You are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate

You Are What You Eat

You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate

Edited by

Annette M. Magid

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate, Edited by Annette M. Magid This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Annette M. Magid and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-492-8, ISBN (13): 9781847184924

For Hillel, Suzie, Elie, Jonathan, Tamar, Yaakov, Shira, Devora, Dov, Sammy and Ella, my family who knows the significance of reading and food

For Hillel, Suzie, Elie, Jonathan, Tamar, Yaakov, Shira, Devora, Dov, Sammy and Ella, my family who knows the significance of reading and food

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Table of Contents

D. ‘You Gotta Eat Somethin’: Food, Violence, and Perversity in Scorsese’s Urban Films ....................................................................... 137 MARLISA SANTOS CHAPTER THREE: MULTICULTURAL TASTES A. Knowledge is as Food: Food, Digestion and Illness in Milton’s Paradise Lost........................................................................................... 154 DARLENE FARABEE B. French Food Images and National Identity: Consommé, Cheese Soufflé, Francité? .................................................................................... 168 MARYANN TEBBEN C. “Architectural” Hors D’oeuvres.......................................................... 190 ANNETTE CONDELLO D. Some Like It Hot: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of Mulligatawny Soup ............................................................................. 206 MODHUMITA ROY E. Food, Hunger, and Identity in Jewish Woman Immigrants’ Autobiography......................................................................................... 238 DEBORAH ISRAEL CHAPTER FOUR: CHILDHOOD EATABLES A. Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts: Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels........................................................ 260 JACQUELINE CORINTH B. At the Core of The Giving Tree’s Signifying Apples ......................... 284 LISA ROWE FRAUSTINO C. Perceptive Appetites: Food Issues in Mother Goose and Nursery Literature ................................................................................................. 307 ANNETTE M. MAGID

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Preface ........................................................................................................ xi Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiv CHAPTER ONE: DOMESTICATING WOMEN A. Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon’s Fiction ................... 2 MARA REISMAN B. Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table .................... 27 RITA COLANZI C. Emily Dickinson’s Breadcrumbs of Grace ........................................... 44 ANNE RAMIREZ D. Dining Well: Food, Identity and Women’s Travel Narratives.............. 56 JANE WOOD E. “A Man Makin’ Pies Out of Sorrel!!” Exploring Issues of Gender and Family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke................................... 66 KRISTIN SANNER CHAPTER TWO: CONSUMING FILMS A. Top of the Food Chain: Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Green Butchers .. 84 MARYANNE FELTER B. Listening to Silence: Forbidden Fruits in Clarice Lispector’s “The Body”................................................................................................ 98 RICK J. SANTOS C. ‘We Don’t Make Meatballs Here Anymore’: Reel Italian American Foodways in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush................................................. 115 PAUL GALANTE

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Cover Art: Frieda Rae Magid (1904-1990) Untitled. Gift to editor and her family Section through interior hors d’œuvre with “flying table” at the Small Hermitage, Russia. Source: Peter Hayden, Russian Parks and Gardens. London: Frances Lincoln, 2005............................................................... 193 Cuccagna’s land of plenty by Remondini (1747). Source: Author’s postcard ................................................................................................... 195 Elevation of Monsieur Monville’s Broken Column House as an exterior hors d’œuvre. Source: Diana, Ketcham. Lé Desert de Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century French Folly Garden, The Artful Landscape of Monsieur de Monville. London, MA: The MIT Press, 1997................... 196 Antonin Careme’s drawing of the Athenian ruinņa fusion of an interior/exterior hors d’œuvre. Source: Careme, Antonin. Le patissier pittoresque, including essays by Allen Weiss. Paris: Mercure de France, 2003 ......................................................................................................... 198 Horseback dinner at Louis Sherry’s restaurant as an interior/exterior architectural hors d’œuvre. Source: Fletcher, Nichola. Charlemagne’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004......................................................................................... 200

PREFACE

The majority of the papers included in You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate were presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2006, 2007 and 2008 Conventions at the “Food for Thought” sessions I chaired. Because of the wide diversity of texts related to food, a monograph of critical analysis is essential for the student to more completely understand the textual material. You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, women, children, film, queer theory, politics, and poetry. In the chapter “Domesticating Women,” Mara Reisman discusses Fay Weldon’s fiction which identifies cooking as an integral part of defining cultural ideals and personal and political relationships; for Weldon, food constitutes a practical and symbolic discourse through which gender and class are revealed and negotiated. Rita Colanzi focuses on politics in the kitchen through her discussion of where and with whom people dine or come in contact with food and the revelation of social barriers and divisions based, for example, on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Anne Ramirez’s poetic analysis of the frequent mentioning of breadcrumbs reveals Emily Dickinson’s sense of deprivation juxtaposed with a symbolic study of spiritual nourishment. Jane Wood’s focus on women’s travel narratives illustrate methods women use to map new concepts of identity that shape a more confident self “at home” and in the world. The last entry in this chapter features Kristin Sanner’s exploration of issues of gender and family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke. In the chapter “Consuming Films,” Maryanne Felter explores Thomas Jensen’s The Green Butchers” opposing issues: vegetarianism as civilized, enlightened liberalism vs. cannibalism as a rhetorical trope of colonization in which she also analyzes the film’s questions of: human vs. planetary survival, past vs. present, insanity vs. sanity, power vs. subjection. Paul Galante explores a post-immigrant paradigm for current meanings of American Italian cultural adaptation, particularly as it relates to one of the most persistent features of ethnic identity—traditional foodways as seen in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush.” Marlisa Santos examines Scorsese’s urban films to assess the violence and perversity in his use of food as a metaphor of the anti-consumption that occurs in the urban environment—where the

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Preface

use of food devours the eater, instead of the other way around. Rick Santos suggests an alternative, queer, reading for the acclaimed Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s 1974 short story, “O Corpo” [“The Body”] as a way to understand the construction/portrayal of a veiled field of significance for transgressive female desire which he compares to the movie version by José Antônio Garcia. The chapter “Multicultural Tastes” presents Darlene Farabee’s paper discusses food, digestion and illness in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” This chapter also features essayist, Maryann Tebben who points out that French national identity is bound up in its culinary world-wide identification and proceeds to examine the representation of French cooking in works of French literature and film as a cipher of French identity inside and outside its borders. Modhumita Roy examines recipes and references to mulligatawny soup in cookery books, memoirs, and novels from the nineteenth century to construct a cultural history of the British in India. Annette Condello’s study views Hors d’oeuvres as visible constructions of food and originally as architectural objects that garnished a constructed landscape. The “Childhood Eatables” chapter contains Jacqueline Corinth’s paper which analyzes the pleasures of domestic food imagery in Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the sensual enjoyment of candy as food in Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the symbolic references of food deprivation and reverence through food in Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Lisa Rowe Fraustino’s essay closely examines how Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree feeds children a “metaphoric matrix” of patriarchal gender ideology, beginning with the signifying apple on the cover and examines how food is used, both literally and metaphorically, in the reproduction of mothering ideology as defined by feminist theorists. Annette M. Magid studies the oral tradition of Mother Goose and nursery rhyme literature as a vehicle to enable adults to cope with expanding families while preparing their children for the behavior modification and tasks of the day. In the “Contemporary Cuisine” chapter, Richard G. Androne, whose college town of Reading is the birthplace of John Updike and is the model of the fictional Brewer of The Rabbit Saga, serves as tempting fare for his study of John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Saga in which he discusses food as a central symbol of alienation, poverty, low horizons, limited education, spiritual deprivation, and the restrictions imposed by class upon Updike’s protagonist. Ya-hui Irenna Chang analyzes food choice and food consumption in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, revealing that food is not only closely related to

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an individual’s physical need, but a mental state and perception of self. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten studies Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes (2003) and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2005) where the romance meets chick lit meets foodie memoir in a new hybrid genre Van Slooten calls “foodie romance” which chronicle the pleasures and complications of relationships and consumption. William Dalessio examines instances of food preparation and food consumption in Fran Ross and Gish Hen which explore the ways in which one’s racial and/or ethnic identity affects the expansion, limitation, or subversion of one’s cultural identity in society. The entire collection of You Are What You Eat includes a diversity of approaches and foci from multicultural national and international scholars and has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, women, children, film, queer theory, politics, and poetry. The chapters “Domesticating Women,” “Consuming Films,” “Multicultural Tastes,” “Childhood Eatables,” and “Contemporary Cuisine” present insightful approaches to the study of food. The topic addresses a range of interests among beginning college students as well as advanced program students. Because of the universal appeal of the topic, You Are What You Eat could be utilized in a topic-specific Intro to Lit class as well as a text for higher level literature classes.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the late Dr. Leslie Fiedler who inspired me to write about topics of interest and to Professor Irving Feldman for his encouragement. Thanks also to David Schoonover who graciously consented to my using one of his MMLA panel topics, Food and Literature, as a springboard to the food panels I chaired over the last several years at the Northeast Modern Language Association [NeMLA] Conventions. Much appreciation is also extended to the wonderful library staff at Erie Community College/ South Campus. Thanks to all those who contributed to this monograph and to all those who attended the captivating “Food for Thought” sessions at NeMLA. I am especially grateful for all the encouragement and support my husband Hillel gave to me, not only by teaching me the delights of good food and cooking, but also with his computer and researching expertise. Thanks also to the late Mrs. David Magid [Frieda Rae Magid], extraordinary artist and motherin-law whose painting graces the cover of this book. Special thanks to Amanda Millar and the editorial staff at Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing who selected my panel as a monograph candidate.

CHAPTER ONE: DOMESTICATING WOMEN

FOOD FIGHT: WAR AND DOMESTICITY IN FAY WELDON’S FICTION MARA REISMAN

Alan still held the frying pan in his hand. The whites of his eyes glinted in the light from the oil lamp. It seemed for a moment that he was going to throw the omelette full in his wife’s face. . . .1 —Fay Weldon

British author Fay Weldon began her writing career in advertising, and one of her best-known campaigns was “Go to Work on an Egg.” In her fiction, this slogan can be rewritten “Go to War on an Egg” as eggs signify aggression in The Fat Woman’s Joke and become a potentially lethal weapon in “Pumpkin Pie.” More broadly, Weldon juxtaposes military motifs with domestic space in order to highlight the fierce battles that take place in the domestic sphere. As one of her characters in “The End of the Line” observes, “Compared to home, International Relations is a piece of cake.”2 In the epigram, a passage from The Fat Woman’s Joke,3 an argument about omelette preparation results in an expression of intense rage that nearly leads to physical violence. Later in the novel, an argument about food does lead to a physical confrontation. Alan is “overwhelmed” by anger when he finds “Esther crouched in a corner [. . .] eating a biscuit,”4 and when she refuses to stop eating, he tries to strangle her. In both scenes, food is the catalyst for violence but not the cause. The cause is domestic discontent. Weldon made a name for herself in the 1960s and 1970s writing about this discontent. Weldon’s feminist consciousness and the women’s movement developed contemporaneously, and her early works reflect the emerging feminism of the time. Weldon’s women-centered novels address

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the particular problems women face as well as critique the culture that perpetuates inequalities between men and women. Her close attention to history and sexual politics make her novels important social documents, and in this essay I use this cultural context to explore the gender and class implications of food and food preparation. Weldon’s fiction exemplifies the ways in which cooking is an integral part of defining cultural ideals and personal and political relationships, and in her work, food constitutes a practical and symbolic discourse through which gender and class are revealed and negotiated. Through her attention to the multiple uses and meanings of food, Weldon makes explicit Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik’s contention that food “is a central pawn in political strategies of states and households.”5 In the first part of this essay, I examine the ways in which Weldon portrays an ideal of domesticity represented by the suburbs and the rigid gender roles this environment encourages. Because of its compelling depiction of 1960s suburban life, I use Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and sociological and historical texts to create a framework in which to discuss food, domesticity, and gender. I then explore the ways in which domestic ideals are challenged and subverted both in this novel and in The Fat Woman’s Joke. In these novels, the kitchen becomes a battleground for the war between the sexes and a site of rebellion against socially prescribed gender roles. Part two addresses the relationship between food, class, and war. In The Shrapnel Academy, class and military warfare are played out through food as the suburban battlefield of the kitchen is moved to the dining room and the servants’ kitchen. I conclude with a discussion of Weldon’s short story “Polaris” in which the threat of international warfare is juxtaposed with fine dining. In all of her work, cooking is about power: who has it, who wants it, and how one can get it. As such, food becomes an important symbol of gender and class tensions and an indicator of civility and survival.

Rebellion in the Kitchen In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and The Fat Woman’s Joke, Weldon focuses on the “hotting up of the male-female war” taking place on the domestic front in the late 1960s.6 Suburbia, which represented dedication to family life, community interaction, and stability became a battlefield.7 Because they represented traditional values and a nostalgia for an era in which men and women had distinctive, but complementary roles, roles where according to historian David Farber “the rules were clear,” the suburbs created a “stabilizing, comforting, and edifying”

PREFACE

The majority of the papers included in You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate were presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association’s 2006, 2007 and 2008 Conventions at the “Food for Thought” sessions I chaired. Because of the wide diversity of texts related to food, a monograph of critical analysis is essential for the student to more completely understand the textual material. You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, women, children, film, queer theory, politics, and poetry. In the chapter “Domesticating Women,” Mara Reisman discusses Fay Weldon’s fiction which identifies cooking as an integral part of defining cultural ideals and personal and political relationships; for Weldon, food constitutes a practical and symbolic discourse through which gender and class are revealed and negotiated. Rita Colanzi focuses on politics in the kitchen through her discussion of where and with whom people dine or come in contact with food and the revelation of social barriers and divisions based, for example, on issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Anne Ramirez’s poetic analysis of the frequent mentioning of breadcrumbs reveals Emily Dickinson’s sense of deprivation juxtaposed with a symbolic study of spiritual nourishment. Jane Wood’s focus on women’s travel narratives illustrate methods women use to map new concepts of identity that shape a more confident self “at home” and in the world. The last entry in this chapter features Kristin Sanner’s exploration of issues of gender and family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke. In the chapter “Consuming Films,” Maryanne Felter explores Thomas Jensen’s The Green Butchers” opposing issues: vegetarianism as civilized, enlightened liberalism vs. cannibalism as a rhetorical trope of colonization in which she also analyzes the film’s questions of: human vs. planetary survival, past vs. present, insanity vs. sanity, power vs. subjection. Paul Galante explores a post-immigrant paradigm for current meanings of American Italian cultural adaptation, particularly as it relates to one of the most persistent features of ethnic identity—traditional foodways as seen in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush.” Marlisa Santos examines Scorsese’s urban films to assess the violence and perversity in his use of food as a metaphor of the anti-consumption that occurs in the urban environment—where the

