takes away identity and place: “The Entering—takes away—” (579, 20). It seems preferable to remain outside among the shadows. Eating does not satisfy: it “takes away” hunger; it takes away hope. Ending the poem with the dash “—” allows the emptiness and the missing something to resound as it stands alone denoting nothing or less than nothing as it also subtracts. Being “outside” places the poetic voice, but “Entering” forces the speaker to be displaced because she is then “Transplanted.” “As Berry—of a Mountain Bush— / Transplanted—to the Road—” (579, 15–16) communicates this wrench from the promise to the real. More than this, though, through this metaphor the voice becomes the food rather than that which eats. Identifying with the berries to be eaten, the voice is no longer hungry, but waits to be consumed. This “disorder in the relations of signifiers and signifieds” is, according to Anne Williams, common in “Gothic conventions” (71) and it is part of Dickinson’s
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idiolect. Her poetic voice is transformed into the objects she discusses and these objects are in turn personified. The Blackberry, for example, “wears a Thorn in his side—” but “He offers His Berry, just the same” (554, 1, 3). In Dickinson’s poetic conceits nature is imbued with an uncanny excess of life rather than a “demonic hollowness behind nature” (Lloyd-Smith 92), which Alan Lloyd-Smith writes is part of the American Gothic landscape. The dream that masks American reality or as Fossum and Roth term it “figurative America” (8) is expressed in linguistic disruption. This disruption of signification is an Othering technique. By replacing the signifier’s meaning with its opposite Dickinson conveys the inherent potential of the self to become its Other; that is to say, enough comes to signal lack, hunger becomes fulfillment, and exclusion signals home. Savoy argues that “the gothic cannot function without a proximity of Otherness” (“The Face of the Tenant” 6) and Dickinson’s poetry conveys the central, integral place the Other holds in American Gothic by Othering the very food that must be taken into the self. According to Savoy, American Gothic “aspires to a narrative of the return of the Other’s plenitude on a frontier in which ‘geography’ supplements the impossibilities of language” (“The Face of the Tenant” 6–7). This is part of the frontier’s impact, where “the settlers were acutely conscious that they lived on the verge of a vast wilderness, a land of threat as much as material promise” (Lloyd-Smith 37). Fossum and Roth argue that “[t]he effect of the frontier, both as fact and as metaphor, must . . . be taken into account if the texture of the [American] Dream is to be perceived” (7); the frontier is not only a physical landscape but it is also a crucial part of the American psyche. The very notion of the new disallows familiarity and comfort; it disallows the notion of home, since home implies knowledge and roots. Charles Crow comments that “[i]f the national story of the United States has been one of faith in progress and success and in opportunity for the individual, Gothic literature can tell the story of those who are rejected, oppressed, or who have failed” (2), and here Dickinson engages with the flawed fantasy of the new. Uncertain in the presence of what she considers to be the impossible concept of “enough,” and comfortable instead with the hunger that has kept her company, the poetic persona observes that “The Plenty hurt me—’twas so new—” (579, 13). In this phrase Dickinson uncovers the story of the rejected, displays the horror of progress, success, opportunity, and individuality in the detachment these goals necessitate and the excess that they encourage. Lloyd-Smith also suggests that “[t]he tropes of the Gothic seem almost reassuring in comparison with the not-knowing
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The Frontier in Dickinson’s Poems Savoy argues that “common to all [American Gothic] is a narrative site that tends to be an epistemological frontier” where there is a “spatial division between the known and the unknown, the self and the Other” (“Face of the Tenant” 6). In Dickinson, this frontier view is connected to food and consumption. Susan Williams explains that foodways were “reshaped by the new environments on the frontier” (Food in the United States 122). The frontier land and the mind-set of frontier living is a site of change and development of new and old mixing to create something different, and this “heterogeneous blend” (122) is resisted by the “freezing lips— / Too rapt with frost” (690, 2–3) of Dickinson’s poems. C. Fischler discusses the frontier in his theory of eating, explaining “incorporation” as “the action in which we send a food across the frontier between the world and the self, between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ our body” (qtd. in Lupton 17). There is a sense that Dickinson’s poetic persona has internalized the “epistemological frontier” and for her the act of eating is that of broaching a huge expanse of the chaotic outside and bringing it inside. Instead she approaches food, even “just a Crumb” (791, 2), with sealed lips. With this in mind, her allusions to cannibalism are very interesting since in cannibalism, especially auto-cannibalism, there is no “spatial division” as such between the outside and inside. “Deprived of other Banquet, / I entertained Myself—” (773, 1–2), she writes, and this cannibalistic allusion to feasting on her own flesh is echoed in her anthropomorphism of the blackberry offering “His Berry . . . / To Partridge—and to Boy—” (554, 3–4). Her desire for and de-naturalizing of berries and vegetables also denies the fusion of food traditions and the integration of imported tastes, creating instead a nostalgic relationship with homegrown unadulterated food. Dickinson’s poems attempt to control the terrifying and ever-changing world outside of her poetic imagination by finding sustenance from her own flesh and through images of rejection and diminution. For her starvation is a “poignant luxury” (791, 4), a “finer Famine” (872, 13). Through disallowing incorporation and maintaining that what is local to her, even her own flesh, is “sumptuous enough for me—” (773, 7), Dickinson soars into the “Miles on Miles of Nought—”
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emptiness the American confronts” (79)6; paradoxically, Gothicizing nature re-familiarizes it, and holding onto the darkness of hunger is preferable to the “Plenty” that “I did not know” (579, 9) because this hunger takes her “turning . . . Home” (6).
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(443, 17).7 Broaching the frontier of a land seemingly infinite and empty is a source of fear in American Gothic. When discussing the “terror of nonreintegration,” Daneen Wardrop writes of “the message no one can bring herself or himself to read, that nihilism prevails” (126). Heather Kirk Thomas argues that “Dickinson’s style can be characterized as ‘anorexic’ ” (207) and considers the “personal demons” (217) that may haunt Dickinson’s poetry8; yet, perhaps paradoxically, Dickinson glories in this nihilism. American Gothic’s engagement with this “Nought” is evident in Lloyd-Smith’s description of the mode as “a product of the inconvenient absence of castles and the heavy foot-step of the European past, but also no doubt a legacy of intense Puritan introspection and a relative ‘thinness’ of society and available ‘usable,’ past” (94). Simply coincidental, perhaps, that the metaphor describing America is “thinness,” a starved and hungry body forced to feed upon its own “slender addings” (773, 5), as Dickinson describes her empowered and cannibalistic persona. The possibility of being swallowed by the weight of European history forces America onward and into the terrifying new to fill what Savoy also terms the “thinness, the blankness of the American historical past” (“Face of the Tenant” 6). However, Dickinson’s poetic persona resists heavy fullness and instead welcomes this “absence”; she finds comfort and familiarity in hunger and emptiness, feasting on the “Banquet of Abstemiousness” (1430, 3).
Conclusion: “You are Happiest While I Withhold” What Wardrop considers as Dickinson’s “manual for dealing with the abyss” (197 11n) in poem 546 seems instead to be a celebration of hunger, an illustration of desire and an example of inescapable emptiness: To fill a Gap Insert the Thing that caused it— Block it up With Other—and ’twill yawn the more— You cannot solder an Abyss With Air.