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My children come in from the midsummer garden. A pigeon pair. [. . .] The dog and the cat follow after. The guinea pig rustles and snuffles in its corner. I have just turned out its cage. The chocolate for the mousse bubbles and melts in the pan. This is the happiness, the completeness of domestic, suburban life. It is what we should be happy with: our destiny. Out of the gutter of wild desire onto the smooth lawns of married love.14

But Ruth undercuts this happy picture of domestic life with her next words: “Sez you,”15 implying that this image does not describe her life. Ruth’s words emphasize that the reality of life in the suburbs does not match up with the idealization of it, and she challenges Bobbo’s authority to tell her “It is a good life.”16 For Ruth, Eden Grove is not perfection but purgatory. As the contrasting opinions of Bobbo and Ruth suggest, the disparity in fulfillment is gender-specific. For men, the suburbs represent idealized success. The eponymous Praxis notes, husbands “reckoned their achievement in life by the leisure and comfort they could offer their families: the picture windows, the carpets, the air, the light, the safety.”17 For these amenities, women were expected to feel grateful. In The Fat Woman’s Joke, Alan makes this expectation of gratitude explicit: “You’ve got a home, and a child, and security, and a husband who comes home every night. I support you. I’m polite to you. I don’t beat you. You’re luckier than most every other woman in the world.”18 A home, child, security, and freedom from violence are supposed to be enough for women. But they are not. Unlike her husband who goes to work, Ruth has no relief from suburban life. She has no place to which to retreat, because, as Marjorie Ferguson notes in Forever Feminine, “a woman’s world was finite, bounded by the traditional task division which assigns child and homecare exclusively to her.”19 Life in the suburbs is, to invoke the title of Weldon’s second novel, life down among the women; it is an all female world. Men leave to go to work and women spend their time stuck at home or in their neighbors’ homes. For the most part, they do not go to work, because as Weldon explains, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “A working wife was synonymous up and down the street with male failure to provide,”20 and for men, providing a good life for their families epitomized the suburban ideal. Ruth understands the confinement of her situation, that while “[o]utside the world turns [. . .] I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular spot.”21 This sense of fixity is the reason that maps are so important to Ruth. She “spend[s] a lot of time with maps” in order to ascertain “the geographical detail of [her] misfortune.”22

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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction

However, what Ruth comes to realize is that misfortune has little to do with geographical location but instead with issues of power, gender, and class.23 In Weldon’s Down Among the Women, Jocelyn, the narrator, describes the behavior of a “good wife”: I went to a party the other night. At midnight, the host escorted a woman guest to her home. By five in the morning he had not returned. The hostess continued with her hostessly duties, smiling politely. What else could she do? She is fifty, intelligent, and nice, but she is fifty. She has been trained to behave well, and not to shout, scream or murder, and that is the only training she has had, besides cookery and housecraft at school.24

In She-Devil, this litany of a good wife is the paradigm that Ruth refuses to accept. The hostess is the woman Ruth is expected to be, but Ruth rebels. She is willing to “shout, scream or murder” in order to break free of this emotionally deadening behavior. The problem that Friedan defines as the “feminine mystique” and which Weldon depicts in her novels is the conflict between what women feel and what, according to advertisers, sociologists, family, and friends, women should feel. Friedan writes: “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform.”25 This discrepancy between image and reality was not new.26 What was new was the attention it was getting. The damaging physical and psychological effects for women were being noticed and written about in books such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Weldon’s The Fat Woman’s Joke. Although Esther in The Fat Woman’s Joke, redefines her breakdown as a “fit of sanity,”27 women still felt as if they were going crazy. While many women were incapacitated by depression, many others rebelled. It is in the domestic sphere that the women in Weldon’s novels fight back. They use the tools of this environment to subvert culturally defined gender roles. In She-Devil, Ruth wages war against the domestic ideal by ruining dinners and eventually burning down the house. When Ruth begins preparing dinner for her in-laws’ visit, she practices a bit of domestic voodoo. She describes the process of making dough dolls in detail: I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the brim of a wine-glass, making wafer rounds, I take the curved strips the cutter left behind and mold them into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp

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the figure in it until such a stench fills the kitchen that even the fan cannot remove it. Good.28

In the next sentence, Ruth imagines the real event: “I hope the tower burns and Mary Fisher with it, sending the smell of burning flesh out over the waves.”29 Although burning the puff pastry does not result in the destruction of Mary Fisher or her house, the use of the oven as a weapon shows how the chores of a “good wife” can become a means of expressing anger and discontent. The vol-au-vents do not fare much better than the charred dolls. Upset over Bobbo’s insinuation that she has gained weight, Ruth drops the dinner she has been carefully preparing for his parents: “He heard the click of the oven opening: he heard a little cry, a crash. She had burned her fingers. The vol-au-vents were on the floor—he knew it.”30 Bobbo’s expectation that the dinner has been ruined and his later comment to his parents that they should go out to dinner “since my wife has already thrown your main course on the floor”31 reflects his perception that Ruth has intentionally ruined the meal. While the dropping of the vol-au-vents may or may not have been an accident, when Ruth later drops the mushroom soup, it is a deliberate act of sabotage. After Bobbo praises Mary Fisher and degrades Ruth in front of his parents, Ruth takes her revenge: “Ruth looked from one parent-in-law to the other and then at her husband and dropped the tureen of mushroom soup, which flowed over the metal rim where the tiles stopped and the carpet began.”32 This incident ruins the dinner entirely, sets Bobbo’s parents to fighting, and is the catalyst for Bobbo to call Ruth a “she-devil.”33 Once she claims this identity as a she-devil, Ruth becomes even more destructive as she gleefully sets the house ablaze. Significantly, Ruth starts the fire in the kitchen, a primary symbol of domesticity. In the following scene, Weldon describes Ruth’s extraordinary behavior as something ordinary if “rather more intense,” suggesting that all housewives have the potential to burn down the house: Ruth went through the house as a good housewife should in such weather, and opened all the windows. She went into the kitchen and poured a whole bottle of oil into the deep fryer, so that it brimmed, and lit a low gas flame beneath it. She estimated that it would take some twenty minutes for the oil to reach the boiling point. She adjusted the kitchen curtains so that they hung as the architect had intended, cheek by jowl with the stove. She plugged in all the electrical appliances in the house—except the lamps, which might attract neighborly attention—using multipoint adaptors bought especially for this purpose. Dishwasher, washing machine, dryer, exhaust fan, air conditioner, three television sets, four electronic games,

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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction two convection heaters, a hi-fi system, sewing machine, vacuum cleaner, blender, three electric blankets (one very old), and the steam iron. She set them all to maximum performance and turned on all the switches. The house roared and presently a slight smell of burning rubber filled the air. Such sounds and smells were not unusual in Eden Grove on a Saturday morning; just rather more intense than normal, as they wafted over Nightbird Drive. Ruth went back into the kitchen and turned on the gas in the stove, then knelt and pushed down the plunger that worked as an electric spark. This plunger, if held down for at least some nine or ten seconds, heated to redhot a metal flange, which then ignited the gas in the oven. It had always been an annoying device. This morning she held the plunger down for only eight seconds. Then she removed her finger and closed the oven door without checking that the flame had lit.34

Ruth fulfills the role of a good housewife with a vengeance as all the appliances are set to maximum performance. She knows how long it takes for oil to reach the boiling point; she knows how the ignition plunger on the gas oven works; and she uses this knowledge of household appliances to perfectly and purposely destroy the house. Ruth acts out the sentiment of Marge Piercy’s poem “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” which ends with the line “Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.”35 In both texts, fire in the kitchen is a conscious call to arms. In The Fat Woman’s Joke, Esther, too, recognizes the unfulfilling reality of the feminine mystique. She rebels by leaving her home and domestic duties, and she tries to foster rebellion by revealing the contradictions of the feminine mystique to her friend Phyllis. Using the example of making curry from scratch, Esther explains to Phyllis that the primary purpose of domestic tasks is to fill time: “it keeps women occupied, and that’s important.”36 Otherwise, women might revolt. Esther couches this rebellion in terms of laughter: “If they had a spare hour or two they might look at their husbands and laugh, mightn’t they?”37 The implication is that this laughter will upset the social order. It will upset the balance of power by diminishing men’s authority. As Regina Barreca notes, “the unsolicited laughter of women spells trouble to those in power.”38 Esther embodies this rebellion physically and through her irreverent conduct. She questions the role of a “good wife” when she observes: “Running a house is not a sensible occupation for a grown woman.”39 Her own housework she couches in terms of war when she describes it as a continuous battle with Alan. She tells Phyllis:

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Alan only searched for flaws: if he could not find dirt with which to chide me, if he could not find waste with which to rebuke me, then he was disappointed. And daily I tried to disappoint him. To spend my life waging war against Alan, which was what my housewifeliness amounted to, endeavoring to prove a female competence which was the last thing he wanted or needed to know about—what a waste of time this was!40

While Esther has harsh words about her role as a housewife, her statement to Phyllis: “I shall pretend no longer”41 is even more revolutionary. These words of defiance and insurrection resonated with women around the world. The narrator in Weldon’s Down Among the Women also lays bare the reality behind the duties of a housewife when she observes, “The cleaner the house the angrier the lady.”42 The lady is very angry in The Fat Woman’s Joke, and the battlelines are particularly well-drawn in the kitchen. The references to food position the book in the cultural moment of the 1960s in which the careful presentation of food represents idealized domesticity and civility. Dinner parties with friends are a mark of sophistication and social importance. As such, a certain decorum and politeness must be maintained. Esther explains to Phyllis that if these rules of engagement were not followed— i.e., dinners at friends’ houses were criticized—“[t]he middle classes would grind to a social halt.”43 Family life and marriage would also be threatened if ritual meals were abandoned. An affinity for food initially holds Esther and Alan’s marriage together, and because it keeps them occupied, food also keeps both parties civilized. As Esther explains: “food set the pattern of our days. All day in his grand office Alan would sip coffee and nibble biscuits and plan his canteen dockets and organize cold chicken and salad and wine for working lunches, and all day at home I would plan food, and buy food, and cook food, and serve food.”44 Their attention to food and their satiety leads to their complacency. Esther remarks on this soothing effect to Phyllis: “Alan and I would sit back, lulled by our full bellies into a sense of security, and really believe ourselves to be happy, content and well-matched [. . .]. But there is none so blind as those who are too stuffed full of food to see!”45 However, when they go on a diet, they are no longer blind to their discontent and food becomes a battleground. Both try to deprive each other of food,46 but Esther also claims to cook food Alan likes in an attempt to save the marriage. Yet despite Esther’s claim that she made Alan’s omelette with butter as a “peace offering,” Alan sees it as “an act of aggression.”47 He asks Esther accusingly:

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the late Dr. Leslie Fiedler who inspired me to write about topics of interest and to Professor Irving Feldman for his encouragement. Thanks also to David Schoonover who graciously consented to my using one of his MMLA panel topics, Food and Literature, as a springboard to the food panels I chaired over the last several years at the Northeast Modern Language Association [NeMLA] Conventions. Much appreciation is also extended to the wonderful library staff at Erie Community College/ South Campus. Thanks to all those who contributed to this monograph and to all those who attended the captivating “Food for Thought” sessions at NeMLA. I am especially grateful for all the encouragement and support my husband Hillel gave to me, not only by teaching me the delights of good food and cooking, but also with his computer and researching expertise. Thanks also to the late Mrs. David Magid [Frieda Rae Magid], extraordinary artist and motherin-law whose painting graces the cover of this book. Special thanks to Amanda Millar and the editorial staff at Cambridge Scholars’ Publishing who selected my panel as a monograph candidate.

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emasculation as Alan ultimately “faces the shrivelled facts.”57 Esther at least has power through action, even if it is only at the slow pace of an “indifferent” “waddle.”58 Early reviews depicted Esther as dominant and powerful because she is not the passive housewife of the feminine mystique. In the novel, Susan voices this position when she says to Esther, “You are not [. . .] what I expected at all. For a wife you are very vocal.”59 Like Wordworth’s review, the Kirkus and Publishers Weekly reviews emphasize Esther’s size and link it to her power in the marriage. The Kirkus reviewer pairs Esther’s “dominance” with her “advanced dimensions,”60 and the Publishers Weekly reviewer positions her as dominant by focusing on Esther’s physical presence and her rampant food consumption. The reviewer’s description of Esther highlights her willful power as she “chuck[s] it all up,” “refus[es] to return” home, and is intentionally “fat” and “sloppy-dirty.”61 This depiction of Esther’s conscious defiance marks her departure from home and subsequent eating as an act of rebellion rather than simply gluttony. It is a symbol of domestic duties gone awry as Esther’s continual cooking does not bring the family together at mealtimes. Instead, Esther’s cooking is a selfcentered act. She only feeds herself (and, occasionally, Phyllis), which conflicts with the selfless acts expected of a housewife. Both Esther’s absence from home and her binge-eating effectively disrupt the happy household ideal. In The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer describes uncontrolled eating as a sign of contemporary domestic despair: In England a “neglected” and “down-trodden,” “bored,” “lonely” housewife is likely simply to eat too much rubbish. Advertising of chocolate bars and cookies in England has recently recognized the function of escapist eating. What we are told to expect from machine-made sludge is “a taste sensation,” an “explosion,” excitement, and visions of faraway places. Television advertising of candy promises hallucinations and orgasms. Certainly a Mars Bar costs less than a divorce.62

Mars bars offered an escape from the house and all its problems. Having the power to buy household products, including food, was meant to keep women from recognizing, or at least acting on, their discontent. Within this paradigm, Esther represents the role of consumer with a vengeance as she both buys and eats products aimed at housewives. In her excess, Esther challenges the positive image of the happy housewife consumer that advertisers were trying to sell. In his New York Times review, Martin Levin focuses on the tangible links between marriage, morality, power, and food. Unlike the previous

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reviews that blame Esther for the failed marriage, the first sentence of this review—“When Esther Wells’s husband Alan is unfaithful to her (with his temporary secretary), Esther deserts him and goes on an eating orgy in a London basement hideaway”63—places the blame on Alan. But despite Alan’s primary role in the marriage’s demise, Levin’s description of Esther makes her culpable as well. She commits the “sin” of “gluttony,” which Levin implies is just as bad as Alan’s infidelity: “she [. . .] repays one sin with another.”64 Esther’s other sins include living like an animal in a “downstairs lair” and causing “mischief” for those around her.65 Levin’s use of active verbs to describe Esther’s behavior and influence positions Esther as the active party whose actions lead other characters to respond. In the end, according to Levin, “life rearranges itself around her.”66 These words suggest that Esther is a force with which to be reckoned. She does not have to change. Everything around her does. Whether or not Esther will maintain her authority when she returns home, her domestic rebellion represents the first step in renegotiating power between the sexes.

Dinner and Death In The Shrapnel Academy, class relations are mediated and negotiated through food. Weldon’s novel is a parable about war and personal responsibility. Conflict is exemplified by one’s relationship to food as Weldon juxtaposes technological warfare with a weekend retreat. This year’s Wellington Weekend Lecture is on “Decisive Battles of World War II.”67 Despite this focus on military strategy, much of the weekend is centered around food, including a dinner party, a traditional tea, and a late night snack. Custodian and Administrator of the Academy, Joan Lumb positions herself as a kitchen general and carefully plans the meals for these events; the servants below execute her orders. Weldon emphasizes the importance of food by giving the reader the precise dinner party menu, including recipes for some of the dishes, and providing a drawing of the seating chart. As we learn from Joan, seating arrangements are vital to a successful dinner party: “A dinner party’s like a cocktail—no matter how good the ingredients, if you don’t stir properly, everything’s wasted.”68 This dinner party is a prime example of domestic concerns overlapping with military history and current military concerns. The dinner is prepared “based on a dinner served by Mrs. Simcoe, the wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, in January 1794” where Henry Shrapnel was once stationed.69 Two of the guests, Victor and Shirley, hope the “special menu” is not too historically accurate, with the “[g]reasy and fattening”

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food that the officers ate or the “dry bread and maggots” that the men probably ate,70 and are relieved to find that dinner consists of Pumpkin Soup, Poached Salmon, Caribou Patties & Cranberry Jelly, Turkey Pie, Sweet Potatoes & Peas, Blueberry Délice, and Stilton.71 Some of the food even looks like weaponry. The Blueberry Délice, for example, is shaped like a cannon. Despite the effort that went into making the Délice, it lacks taste, literally as well as metaphorically. The narrator explains the import of the tasteless food: “This lack of reverence for the pleasures of the palate [. . .] is symptomatic [. . .] of those who care little for life, their own or anyone else’s.”72 The underlying problem is indifference. Without the ability to enjoy the simple things that make life satisfying, selfpreservation, and by extension, world preservation become unimportant. In other words, bad food leads to bad manners and bad manners lead to war. Despite Joan’s careful strategizing about the menu and seating, Clancy Sigal notes that “Violence breaks through the thin skin of politeness that has masked the inherent savagery of the dinner party.”73 Although one is meant to be polite at dinner parties, the enforced closeness of a group of people who have little in common ends in mutual antagonism. The reporter for the Women’s Times, Mew, must be reminded that taking clandestine pictures at dinner just “isn’t done,” and although “[m]ost deals are done at dinner,” Baf’s trying to sell weapons at the table is not entirely appropriate.74 Nevertheless, the Eve-of-Waterloo dinner, as its name implies, provides a space in which food is eaten and weapons discussed with equal zeal. In an interview with Craig Gholson, Weldon comments on her strategy of situating a military crisis in a domestic setting: The Shrapnel Academy has the development of weapons mixed up with cucumber salad. [. . .] You’ve got to bring it back to cucumber salad because you’ve got to get a reader to believe it’s true. To bring it down to a domestic level so that you can focus. You bring back the mind to an everyday level, both in order to underline the awfulness of what people are doing but also to see that people who are doing it are no different from you who bought cucumber salad. It’s just where you go if you’re in that situation and not watching out as it were. You end up blowing up the world.75

Weldon’s explanation emphasizes the ease with which we can destroy ourselves and our complicity in this destruction. As the reader is warned by the narrator: “Bad deeds escalate: even little ones. [. . .] So never say a harsh word if you can say a kind one; it may be you who starts the war.”76

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the particular problems women face as well as critique the culture that perpetuates inequalities between men and women. Her close attention to history and sexual politics make her novels important social documents, and in this essay I use this cultural context to explore the gender and class implications of food and food preparation. Weldon’s fiction exemplifies the ways in which cooking is an integral part of defining cultural ideals and personal and political relationships, and in her work, food constitutes a practical and symbolic discourse through which gender and class are revealed and negotiated. Through her attention to the multiple uses and meanings of food, Weldon makes explicit Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik’s contention that food “is a central pawn in political strategies of states and households.”5 In the first part of this essay, I examine the ways in which Weldon portrays an ideal of domesticity represented by the suburbs and the rigid gender roles this environment encourages. Because of its compelling depiction of 1960s suburban life, I use Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and sociological and historical texts to create a framework in which to discuss food, domesticity, and gender. I then explore the ways in which domestic ideals are challenged and subverted both in this novel and in The Fat Woman’s Joke. In these novels, the kitchen becomes a battleground for the war between the sexes and a site of rebellion against socially prescribed gender roles. Part two addresses the relationship between food, class, and war. In The Shrapnel Academy, class and military warfare are played out through food as the suburban battlefield of the kitchen is moved to the dining room and the servants’ kitchen. I conclude with a discussion of Weldon’s short story “Polaris” in which the threat of international warfare is juxtaposed with fine dining. In all of her work, cooking is about power: who has it, who wants it, and how one can get it. As such, food becomes an important symbol of gender and class tensions and an indicator of civility and survival.

Rebellion in the Kitchen In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and The Fat Woman’s Joke, Weldon focuses on the “hotting up of the male-female war” taking place on the domestic front in the late 1960s.6 Suburbia, which represented dedication to family life, community interaction, and stability became a battlefield.7 Because they represented traditional values and a nostalgia for an era in which men and women had distinctive, but complementary roles, roles where according to historian David Farber “the rules were clear,” the suburbs created a “stabilizing, comforting, and edifying”

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blood) and the method of his revenge was made clear to him.”81 Already upset over another servant’s death in childbirth, which he attributes to those Upstairs, Acorn uses Harry’s death to avenge Miriam’s and to protest against “the wilful stupidity of the master races” and “their unreasonable assumption of moral superiority.”82 As he explains to those he is trying to lead in revolt, “A life for a life. [. . .] They hold their pets dearer than they do their servants.”83 By killing and cooking the dog, food preparation becomes the means by which the servants, those who traditionally have less power than those they serve, are empowered. This act is the “first definite act of war.”84 The battle really heats up when Acorn serves the dog as pâté in “soft little white sandwiches.”85 Whether or not those Upstairs completely understand the gesture, it is a declaration of war on Acorn’s part. At first, those Upstairs simply enjoy their pâté sandwiches and cocoa, exclaiming “Delicious!” “Wicked!” “How Tasty!” as they eat.86 It is only when Murray identifies the meat as dog-meat that those Upstairs recognize that war is being waged, and they fight back in earnest. Those Upstairs organize themselves by calling a Council for War. Significantly, the seating for the strategy session matches the dinner party seating. But now a real general, General Leo Makeshift, instead of the kitchen general Joan is in charge of strategizing. Even at this meeting in which those present fear the threat of armed servants, the discussion of food is paramount, because food symbolizes survival and power: “A few nuts and raisins were discovered in cupboards, and the General generously had his bottle of Laphroaig brought down.”87 But scotch and the ingredients for trail mix will not be satisfactory for long. The lack of food Upstairs emphasizes that the tables have been turned. With food as a controlling metaphor, the phrase gains new meaning as those whose power was indicated by their seated position at the table now have less power than those who had served them: “all remarked on how the sealing of the green baize door [which leads downstairs to the servants] had reversed the normal order of things—now Downstairs had everything—at least in the way of food, drink, and warmth—and Upstairs had nothing.”88 Acorn’s plan after serving Harry is to further reverse the normal order of things and instead of feeding the dinner party, he plans to feed on them: “We will boil them alive. [. . .] There will be a risotto: the most wonderful risotto the world has ever known. For once there will be no shortage of meat. We will eat the dinner party!”89 Fortunately for those Upstairs, before this new plan can be enacted, Acorn is deposed. After a struggle downstairs “between civilisation and barbarity,” Acorn is subdued with the result that “[c]ivilisation below

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stairs had been saved, or at any rate an improved status quo restored.”90 Unfortunately, those Upstairs do not know that instead of planning further attacks, those Downstairs have gone to bed. Those Upstairs misread this silence as malevolent plotting and act accordingly, thereby fulfilling the narrator’s warning that “Bad deeds escalate: even little ones.”91 By the end of Weldon’s novel, all these small acts have led to the destruction of the Shrapnel Academy and the death of 331 people. The body count in Weldon’s short story “Pumpkin Pie” is significantly less, but there remains the potential for death by food. As in The Shrapnel Academy, class boundaries are emphasized by the division between who cooks and who eats. The power dynamics inherent in these roles of servants and employers are reversed when the maid Antoinette serves something that is forbidden: egg yolks. In “Pumpkin Pie,” the reader does not see the lethal effect of the cooking transgression; it is only hinted at. The basis of the story is the preparation of a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner. Here, eggs are the weapons that can be used to destroy the rich.92 Because Honey Marvin’s husband is recovering from a heart attack, the pie is supposed to be made only with egg whites so that it is cholesterol-free. Antoinette sets out to meet her employer’s requirements by making the cholesterol-free pie and sacrificing Thanksgiving plans with her family so she can serve her employers. But while the pie is baking, she is unexpectedly called home in order to deal with a family crisis, and the pie burns. She does not have time to bake another pumpkin pie so she replaces it with one from home. This one, however, has egg yolks in it. She serves it anyway. Like the Shrapnel Academy guests who enjoy the dog pâté, the Marvins enjoy the pumpkin pie immensely and are unable to tell the difference. Nevertheless, Honey, who needs to maintain control over the kitchen even if she does not cook in it, checks to make sure that the pie is cholesterol-free. She asks Antoinette: “You didn’t put egg yolk in it, did you? Because, as you know, egg yolk can kill my husband.”93 Antoinette lies to protect herself. She denies that she has put yolks in the pie, but she is prepared for Honey’s scrutiny and shows Honey a bunch of yolks in a bowl. These, however, are extra eggs from home she has brought just for that evidentiary purpose. While the story ends before the reader learns if the eggs were indeed lethal, the narrator offers a moral: The moral of this Thanksgiving story is not that the poor are happier than the rich. They’re not. But that the only point in being rich, as the palate of the wealthy gets jaded, lies in not being poor. The rich do what they can to make the poor mind being poor to keep the differential going. And the poor

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do mind, and they consent to being poor less and less, and there are more of them about. Had you noticed? And they begin to know that the pumpkin pies of the poor taste as good if not better than the pumpkin pies of the rich; so if you can’t make your own, do without, and let the hired help stay home for a change. Or you’ll find cholesterol in your pie and a knife in your back.94

The link between food and revenge is made explicit as domestic discontent has potentially lethal consequences. Food, then, in Weldon’s fiction offers a means of rebelling against the social order that oppresses one whether it is due to gender, class, or race.

Pleasing the Palate Despite the subversive potential of food in much of Weldon’s fiction, in her short story “Polaris,” rather than acting as a site of rebellion, food— good food, at least—plays a positive and idealized role. It preserves the world from war. Like The Shrapnel Academy, “Polaris” takes place in a military environment—a naval base in the North Sea where the nuclear submarines that can launch Polaris missiles are housed—which emphasizes the relationship between food, domestic discontent, and warfare. The Attack Team for these submarines consists of a navigator, captain, and first officer. Meg, who is a new wife and new to military life, has a romantic view of her new husband Timmy’s job and believes him to be innocent of any destructive responsibility. She tells Zelda, “He’s a navigator: all he does is steer ships about by the stars.”95 But Zelda, who is married to the first officer, explains that everyone on board is culpable and that “[w]ith a little help from the captain, your husband and mine could finish off the world.”96 Fortunately, because of their appreciation of food, the officers are more intent on finishing dinner than finishing off the world. Juxtaposed with the officers’ military duties are their culinary responsibilities aboard ship. Because of great significance of their missions and the potential for disaster, it is important that the men aboard the submarine stay sane and happy. Quality food and fancy cooking come to fulfill this goal. Unlike the characters in The Shrapnel Academy, the submarine crew has a “reverence for the pleasures of the palate.”97 The Attack Team even delays the start of their mission when there is a “mishap” resulting in “[s]ome of the exotic veg”—aubergines, fresh chilies, and fresh ginger—not being on board.98 More drastically, there are only two liter bottles of olive oil aboard ship. “‘Not enough,’ said the captain and closed down the engines”99 in order to properly stock the

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However, what Ruth comes to realize is that misfortune has little to do with geographical location but instead with issues of power, gender, and class.23 In Weldon’s Down Among the Women, Jocelyn, the narrator, describes the behavior of a “good wife”: I went to a party the other night. At midnight, the host escorted a woman guest to her home. By five in the morning he had not returned. The hostess continued with her hostessly duties, smiling politely. What else could she do? She is fifty, intelligent, and nice, but she is fifty. She has been trained to behave well, and not to shout, scream or murder, and that is the only training she has had, besides cookery and housecraft at school.24

In She-Devil, this litany of a good wife is the paradigm that Ruth refuses to accept. The hostess is the woman Ruth is expected to be, but Ruth rebels. She is willing to “shout, scream or murder” in order to break free of this emotionally deadening behavior. The problem that Friedan defines as the “feminine mystique” and which Weldon depicts in her novels is the conflict between what women feel and what, according to advertisers, sociologists, family, and friends, women should feel. Friedan writes: “There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform.”25 This discrepancy between image and reality was not new.26 What was new was the attention it was getting. The damaging physical and psychological effects for women were being noticed and written about in books such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Sue Kaufman’s Diary of a Mad Housewife, and Weldon’s The Fat Woman’s Joke. Although Esther in The Fat Woman’s Joke, redefines her breakdown as a “fit of sanity,”27 women still felt as if they were going crazy. While many women were incapacitated by depression, many others rebelled. It is in the domestic sphere that the women in Weldon’s novels fight back. They use the tools of this environment to subvert culturally defined gender roles. In She-Devil, Ruth wages war against the domestic ideal by ruining dinners and eventually burning down the house. When Ruth begins preparing dinner for her in-laws’ visit, she practices a bit of domestic voodoo. She describes the process of making dough dolls in detail: I make puff pastry for the chicken vol-au-vents, and when I have finished circling out the dough with the brim of a wine-glass, making wafer rounds, I take the curved strips the cutter left behind and mold them into a shape much like the shape of Mary Fisher, and turn the oven high, high, and crisp

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between Meg’s and her husband’s relationship to food and war suggests, Weldon’s fiction redefines Virginia Woolf’s observation that “[o]ne cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”106 More significantly, one cannot maintain peace if one has not dined well. As the captain, referring to “banana and rum fritters” and wine, proclaims at the end of “Polaris”: “You know, if a Routine came through to push those buttons, I wouldn’t! What, and lose all this?”107 There is, however, a caveat. Weldon’s short stories and novels show that Woolf’s formulation only works if one is not entirely responsible for cooking for others; or, if one is, he or she is appreciated and respected by those for whom the cooking is done. Wives and servants have a very different relationship to food than the officers on the Polaris ship. For the latter, food is a hobby, albeit one they take seriously during their stay on the submarine; it allows them to express their creativity. Moreover, they do not have to worry about gratifying others (not even the crew, who complain about the smell of garlic); they only have to please themselves.108 For wives and servants, preparing meals is often a thankless occupation, and for them the kitchen is a site of oppression. Yet, as one can see in Weldon’s fiction, the kitchen can become a key site of gender and class rebellion. Weldon’s characters may not use frying pans and rolling pins to hit their enemies over the head, but they do know how to use their culinary tools as weapons and their domestic skills for strategic warfare. In contrast to the pacifying effect preparing good food has on the captain (and earlier on Alan and Esther), when those who have nothing to lose make the food, the possibility of war becomes almost inevitable. But the moral of Weldon’s fiction is that good food and good manners can, in the end, save civilization, for it is at the level of everyday acts and interactions—good deeds as well as bad deeds can escalate—that social change takes place.