This is an image of an empty mouth craving fulfillment and aware that there will never be enough to satisfy. The “yawn” is both a visual image connoting the wide-open mouth, but also an onomatopoetic
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representation of emptiness with the elongated a sound distorting the mouth and enacting the reflex to take in air. The juxtaposition of “Gap” and “Other” seems to suggest that the self is emptiness and the Other is plenitude; however, there is never enough of the “Thing” to “fill” up the desire and want of the self. The impossible image of soldering air suggests that what is used to “Block . . . up” the Gap will evaporate. Hunger or want is the only tangible thing; satisfaction or enough is “so vast a sweetness” (Johnson 479), such impossible manna, that it is as abstract and insubstantial as “Air.” Strength is found in denial, in accepting the gap and ceasing to struggle with hunger. Here Dickinson contests the terror that founds the American Gothic aesthetic. For Dickinson, plenty is a falsity or impossibility, while in nothingness there is hope and liberation.9 According to Savoy, “[i]t is . . . the lesson of Melville that nothing is so terrible as nothingness itself,” and the disruption of language, the “absence of a coherently meaningful symbolic” (“The Face of the Tenant” 6), is an expression of this terror of nothingness in the Gothic, particularly American Gothic.10 Dickinson, however, welcomes and thrives on this absence. Her comic depiction of auto-cannibalism as she “entertained Myself” (773, 2) expresses the independence that hunger allows. However, Gothic resists this possibility of self-contained satisfaction. Instead it obsessively looks for alternatives to cover over the horrific possibility that there is a vacuum, a gap of meaning that only this type of cannibalism can salve. Of course, this obsession only focuses attention on the “emptiness inside an apparently full reality” that Rosemary Jackson notes when writing on Fantastic texts (158). Dickinson’s self-cannibalism does not wholly satisfy but is left “almost to suffice” (773, 8), creating a loop that will always form a hollow. Yet, the paradox remains that in the midst of this “emptiness inside” there is a surplus, a “Reserve” (773, 12). Martin and Savoy, using Julia Kristeva’s abject, explain this type of Gothic contradiction; they suggest: “the gothic tendency itself: ‘. . . is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance’ ” (ix), and Dickinson’s descriptions of thriving on food that is not food, on the rejection of food, is just such a new “start of life” amidst a desire for oblivion. The absence that is so feared in American Gothic, the terror of the undiscovered, unknown, and unconquerable, is what Dickinson’s poems crave. Her metaphors of food create enticing images only to refuse their consumption, instead preferring hunger. Yet through this abnegation there is release. Paul Atkinson argues that “[f]ood is a liminal substance; it stands as a bridging substance between nature and culture, the human and
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the natural, the outside and the inside” (qtd. in Lupton 16–17), but Dickinson’s poetic persona and the American Gothic mode deny this connection. Food is “foreshadowed” (1555, 4); no longer an index of life and sustenance, it is emptied and Gothicized. Yet, feelings of displacement are expressed through identification with food: “As Berry—of a Mountain Bush—/ Transplanted—to the Road—” (579, 15–16). This ambiguity is inherent within the American Gothic tradition that communicates, Lloyd-Smith suggests, “a terror of the land itself, its emptiness, its implacability; simply a sense of its vast, lonely, and possibly hostile space” (93). Dickinson’s persona is itself “vast,” “lonely,” and empty. Her tropes of hunger and denial within a context that longs for plenty, in which “a healthy diet was an ample diet. In those times [the nineteenth century] a healthy person was one who consumed vast quantities of food” (Pillsbury 9), convey the anxiety beneath the excess of the American way. The notion that “[i]t was volume, not content, that promoted a healthy body” (10) is an ethos that takes the vast prairie landscape and unknown future into a dietetics. However, Dickinson’s poems, for example, 612, tell how “It would have starved a Gnat—/ To live so small as I—” (1–2) and that “Food’s necessity” (4) was savagely “Upon me—like a Claw—” (5). The notion that food should be copious and indiscriminately devoured masks the fear of emptiness that is challenged by Dickinson. Dickinson’s poems do offer “redemption from the very trauma they describe” (Reynolds 417), a trauma that is both universal and peculiarly American, because it is impossible to fear nothingness when you are “Inebriate of Air” (214, 5).
Notes “All other bounty sudden chaff / For this foreshadowed Food” (1555, 3–4). Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All references to Emily Dickinson’s poems come from this edition. The chapter epigraph is taken from a letter written by Emily Dickinson to T.W. Higginson in Thomas H. Johnson, page 479. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1958, 1986, The President and Fellows of Harvard College; 1914, 1924, 1932, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi; 1952 by Alfred Leete Hampson; 1960 by Mary L. Hampson. All references to Emily Dickinson’s letters come from this edition.
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1. Stavely and Fitzgerald discuss this representation of a New England meal within Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1859 novel The Minister’s Wooing. 2. Cummings elaborates that in 1832 “because of the cholera epidemic city councils prohibited its [fruit’s] sale” (43). 3. Food becomes an abstract idea; indeed the image that Louis cites is the anthropomorphism of food, which Dickinson writes in her letter to Louise and Frances Norcross in 1870, of the sugar pears with “hips like hams, and the flesh of bonbons” (Johnson 476). 4. Cummings writes: “[a]s late as 1867 the press reported that someone passing a fruit stand laden with spoiled peaches suffered an attack of the gripes. The conclusion was reached that, ‘if bare proximity to those peaches caused him so much pain, the eating of them would have been certain death’ ” (44). Here Cummings cites the Chicago Tribune from August 8, 1867. Cummings goes on to relay the Speech of Mr. Charles Ogle of Pennsylvania on the Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace, Delivered in the House of Representatives April 14, 1840, where Van Buren was criticized for being “ ‘elegant’ . . . [for] using public money to raise strawberries and raspberries, cauliflower, and celery for his table” (22–23). This distrust of the “delicacies” (30) of fresh fruit stems from, Cummings argues, “the devotion of rural dwellers to staples” such as “corn and salt-pork” (22). 5. Cummings quotes John Adams (1850) and his reaction to “jellies and trifles, fruits and nuts, syllabubs and sweetmeats—[which] seemed ‘mighty,’ ‘elegant,’ and ‘sinful’ ” (30). 6. Lloyd-Smith describes Edgar Huntly (1799) here. 7. Wardrop uses this line from poem 443 to illustrate that Dickinson “predates . . . the twentieth-century existentialist fascination with abjection” (Wardrop 151); yet this line also situates her within the first terrifying yet hopeful experience of America for the settlers. 8. Thomas notes the “metaphorical link between Dickinson and anorexia” (206) but suggests, “one cannot supply a definitive medical diagnosis” (224). 9. The heading of this concluding section contains a quotation from Letter 562 from Dickinson to Otis P. Lord: “Dont [sic] you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?” (617). Dickinson goes on to describe how she will “lie so near your longing—to touch it as I passed” (617), thus conveying the dark enjoyment in denial, almost sadistic in nature. 10. Savoy uses Melville and Hawthorne to illustrate his point, while Wardrop cites Poe: “Poe’s narrator in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ recounts, ‘it was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see’ ” (126; emphasis in the original). For Wardrop, Dickinson’s poems of the void or nothingness express “the most awful menace” (126).
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E m i l y D i c k i n s o n ’s A m e r i c a n G o t h i c
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C onsu m p t ion a n d C a n n i b a l ism i n t h e A lt ru r i a n Rom a nc es of Wi l l i a m De a n How e l l s Lance Rubin
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hroughout William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances—A Traveler From Altruria (1893) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907), as well as the series Letters of an Altrurian Traveler that appeared in Cosmopolitan between 1893 and 1894—Aristedes Homos, the mythical Altrurian, expresses shock at what he sees as the barbaric state of American culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Seeing the incongruity of America’s “devotion to the spirit of Christianity amid the practices which seem to deny it,” Homos explains how Altruria has evolved beyond competitive capitalism to become a perfectly functioning, biblically inspired socialist utopia devoid of poverty, crime, and want (Through 268).1 Coming from a land marked by complete equality, “where people love one another as the first Christians did” (348), Homos is dismayed at the predatory ethos that dominates American life. Seeing the indentured status of farmers, the rapacity of financial institutions, the fanatical adherence to individuality, the self-serving notions of patriotism, the attitude with which physical labor is frowned upon, and the caste-like approach to class distinctions, Homos attempts to make his American hosts recognize the grotesque gap between their democratic and religious ideals and the manner in which both are manipulated for the enrichment of an exclusive cultural elite.
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Chapter 13
L a nce Rubin
To be sure, I am not breaking new ground in rehearsing the politics of Altruria as Howells’s imagined solution for the inequities of the Gilded Age.2 What has been neglected in the critical discussions of the Altrurian texts, however, is how he positions the role of food and eating practices as sites of political, economic, and class struggles.3 As Homos tells his correspondent Cyril, he is stunned not only “how the Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, and blunderingly, but how they live in the body” (Through 277). Indeed, eating customs serve as a starting point for Homos’s questions about the voracious competitiveness of an unchecked system in which the poor are, in a sense, devoured by the rich and the striking difference between countries “where people live upon each other as the Americans do, instead of for each other as the Altrurians do” (267; Howells’s italics). Homos is astonished by the gluttony and waste associated with the spectacle of upper-class individuals’ dining habits—as well as their dismissive ignorance of how food gets to their tables—amidst those who cannot provide enough sustenance for themselves in the competitive economic system of turn-of-the-century America.4 Unlike Altrurians who imagine themselves as part of a collective body through which food and goods circulate to the benefit of all its members, Americans support a model that sets the various parts of that body politic against one another, undercutting the nation’s ideals, identity, and promises. Through its representations of eating and dining, Homos identifies the conspicuous consumption of the upper classes as inseparable from their cannibalistic social, cultural, and political policies. Even though they do not literally eat human flesh, Howells implies that the upper classes enforce a system of inequitable cultural appropriation and consumption. The metaphors of eating and cannibalism are wonderfully suggestive for exploring a host of issues surrounding “civilization” and “human nature,” and in suggesting that Homos sees Gilded Age capitalism as a modern form of cannibalism, I am working from food scholarship that documents the symbolism and politicization of diet.5 Of particular interest is how Western imperialism introduced stories of flesh-eating to its citizens, against which they constructed behavioral and gastronomic distinctions, in part to justify continued subjugation and conquest of lands and commodities.6 Claude Lévi-Strauss destabilized the supposedly firm boundaries constructed between the “raw and the cooked,” “nature” and “culture,” “savage” and “civilized,” “us” and “them,” and initiated a more critical, self-reflexive body of scholarship that put as much emphasis on the cultural biases of those writing the accounts of the Other as the practices of the