Works Cited Alexander, Robyn. 1996. “Fay Weldon’s Use of Form and the ‘Female Voice.’” Inter-Action 4: 3-20. Barreca, Regina, ed. 1988. Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy. New York: Gordon and Breach. —. 1994. Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Becker, Susanne. 1992. “The Haunted Voices of Fay Weldon.” A Decade of Discontent: British Fiction in the Eighties, edited by Hans-Jürgen Diller, et all, 99-113.

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Cane, Aleta F. 1997. “Demythifying Motherhood in Three Novels by Fay Weldon.” In Family Matters in the British and American Novel, edited by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Elizabeth Mahn Nollen, and Sheila Reitzel Foor, 183-94. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. Counihan, Carole, and Penny Van Esterik. 1997. Introduction. In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 1-7. New York: Routledge, Dubino, Jeanne. “The Cinderella Complex: 1993. Fiction, Patriarchy and Capitalism.” Journal of PopularCulture 27, no. 3: 103-18. Farber, David. 1994. The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s. New York: Hill and Wang. Ferguson, Marjorie. 1983. Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. Exeter: Heinemann, Flanagan, Mary. “Native Wits.” Review of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon. Books and Bookmen, August 1986. 31. Friedan, Betty. 1981. The Feminine Mystique. 1963. New York: Dell. Glastonbury, Marion. 1984. “Days of Judgment.” Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. New Statesman, January 20, 1984. 24. Greer, Germaine. 1971. The Female Eunuch. New York: McGraw Hill. Hebert, Ann Marie. 1993. “Rewriting the Feminine Script: Fay Weldon’s Wicked Laughter.” Critical Matrix 7, no. 1: 21-40. Kenyon, Olga. 1988. Women Novelists Today: A Survey of English Writing in the Seventies and Eighties. New York: St. Martin’s. Koenig, Rhoda. 1984. “Women Beware Women.” Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. New York, September 24, 1984. 97-98. Krouse, Agate Nesaule. 1978. “Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon’s Novels.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 20, no. 2: 5-20. Levin, Martin. 1968. “Reader’s Report.” Review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon. New York TimesBook Review, March 3, 1968. 44-45. Little, Judy. 1983. Comedy and the Woman Writer: Woolf, Spark, and Feminism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Martin, Sara. 1983. “The Power of Monstrous Women: Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984), and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry.” Journal of Gender Studies 8, no. 2 (1999): 193-210. Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue...The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington Press.

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Peterson, Shirley. 1996. “Freaking Feminism.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 291-301. New York: New York University Press. Piercy, Marge. 1982. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” In Circles on the Water. New York: Knopf, 288. Review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon. 1967. Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1967, 1438. Review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon. 1967. Publishers Weekly, December 11, 1967. 39. Russell, Lorena. 2000. “Dog-Women and She-Devils: The Queering Field of Monstrous Women.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5, no. 2: 177-93. Sage, Lorna. 1984. “Hell Hath No Fury. . .”. Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. The Observer, January 15, 1984. 48. Seidenbaum, Art. 1984.Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. 1984. Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1984. 20. “She-Devil and Other Valentines.” 1984. Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. Punch, February 8, 1984. 56. Sigal, Clancy. 1987. “Dinner’s at 8. When’s the Revolution?” Review of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon. New York Times, April 26, 1987, 14. Smith, Patricia Juliana. 1995. “‘And I Wondered if She Might Kiss Me’: Lesbian Panic as Narrative Strategy in British Women’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3: 567-607. Stokes, Geoffrey. 1984. “Beyond Death and Taxes.” Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. Vogue, September 570, 575. Walker, Nancy A. 1988. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weldon, Fay. 2002. Auto Da Fay. London: Flamingo. —. 1972. Down Among the Women. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1991. —. 1997. “End of the Line.” In Wicked Women. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 3-61. —. 1967. The Fat Woman’s Joke. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1995. —. 1987. The Heart of the Country. New York: Viking, 1988. —. 1999.Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays. London: Flamingo. —. 1984. I Love My Love. New York: Samuel French. —. 1990. Interview by Craig Gholson. BOMB 30 (): 45-47. —. 1984. Interview by Sybil Steinberg. Publishers Weekly 226: 83-84. —. 2000. Interview by Joanna Zylinska. Critical Survey 12, no. 3: 108-22. —. 1983. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

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Alan only searched for flaws: if he could not find dirt with which to chide me, if he could not find waste with which to rebuke me, then he was disappointed. And daily I tried to disappoint him. To spend my life waging war against Alan, which was what my housewifeliness amounted to, endeavoring to prove a female competence which was the last thing he wanted or needed to know about—what a waste of time this was!40

While Esther has harsh words about her role as a housewife, her statement to Phyllis: “I shall pretend no longer”41 is even more revolutionary. These words of defiance and insurrection resonated with women around the world. The narrator in Weldon’s Down Among the Women also lays bare the reality behind the duties of a housewife when she observes, “The cleaner the house the angrier the lady.”42 The lady is very angry in The Fat Woman’s Joke, and the battlelines are particularly well-drawn in the kitchen. The references to food position the book in the cultural moment of the 1960s in which the careful presentation of food represents idealized domesticity and civility. Dinner parties with friends are a mark of sophistication and social importance. As such, a certain decorum and politeness must be maintained. Esther explains to Phyllis that if these rules of engagement were not followed— i.e., dinners at friends’ houses were criticized—“[t]he middle classes would grind to a social halt.”43 Family life and marriage would also be threatened if ritual meals were abandoned. An affinity for food initially holds Esther and Alan’s marriage together, and because it keeps them occupied, food also keeps both parties civilized. As Esther explains: “food set the pattern of our days. All day in his grand office Alan would sip coffee and nibble biscuits and plan his canteen dockets and organize cold chicken and salad and wine for working lunches, and all day at home I would plan food, and buy food, and cook food, and serve food.”44 Their attention to food and their satiety leads to their complacency. Esther remarks on this soothing effect to Phyllis: “Alan and I would sit back, lulled by our full bellies into a sense of security, and really believe ourselves to be happy, content and well-matched [. . .]. But there is none so blind as those who are too stuffed full of food to see!”45 However, when they go on a diet, they are no longer blind to their discontent and food becomes a battleground. Both try to deprive each other of food,46 but Esther also claims to cook food Alan likes in an attempt to save the marriage. Yet despite Esther’s claim that she made Alan’s omelette with butter as a “peace offering,” Alan sees it as “an act of aggression.”47 He asks Esther accusingly:

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Weldon, Fay. 1999. Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays. London: Flamingo. 7. Ibid., 9. 13 Weldon, Fay. 1984. Interview by Sybil Steinberg, Publishers Weekly 226. 84. For reviews that place the novel in Britain or the United States, see the following: Koenig, 97; Sage, 48; Glastonbury, 24; Seidenbaum, 20; “She-Devil,” 56; Stokes, 570. 14 Weldon, Fay. 1985. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. New York: Ballantine. 12. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., 5. 17 Weldon, Fay. 1978. Praxis. New York: Summit. 171. 18 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 181. 19 Ferguson, Marjorie. 1983. Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. Exeter: Heinemann. 55. 20 Weldon, Fay. 2002. Auto Da Fay. London: Flamingo. 294. 21 Weldon. 1985. She-Devil, 3. Contemporary women’s magazines perpetuated this confinement: “Home-centredness persisted as a dominant image of British womanhood” (Ferguson, 55). 22 Weldon,. 1985. She-Devil. 4. 23 Thirty years earlier, Virginia Woolf articulated this geographical dilemma in Three Guineas when she wrote “as a woman, I have no country” (109). But Woolf then takes control of this moment of powerlessness by defying it: “As a woman I want no country.” In the next sentence, she transforms her dislocation into something powerful: “As a woman my country is the whole world” (109). In SheDevil, Ruth appropriates the power of the dispossessed. 24 Weldon, Fay. 1991. Down Among the Women. Chicago: Academy Chicago. 140. 25 Friedan. 7. 26 Thirty-five years earlier in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf names this inability to conform to one’s socially prescribed role “contrary instincts” (49). Using this idea, Woolf defends her story of the life of Shakespeare’s sister: “This may be true or it may be false—who can say?—but what is true in it, so it seemed to me, reviewing the story of Shakespeare’s sister as I had made it, is that any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty” (49). The harmful physical and psychological effects of the contrary instincts that Woolf describes remained the same in the 1960s. 27 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 160. 28 Weldon. 1985. She-Devil. 11. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 20. 31 Ibid., 46. 12

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Ibid., 44. Ibid., 47. 34 Ibid., 66-67. 35 Piercy, Marge. 1982. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” in Circles on the Water. New York: Knopf. 288. 36 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 72. The title of one of the chapters in The Feminine Mystique--“Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available”--mirrors Esther’s contention that housework is simply to fill time. 37 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 72. 38 Regina Barreca. 1994. Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 22. For more on the role humor plays in Weldon’s fiction see Barreca’s Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, Krouse, Hebert, and Kenyon. For broader discussions of feminist humor, see Walker and Little. 39 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 73. 40 Ibid., 73-74. 41 Ibid., 72. 42 Weldon, 1991. Down. 74. 43 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 33. 44 Ibid., 21. 45 Ibid., 22. 46 Ibid., 112. 47 Ibid., 112, 113. 48 Ibid., 51. 49 Ibid., 9. 50 Ibid., 103. 51 Ibid., 139. 52 Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue...The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington Press. 18. 53 I look primarily at reviews because there is no academic criticism contemporary to Weldon’s first novel. The novel was discussed in detail for the first time in Agate Nesuale Krouse’s “Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon’s Novels” which was published in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction in 1978. This article and subsequent criticism tend to mention The Fat Woman’s Joke in order to emphasize Weldon’s growth as a writer since the publication of her first novel. There is a considerable amount of criticism on The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, but like that about The Fat Woman’s Joke, most of it came out a decade or more after the book’s publication and does not discuss food. Instead, it mainly focuses on Weldon’s deconstruction of the romance narrative and gender conventions (see Becker, Young, Dubino, Hebert, Alexander, Cane, and Smith) and her use of the gothic or grotesque (see Peterson, Martin, and Russell). 54 Wordsworth, Christopher. 1967. “Neither Loved Nor Lynched,” review of The Fat Woman’s Joke, by Fay Weldon, Manchester Guardian, August 31, 1967: 5. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 33

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25

Ibid. Ibid. 59 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 172. 60 Review of And the Wife Ran Away. 1967. by Fay Weldon, Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1967: 1438. 61 Review of And the Wife Ran Away. 1967. by Fay Weldon, Publishers Weekly, December 11, 1967: 39. 62 Greer, Germaine. 1971. The Female Eunuch. New York: McGraw Hill. 277. In a similar recognition of the relationship between eating and discontent, in Weldon’s play I Love My Love, Cat notes that the shop would do better “if we did away with the health foods and stocked confectionery. [. . .] The appetite for junk food round here is amazing.” Derek asks, “You mean Mars bars?” to which Cat replies affirmatively, “That sort of thing” (19). 63 Levin, Martin. 1968. “Reader’s Report,” review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon, New York Times Book Review, March 3, 1968: 44. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Weldon, Fay. 1994. The Shrapnel Academy. Great Britain: Sceptre. 9. 68 Ibid., 36. 69 Ibid., 95. 70 Ibid., 19. 71 Ibid., 95. 72 Ibid., 127. 73 Sigal, Clancy. 1987. “Dinner’s at 8. When’s the Revolution?” review of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon, New York Times, April 26, 1987: 14. 74 Weldon. 1987. Shrapnel. 155, 126. 75 Weldon, Fay. 1990. Interview by Craig Gholson, BOMB 30: 46. 76 Weldon. 1994. Shrapnel. 139. 77 Ibid., 59. 78 Weldon, Fay. 2000. Interview by Joanna Zylinska,Critical Survey 12, no. 3: 114. 79 Flanagan, Mary. 1986. “Native Wits,” review of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon, Books and Bookmen, August 1986: 31. 80 Weldon. 1987. Shrapnel. 112. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., 113. 84 Ibid., 113. 85 Ibid., 157. 86 Ibid., 157, 158. 87 Ibid., 187. 88 Ibid., 187-88. 89 Ibid., 144. 90 Ibid., 165. 91 Ibid., 139. 58

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reviews that blame Esther for the failed marriage, the first sentence of this review—“When Esther Wells’s husband Alan is unfaithful to her (with his temporary secretary), Esther deserts him and goes on an eating orgy in a London basement hideaway”63—places the blame on Alan. But despite Alan’s primary role in the marriage’s demise, Levin’s description of Esther makes her culpable as well. She commits the “sin” of “gluttony,” which Levin implies is just as bad as Alan’s infidelity: “she [. . .] repays one sin with another.”64 Esther’s other sins include living like an animal in a “downstairs lair” and causing “mischief” for those around her.65 Levin’s use of active verbs to describe Esther’s behavior and influence positions Esther as the active party whose actions lead other characters to respond. In the end, according to Levin, “life rearranges itself around her.”66 These words suggest that Esther is a force with which to be reckoned. She does not have to change. Everything around her does. Whether or not Esther will maintain her authority when she returns home, her domestic rebellion represents the first step in renegotiating power between the sexes.

Dinner and Death In The Shrapnel Academy, class relations are mediated and negotiated through food. Weldon’s novel is a parable about war and personal responsibility. Conflict is exemplified by one’s relationship to food as Weldon juxtaposes technological warfare with a weekend retreat. This year’s Wellington Weekend Lecture is on “Decisive Battles of World War II.”67 Despite this focus on military strategy, much of the weekend is centered around food, including a dinner party, a traditional tea, and a late night snack. Custodian and Administrator of the Academy, Joan Lumb positions herself as a kitchen general and carefully plans the meals for these events; the servants below execute her orders. Weldon emphasizes the importance of food by giving the reader the precise dinner party menu, including recipes for some of the dishes, and providing a drawing of the seating chart. As we learn from Joan, seating arrangements are vital to a successful dinner party: “A dinner party’s like a cocktail—no matter how good the ingredients, if you don’t stir properly, everything’s wasted.”68 This dinner party is a prime example of domestic concerns overlapping with military history and current military concerns. The dinner is prepared “based on a dinner served by Mrs. Simcoe, the wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, in January 1794” where Henry Shrapnel was once stationed.69 Two of the guests, Victor and Shirley, hope the “special menu” is not too historically accurate, with the “[g]reasy and fattening”

MARGINALIZATION, INCLUSION, AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: THE POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KITCHEN AND AT THE DINING TABLE RITA COLANZI

In Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, John Egerton argues: To learn what has gone on in the kitchen and the dining room—and what still goes on there—is to discover much about a society’s physical health, its economic condition, its race relations, its class structure, and the status of its women.1

Similarly, Peter Farb and George Armelagos argue in their book Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating that “to know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.”2 In regard to American society, we will explore some of these aspects of the dining experience, particularly the primary sites where we come in contact with food: the kitchen and the dining room/main table. In the process, we will gain insight into the ethics and politics of inclusion versus exclusion as they impact the lives of women and minorities. We also will observe how these dining spaces reconceive the social order, whether to offer us a vision of an all-inclusive society, to express resistance to any type of inclusion or assimilation that would involve the loss of the marginalized group’s cultural identity, or to propose that the disenfranchised gather at their own table, where they may nourish themselves creatively, intellectually, and spiritually and position their table to be an alternative to the one ruled by those who hold power and privilege. As Barbara Haber bids us in her essay of the same name, “follow the food.”3 In writing about groups who have been marginalized because of their race or their ethnicity, the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston and the Italian American author Pietro Di Donato depict the kitchen as site and symbol of the marginalization. The speaker of the

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Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table

poem “Restaurant” by Maxine Hong Kingston describes the mundane, laborious activities that she and her coworkers perform until the early morning hours in the kitchen, which is located in the basement of a fine dining establishment. As she and the worker to whom she addresses the poem come up from the lower depths of the restaurant into the night, they “wonder at the clean diners behind glass in candlelight.”4 Kingston creates an underclass apart from the pristine above-ground world of the privileged diners. Word choices such as “China cap,” “Mulattos,” and “‘Black socalled musician’” suggest that the underclass is multiracial and comprised specifically of races that have been disenfranchised.5 In drawing distinctions between where and with whom people eat or come in contact with food, Kingston exposes racism, classism, and economic injustice and in the process interrogates the character and ethics of her society. Describing in his novel Christ in Concrete how the male members of the Italian American immigrant community eat, Pietro Di Donato articulates the politics of inclusion versus exclusion in regard to this community’s position in society at large. As the wedding feast for the widow Cola and the disabled construction worker Luigi concludes, the men, whose hunger is still not satisfied, gorge themselves on spaghetti, which is spread across the kitchen table. They do so “‘with hands tied behind’” and “with mouth-open faces.”6 Their hunger for food dramatizes their hunger for a place in America. That they manifest their insatiable hunger in the kitchen suggests that these immigrants are far from achieving a significant place in America. While their eating “‘with hands tied behind’” is essential to the contest of skill in which they engage, it also accentuates how these immigrant construction workers, who use their hands to build America, are held back by their Bosses, the power establishment, from achieving the American Dream. Moreover, that only males are involved in the eating contest reveals how gender is negotiated in the Italian immigrant culture. The women are excluded from full participation, not only in mainstream American society, but also in their families and in their immigrant community. The kitchen is often presented as the site where women are marginalized. Susan B. Anthony II, the great-niece and namesake of the famous women’s rights activist, illustrates the disjunction between the constrictive space of the kitchen and the world at large in her book on women during World War II: Out of the Kitchen—Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama. The dash that separates “Kitchen” from “War” in the book’s title emphasizes the distance and division between the two sites. Anthony enjoins her country to enable women to cross the divide. Consequently, the dash in the title also may represent the

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bridge that needs to be forged. For Anthony, the kitchen is synonymous with fascism. She queries, “How can we claim to be purified of fascist tendencies in our own nation if we permit a fascist concept of women to prevail?”7 She argues that within the fascist framework a woman “after having fulfilled her biological function . . . is . . . only useful to brood over the kitchen stove.”8 Anthony concludes her book with the following mandate: America must unlock millions of doors that have imprisoned millions of women. Women must be let out—liberated from the homes, so that they can take their place in the war of the world today—and in the work of the world tomorrow.9

She dedicates the book to her mother who, according to Anthony, “has come out of the kitchen into the war.” In the essay “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Paule Marshall appears to be in Anthony’s camp as she describes her initial reaction to a comment by “a well known male novelist [who] visited [her] class,” a “graduate seminar in fiction.”10 The novelist “remark[ed] that women writers are luckier than those of his sex because they usually spend so much time as children around their mothers and their mothers' friends in the kitchen.”11 Marshall bristles, “There again was that awful image of women locked away from the world in the kitchen with only each other to talk to, and their daughters locked in with them.”12 Marshall adds, however, that the visitor “wasn’t really being sexist or trying to be provocative or even spoiling for a fight”; instead, he wanted to emphasize that, as a result of their time in the kitchen, women writers develop facility with “everyday speech.”13 As we shall see, Marshall goes on to subvert the image of the kitchen as a constrictive, oppressive space. The kitchen becomes the stage for war in Marge Piercy’s poem “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” From the kitchen, the very space that traditionally has held them bound, women wage war against a patriarchal society that represses and devalues them. Piercy begins by referring to women in general and then narrows her focus to a single woman from whose perspective we view the kitchen. In entering the mind of the woman, we understand what others like her endure. Moreover, we see her as an individual, not as the nonentity to which her kitchen existence has reduced her. The kitchen signifies the constraints of her marriage to a man who once considered her a gourmet entrée, “roast duck . . . with parsley,” but now views her as a nondescript, common product like “Spam.”14 That she is equated with food on her husband’s “platter”15 illustrates how her marriage dehumanizes and consumes her. The kitchen delineates for

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blood) and the method of his revenge was made clear to him.”81 Already upset over another servant’s death in childbirth, which he attributes to those Upstairs, Acorn uses Harry’s death to avenge Miriam’s and to protest against “the wilful stupidity of the master races” and “their unreasonable assumption of moral superiority.”82 As he explains to those he is trying to lead in revolt, “A life for a life. [. . .] They hold their pets dearer than they do their servants.”83 By killing and cooking the dog, food preparation becomes the means by which the servants, those who traditionally have less power than those they serve, are empowered. This act is the “first definite act of war.”84 The battle really heats up when Acorn serves the dog as pâté in “soft little white sandwiches.”85 Whether or not those Upstairs completely understand the gesture, it is a declaration of war on Acorn’s part. At first, those Upstairs simply enjoy their pâté sandwiches and cocoa, exclaiming “Delicious!” “Wicked!” “How Tasty!” as they eat.86 It is only when Murray identifies the meat as dog-meat that those Upstairs recognize that war is being waged, and they fight back in earnest. Those Upstairs organize themselves by calling a Council for War. Significantly, the seating for the strategy session matches the dinner party seating. But now a real general, General Leo Makeshift, instead of the kitchen general Joan is in charge of strategizing. Even at this meeting in which those present fear the threat of armed servants, the discussion of food is paramount, because food symbolizes survival and power: “A few nuts and raisins were discovered in cupboards, and the General generously had his bottle of Laphroaig brought down.”87 But scotch and the ingredients for trail mix will not be satisfactory for long. The lack of food Upstairs emphasizes that the tables have been turned. With food as a controlling metaphor, the phrase gains new meaning as those whose power was indicated by their seated position at the table now have less power than those who had served them: “all remarked on how the sealing of the green baize door [which leads downstairs to the servants] had reversed the normal order of things—now Downstairs had everything—at least in the way of food, drink, and warmth—and Upstairs had nothing.”88 Acorn’s plan after serving Harry is to further reverse the normal order of things and instead of feeding the dinner party, he plans to feed on them: “We will boil them alive. [. . .] There will be a risotto: the most wonderful risotto the world has ever known. For once there will be no shortage of meat. We will eat the dinner party!”89 Fortunately for those Upstairs, before this new plan can be enacted, Acorn is deposed. After a struggle downstairs “between civilisation and barbarity,” Acorn is subdued with the result that “[c]ivilisation below

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those who exclude him and “[t]hey’ll see how beautiful” he is “[a]nd be ashamed.”25 Hughes anticipates that the entire human family will come together at the main dining table, a table at which all are welcome and are never sent away because of their differences. Thus, Hughes changes our perspective on the kitchen from a strictly oppressive space to a site where the disenfranchised can envision and initiate a process of personal and social transformation. Interestingly, though, in poems in which African American women are relegated to the kitchen as cooks or domestics, poems such as “Graduation” and “Ruby Brown,” the kitchen remains a space of confinement, not a starting point for change. Hughes recognizes that their situation is even more restricted than that of the men. The film Big Night gives us a glimpse of the type of inclusive society that Hughes projects in “Epilogue.” The extraordinary feast in Big Night brings together a diverse group of diners, obscures their differences, and creates a spiritual community reminiscent of The Last Supper. The film focuses on two Italian immigrants, the brothers Primo and Secondo, whose restaurant Paradise is on the verge of bankruptcy because, unlike their enormously successful competitor Pascal, they do not conform to America’s stereotypical image of Italian culture and cuisine. The menu at Paradise, the brothers' restaurant, consists of native Italian dishes. Accordingly, the food that they create and serve sets them apart from mainstream America, which associates being Italian with cooking and eating spaghetti with meatballs and other pasta dishes smothered in red sauce. The menu, which the restaurant’s chef Primo in particular refuses to alter, precipitates the demise of the brothers' dining establishment. Ironically, the food that sets the brothers apart and bankrupts them is what brings a diverse community together at table. Not only is the table filled with members of the Italian American community to which the brothers belong, but also it includes members of mainstream American society, such as the car salesman; Anne and Phyllis, the brothers’ love interests; and the newspaper reporter who will cover the arrival of the guest of honor Louis Prima, the jazz musician whose presence at the dinner was supposedly orchestrated by Pascal to help the bothers save their failing business. That the brothers sit at table with Pascal, a guest who secretly has betrayed them by not inviting Louis Prima, that Secondo behind his brother’s back has conspired with Pascal to arrange the dinner, that the meal ends in conflict between the brothers, and that it apparently does not succeed in saving the restaurant—all suggest, however, that the type of inclusive community reflected at the table during the feast in Big Night has not been realized. Moreover, though at the film’s end the brothers reunite

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Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table

over breakfast in the restaurant’s kitchen, this final image of unity within the family does not prefigure any immediate change in society at large. In contrast, Judy Wicks, owner of the White Dog Cafe, appears more confident about what can be accomplished long term at the main table. In the introduction to the White Dog Cafe Cookbook, which she coauthored with the restaurant’s chef Kevin von Klause, Wicks emphasizes that she is committed to “combining business with an agenda for social change.”26 Wicks is dedicated to raising awareness of social injustice and to promoting equality and inclusiveness. She is optimistic about her social and political agenda: The most joyful vision I can imagine is everyone in the world sitting at one big table, sharing in the Earth’s abundance and the beauty of each different face. I imagine walking into a restaurant and saying to the maitre d’, “Table for six billion, please!”27

The main table is emblematic of the social transformation that Wicks promotes. The subtitle of her cookbook speaks to Wicks’s commitment to an egalitarian society and to radical social reform: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia's Revolutionary Restaurant. One of the dangers in an inclusive society is that those who formerly were marginalized lose their individual and cultural identities. In “Epilogue,” Hughes anticipates a transformation that will create a unity that welcomes and respects diversity. In the following excerpt from the Preface of Colored People: A Memoir, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. desires a type of social transformation similar to that which Hughes describes. Gates employs a food reference to help illustrate his point: I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time—but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish.28

While these statements may project Gates’s ideal society, he confronts us with hard reality in the chapter appropriately entitled “In the Kitchen.” In contrast to Hughes, Gates depicts the kitchen, not as the site where the marginalized nourish and fortify their individual and cultural identities so that they can transform their oppressors, but rather as the place where the disenfranchised attempt to remake themselves into the image of those who reject them. In Gates’s memoir, the kitchen is the place where his mother straightened the hair of her black customers with a “red-hot iron” that “burned its way through damp kink.”29 It is the place where hair is

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“fried,”30 where, in an effort to be what they are not, the marginalized reduce themselves to prepared food. And yet there is something intrinsic to those who attempt to lose themselves, something that resists cultural assimilation. Gates calls it the “‘kitchen’”: It “is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of the head, where the neck meets the shirt collar.”31 Gates recalls that the “kitchen” resisted being straightened; it “was permanent, irredeemable, invincible kink. Unassimilably African.”32 Like its bodily counterpart, the hair or “‘kitchen’” at the lower part of the neck, the room called the kitchen, a place of low social status and exclusion, becomes by association a site of resistance where the marginalized, whether they intend to or not, remain irremediably at odds with mainstream culture, try as they may to join it. Similarly, in the film Big Night, the kitchen signals resistance to assimilation. While Secondo contends with a banker who plans to foreclose on Paradise and who, in assuming that the Italian immigrant speaks little English, treats him condescendingly; while the brothers’ competitor Pascal, who has bartered his soul to achieve the American Dream, seeks to facilitate the demise of the brothers’ restaurant; and while Secondo is tempted to succumb to the same fate as Pascal, Primo holds fast in the kitchen of Paradise where he creates native dishes and in the process asserts his individual and cultural identity. For Primo, the kitchen is not a place of exclusion and confinement; rather, it is the site of artistic expression and liberation. If Primo moves beyond his kitchen to accommodate himself to American society, he risks losing his very soul like Pascal. However, in resisting assimilation, he faces bankruptcy. The film suggests that the marginalized pay a price, no matter what course they pursue. While the kitchen marks the divide between the haves and have-nots and while it serves as a site of resistance to oppression and cultural assimilation, in some works, it assumes a privileged position. Primo’s kitchen in Big Night certainly has its own value and validity. So too do the kitchens about which Gloria Wade-Gayles writes in her essay “‘Laying On Hands’ through Cooking: Black Women’s Majesty and Mystery in Their Own Kitchens.” Her mother and other “black women like those in [WadeGayles’s] old community . . . took pride in their cooking and considered their own kitchens temples in which they prepared sacraments for family rituals.”33 The religious imagery elevates these black women to the level of priest and their kitchens to sacred spaces. Building on this motif, WadeGayles recalls that her mother prepared food that had healing power and speculates that this phenomenon resulted from the fact that, “for [her mother], cooking was a spiritual experience.”34 Wade-Gayles adds that the