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Others themselves. Thus, in debates including the ethics of vegetarianism or the complicity of sugar consumers in the slave trade, the distinction between the civilized European and the savage flesh-eater is eroded.7 Working from this framework, Priscilla Walton insightfully claims that “the cannibal, as the devourer of human beings” can be profitably “projected onto other discourses, be it a discourse of disease, eating habits, consumer practices, or everyday activities (such as shopping)” (4). Dean MacCannel likewise argues that contemporary cannibalism can be witnessed in the interconnected practices of economic, political, ideological, corporeal, and psychological consumption, incorporation, and appropriation.8 This modern form of cannibalism is no less horrifying for not being literal; talking about “metaphoric cannibalism,” in fact, actually protects it from having to admit its gruesome excesses—the socioeconomic and geopolitical inequities that devour poorer countries—“empowering it in ways that the original form of cannibalism could not imagine” (20). The suggestion that modern practices of consumption detach cannibalism from the body while retaining the craving for absolute power and hegemony by devouring Otherness is helpful for understanding Homos’s belief that the “monstrous conditions” of America legitimate barbaric “inducements to rapacity” (Letters 194, 186). The mode of consumption and desire to dominate and incorporate others, while allegorical, is still savage and, even worse, encouraged as the national ideal. Howells establishes the connection between eating practices, Gilded Age capitalism, and the social Darwinism that characterizes American life in the first paragraphs of A Traveler From Altruria, as Homos’s host, the romantic novelist Mr. Twelvemough, hurries the two from the train station to their New England resort because, as he explains, “we shall not stand so good a chance for supper if we are not there pretty promptly” (9). Confused at the idea of not being fed because the train was late (and because Homos, bewildering his host, helps the porter unload all of the suitcases), Twelvemough explains to him, “first come, first served, you know. That’s human nature.” This is the first of several times that the competitive logic of “first come, first served” is positioned as human nature in answer to Homos’s questions about American values and customs, so contradictory to his initial ideas about its democratic practices. Later, discussing the high interest rates that keep farmers enslaved to the banks who own their land, Twelvemough casually remarks, “I suppose that man likes to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip. That’s human nature” (83). Likewise, Dorothea Makely, a society woman with
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whom Homos becomes acquainted, tells Homos that his account of a cooperative, socialist Altrurian society “is opposed to human nature” because it abolishes “incentive, and all the motive for exertion and advancement . . . [I]t’s perfectly un-American” (92). When Homos tells her of the familial relationship among all citizens of Altruria, she refuses to believe him, calling it “nonsense” by proclaiming, “I know human nature, Mr. Homos!” (70; emphasis in the original). This repeated explanation exposes the plutocratic belief that competitive “first come first served” struggle and class division are essential biological or psychological characteristics, not ideological constructions of those who accept aggressive consumption as the proper functioning of the body politic. Indeed, in Capital (1867), Marx ridicules the “naturalness” of exploitation and inequality through metaphors of cannibalism and vampirism, suggesting that capitalism survives on the blood and flesh of others: “there is no natural obstacle absolutely preventing one man from lifting from himself the burden of labor necessary to maintain his own existence, and imposing it on another, just as there is no unconquerable natural obstacle to the consumption of flesh of one man by another” (647). The cannibal figures importantly in his understanding of capital’s need to grow continuously, to eliminate competitors for resources and markets, and to “absorb the greatest amount of surplus labor” (341–42). In other words, the capitalist, like the cannibal, survives by turning individual subjects into objects (labor, food) for its sustenance. Marx’s idea that consuming labor and consuming human flesh are unnatural is also suggestive in the second and related reference to the “first come, first served” logic of competitive capitalism that Howells raises in Traveler. Entering the resort’s dining room, populated exclusively by the upper class, Homos leaps up to help a waitress struggling with an overloaded tray of food meant for him and Twelvemough, much to his host’s horror: “To my dismay I saw . . . the Altrurian enter into polite controversy with her” before carrying the tray himself, while the other diners are “aghast at the scandal” (12). Thoroughly confused as to why these events are considered unacceptable to citizens whose foundational document is the Declaration of Independence, Twelvemough explains that “we don’t take that in its closest literality . . . it was rather the political than the social traditions of England that we broke with” (13). Still not understanding why helping waitresses and porters is taboo, he is told that despite the American belief in the honor of work, “a certain social slight does attach to [domestic] service . . . [S]ome occupations are more degrading than others” (15).
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Asked why any would choose this work, Twelvemough admits, “It is a question of bread and butter” (15). The fundamental need to eat, the basic need to keep oneself and one’s family fed, is the foundation upon which those at the bottom of the food chain sustain the consumption of those on top. The Doctor,9 for example, notes the way the euphemism “laid off” reifies the reality of workers and their families “having to face beggary or starvation” (35). The Banker, trying to explain the system, tells Homos, “A man does not care much to get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is always the first question with the workingman” (39). Horrified at the idea that the Manufacturer has the ability to arbitrarily take away a man’s living at any time, Homos tries to comprehend the idea of willingly (especially if they were unionizing) causing a worker and his family to go hungry: “If you shot your fellow man, as you say, the law would punish you; but, if for some reason that you decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually starved to death—” “Then the law would have nothing to do with it,” the professor replied for the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. (54)
Highlighting the consumption, serving, and necessity of food in the novel’s discussions of class, politics, and economics, Howells reinforces the “first come, first served” mentality that Americans recognize as “indestructibly based in human nature itself” (16). That is, food consumption is registered as metonymous with Gilded Age capitalism as a whole; the eat-or-be-eaten ethos of citizens preying upon one another and turning people (waiters, servants, cooks, and farmers) into objects that help to nourish the well-fed bodies of the upper class can be seen as a modern but no less dehumanizing form of cannibalism. The national acceptance of plutocratic values and their appetite for power anticipates Thorstien Veblen’s observation that the “predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitudes for the members of the group; . . . when the common-sense appreciation of men and things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat” (18). Howells’s corroboration with Veblen’s concept of the barbarism that marks America’s elite is seen in Twelvemough’s ironic assertion that “we believe individuality is the principle that differences civilized men from savages, from the lower animals, and makes us a nation instead of a tribe or herd” (21). Though they consider their values
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and assumptions as the pinnacle of “civilization,” the socioeconomic elite do not recognize how their predatory practices are gruesome to the Altrurian. By constructing what they think are firm boundaries between themselves and the working poor—believing they can separate themselves from the other parts of the body politic—the plutocrats ignore how their own nourishment and survival depends on laborers who grow, farm, transport, prepare, and cook their food. Echoing imperial binaries of civilized and savage, Twelvemough calls the farmers and workers who populate the ravaged New England countryside “natives,” marking as savage Others those who live yearround in the places where they vacation so as to justify their actions and attitudes toward the poor. Indeed, while visiting one of the “native” families, the Camps, Twelvemough rationalizes not helping the poor—who, in Mrs. Makely’s view, are “too old or too lazy to get away” (79)—by likening them to parasitic cannibals: “As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it and begin to live on it” (87). Of course, the fact that the Camps grow the food they will consume for survival reveals the folly and fantasy of the individual autonomy so cherished in capitalist America. Rueben Camp not only stands as the voice of the degraded farmer who toils in near-poverty providing the nation’s food, but of all workers who are subject to predatory economics in order to eat. Dismissing Mrs. Makely’s attempt to smooth over obvious class differences with patronizing declarations of nationalism, Camp claims, America is one thing for you, and it’s quite another thing for us . . . It means liberty for you; but what liberty has a man got if he doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from? . . . I’ve seen men come and give up their liberty for a chance to earn their family’s living. They knew they were right, and that they ought to have stood up for their rights; but they had to lie down and lick the hand that fed them! (100)
Camp vainly argues how the system that Mrs. Makely sees as natural actually devours the lives of those who feed the nation; how the banks feed off of farm labor through mortgage rates that keep families like the Camps as virtual slaves to their debt. Their argument is momentarily interrupted by a homeless man, who Rueben feeds, much to the dismay of Mrs. Makely and Twelevemough, who believe that “if you give the tramp his breakfast without making him work for it, you must see that it is encouraging idleness. And idleness is very corrupting” (105). Unmoved by this logic—and seeing the irony of it coming from the leisure class defined, in part, by their
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idleness—Mrs. Camp subtly positions Mrs. Makely and Twelvemough as similar parasites, asking if “the boarders at the hotel always work to earn their breakfast.” Mrs. Makely scoffs at the question, asserting that “they always pay for it,” to which Mrs. Camp counters, “I don’t think paying for a thing is earning it. Perhaps someone else earned the money that pays for it.” Mrs. Camp then likens the consumption of her visitors to that of the ravenous financial institutions: “my husband and I earned this farm, and now the savings bank owns it . . . I suppose you’ll say that the bank paid for it . . . but the bank didn’t earn it. When I think of that I don’t always think that a person who pays for his breakfast has the best right to a breakfast” (104). Though her guests miss her comparison between the homeless man and the summer vacationers, Homos does not. While the leisure class looks upon the natives and the homeless “creature” as parasites feeding off of the wealth they believed they earned, the wealthy are unable or unwilling to see their own barbarism of not fully acknowledging the humanity of workers or the poor, reducing them to objects in a system in which a certain level of poverty and misery are rationalized as acceptable for the health of the collective whole. Mrs. Makely unwittingly reveals how Gilded Age capitalism updates savage practices of human sacrifice when she claims “heroically” that, though everybody has an opportunity in America, some of the poor “must be sacrificed” to keep the mills and factories running and to satiate capital (94). She and Twelevemough cannot recognize the cannibalistic ethos and their own participation in ideological rituals that ensure their material comfort and nourishing diet on the sweat of other bodies. Homos positions Altruria as a solution to distinctions between the civilized and the native while speaking to the natives and the resort dwellers at the conclusion of Traveler. He explains how Altrurians gather without “social distinction” or “the vapid and tedious . . . receptions and balls and dinners of a semi-barbaric people striving for social prominence by shutting a certain number in and a certain number out, and overdressing, overfeeding and overdrinking” (174). Aside from returning to the images of food that began the novel, Homos also employs the language of parasitical cannibalism by claiming, “No one is more host than guest; all are hosts and guests” (175). Unlike America’s symbiotic feeding of one class upon another, Altruria has eliminated the economic incentives for devouring others and the competitive nature of consumption. Homos reinforces this idea by explaining how Altrurians “consort much according to their tastes— literary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechanical—but these tastes are made approaches, not barriers; and we find out that we have many
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more tastes in common than was formerly supposed” (175; my italics). The metonymy of food with socioeconomic practices is made clear as the Altrurians share the same “tastes” that nourish and sustain, in body and mind, the entire body politic, not just those on top of the competitive food chain. Though Howells hoped that his largely conservative readers were going to consider Altruria as a springboard from which to rethink their predatory assumptions, the years after the novel’s publication proved otherwise. As Clara Kirk notes, the turn of the century not only showed an acceleration of the inequalities and contradictions Howells condemned, but introduced another level of barbarity, “the un-Altrurian activities of this country during the Spanish-American War” (112). Indeed, Howells endorsed Eugene Debs, Socialist candidate for the 1906 presidential election, a clear sign of his resignation that the more entrenched political parties would further his Altrurian ideals. His disillusionment and resentment toward America’s continued betrayal of its ideals is made even more forcefully in the series of “Letters From an Altrurian Traveler” for Cosmopolitan and the 1907 sequel to Traveler, Through the Eye of a Needle, which included several reedited portions of the “Letters.” The ninth “Letter,” entitled “The Selling and Giving of Dinners” (July 1894), provides a clear indication of how Howells sees American eating habits as analogous to their larger political practices as Homos writes, “Nothing seems so characteristic of [New York] . . . as the eating and drinking constantly going on in it” (447). He focuses on this “both for the sake of the curious spectacle it affords, and for the philosophy it involves” (448). Witnessing the performances of disparity between the fed and the hungry, Homos laments how “a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere visible as sumptuous tables” (447). Aside from the sight of overeating and overdrinking, what shocks him is the way all classes accept the division of wealth and nourishment as natural: “Americans are so used to their perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit in their civilization, that they do not seem to mind it” (447). He is also repulsed by the butchers and grocers in the immigrant neighborhoods stocked with “revolting and unwholesome” food, “pieces of loathsome carnage, and bits of decaying vegetation” (450). But more confounding is the staggering waste of food Homos sees in the face of so much hunger. The hotels and restaurants dump their unused and half-eaten food into boats “so that even the swine may not eat of it, much less the thousands of hungering men and women and children . . . Every comfortable family in this city throws away at every meal
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the sustenance of some other family; or . . . at least as would keep it from starvation” (450). Homos sees these displays of waste and want as proof that the “predatory instinct is very subtle” among “people who live upon each other, instead of for each other” (450). The “spectacle of their contradictions,” the visible show of surfeit and starvation, reveals the hollowness of the nation’s cherished ideals: “they have no such thing as individuality here, and that in conditions where one man depends upon another man for the chance of earning his bread, there can be no more liberty than there is equality” (“Letter 1” 195). Picking up where Traveler leaves off, Needle centers on Homos’s interaction with the social circle of Mrs. Makely. In the novel’s first half, Howells goes into great detail about the lavish tables and gluttonous behavior of the upper class who feed to excess, while “within five minutes’ walk of their warmth and surfeit” is “the actual presence of hunger and cold” and “houselessness” (332). Seeing “how hardened people became to such things” (332), Homos likens the average American to “a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his starving tribesman, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his return from the chase with food” (276). However, while walking the city and watching New Yorkers shop, Homos gets a glimpse of how easily one can become “forgetful” of everyday social inconsistencies as he is nearly hypnotized while staring at the artful arrangement of food for so long at the markets. Anticipating Guy Debord’s analysis of the spectacle, Howells suggests how the omnipresence of commodities can distract and depoliticize by turning individuals into passive consumers. Even the politically astute Homos becomes a momentary casualty in what Debord calls “a permanent opium war” (130) as he struggles to resist surrendering to the aesthetic display of the very food that is out of reach for so many walking the same streets. The display began on one hand with a basal line of pumpkins well out on the sidewalk. Then it was built up with the soft white and cool green of cauliflowers, and open boxes of red and white grapes, to the window that flourished in the banks of celery and rosy apples. On the other side, gray-green squashes formed the foundation, and the wall sloped upward with the delicious salads you can find here, the dark red of beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association of colors was very artistic and even the line of mutton carcases [sic] overhead . . . flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the line, was picturesque. (309)
Arranged through layers of colors and texture, the aesthetic display of food is “absolutely separated from the productive forces operating
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as a whole,” as Debord says is true of all commodities in a hypercapitalist society, adding, “when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life, . . . economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively” (29). Homos, awakening from the spectacular display with an effort, likewise admits, “there are so many things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget” (309). The message is clear: the capitalist commodification of culture transforms, through a sophisticated system, a basic need for survival like food into an aesthetic, pleasurable presentation to render consumers passive to commercial manipulation and to obfuscate the nature and effects of capitalism’s power and deprivations. The display momentarily lulls Homos, revealing its power to blunt one’s capacity for imagining alternatives or forgetting one’s duty and responsibility to others. Indeed, the spectacle, more than individuals like Dorothea Makely or Mr. Twelvemough, comes under Howells’s scrutiny; the elite are victims, in their own way, of a system that makes surfeit attractive and predatory ideology seem natural. The theatrics of the meals reinforce the barbarism, especially Thanksgiving dinner.10 Homos relates how the holiday was established “in proclamations enjoining a pious gratitude upon the people for their continued prosperity as a nation and a public acknowledgment of the divine blessings,” but that seems incongruous with the sight of “hordes of men and women of every occupation [who] are feeling the pinch of poverty” (307). Further undermining any pretense to acknowledging good fortune or humility in a nation besieged by hunger and want, Homos also notes how Thanksgiving is “devoted to witnessing a game of football between the Elevens of two great universities,” after which “there is always a heavy dinner at home” (308). Mrs. Makely’s Thanksgiving meal, which she insists is modest, is “abominable for its extravagance, and revolting in its appeals to appetite” to Homos who, we learn, is used to the vegetarian diet of Altruria (315). Through a description that continues for several pages, Howells reinforces the spectacle of the dinner table, which Homos likens to “a stage-setting” (314) designed for, as Susan Williams notes in Food in the United States, 1820s–1890 (2006), “maximum social impact” (153). Indeed, Williams describes how, as the meals of the middle and upper classes become more elaborate toward the end of the nineteenth century, the dinner table is transformed into a site of class demarcation, with the reinforcement of older “social relations— deference, hierarchy and religious orthodoxy—[that] were declining in the face of social, geographic, and occupational mobility” (153).