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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction

galley. For the three officers on board, cooking has a therapeutic value: “They couldn’t remember themselves what they had done, in the days before they’d discovered the soothing art, and had dined on hamburgers like anyone else. But now the weeks were filled with a sense of purpose; and, indeed accomplishment.”100 Not only does cooking keep the officers from getting bored, it also generates a sense of worth that leads the men to value their lives as well as the lives of others. Their culinary duties also encourage teamwork and camaraderie: “Dinner [. . .] was multinational—the home-made ravioli done by Jim, who was so good at fiddly dishes; Persian chicken—the kind stuffed with ground mixed nuts and simmered—produced by the captain; and a French tarte aux poires, prepared by Timmy, who could produce a more delicate confectioners’ cream than anyone aboard.”101 The harmonious melding of multinational dishes and flavors offers the possibility that the nations that developed these dishes can peacefully coexist as well. In contrast to the variety of culinary delights prepared aboard the submarine, those on the base eat bland food that is easy to prepare. The difference in food quality is exemplified when the security guards check to make sure the liquid in the bottles Zelda brings to the submarine is not alcohol: “they put their fingers into the liquid and sucked and shuddered. Olive oil! Their wives still fried in lard, and used Heinz Salad Cream on the salad.”102 In contrast to the white lumps of grease, the viscous green olive oil is orgasmic. While Meg is slightly more ambitious in her cooking than the wives of the guards, the food she makes is still utilitarian: drop scones and cottage pie. The pie, in particular, contrasts with the champagne that Meg’s husband brings home to celebrate his return and her pregnancy. From Timmy’s point of view, the champagne is a pleasurable indulgence; from Meg’s it is “unbearably extravagant,” and she fails to appreciate it.103 The result of not pleasing the palate is that those on land are dissatisfied with their lives and think more about war than the crew. For example, Meg muses: “It’s all the men’s fault [. . .]. All the bombs and the missiles and the schemes and the theories and the rival forms of government, and they make believe that the way to solve things is to see who can blow each other up best: all male, male and angry and mad.”104 Ironically, it is Meg, a woman, who is so angry that she can imagine blowing up the world in order to get peace: “She was glad Thompson [the dog] was dead. She hoped the baby was dying too, and then herself. She wanted the world to end: if she could have ended it then and there she would have. Pressed the button, finished it all.”105 Timmy has the power to do what Meg can only wish, but he avoids using it. As the difference

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their position in society. Ultimately, the play subverts this image of the kitchen and its occupants. Mr. Hale voices the men’s attitude toward the women and their realm when he dismisses the imprisoned Mrs. Wright’s concern about her preserves by observing that “women are used to worrying over trifles.”39 However, the “kitchen things,” the “trifles,”40 that the men ignore are the key to unraveling the truth about Mr. Wright’s murder. By the end of the play, the kitchen and its contents, and by analogy the women who occupy this space, take on the privileged position. For Glaspell, the kitchen and the male-dominated spaces that circumscribe it remain separate from each other and at odds. While the men refuse to see the women and their sphere as more than “trifles,” the women never take the men into their confidence. Instead, the women withhold the evidence that they discover in the kitchen. The respect and appreciation that readers and viewers may gain for the kitchen and its occupants as they witness the women uncovering the truth are what the play’s patriarchal society must develop in order for any type of social change to occur. Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor promotes a virtual kitchen Renaissance in one of the two poems that concludes her autobiographical cookbook Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. In the poem titled “The Kitchen,” she pays homage to this space by opening with the line, “THE KITCHEN IS THE MOST IMPORTANT ROOM IN MY HOME.”41 She also calls attention to this often undervalued room and emphasizes its significance by capitalizing every letter of every word in the poem. For Smart-Grosvenor, the kitchen is where she does “EVERYTHING.”42 For example, in the kitchen, she eats, completes chores, visits with friends, and engages in creative work, such as writing her book. She even “TRIE[S] TO MOVE THE PIANO IN.”43 SmartGrosvenor notes that “SOMETIMES THERE IS SO MUCH HAPPENING IN THE KITCHEN”44 that she is unable to cook. Instead she must send for take-out. Moving beyond conventional ways of viewing the kitchen, Smart-Grosvenor presents it as central to our lives. The kitchen is not only a place where domestic needs are satisfied, but also it is a site that facilitates relationships with others, that fosters intellectual engagement and creativity, and that ensures freedom. Italian American writer Helen Barolini presents a similar view of the kitchen in the essay “Appetite Lost, Appetite Found.” Confessing that while she was “[g]rowing up” she “had deliberately stayed as far from [her] mother’s kitchen as [she] could” to avoid being reduced to “the stock figure Italian American woman,”45 Barolini describes her change of perspective, a change that occurred after “years and the women’s

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Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table

movement.”46 In writing Festa: Recipes and Reminiscences of Italian Holidays, her “autobiographical cookbook,” Barolini stresses that she “wanted to turn the so-called woman’s room (the kitchen) from a holding pen into what it really is—an embassy of cultural tradition.”47 Thus, she redirects our perspective and celebrates this sphere: The kitchen is not only the center of food making—it is the place from which emanate ritual and tradition and family history. From food—both in the making and in the partaking—not only body, but also mind and soul are nourished.48

The very title of the memoir and cookbook It Happened in the Kitchen: Recipes for Food and Thought, which Rose B. Nader coauthored with her daughter Nathra Nader, speaks to this space’s privileged place in her life and that of her family. For Rose Nader, the mother of social and political activist Ralph Nader, “[a] kitchen provides an atmosphere for human interaction. . . .”49 Moreover, like Langston Hughes in “Epilogue,” she views the kitchen as the starting point for social change. One of the lessons that she taught her children falls under the heading “You Should Care.”50 It is a lesson about “get[ting] interested in the community, about “civic initiative.”51 The key to this process is to empower her children and her readers “to trust in the ever-maturing value of [their] own judgment.”52 Nader originally intended to title her book “Use Your Own Judgment.”53 As she explains, By learning to use and expand your own judgment, it will grow and evolve far beyond the kitchen and family into the neighborhood and community as if to say “My style in life is not introverted, but looks outward from a position of stability and nurturing onto the world to which I want to contribute.” This integrated participation in life is the real significance of what happened in the kitchen as I was raising my family.54

In addition to her concern with “transmitting proper values and family experience,”55 Rose Nader raised awareness about “food and health, contaminants in the environment, the absence of attentiveness to children’s welfare in this country, nuclear war, and local needs such as maintaining a community hospital.”56 As the place where Nader articulates her philosophy of self-reliance and civic engagement, the kitchen becomes integral to the process of social transformation. Not only is the kitchen an important site for initiating social change, but also this space is emblematic of a better world. The book In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín contains a cookbook

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written by Jewish women of Terezín who, in creating the recipe collection, reimage the dystopian world of the concentration camp in which they were interned and exterminated. According to Cara De Silva, who edited and wrote the introduction to this collection of “about eighty recipes” assembled by inmate Mina Pächter, “the creation of such a cookbook was an act of psychological resistance, forceful testimony to the power of food to sustain us, not just physically but spiritually.”57 At the end of her introduction, De Silva quotes Mina Pächter’s daughter Anny Stern: “‘By sharing these recipes, I am honoring the thoughts of my mother and the others that somewhere and somehow, there must be a better world to live in.’”58 Indeed, through the cookbook, the women give us a glimpse of that better world. Unlike the concentration camp in which prisoners were separated from loved ones, marginalized in relation to mainstream society, deprived of freedom, malnourished, and ultimately reduced to ash in the ovens of the camp, the kitchens of the women of Terezín, which they visited through memory, were places where they preserved family history and cultural heritage through the recipes that they cooked, where families gathered and inclusiveness was the norm, where everyone freely came and went, where they were all well nourished, and where cooking was a creative process, not the destructive one to which the ovens of the concentration camp reduced it. At the conclusion of How to Cook a Wolf, M. F. K. Fisher writes, I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and everincreasing enjoyment.59

The women of Terezín were doing just that by returning in memory to their kitchens to gather the recipes for their cookbook. In the process, even though they might have been unaware of the broad-ranging implication of their work, they provided us with a model for social transformation. Sometimes social change involves maintaining two separate spheres: that of the kitchen and that of world beyond it. Paule Marshall and Eleanore Holveck portray the culture of the kitchen as more desirable than that of the mainstream culture that marginalizes them or, in Holveck’s case, that accepts them provisionally. Their doing so, however, does not imply that they are resigned to keeping the disenfranchised in an underprivileged position. In “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Marshall recalls that “[t]he basement kitchen of the brownstone house where [her] family lived was the usual gathering place”60 for the women in her community, immigrants from Barbados.

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Peterson, Shirley. 1996. “Freaking Feminism.” In Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, edited by Rosemarie Garland Thomson, 291-301. New York: New York University Press. Piercy, Marge. 1982. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” In Circles on the Water. New York: Knopf, 288. Review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon. 1967. Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 1967, 1438. Review of And the Wife Ran Away, by Fay Weldon. 1967. Publishers Weekly, December 11, 1967. 39. Russell, Lorena. 2000. “Dog-Women and She-Devils: The Queering Field of Monstrous Women.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5, no. 2: 177-93. Sage, Lorna. 1984. “Hell Hath No Fury. . .”. Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. The Observer, January 15, 1984. 48. Seidenbaum, Art. 1984.Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. 1984. Los Angeles Times, August 31, 1984. 20. “She-Devil and Other Valentines.” 1984. Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. Punch, February 8, 1984. 56. Sigal, Clancy. 1987. “Dinner’s at 8. When’s the Revolution?” Review of The Shrapnel Academy, by Fay Weldon. New York Times, April 26, 1987, 14. Smith, Patricia Juliana. 1995. “‘And I Wondered if She Might Kiss Me’: Lesbian Panic as Narrative Strategy in British Women’s Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3: 567-607. Stokes, Geoffrey. 1984. “Beyond Death and Taxes.” Review of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, by Fay Weldon. Vogue, September 570, 575. Walker, Nancy A. 1988. A Very Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Weldon, Fay. 2002. Auto Da Fay. London: Flamingo. —. 1972. Down Among the Women. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1991. —. 1997. “End of the Line.” In Wicked Women. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 3-61. —. 1967. The Fat Woman’s Joke. Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1995. —. 1987. The Heart of the Country. New York: Viking, 1988. —. 1999.Godless in Eden: A Book of Essays. London: Flamingo. —. 1984. I Love My Love. New York: Samuel French. —. 1990. Interview by Craig Gholson. BOMB 30 (): 45-47. —. 1984. Interview by Sybil Steinberg. Publishers Weekly 226: 83-84. —. 2000. Interview by Joanna Zylinska. Critical Survey 12, no. 3: 108-22. —. 1983. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

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a philosophical discourse that articulates this experience and that gives women a voice. Ironically, though she pays homage to Beauvoir and studies her methodology, Holveck invests the kitchen with a value and transformative capacity that Beauvoir in The Second Sex does not assign to it. Both Holveck and Marshall transform the kitchen into a site of women’s empowerment, creativity, and intellectual engagement. In the process, they deconstruct the all-inclusive main dining table as a model of social progress. A study of the dining experience that centers particularly on the kitchen and dining room/main table takes us beyond the literal meaning of food and eating to reveal the flaws in our social structure, to question our ethics, to re-envision the social order, to consider the problems in doing so, and to interrogate the efficacy of creating a society in which all members sit and participate at one main table. As some writers and thinkers suggest, two or more tables may indeed be better than one.

Works Cited Anthony II, Susan B. 1943. Out of the Kitchen—Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama. New York: Stephen Daye. Barolini, Helen. 2005. “Appetite Lost, Appetite Found.” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 228-37. Big Night. 1998. Dir. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott. Screenplay by Stanley Tucci and Joseph Tropiano. 1996. DVD. Columbia Tristar. De Silva, Cara. 1996. Introduction. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín. Ed. Cara De Silva. Trans. Bianca Steiner Brown. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Di Donato, Pietro. 1993. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet. Egerton, John. 1987. Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. New York: Knopf. Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Fisher, M. F. K. 1976. How to Cook a Wolf. The Art of Dining. New York: Vintage. 185-350. Gates, Jr, Henry Louis. 1994. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf. Glaspell, Susan. 2005. Trifles. The Bedford Introduction to Drama. Ed Lee A. Jacobus. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 911-18. Haber, Barbara. 2005. “Follow the Food.” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking.

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Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 65-74. Holveck, Eleanore. 1995. “Can a Woman Be a Philosopher? Reflections of a Beauvoirian Housemaid.” Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir. Ed. Margaret A. Simons. University Park: Penn State University Press. 67-78. Hughes, Langston. 2001. “Epilogue.” The Poems, 1921-1940. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 61-62. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Gen. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. 16 vols. 2001-04. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 2005. “Restaurant.” The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. 883. Marshall, Paule. 1983. “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Reena and Other Stories. New York: Feminist Press. 3-12. Nader, Rose B., and Nathra Nader. 1991. It Happened in the Kitchen: Recipes for Food and Thought. Washington, D.C.: Center for Study of Responsive Law. Piercy, Marge. 2005. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 111. Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. 1986. Vibration Cooking or The Travel Notes of a Geeche Girl. New York: Ballantine. Wade-Gayles, Gloria. 2005. “‘Laying On Hands’ through Cooking: Black Women’s Majesty and Mystery in Their Own Kitchens.” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg, 95-103. Wicks, Judy, and Kevin von Klause. 1998. White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Restaurant. Philadelphia, Running Press.

Notes 1

Egerton, John. 1987. Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History New York: Knopf. 3. 2 Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 211. 3 Haber, Barbara. 2005. “Follow the Food,” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 69.

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Kingston, Maxine Hong. 2005. “Restaurant,” The Bedford Introduction to Literature, ed. Michael Meyer, 7th ed. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. 883. 5 Ibid. 6 Di Donato, Pietro. 1993. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet. 199. 7 Anthony, II, Susan B. 1943. Out of the Kitchen—Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama. New York: Stephen Daye. 244. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 246. 10 Marshall, Paule. 1983. “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen,” Reena and Other Stories. New York: Feminist Press. 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Piercy, Marge. 2005. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 111. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Hughes, Langston. 2001. “Epilogue,” The Poems, 1921-1940, ed. Arnold Rampersad. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 61, vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, gen. ed. Arnold Rampersad, 16 vols. 2001-04. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 62. 24 Ibid., 61. 25 Ibid., 62. 26 Wicks, Judy, and Kevin von Klause. 1998. White Dog Cafe Cookbook: Multicultural Recipes and Tales of Adventure from Philadelphia’s Revolutionary Restaurant. Philadelphia: Running Press. 23. 27 Ibid., 21. 28 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1994. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf. xv. 29 Ibid., 41. 30 Ibid., 45. 31 Ibid., 42. 32 Ibid. 33 Wade-Gayles, Gloria. 2005. “‘Laying On Hands’ through Cooking: Black Women’s Majesty and Mystery in Their Own Kitchens,” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 96. 34 Ibid., 98. 35 Ibid., 98-99. 36 Ibid., 100.

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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction

Ibid., 44. Ibid., 47. 34 Ibid., 66-67. 35 Piercy, Marge. 1982. “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” in Circles on the Water. New York: Knopf. 288. 36 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 72. The title of one of the chapters in The Feminine Mystique--“Housewifery Expands to Fill the Time Available”--mirrors Esther’s contention that housework is simply to fill time. 37 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 72. 38 Regina Barreca. 1994. Untamed and Unabashed: Essays on Women and Humor in British Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 22. For more on the role humor plays in Weldon’s fiction see Barreca’s Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy, Krouse, Hebert, and Kenyon. For broader discussions of feminist humor, see Walker and Little. 39 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 73. 40 Ibid., 73-74. 41 Ibid., 72. 42 Weldon, 1991. Down. 74. 43 Weldon. 1967. FWJ. 33. 44 Ibid., 21. 45 Ibid., 22. 46 Ibid., 112. 47 Ibid., 112, 113. 48 Ibid., 51. 49 Ibid., 9. 50 Ibid., 103. 51 Ibid., 139. 52 Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue...The Anti-Diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss. New York: Paddington Press. 18. 53 I look primarily at reviews because there is no academic criticism contemporary to Weldon’s first novel. The novel was discussed in detail for the first time in Agate Nesuale Krouse’s “Feminism and Art in Fay Weldon’s Novels” which was published in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction in 1978. This article and subsequent criticism tend to mention The Fat Woman’s Joke in order to emphasize Weldon’s growth as a writer since the publication of her first novel. There is a considerable amount of criticism on The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, but like that about The Fat Woman’s Joke, most of it came out a decade or more after the book’s publication and does not discuss food. Instead, it mainly focuses on Weldon’s deconstruction of the romance narrative and gender conventions (see Becker, Young, Dubino, Hebert, Alexander, Cane, and Smith) and her use of the gothic or grotesque (see Peterson, Martin, and Russell). 54 Wordsworth, Christopher. 1967. “Neither Loved Nor Lynched,” review of The Fat Woman’s Joke, by Fay Weldon, Manchester Guardian, August 31, 1967: 5. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 33

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Ibid. Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 74. 73

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BREADCRUMBS OF GRACE, BIRDSONGS OF JOY: EMILY DICKINSON’S GIFTS ANNE RAMIREZ

Emily Dickinson frequently employs the image of breadcrumbs to represent precious morsels of grace that she humbly receives—or generously offers to others. Throughout her life and art, bread seems both literally and metaphorically significant. One of the best-known of Thomas W. Higginson’s recollections of the poet is her declaration that she baked the family’s bread and that her father would eat no other (1891), even though she often refers to other domestic tasks as burdensome. After her father’s death, Dickinson affectionately recalled his stepping out into the snow in his slippers one cold morning to scatter grain for hungry birds, later adding that the rescued birds were still singing outside her door and asking that her cousins spare a crumb or crust of love for the sparrows (Letter 442). As Vivian Pollak (1990) notes, more than a tenth of Dickinson’s poems contain images of food and drink; and Midori Ando (1998) points out that she mentions at least fifty specific birds in addition to more general bird references, both literal and figurative. Several critics have discussed Dickinson’s treatment of each of these topics, but given little attention to her synthesis of them in numerous poems. In some cases her treasured bread crumbs of grace are very hardly won and hence the more precious, while in other poems a “Lady” offers crumbs to a bird, whose grateful singing suggests that the poet identifies with both bird and benefactor. Seen in this larger context, Dickinson’s repeated use of bread imagery contributes to her unique amalgamation of traditional sacramental language with her daily life and her literary vocation. As the poet-critic Richard Wilbur (1960) whimsically opened his classic essay “Sumptuous Destitution”: “At some point Emily Dickinson sent her whole Calvinist vocabulary into exile, telling it not to come back until it would subserve her own sense of things.” He went on to note her repeated assertion “that privation is more plentiful than plenty; that to

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renounce is to possess the more,” a paradox further explored by Vivian Pollak (1990) and Jane Donahue Eberwein, (1985) among others. Pollak observes that the poet’s “food and drink imagery . . . describes a cycle of deprivation, self-deprivation, and attempted self-sustenance” by means of “the ideal constructs of her imagination.” Similarly, Eberwein explains that one of Dickinson’s strategies was a stern “determination to tailor her wants to possibilities, to cultivate minimal hopes”— as in Fr135/J159 in which the speaker affirms that “a little Bread—a Crust—a crumb” is adequate for survival in this world of time. Eberwein aphoristically adds that “loss became for Dickinson an instigator of appreciation” and concedes that metaphorical hunger and thirst “could and often did turn Dickinson’s mind toward heaven and its wished-for lasting values,” but also motivated her expression of “violent reactions to pent-up hope. The poet’s imagery of breadcrumbs supports Eberwein’s perception that Rather than substituting literature for religion, she used its resources as instruments of her own religious development. Despite her many deprivations, she had received gifts as well—chief among them being the verbal fluency and imagination that had been her delight since childhood.

As both literary and religious artifact, the Bible was a very major influence on Dickinson’s search for “her own sense of things.” In Cynthia Wolff’s valuable discussion (1986) of the importance of Christ’s Last Supper to Dickinson’s culture, she notes that the specific elements of bread, wine, and water are predominant in the poet’s food and drink imagery. It is noteworthy, however, that the word “crumb” appears more often than “bread” in Dickinson’s work. Perhaps another literary inspiration for such imagery is the story of the Gentile mother whose daughter is healed by Jesus, as recounted in Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28. (All quotations herein are from the King James or Authorized Version of the Bible). Strangely, Jesus at first ignores and then indirectly rejects the mother’s pleas in behalf of her daughter who lies at home tormented by a demon. Yet the woman firmly refuses to be diverted from her purpose even when Jesus says it is not right to cast the children's bread to the dogs. With an audacity akin to some of Dickinson's personae, she responds: "Truth, Lord, but the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table." In effect, she tells him he may call her anything he likes, if only he will cure her beloved daughter. Impressed by her quick-witted reply, Jesus at last answers her prayer: "For this saying, your daughter is healed."

MARGINALIZATION, INCLUSION, AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: THE POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KITCHEN AND AT THE DINING TABLE RITA COLANZI

In Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, John Egerton argues: To learn what has gone on in the kitchen and the dining room—and what still goes on there—is to discover much about a society’s physical health, its economic condition, its race relations, its class structure, and the status of its women.1

Similarly, Peter Farb and George Armelagos argue in their book Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating that “to know what, where, how, when, and with whom people eat is to know the character of their society.”2 In regard to American society, we will explore some of these aspects of the dining experience, particularly the primary sites where we come in contact with food: the kitchen and the dining room/main table. In the process, we will gain insight into the ethics and politics of inclusion versus exclusion as they impact the lives of women and minorities. We also will observe how these dining spaces reconceive the social order, whether to offer us a vision of an all-inclusive society, to express resistance to any type of inclusion or assimilation that would involve the loss of the marginalized group’s cultural identity, or to propose that the disenfranchised gather at their own table, where they may nourish themselves creatively, intellectually, and spiritually and position their table to be an alternative to the one ruled by those who hold power and privilege. As Barbara Haber bids us in her essay of the same name, “follow the food.”3 In writing about groups who have been marginalized because of their race or their ethnicity, the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston and the Italian American author Pietro Di Donato depict the kitchen as site and symbol of the marginalization. The speaker of the

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Whether or not Dickinson was familiar with this prayer, this humble gratitude for the smallest crumb of God’s grace is similarly emphasized by Thomas a Kempis in The Imitation of Christ (Rpt. 1955), a fifteenthcentury spiritual classic that Martha Dickinson Bianchi listed among the few select volumes kept on the poet’s bedroom mantel. In Book IV “Which Treats Especially of the Sacrament of the Altar,” Thomas a Kempis exclaims: O my Lord Jesus, trusting in your goodness and mercy, I come to you as a sick man comes to him who will heal him, and as a hungry and thirsty man to the Fountain of Life. . . . But how is it that you come to me? . . . You know your servant and you see well that he has no goodness of himself for which you should give him this grace. I confess, therefore, my own unworthiness and I acknowledge your goodness. . . . Truly, You do all this from your own goodness and not because of my merit. . . .O, my soul, be merry and glad for so noble a gift and so singular a comfort left to you in this vale of misery.

Although Dickinson did not attend church or receive the communion sacrament for much of her life, her knowledge of such precedents within established Christian tradition may have influenced similar themes discernible within her poetry. In “A little bread—a crust—a crumb,” cited earlier, the speaker’s tone is surprisingly reassuring, even jubilant. A little bread, “a little trust” is enough to “keep the soul alive,” if not “portly,” until “the neighboring life!” Our attention should be where we are bound; “A sailor’s business is the shore!” An even earlier poem, and one of her best known, “These are the days when Birds come back” (Fr135/J130), illustrates the speaker’s sense of identification with the birds who have paused to enjoy the “last supper” of Indian summer. Invariably many students are deceived by the opening line of the poem, at first thinking it refers to spring, precisely as the speaker is almost deceived by the “blue and gold” of the warm autumn day. Addressing the soon-departing summer as Host, she cries out to join in the feast, “Thy consecrated bread to taste / And thine immortal wine!” The winter Dickinson always dreads inevitably comes, both in nature and in human life. Upon the death of her beloved Aunt Lavinia Norcross, Emily sent her bereaved cousins Louise and Fannie the following poem (Fr 528/J335): Tis not that Dying hurts us so— The living hurts us more— But Dying—is a different way—

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Breadcrumbs of Grace, Birdsongs of Joy: Emily Dickinson’s Gifts A kind behind the Door— The Southern Custom—of the Bird— That ere the Frosts are due— Accepts a better Latitude— We are the Birds that stay— The Shiverers round Farmer’s doors— For whose reluctant Crumb— We stipulate—till pitying Snows Persuade our Feathers home.

Here Dickinson gently observes that dying, the going home, is less painful than living without the departed loved one. She and her cousins are the birds who stay behind, shivering in the cold like those fed by her father in one of those moments indicating a compassionate heart beneath Edward Dickinson’s stern exterior. Although the tone is completely different from that of “A little Bread,” there is again the suggestion that if crumbs are all that can be had, they will suffice for the time being. Dickinson also uses bread imagery in one of her most analyzed poems, “I had been hungry all the years” (Fr439/J579), describing the difficulty of adjusting to the change from privation to plenty. At last bidden to dine, the speaker . . . trembling drew the Table near, And touched the Curious Wine— ............... ............ .. I did not know the ample Bread— ‘Twas so unlike the Crumb The Birds and I, had often shared In Nature’s Dining Room— The Plenty hurt me—‘twas so new— Myself felt ill— and odd— As Berry—of a Mountain Bush Transplanted—to the Road—

The speaker is no longer hungry as she was when gazing through windows at the full tables of other households, an excellent example of Dickinson’s paradoxical embracing of deprivation. In this case, instead of directly identifying with the birds, the speaker describes them as comrades sharing a “Crumb” with her in “Nature’s Dining Room,”—once again suggesting some shared fulfillment from this seemingly sparse repast.

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Several critics have commented on Dickinson’s echoes of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), another modest heroine who compares herself to a bird, and this particular poem is strikingly close to Jane’s discomfort upon being showered with unaccustomed good fortune: "I again felt rather like an individual of but average gastronomical powers sitting down to feast alone at a table spread with provisions for a hundred." Another poem, Fr 872/J773, makes a slightly different use of food imagery that would be almost equally characteristic of Jane Eyre: Deprived of other Banquet, I entertained Myself— At first—a scant nutrition – An insufficient Loaf— But grown by slender addings To so esteemed a size ‘Tis sumptuous enough for me— And almost to suffice A Robin’s famine—able— Red Pilgrim, He and I— A Berry from our table Reserve—for Charity—

Gradually, the speaker contrives to reform many crumbs into a loaf “sumptuous enough” for herself and a robin as well, allowing them to spare a bit of food for others in greater need. Thus, we begin to see a developing continuum of such poems, wherein the speaker is no longer merely a supplicant but also a dispenser of gifts, with some measure of control over her situation. Curiously, the speaker’s fulfillment sometimes seems to come through creating or preserving bread rather than from eating it, a motif also developed in Fr 748/J791: God gave a Loaf to every Bird— But just a Crumb—to Me— I dare not eat it—tho’ I starve— My poignant luxury—

Perhaps because this poem was enclosed in a letter to the Norcross cousins, Emily was unusually explicit in declaring that the mere possession of her “Crumb” makes her sovereign over the so-called “Rich” who may never know her happiness. As Doriani (1996) explains, “Her

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Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table

women both the boundaries of marriage and their lack of opportunity in the world at large. Ironically, in refusing to comply with the stereotype of the dutiful wife who aims to please her husband, the woman whose life is “cooked and digested”16 retaliates by using the kitchen as her base of operation and the food and equipment as weapons. Others of her sex likewise engage in battle: “All over America women are burning / food they’re supposed to bring with calico / smile on platters glittering like wax.”17 As Piercy reveals, the housewife desires to transform her spouse into food, no doubt to cannibalize the husband who devours her life. Alternatively, she imagines feeding him a meal that is the antithesis of the gourmet dish with which he once equated her. Not only would the meal she concocted be even more debased than the “Spam” into which her husband eventually reduced her, but also it would be deadly: If she wants to grill anything, it’s her husband spitted over a slow fire. If she wants to serve him anything it’s a dead rat with a bomb in its belly18

According to Piercy, the woman’s “[a]nger sputters in her brainpan, confined / but spewing out missiles of hot fat.”19 The comparison of the housewife’s brain to a kitchen pan emphasizes how her intellectual life is circumscribed by her social situation. So too is her emotional life. While on the attack and potentially lethal, her anger is confined within the pan on the stove and within the walls of the kitchen. Nonetheless, the rebellion that brews in the kitchen is a wake-up call for change. Piercy concludes the poem by emphasizing that “[b]urning dinner is not incompetence but war.”20 The speaker of Langston Hughes's poem “Epilogue” initiates peacefully a process of transformation within the space of the kitchen to which he is banished. The speaker reveals that the privileged members of the household send him, their “darker brother,” to the kitchen “[w]hen company comes.”21 Their excluding him from the main dining table testifies to the racism within the house that is America. Hughes suggests in the poem that the best response to oppression and discrimination is not to give in to self-defeat but to “eat well, / And grow strong.”22 On the figurative level, the eating represents a process of self-transformation. In not allowing himself to be defined by those who reject him as unworthy and repulsive, in asserting his value through his plan of self-realization, in proclaiming “I, too, am America,”23 the speaker of “Epilogue” will prompt those family members who ostracize him to have an epiphany. According to the speaker, there will come a “Tomorrow”24 when he will join at table

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adoration of “Him whom never Ragged – Coat/ did supplicate in vain”—a significant tribute from a poet who at other times expresses skepticism about God’s mercy. It is not the purpose of this article to take any firm stand on the vexed question of coherence within Dickinson’s fascicles. Although it seems worth noting that occasional poems with similar food imagery do appear in the same fascicle, it must also be noted that motifs of bread, crumbs, hunger, and fulfillment recur throughout the poet’s entire canon, without a clearly consistent pattern or order. However, certain bits of verse jotted on various scraps of paper relatively late in her career read very like mature reflections on the themes of much earlier poems. For example, Fr1106/J1077 (“These are the Signs to Nature’s Inns”) confidently affirms that Nature welcomes “Whosoever famishing / To taste her mystic Bread,” balancing the anxious longing of the speaker in “These are the days the Birds come back,” to taste the last of the summer’s “consecrated Bread” and “Immortal Wine.” Fr 1291/J1240 observes that “the Beggar at the Door for Fame / Were easily supplied,” but “Bread is that Diviner thing” much “harder to obtain.” Echoing this theme is Fr 1404/J1382, in which ‘Joy,” so often associated with bread in Dickinson’s imagination, comes and goes unexpectedly—a gift of grace unasked and unearned, so profound that it leaves behind a “sumptuous Destitution” (the phrase that caught Richard Wilbur’s attention). This quiet acceptance of the elusive nature of happiness suggests an inner strength developing over a lifetime. But Emily Dickinson always has another paradox lying in wait for her readers, for one of her most memorable references to bread crumbs appears in the relatively early Fr 314/J254, a particularly evocative poem celebrating the gallantry of a bird who “perches in the soul” and never pauses in its song to ask for a crumb at all: “Hope” is the thing with feathers— That perches—in the soul— And sings the tune without the words— And never stops—at all— And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard— And sore must be the storm— That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm— I’ve heard it in the chillest land— And on the strangest Sea—

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Breadcrumbs of Grace, Birdsongs of Joy: Emily Dickinson’s Gifts Yet—never—in Extremity, It asked a crumb— of me.