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In fact, Mrs. Makely’s multi-coursed meal is strikingly similar to the one described in “A Simple Company Dinner” in an 1883 edition of The Successful Housekeeper. Her “simple” meal includes oysters served with “delicate French wine,” followed by soup, “fish, with sliced cucumbers,” “sweetbreads with green peas,” and champagne. Immediately following is “a remove, a tenderloin of beef, with mushrooms . . . stewed terrapin . . . stuffed peppers” accompanied by “one or two side-dishes, and with all the burgundy” (315). The time between courses is spent drinking several glasses of wine and passing “plates of radishes, olives, celery, and roasted almonds.” After palate-cleansing “water-ice flavored with rum,” the servants bring in “a roast turkey the size of an ostrich” and a platter of “Canvasback duck,” accompanied by cranberry sauce and “currant jelly.” Homos notes, “there was a salad with the duck, and after that there was an ice-cream, with fruits and all manner of candied fruits, and candies, different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the coffee” (316). Noting that Homos drinks almost no wine, one of the guests says “he did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much. ‘Dining, you know, means overeating,’ he explained, ‘and if you wish to overeat, you must overdrink’ ” (324). The gentleman confesses to love dinner at the Makely’s, though he complains of a late dinner he ate there the previous week—“blue-point oysters, consommé, stewed terrapin . . . lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages, caviar, radishes, celery, and olives,” and “endless drinkables and smokables”—for causing him, tellingly, to miss church (324). Homos, however, is not alone in his disgust with the spectacle. At the dinner he becomes acquainted with Eveleth Strange, a widow whose husband left her a fortune, but who is also uncomfortable at the excess and gluttony on display. She asks the crowd “how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes’ walk of us, who had no dinner to-day” (325). She then proceeds to quote Henry Longfellow’s “The Challenge,” a poem about a knight who calls his starving people traitors for not effectively defending a slain king. The last half of the poem discusses the “poverty-stricken millions / Who challenge our wine and bread,” whose “wasted hands are extended / To catch the crumbs that fall” from those feasting in “light and plenty,” oblivious to the “hunger and despair.” The guests are likewise oblivious to Eveleth’s critique of the parallel situation that substitutes royalty and peasants with plutocrats and immigrants. Rather than discuss the poem’s message, the guests applaud how “it is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs. Strange. That sort of
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thing has almost going out!” (326). Homos recognizes her anguish over the contradictory system in which she exists, and indeed, she later confesses her deep dissatisfaction. While not suffering “a hunger of body,” she reveals a “hunger of soul. If you escape one, you suffer the other, because if you have a soul, you must long to help” (335). Through several discussions about the incongruous gulf between America’s nationalistic and religious ideals and their actual practices, Mrs. Strange agrees to marry Homos and return with him to Altruria. The second half of the novel is also written in epistolary form, letters from Eveleth to Dorothea Makely as she describes Altrurian life. While space prevents a fuller discussion of Howells’s utopia, Altruria is exactly how Homos describes: a society with a sensed of shared duty, equality between genders, the absence of a class system, and a socialist ethos modeled after the “first Christians” (348). Gradually, Eveleth allows herself to abandon her old habits and ideologies— about the public role for women, work, fashion—but she has the most difficulty letting go of her ideals surrounding food. While respecting the openness with which all citizens treat each other, Eveleth (echoing the opening of Traveler) cannot initially bring herself to eat at the same table with those who cook and serve her food. “I instinctively drew the line at cooks and waitresses,” she writes Dorothea: “In New York, you know I always tried to be kind to my servants, but as for letting one of them sit down in my presence, much less sit down at table with me, I never dreamed of such a thing in my most democratic moments” (382). Upon learning that the women who served their first meal upon arriving at Altruria “had drawn lots” to do so and “were proud of having the honor of waiting on us,” she realizes the preposterousness of adhering to habitual predatory hierarchies (382). But Eveleth’s more daunting obstacle is the strictly vegetarian diet of Altrurians. And though she is surprisingly satisfied with the “different kinds of mushrooms which took the place of meat,” her craving for meat remains: “I was hungry for meat—for roast, for broiled, for fried, for hashed” (382–83). Homos blames himself for overlooking how her old tastes would linger, but feels hopeless since “nobody since the old capitalist times has thought of killing a sheep or cattle for food” (383). That the desire to consume flesh is the hardest cultural trait to let go of is telling, but logical if we understand meateating as metonymous with the metaphorical cannibalism practiced in capitalistic America, and vegetarianism that sees consuming flesh as a sign of one’s animal, predatory nature. In other words, the diet of the individual body in both cultures corresponds to that of the
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body politic. Cooperation, equality, and coexistence are marked by finding sustenance without relying on aggressively devouring other living things. Eveleth’s periodic craving for meat, despite the vegetables and mushrooms abundant on Altruria, registers the difficulty she has in imagining a way of life where insatiable consumption and the devouring of other is accepted and encouraged. The connection between Eveleth’s meat-eating and American politics is made explicit as she writes Dorothea, “You are so used to seeing [animals] in the butcher’s shop, ready for the range, that you never think of what they have to go through before that” (384). Still, she pleads with Homos to find her a chicken to eat, and though he procures one, the two are forced to kill and dress it themselves. Used to others laboring for her meals, Eveleth is horrified when they perform “the murderous deed” and after killing it, she does not have the heart to consume it: “We buried the poor thing under the flowers of the guest-house garden, and I went back to my mushrooms” (384). The Altrurian diet is almost certainly inspired by Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on Howells’s thinking at this time is immeasurable. To be sure, there were various vegetarian movements throughout the nineteenth century in response “to industrialism, urbanization, and separation from the natural world” (Gregory 18). But in 1898 Howells proclaimed that Tolstoy’s “writings and his life have meant more to me than any other man’s . . . It has been his mission to give men a bad conscience, to alarm them and distress them in the opinions and conventions in which they rest so comfortably” (“In Honor” 288). One of Tolstoy’s most fervent beliefs was that a dietary reform was necessary for larger political and ethical reform. As Ronald LeBlanc documents, Tolstoy believed that the “conditions of luxury, idleness, and epicurean indulgence under which the ‘parasites’ from the privileged classes live” prevented them from thinking and behaving ethically (150). He promoted vegetarianism as a way “to transcend the physical pleasure and corporeal well-being sought by our lower animal self and striving to practice a compassionate Christian love that places altruistic concern for others above selfish concerns for oneself” (150–51). This is, of course, the organizing principle in Howells’s Altruria, and the disappearance of Eveleth’s desire for flesh corresponds to her acceptance of a social and political ethos so opposite from the capitalism upon which she was nourished her whole life. As she embraces Altrurian brotherhood and shared responsibility, she is likewise repulsed by American overeating and comes to see her simple meals of mushrooms, fruits, and cheeses as “a banquet fit for kings—or for
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the poor things in every grade below them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial” (390). But the grounding of an American yacht on the Altrurian shore allows Eveleth to truly understand the barbarity of her former ways. Seeing how the castaways “provisioned themselves from the ship,” she notices how some “seemed to serve the others, but these appeared to be used with a very ungrateful indifference, as if they were of a different race” (408). The passengers turn out to be two families with whom Eveleth associated while in New York, the Thralls and the Moors, and she shamefully recognizes the absurdity with which they maintain class hierarchies and customs on Altruria. Mrs. Thrall, fearful of being left with what she calls “these natives” (borrowing from Mrs. Makely’s term for the New England farmers and implying a kind of savagery), refuses to adopt Altrurian customs in exchange for help. When Eveleth explains how everyone does light physical labor in exchange for food and hospitality, Mrs. Thrall defiantly claims, “We can pay our way here as we do elsewhere” (411). Aghast at being told her money and status are worthless, she jeers, “You want us to be Tolstoys.” Not denying the charge, Cyril answers, “Your labor here will be for your daily bread, and it will be real,” as opposed to the “very corrupting spectacle” of “living without work” and being “served by people whose hire you are not able to pay” (423). But what causes the most conflict between the Thralls and the Altrurians is their carnivorous diet. The boat’s crewmen raid the Altrurian villages for meat, but are captured (or “rescued,” from the Altrurian perspective) and immediately put to work after “the chickens they had killed in their midnight expedition were buried” (414). Gradually, they become accustomed to their new conditions, and are even allowed “to catch shell-fish and crabs” until their craving for meat diminishes, but only if they cook on the beach “during an offshore wind, so that the fumes of roasting should not offend the villagers” (415). The sickening smell that comes from the roasting meat is metonymous with what, for the Altrurians, is a savage politics of class division and cannibalistic survival off of the bodies of laborers. The Thralls’s power over their servants and others is at odds with the ethos of Altrurians, whose unwillingness to harm or consume any living creature reveals a spirit of communion lost on the meat-eating Americans. Gradually, though, the workers upon whose bodies the Thralls live, come to prefer this new life, especially the chef Anatole, who once belonged “to a party of which the political and social ideal was almost identical with that of the Altrurians” (428). He jumps at the opportunity to begin cooking with the herbs and vegetables, and actually
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expands the dietary options for the entire society, confessing that he “always had a secret loathing for the meats” he prepared for “the French and American bourgeoisie” (429). Even the Thralls and the Moors find their carnal appetites changed with their eventual acceptance of the socioeconomic tastes of Altruria. Though Mrs. Thrall is allowed to cook with “the canned meats brought ashore from the yacht,” the physical activity and fresh air take away “any taste for such dishes” (434). Everybody thrives in Altruria, developing characteristics kept hidden in the rigidly defined public roles they were forced to play in America and realizing that the system they were trained to despise is actually more palatable than the plutocratic conditions they have left. Literally and figuratively, Howells establishes the conflict between the carnivorous diets of Americans—grown, delivered, prepared, and served by servants and workers with whom the consumers would never think of sharing the table—and the vegetarian diets of Altrurians, for whom cooking and service does not place them on a lower social hierarchy. Food is the overarching metaphor for illustrating turn-of-the-century conflicts and attitudes between the socially empowered who practice a form of moral cannibalism—the consumers—against those required by economic necessity to surrender their bodily autonomy, the consumed. These relatively ignored late works of Howells’s long career are rich with textualities that deserve to be taken seriously one hundred years later, as the visiting Altrurian locates many of twenty-firstcentury America’s political tensions on plates and dinner tables, intimate spaces that are not free from public discourses and agendas. What is on American plates, how that food gets there, and how it is consumed, proves, for the Altrurian, a fascinating archive of cultural practices. Howells has followed us to our own contemporary hungers, informing Americans of how what seems temporary, unimportant, or transient—the dinner table or restaurant—may prove to be profound spaces from which to witness the complexity that surrounds satisfaction on an individual and societal level.
Notes Many thanks to Robert Davidson and the William Dean Howells Society for allowing me to present a shorter version of this essay at the American Literature Association in May 2008 and for publishing it in The Howellsian (Spring/Fall 2008). 1. Page references to all of the Altrurian texts come from the Kirk’s edition of The Altrurian Romances.
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Th e A lt ru r i a n Rom a nc e s of How e l l s
L a nce Rubin
2. Though Howells scholars note his increased attention to politics beginning in the 1880s, Clara Kirk’s W.D. Howells, Traveler From Altruria (1962) is still the most thorough study of the personal and social history behind Howells’s conception of the utopia. Also insightful in regards to Howells’s increasing radicalism is Robert L. Hough’s The Quiet Rebel (1959). 3. The idea that food’s function goes beyond sustenance is indebted to many works, including Margaret L. Arnott’s Gastronomy (1975) and Peter Farb and George Armelagos’s Consuming Passions (1980). Both are working from Roland Barthes’s observations that “food, aside from being a necessity, is also ‘a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviors’ ” (“Toward a Psychosociology” 21). 4. As Peter Eisinker notes, statistics measuring hunger in America were not attempted until the 1995 Current Population Survey (19). Though the USDA collected data on America’s food consumption habits beginning in the 1890s, hunger, malnutrition, deprivation, and distribution issues were not accounted for (27). It is worth noting that until the Great Depression of the 1930s, America’s biggest economic depression occurred in 1893. Fogel blames hunger and diet for the fact that life expectancy for Americans in 1900 was fortyeight, compared with seventy-six in 1990 (2). 5. Though too numerous to mention here, Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik’s collection Food and Culture: A Reader (1997) is an excellent resource for an overview of multidisciplinary food studies. 6. See chapter one of Walton for an overview of how the Other is marked by flesh-eating. 7. See Timothy Morton’s Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite (2004) for a discussion of these issues and more, particularly Morton’s introduction (1–17) and Kitson (77–96). 8. For the metaphorical uses of the cannibal, see also Kilgour and Guest. 9. With the exception of Twelvemough the rest of the men in the social circle are identified only by their professions. 10. On the origins of Thanksgiving, see Williams (Food in the United States 182–84) and Siskind.
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Willis, Nathaniel Parker. Out-doors at Idlewild; or, The Shaping of a Home on the Banks of the Hudson. New York: Scribner, 1855. Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. In a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There. 1859. Intro. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage, 1983. Wilson, Mary Tolford. “Amelia Simmons Fills a Need: American Cookery, 1796.” William and Mary Quarterly 14.1 (Jan. 1957): 16–30. Woloson, Wendy A. Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery, and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Woodward, George E., and F.W. Woodward’s Country Homes. 5th ed. New York: Woodward, 1866. “Worth of an Old Book.” Youth’s Companion 16.44 (9 March 1843): 176.
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Wor k s C i t e d
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Elizabeth Andrews teaches and researches at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her research interests lie in Gothic literature from the eighteenth century to the present day with specific focus on Gothic representations of food and the body. She has edited The New Monk (Valancourt Books, 2007), which had been out of print since it was first published in 1798. Kim Cohen is a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa and a prior graduate merit fellow. She specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. women’s literature and food studies. Her dissertation entitled “ ‘A Severe and Thankless Task’: Managing the Middle Classes in 19th Century US Domestic Fiction” examines household writers’ attempts to negotiate social change as well as class and ethnic tensions in domestic fiction, periodicals, and cookbooks through the use of food, mistress-servant relationships, and kitchen culture more broadly. She has published a nonfiction essay in the Massachusetts Review’s special food issue. Lorinda B. Cohoon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Memphis, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in children’s literature. Her book Serialized Citizenships was published by Scarecrow Press in 2006. In addition to her work on food in children’s periodicals, her current work focuses on representations of law in children’s periodicals and literature from the nineteenth century. Maura D’Amore is Assistant Professor of English at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont. She recently defended her dissertation project, “ ‘Country Life Within City Reach’: Masculine Domesticity in Suburban America, 1819–1871,” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Andrew Dix is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University. He is the author of Beginning Film Studies (Manchester University Press, 2008) and coeditor, with Jonathan Taylor, of Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology
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C on t r i bu t or s
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Contr ibutors
Marie Drews is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. Her investigations of kitchen practices in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, specifically as they intersect with cultural discussions about history, gender, and race, include contributions to the collection Edible Ideologies: Representing Food and Meaning (SUNY, 2008) and Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge (summer 2007). She is also, with Verena Theile, coeditor of Reclaiming Home, Remembering Motherhood, Rewriting History: African American and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Monika Elbert is Professor of English at Montclair State University and editor of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review. Her essay “Rewriting the Puritan Past: Food and Illicit Desires in Hawthorne’s Fiction” appeared recently in Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption, 1700–1900, eds. Tamara Wagner and Narin Hassan (Lexington, 2007). She has published extensively on nineteenth-century American literature, with, most recently, an edited collection, Enterprising Youth: Social Values and Acculturation in 19th-Century American Children’s Literature (Routledge, 2008). Hildegard Hoeller is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, with appointments in English and women’s studies at the Graduate Center. She is the author of Edith Wharton’s Dialogue with Realism and Sentimental Fiction (2000), coauthor with Rebecca Brittenham of Key Words for Academic Writers (2004), and the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick (2007). Cree LeFavour is an independent scholar and food writer working out of her home in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has a PhD in American Studies from New York University and a BA from Middlebury College. Her most recent book, The New Steak: Recipes for a Range of Cuts Plus Savory Sides (Ten Speed Press) came out in April 2008. Cree has also published her work in Book History and as a part of the Romantic Circles Praxis Series at www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/. Her blog, “On the Plate,” can be found at www.creelefavour.com. Mark McWilliams is Associate Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy. His work on food studies has appeared in 10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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in English and American Writing, 1800–2000 (Sussex Academic Press, 2006). His other published work includes articles on Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, contemporary Native American fiction, and the films of Michael Winterbottom.
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Yvonne Elizabeth Pelletier teaches in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee. She received her PhD from the University of Toronto and is in the process of completing her book Mapping and Masculinity in Nineteenth-Century British and American Narrative, which examines representations of space, identity, and empire in transatlantic literature. She has published on Melville and Thackeray, and her primary research interests include travel, cosmopolitanism, and consumerism in nineteenth-century fiction. Lorna Piatti is completing her PhD at Loughborough University. Her current research focuses on representations of food and eating in contemporary American literature and culture. She teaches on undergraduate modules at Loughborough and De Montfort Universities and is author of “The Hunger and the Horror: Food, Subjectivity and Corporeal Boundaries in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar” in Boundaries, eds. Jenni Ramone and Gemma Twitchen (Cambridge Scholar, 2007). Lance Rubin is Humanities Chair at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. He is the author of William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis (Cambria Press, 2008) and several articles on American literature. He is also the coeditor of Reading Chuck Palahniuk: American Monsters and Literary Mayhem (Routledge, 2009) and is currently coediting another collection entitled American Literature After the American Century. Robert T. Tally Jr. is Assistant Professor of English at Texas State University, where he teaches American literature, world literature, and critical theory. He is the author of Melville, Mapping and Globalization: Literary Cartography in the American Baroque Writer (Continuum Books, 2009). Tally holds degrees in law and in literature from Duke University and the University of Pittsburgh.
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venues including Food, Culture, & Society, Early American Literature, and the proceedings of the Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery.
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African Americans 4–5, 59–63, 83, 89–105, 133, 178–79 Alcohol 148–49, 151–52, 159–60; wine 164, 196, 231; temperance 196, 203n. 9 Alcott, Abba 190, 191, 194, 196, 198, 203n. 8, 203n. 11, 203n. 13 Alcott, Bronson 15, 189–204 Alcott, Louisa May 15, 189–204 Anorexia 173–74, 177, 180, 185, 186n. 1, 202, 216, 219n. 8 Appetite 3–8, 15, 25, 28, 44, 66, 78, 82, 104n. 8, 118, 126, 139–46, 154–65, 167n. 3, 177–79, 183, 193, 202–3n. 6, 206–12, 225, 230, 235; animal nature 154, 156, 158, 163, 167n. 2, 232–33 Apples 2, 5, 7, 9, 27, 127, 129–31, 135–36, 138n. 11, 139, 166n. 1, 182, 183, 191, 192, 201, 202, 202n. 4–5, 211, 229 Asceticism 5, 7, 194 Banquet 21, 156–68, 233 Barthes, Roland 16, 18n. 7, 59, 236n. 3 Beecher, Catharine 3, 5, 14, 37, 89–105, 115 143–44, 146–47, 207 Beef 2, 7–9, 17n. 5, 18n. 10, 21, 30, 36, 46, 51, 157–67, 168n. 6, 197, 203, 229, 231; steaks, beefsteaks 7, 74–82, 150, 164, 167n. 3
Benevolence 94–95, 97, 127, 133, 161 Benson, Carl 6, 87, 94, 100, 156, 161, 168n. 9 Books edible book 139–52; country books 22–23; paperhousekeeping 110–11; see also cookbooks Bourdieu, Pierre 17n. 1, 18n, 7, 37, 48, 51, 52n. 6, 155 Bourne, George 89–92, 101–5 Boys and food 32, 45, 125–38, 211–12 Bread 7, 10, 54, 56, 67, 79, 93, 98, 107, 116, 117, 190, 193–94, 206, 212, 229, 231, 234; bread and butter 46, 146, 183, 225; corn bread 9, 63; sweetbread 231; toast 7, 175–77 Breakfast 9, 29–31, 50, 77–78, 98, 145, 161, 191, 193–94, 197, 226–27 Bremer, Fredrika 10 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anthelme 6, 11, 35, 168n. 7 Britain/British 3, 9–10, 13, 15, 17n. 1, 84, 139–52, 153–69, 176–77; England/English 1, 3, 9–10, 41, 50, 86n. 6, 111, 114–15, 139–52, 153–69, 190, 202n. 3, 210–11, 224; Scotland/Scottish 86n. 6, 165, 185; Wales 38–39 Bull, John 18n. 10, 159–61, 165 Bulwer, Edward Lytton 146–47
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I n de x
Index
Butter 8, 17n. 6, 27, 46, 54, 75, 78, 80, 81, 93, 116, 133, 146, 167, 183, 187n. 11, 225 Cable, George Washington 55, 62 Café Anglais 50 Cajun 53, 59, 62–63 Cake 9, 22, 27, 31–32, 54, 56, 62, 114, 117, 127–28, 158–59, 183, 187n. 14, 204n. 18; buckwheat cakes 7, 30, 193 Candy 54–55, 57–58, 63–66, 68, 127, 137n. 4, 138n. 10, 146–47, 173, 180; bonbons 54–56, 58, 61, 63–68, 152, 219n. 3; caramels 57–58, 64–65; chewing gum 57–58, 64; children 64–66, 145–46; chocolate 57, 65, 69n. 4 Cannibalism 76–77, 85n. 2, 154, 167n. 3, 206, 215, 217, 222–36 Capitalism 7, 13, 15, 56–57, 173–87, 221–36 Carlyle, Thomas 202n. 3 Charity 108, 114, 128, 177–87, 195–96, 203n. 12–14, 204n. 19; charity events 168n. 9 Child, Lydia Maria 2, 166n. 2, 187n, 12 Children 3, 29, 31–32, 64–66, 90, 98–101,125–38, 146, 149, 189–204, 212; see also Boys, Girls Chopin, Kate 13–14, 53–69 Chowder 74, 78–79, 86n. 6 Citizenship 125–38 Civil War 26, 36, 38–39, 48, 51, 116, Civilization 4, 7, 16, 39–40, 155–56, 161–62, 167n. 3, 206, 222–28, 104n. 6; civil and savage 59, 74–78, 82, 86n. 4, 94 Class impoverished class 63, 119, 128, 133–35, 151, 169n. 10, 176–77, 179, 191–92;
impoverished servant class 96; middle class 35–39, 51, 176–77, 184–87, 203n. 12, 203n. 14; middle class and suburban living 23–25; middle class and domestic management 107–22; middle class readers and reading 141–43, 189, 192; upper class 39–40; nouveau riche 40, 42; emulation of upper class 43–44; rich versus poor 10, 65, 162–63, 226–27, 229–31 Coffee 6, 7, 9, 30, 46, 54, 77, 107, 173, 180–81, 187n. 10, 197, 231; coffee houses 43 Coffin, Robert Barry (Barry Gray) 21–33 Confections 53–69, 126–27, 137n. 4, 138n. 13; see also Candy Conspicuous consumption 35–52, 58, 222, Cookbooks 2–5, 50–51, 126, 166–67, 176, 209–10; cookbook novels 14, 107–22 Cooks/chefs 11, 17n. 4, 22, 30–31, 40, 46, 51, 57, 73–85, 86n. 6, 87n. 9, 111–21, 153–54, 157, 166n. 1, n.2, 166n. 3, 180, 192, 197, 225–26, 232–35 Cozzens, Frederic S. 24, 25 Crafts, Hannah 93, 103 Cream 7, 181, 193; strawberries and cream 28, 198 Creole 14, 53–63 Cult of domesticity 36–37, 189 Curtis, George William 25 Debord, Guy 229–30 Delmonico’s 35–52; Lorenzo Delmonico 40, 42; famous guests 36 Deprivation 190–95; 203n. 11, 229–30, 236n. 4; see also Hunger
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Dickens, Charles 9–10, 36, 144, 147, 169n. 11 Dickinson, Emily 12, 15, 205–19 Diet European versus American, 18n. 10, 158–60, 168n. 6; dietary restriction 190; dietary morality 193–94; dietary reform 202n. 2, 233; American diet 3, 17n, 3, 116; healthy diet 5, 9–10, 16, 218; politicization 85n. 1, 222, 232–33; specialized or nontraditional diets 17n. 5, 119; see also Vegetarian, Meat Consumption Digestion 9, 118, 139; indigestion 9, 127, 162 Dinner 9, 13, 14, 21, 24, 28–29, 31–52, 63, 74–82, 89–104, 109, 118, 153–66, 168n. 9, 191–92, 202n. 3, 203n. 9, 227, 230–31; dinner table 14, 89–104, 235; dinner party 28, 35- 38, 52n. 1, 161, 166n. 1 Dogs 99–100, 104n. 8, 132–33 Domestic management 89–105, 107–22 Domestic Manuals 1, 3, 14, 45, 89–105, 110, 120, 141; see also Catharine Beecher Domestic Science 4, 86, 108–11 Doughnuts 56, 137n. 1, 137n. 5; beignets 56 Dumplings 74–78, 127, Economics economic panic and depression, 23, 137n. 9, 174–75, 236n. 4; food as economic exchange 126–28, 136–37, 174, 198–99; sugar industry 57–58; women and economics 108–9, 119, 182–85; consumerism and consumption 37, 221–36; see also Class Eddy, Daniel 143, 147, 149–50,
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Eden 154, 190, 192, 202n. 4, Edgeworth, Maria 144, 148 Education 14–15, 45, 64, 107–22, 126–27, 138, 140–46, 189–204, Emerson, Ralph Waldo 1, 6, 16, 203n. 13 England see Britain Europe 137n. 6, 58, 61, 126, 151, 211, 213, 216; Americans in Europe 7–8, 41, 153–69; Europeans the U.S. 9–10, 38, 43, 114; European sophistication and civilization 16, 36, 177, 181, 223 Exotic foods, 31, 54–55, 58, 200–1; eating experiences 75–78, 86n. 5 Femininity 137n. 4, 139–52; saccharine femininity 64, 67–68; feminine appetite 142; white femininity and reading 139–52; feminine pleasure 64, 139–52; female body 139–52, 159–60; women’s work 107–22 Fiction 107–10, 127, 132, 141–52, 153, 159–60; realistic influences on fiction 189–204; see also Panic fiction Fillippini, Alessandro 50–51 Fisher, Abby 4–5, 17n. 4 Flesh body, 159–60, 163–64, 167n. 3; pleasure of the flesh 142, 151–52, 209; see also Cannibalism, Meat Consumption France/French 1, 5, 16, 18n. 10, 43, 120, 140, 158, 167n. 4, 235; versus American consumption 16; French cuisine 6, 11, 15–16, 18n. 10, 30, 35–49, 54–61, 86n. 6, 109, 145–46, 158, 231; French restaurant 49; French novel 146, 151–52
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Index
Index
Franklin, Benjamin 5–7 Frugality 2–3, 5, 93, 181–82; frugality and vegetarianism, 5–6, 118–19; The American Frugal Housewife (Lydia Maria Child) 2–3, 187n. 12; Fruit 54, 127, 133–34, 136, 206, 212; berries 134, 214–15, 218; figs 54, 178; grapes, 178–79, 187n. 7; limes 138n. 13, 198–99, 203n. 17; peaches 131–32, 219n. 4; pears 219n. 3, 136, 158, 159; strawberries 128, 197–98, 202n. 3 210–13, 219n. 4; see also Apples Gender see Femininity, Masculinity Gentility 77, 125–26, 167, Germany foods, 58, 113; cookery 111; German domestics 113, 115; 201 Gift food as gift, 67, 68, 128–29, 173–87; hunger as gift 193–96, 203n. 10 Gigante, Denise 11, 17n. 1, 32–33, 137n. 4, Gilded Age 35–52, 110, 222–31, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 3–4, 9 Gingerbread 125–26, 128, 136–37 Girls 138n. 13, 138n. 17, 189–204, 211; hired girls 96, 101–2, 114–15 Gluttony 6, 136, 140, 207, 222, 229, 231 Godey’s Lady’s Book 3, 16, 144–45, 148, 151 Good Housekeeping 107–8, 110–12, 118–21 Goodrich, Samuel 132 Gothic 205–19 Graham, Sylvester 6, 190 Grimké Weld, Angelina 92–93
Grotesque 146, 159, 206 Hale, Sarah Josepha 3, 17n. 3, 94, 166n. 1–2 Hardy, Thomas 65, 69n. 42 Harrison, William Henry 36 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 12, 15, 73, 86, 125, 137, 153–69, 207, 219 Health 3–5, 16–18, 22–27, 116, 139–51, 181, 190, 207–12, 218, 227; disease 9, 16, 61, 68, 140, 148, 153, 160, 213, 219, 223 Hedonism, gluttony 5–7, 15, 136, 140, 207, 222, 229–31 Howard, Caroline 134 Howells, William Dean 12, 13, 15, 35–51, 221–36. Hunger 5, 8, 15, 21, 80, 125–35, 141–42, 153, 167, 177–86, 189–203, 205–18, 225, 228–35, 236n. 4 Ice cream 10, 22–23, 62, 183, 204n. 18, 231 Idleness 110, 133–34, 205, 226–27, 223 Immigrant, immigration 8, 40, 55, 62, 86n. 6, 102, 108–20, 228–31 Irish 26, 86, 102, 119, 199 Italian cuisine 31, 118, 157–58 James, Henry 12, 13, 35–51 Journal 12, 18, 108–19, 153–67, 191, 202 Journalism 21, 36, 47, 55, 107, 115, 121 Kellogg, John Harvey 6 Kitchen 3–4, 12–14, 22, 27, 78, 95, 98, 108–20, 173, 180–84, 197 Korsmeyer, Carolyn 17, 18, 22,
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Labor (domestic) 27–31, 44, 110–21, 149, 181–83; working class 14, 17n. 3, 59–62, 98, 121n. 4, 191, 200, 221–34 Lane, Charles 190–91, 199 Leslie, Eliza 45, 210, 213 Levenstein, Harvey 12, 17, 39, 41, 52n, 10, 112, 122 Levi-Strauss, Claude 17, 86, 167, 222. Lobsters 48, 197, 200–1 Lunch, luncheon 10, 35, 39, 49–50, 168n. 9 Manners, table manners 9, 38, 44–45, 77–82, 87n. 8, 90–104, 132, 138n. 15, 144, 155–65, 167n. 3 Martineau, Harriet 10, 141 Marx, Karl 224 Masculinity, manhood 64, 73–87, 109, 135–36, 137n. 4; bachelors 26; boyhood 32, 125–37, 138n. 17; fathers 15, 89, 130–32, 174–75, 180, 191–202, 203n. 8; husbands 4, 28–29, 108–10, 159–60, 203, 227, 231; masculine domesticity 13, 22–33, Meat Consumption (animal food, animal diet, carnivore) 3–6, 9, 16, 23, 27, 39, 45, 59, 76, 80–83, 86n. 4, 117–19, 132–34, 154, 158, 190–92, 202n. 3, 232–35; McDonald’s 15, 164; see also Beef, steak, beefsteak Melville, Herman 14, 73–87, 167, 217, 219n. 10 Merry’s Museum 127–35 Metaphors (food metaphors) 11, 15, 16, 73–74, 83, 86n. 3, 118, 154, 179, 206–7, 212–17, 219n. 8, 222–24, 232–35, 236n. 8; edible book 140–52;
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cannibalism 76, 77, 85–86, 154, 167, 206, 215, 217, 222–36 Middle class 14, 23–25, 35, 51, 108–22, 141–43, 155, 176, 184–87, 189–203 Milk 7, 22, 27–28, 47, 93, 98, 159, 167, 175, 194, 201 Mintz, Sidney 8, 17, 53–54, 66, 69n. 3, 85, 137 Mitchell, Donald Grant 24 Moderation 5–7, 18, 127, 132, 140–47, 149. Molasses 62–63, 137n. 7 Montanari, Massimo 7, 18, 92 Morals/morality 14–16, 64, 74, 84–85, 96, 126–35, 140–50, 156, 174, 179–80, 189–203, 235. Mothers/mothering/True Womanhood 29, 47, 56, 65, 67, 89–98, 100, 128–38, 149, 168n. 6, 175–86, 189, 192–200 National identity 2, 12, 16, 126, 140–49, 153–67, 205–19, 221–36 Nationalism 8, 151, 226 New England 12, 44, 86n. 6, 125, 127, 153, 157, 206, 219, 223, 226, 234. Nutrition 3–10, 17n. 5, 28, 56, 146, 190, 236n. 4 Obesity see Weight Owen, Catherine 12, 14, 107–21 Paintings, pictures 59, 75,156, 160, 167n. 3, n. 4, 185; photography 59 Panic fiction 174–86 Periodicals 14, 25–26, 108–15, 126–38, 138n. 17, 141–48
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Index
Index
Pie 7, 8–9, 30, 32, 47, 128, 139, 145, 183, 201–2; meat pie 21, 29, 45, 102, 158, 159 Pilgrim’s Progress 143, 193 Plenty 3–7, 15, 128, 192, 197, 202–18, 231. Poe, Edgar Allan 26, 219n. 10 Poison 75, 142–51, 210 Poverty, poor 37, 44, 63, 96, 119, 128–37, 169n. 10, 179–85, 190–202, 203n. 14, 221–34 Power 4–5, 14, 37, 39, 55–68, 73–85, 85n. 1, n. 2, 95–104, 104n. 3, 110–17, 134–36, 140–47, 152, 174–75, 182–84, 195–99, 203n. 12, 205, 212, 216, 230–35 Race 14, 89–105, 133–34, 149, 167n. 4, 178–79, 186n. 6, 190–91, 233–34, 178–179; see also African American, Whiteness Ranhofer, Charles 40, 51 Reading 14–15, 21–31, 35–36, 44–45, 49–52, 69n. 4, 73–75, 77–78, 82, 86n. 5, 89, 95, 97, 99–100, 104n. 2, 107–21, 160, 176, 186n. 4, 200, 212, 228; child readers 126–37, 138n. 17, 189–94; dangers (and pleasures) of women’s reading 140–50; Hawthorne’s ideal readers 154–55 Restaurant 13, 25, 31, 35–52, 68, 83, 100, 111. 228, 235, Riis, Jacob 10 Romance/Novel 86n. 6, 154 Root, Waverly and Richard de Rochemont 12, 36–40, 116 Salt 8, 10, 21, 28, 36, 47, 63, 75, 78, 145, 165, 198, 219n. 4 Sanderson, John 16, 156 Savage, John 26–28 Sculpture 154, 157, 159
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria 128, 138n. 14 Self-denial 127, 191, 202–3, 209 Selfishness 110, 129, 135–36, 141, 196, 211, 233 Servant/s 94–103, 112–19, 122n. 5, 186, 225, 231–35 Sexuality 53–66, 101, 141–51, 202 n. 1 Sherwood, Mary 35–38, 51, 52n. 1 Slavery 17, 60, 89–103, 137n. 7, 191, 200, 223, 226 Socialism (socialist utopia— Altruria) 155, 221–25, 232 Spirituality 83–84, 179, 187n. 15, 221, 232 Starvation/starving 7, 17, 125, 134, 163, 186, 190–91, 193, 213–18, 225, 229, 231; anorexia 15, 18, 219n. 8; see also Hunger. Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1–3, 6, 16–17, 18n. 10, 37, 51, 93, 104n. 5, 115, 155, 161, 167n. 4, 168n. 7, n. 9, 219 Sublime 1, 74, 154–55, 166 Suburb 13, 21–33, 111 Sue, Eugene 147, 150–51 Sugar 2, 10, 16, 28, 29, 137n. 7, 146, 174–75, 180, 187n. 13, 198, 219; trade, market, economics 14, 16, 53–69, 223; sugar/sweetmeats 146, 219n. 5; chocolate 65–66, 69n. 4; cookies 127–29, 136, 202 Sweets See Candy, Cakes, Confections, Gingerbread Symbolism 7, 14, 55, 59, 62–64, 74, 77–80, 90–92, 109, 118, 140, 211–17, 222 Table talk 28–31, 50, 87n. 9, 153–63; table d’hote 8, 42–43; see also Manners.
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
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Tea 6, 9, 29, 54, 89, 101, 119, 167, 173, 175–77, 182–84, 201–3 Technology 109, 121n. 5 Thanksgiving 7, 29, 230, 236n. 10 Thoreau, Henry David 5–7 Todd, John 139–40, 148 Tolstoy, Leo 233–34 Transcendentalism 5–6, 167, 190–91; Fruitlands 190–202; “Transcendental Wild Oats” (Alcott) 191 Travel and food 2–9, 15, 18n. 10, 31, 41, 50, 78, 86, 93, 134, 153–69 Trollope, Fanny 9, 253 Twain, Mark 7–9, 36, 51 Utopia, utopian 13,154, 167n. 3, 190–202, 221–236; see also Eden, Socialism, Transcendentalism, Van Buren, Martin 36, 219n. 4 Veblen, Thorstein 37, 58, 225 Vegetarian, vegetable diet 5–6, 118–19, 199–200, 232–35; see also Transcendentalism Vegetables cabbage 117–118, 120–121, 166n. 1, 229; mushrooms 165, 206–7, 209–10, 232–33; peas 128, 212–13, 231; potatoes 7, 21, 28, 46, 54, 76, 86n. 6, 107, 118, 119, 139, 181, 197,
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202n. 3, 209; squash 7, 9, 27, 47, 166n. 1, 229; vegetable garden 27, 128, 154–55, 160, 166n. 1; vegetable market 229 Virtue 2, 36, 102, 139–51, 189–92; see also Morals/Morality Ward, Samuel 39–40, 52n. 9 Warner, Susan 9, 12, 15, 173–86, 186n. 18 Wealth 10, 37–48, 60–62, 89, 92, 109–14, 128, 134–35, 151, 16–63, 174, 183–85,195, 200, 202, 221–31 Weight 168n. 98; anorexia 15, 186n. 1, 219; obesity, fat 6, 9, 16, 158–68; thinness 160, 168n. 6, n. 7, 216 Wharton, Edith 36 Whitcher, Miriam Berry 102 Whiteness 62, 96, 97–104, 118, 121, 133–34, 139–52 Whitman, Walt 2, 7, 10 Wilde, Oscar 36 Williams, Susan 12, 17n. 2, 23, 87n. 8, 137n. 6, 138n. 15, 167n. 3, 176, 187n. 11, 207, 209, 215, 230, 236n. 10, Willis, Nathaniel Parker 24–25, 127 Wilson, Harriet E. 12, 14, 89–105 Youth’s Companion 127–33, 138 n. 17
10.1057/9780230103146 - Culinary Aesthetics and Practices in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Edited by Marie Drews and Monika Elbert
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14
Index