At the opposite extreme from the Gentile mother in the Gospels who finally is granted her “crumbs of bread” through sheer persistence, the speaker in “”Hope’ is the thing with feathers” is apparently without obligation to ask for the bird’s song or to give anything in return. But is Dickinson identifying this time with the listener or with the bird? This poem is perhaps more richly ambiguous than any of her others that integrate such imagery. From the first line, it is clear that the bird is metaphorical, symbolizing the abstraction of “Hope,” enclosed in quotation marks as though to imply it might well be called something else. Instead of a literal robin shivering outside her window, this bird dwells within the speaker’s soul, singing a wordless tune. With astounding courage, the bird refuses to be silenced by storms and difficulties, but continues to sing in the most inhospitable conditions so that listeners are “kept . . . warm.” Its unselfishness is epitomized in the affirmation that it “never” asks a “Crumb” in return, yet it does not starve. By the third stanza, the reader might well be so absorbed in the conceit as to forget the bird is figuratively within the speaker herself. Yet this paradox of the inward grace that is revealed through outward means in fact has a precedent—in the traditional communion sacrament, wherein the crumb of bread symbolically enables Host and communicant to become one, like Dickinson’s bird and listener. The speaker’s soul hears “the tune without the words” and creates the poem itself, fitted to the melody within. Dickinson’s gracious bird who ceaselessly bestows its blessings without expecting return bears some resemblance to the dove traditionally symbolizing the Holy Spirit, described by Jesus as the Comforter or Sustainer who would come to his followers after he ascended into heaven. This interpretation of Dickinson’s ambiguous “thing with feathers” does not claim to be the only acceptable reading, but it seems surprising that critics do not appear to have considered it as a possibility. As the Romantic poet John Keats was a favorite of Dickinson’s, it is also possible that such imagery owes something to his famous words in “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Dickinson’s imagery of the hidden music heard by the speaker who attempts to reproduce it becomes even more explicit in the rarely discussed Fr378/J503: Better—than Music! For I—who heard it—

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I was used—to the Birds—before— This—was different—'Twas Translation— Of all tunes I knew—and more—

In uncharacteristic tetrameter rhythm conveying breathless excitement, the speaker affirms that she is "telling a tune" she herself has heard, a melody surpassing the music of the institutional Church. The poem concludes: Let me not spill—its smallest cadence— Humming—for promise—when alone— Humming—until my faint Rehearsal— Drop into tune—around the Throne—

It must be granted that Dickinson’s poems also convey the wintry moods of doubt and loneliness, when she perhaps saw herself in the position of the shivering birds for whom Edward Dickinson scattered grain but from whom he hid to watch them partake of their meager repast. Nonetheless, throughout her career, Dickinson returns over and over to the prophetic persona who is always expectant, always waiting in readiness for the next bars of melody, the next sip of sacred wine, the next breadcrumb of grace that will be transformed into poetry. The gifts she receives are refashioned into the gifts she offers to the world, as she explains in Fr1129/J1109: I fit for them— I seek the Dark With this sufficient sweet That abstinence of mine produce A purer food for them, if I succeed....

Whether viewed as dramatic creation or an aspect of the poet's real self, Dickinson's prophet persona derives her authority from a central metaphorical relationship and reaches out to others through artistic expression. To portray this chain of relationships, Emily Dickinson draws upon her reading of the Bible and other literature for her imagery of host and guest, giving and receiving, sacramental celebration and the sharing of good news. As Dickinson made bread to nourish the body and poetry to nourish the soul, each creative activity became a metaphor for the other. Even this figure of speech was available to her from the Bible, where Jesus compares the “kingdom of heaven” to “leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened” (Matt.

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“fried,”30 where, in an effort to be what they are not, the marginalized reduce themselves to prepared food. And yet there is something intrinsic to those who attempt to lose themselves, something that resists cultural assimilation. Gates calls it the “‘kitchen’”: It “is the very kinky bit of hair at the back of the head, where the neck meets the shirt collar.”31 Gates recalls that the “kitchen” resisted being straightened; it “was permanent, irredeemable, invincible kink. Unassimilably African.”32 Like its bodily counterpart, the hair or “‘kitchen’” at the lower part of the neck, the room called the kitchen, a place of low social status and exclusion, becomes by association a site of resistance where the marginalized, whether they intend to or not, remain irremediably at odds with mainstream culture, try as they may to join it. Similarly, in the film Big Night, the kitchen signals resistance to assimilation. While Secondo contends with a banker who plans to foreclose on Paradise and who, in assuming that the Italian immigrant speaks little English, treats him condescendingly; while the brothers’ competitor Pascal, who has bartered his soul to achieve the American Dream, seeks to facilitate the demise of the brothers’ restaurant; and while Secondo is tempted to succumb to the same fate as Pascal, Primo holds fast in the kitchen of Paradise where he creates native dishes and in the process asserts his individual and cultural identity. For Primo, the kitchen is not a place of exclusion and confinement; rather, it is the site of artistic expression and liberation. If Primo moves beyond his kitchen to accommodate himself to American society, he risks losing his very soul like Pascal. However, in resisting assimilation, he faces bankruptcy. The film suggests that the marginalized pay a price, no matter what course they pursue. While the kitchen marks the divide between the haves and have-nots and while it serves as a site of resistance to oppression and cultural assimilation, in some works, it assumes a privileged position. Primo’s kitchen in Big Night certainly has its own value and validity. So too do the kitchens about which Gloria Wade-Gayles writes in her essay “‘Laying On Hands’ through Cooking: Black Women’s Majesty and Mystery in Their Own Kitchens.” Her mother and other “black women like those in [WadeGayles’s] old community . . . took pride in their cooking and considered their own kitchens temples in which they prepared sacraments for family rituals.”33 The religious imagery elevates these black women to the level of priest and their kitchens to sacred spaces. Building on this motif, WadeGayles recalls that her mother prepared food that had healing power and speculates that this phenomenon resulted from the fact that, “for [her mother], cooking was a spiritual experience.”34 Wade-Gayles adds that the

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Works Cited Ando, Midori. 1998. “Birds.” An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia. Ed. Jane Donahue Eberwein. Westport: Greenwood Press. 22-23. Bianchi, Martha Dickinson. Circa 1935. "The Books of Revelation." Appendix A, Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, by Barton Levi St. Armand. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984: 299-305. Bronte, Charlotte. 1847. Jane Eyre. New York: Bantam Press, 1987. Dickinson, Emily. 1958. Letters. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press. —. 1955. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press. —. 1998. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. 3 vols. Ed. Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge: Belknap-Harvard University Press. Doriani, Beth Maclay. 1996. Emily Dickinson, Daughter of Prophecy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Eberwein, Jane Donahue. 1985. Dickinson: Strategies of Limitation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Farr, Judith, ed. 1996. Emily Dickinson: A Collection of Critical Essays. New Century Views 12. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall Press. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. 1891. “Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” The Atlantic Monthly 68: 444-56. Lerner, Gerda. 1993. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press. Pollak, Vivian R. 1990. “Thirst and Starvation in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” Farr. 62-75. “Prayer of Humble Access, The.” 1662. The Book of Common Prayer, . Thomas a Kempis. 1955. The Imitation of Christ. Ed. Harold C. Gardner. Garden City: Doubleday-Image. Wilbur, Richard. 1960. “Sumptuous Destitution.” Farr. 53-61. Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. 1986. Emily Dickinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Publishers. Woolf, Virginia. 1927. To the Lighthouse. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

DINING WELL: FOOD, IDENTITY, AND WOMEN’S TRAVEL NARRATIVES JANE WOOD

The title of Elizabeth Gilbert’s travel narrative, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia, begins tellingly with the word “eat.” This popular travel narrative traces Gilbert’s emotional collapse and subsequent search for meaning in the post-modern world and yet her title begins with food. Alice Steinbach, in her travel narrative, Without Reservations: the Travels of an Independent Woman, also begins her story with a reference to dining. In Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World, Rita Golden Gelman comes to a gentle understanding of her size; her title reflects the double meaning of her weight in the world as well as her choice to live with gusto internationally. Finally, Ruth Reichl’s text, Comfort Me With Apples, differs slightly in that the narrative centers on food, with travel highlighting those experiences, but, nonetheless, her title puts food front and center. The complex relationship between women and food is intricate and obviously gendered; in western dominant culture, the responsibility for feeding of the body, both self and others, traditionally resides in the women’s sphere. Women often grow, shop for and prepare food for their families and communities. A substantial amount of feminist investigation into the relationship between women’s identity and their bodies reveals that women in westernized culture often feel disconnected from their bodies; they feed others but starve the self.1 Gilbert, Gelman, Reichl, and Steinbach travel, respectively, to discover, feed, and comfort the “self” both physically and spiritually. Their external travels create internal departures from restrictive boundaries. Significantly, all four of these writers are mid-aged women and have money of their own, but initially they hesitate to dine alone. Through their social displacement as the “outsider” in foreign cultures, these women map new concepts of identity that shape a more confident self “at home” and in the world. Alice Steinbach begins Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman with Zora Neale Hurston’s quote “There are years

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that ask questions and years that answer.”2 A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, the mid-aged Steinbach questions the direction of her life: She “was entering a new phase of my life, one that caused me to rethink its direction. My sons had graduated from college . . . the house felt quiet and empty. . . . At times I felt my identity was narrowing down to one thing— being a reporter. What you need to do, a voice inside me said, is to step out and experience the world . . . . After fifteen years of writing stories about other people, you need to get back into the narrative of your own life (xv-xvi). Steinbach’s desire to unravel or to discover a partially buried identity echoes many western women’s sentiments. Indeed, in “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question,” Carol Lazzaro-Weis points to the complication of unraveling female identity as a singular “I” when “women play multiple roles as part of the strategy to subvert the self imposed upon them from the outside and to move toward the development of an autonomous female identity.”3 To term Steinbach’s decision to leave her job and travel for a year a “mid-life crisis” does not accurately depict her grounded certainty that she needs a route for rediscovering the self. Maria Hanna Makowiecka, investigating themes of departure in women’s travel narratives, finds that “[b]oundaries of travel raise the questions of how plausible the fictive geographies are. Writing is . . . a departure/withdrawal from convention and an act of self-creation.”4 Steinbach leaves the security and success of her current life in order to self-create in a country where the mores of her given life do not apply. Like many Americans before her, Steinbach begins her travels in Paris. She writes, “[f]or weeks I had imagined my first day in Paris: I could see myself sipping a citron presse at the Flore, a famous Saint-Germain café.”5 Understandably, she imagines herself at a sidewalk café, enjoying the opportunity to be served (nourished) and cared for at the same time experiencing the “pulsing street life of Paris.”6 Steinbach sees herself as having physical and metaphorical space in Paris, contradicting the gender norms of women, like Odysseus’s Penelope, who waited patiently at home for her husband’s return. The notion that “man travels, woman remains at home as the point of departure and the anticipated destination of his travel”7 turns upside down as Steinbach initiates her own wanderings. Like Odysseus, who encounters many temptations, Steinbach meets a man, Naohiro, who is Japanese, and with whom she begins a romantic relationship. Naohiro’s ethnicity intrigues Steinbach and this attraction culminates in a Vietnamese restaurant in Paris called “Tan Dinh.” American Steinbach dines in Paris with a Japanese man at a Vietnamese restaurant. This “doubling” up of “outsider” status allows Steinbach to

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Marginalization, Inclusion, and Social Transformation: The Politics of Food in the Kitchen and at the Dining Table

movement.”46 In writing Festa: Recipes and Reminiscences of Italian Holidays, her “autobiographical cookbook,” Barolini stresses that she “wanted to turn the so-called woman’s room (the kitchen) from a holding pen into what it really is—an embassy of cultural tradition.”47 Thus, she redirects our perspective and celebrates this sphere: The kitchen is not only the center of food making—it is the place from which emanate ritual and tradition and family history. From food—both in the making and in the partaking—not only body, but also mind and soul are nourished.48

The very title of the memoir and cookbook It Happened in the Kitchen: Recipes for Food and Thought, which Rose B. Nader coauthored with her daughter Nathra Nader, speaks to this space’s privileged place in her life and that of her family. For Rose Nader, the mother of social and political activist Ralph Nader, “[a] kitchen provides an atmosphere for human interaction. . . .”49 Moreover, like Langston Hughes in “Epilogue,” she views the kitchen as the starting point for social change. One of the lessons that she taught her children falls under the heading “You Should Care.”50 It is a lesson about “get[ting] interested in the community, about “civic initiative.”51 The key to this process is to empower her children and her readers “to trust in the ever-maturing value of [their] own judgment.”52 Nader originally intended to title her book “Use Your Own Judgment.”53 As she explains, By learning to use and expand your own judgment, it will grow and evolve far beyond the kitchen and family into the neighborhood and community as if to say “My style in life is not introverted, but looks outward from a position of stability and nurturing onto the world to which I want to contribute.” This integrated participation in life is the real significance of what happened in the kitchen as I was raising my family.54

In addition to her concern with “transmitting proper values and family experience,”55 Rose Nader raised awareness about “food and health, contaminants in the environment, the absence of attentiveness to children’s welfare in this country, nuclear war, and local needs such as maintaining a community hospital.”56 As the place where Nader articulates her philosophy of self-reliance and civic engagement, the kitchen becomes integral to the process of social transformation. Not only is the kitchen an important site for initiating social change, but also this space is emblematic of a better world. The book In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín contains a cookbook

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divorce, does not define herself as an independent woman. In fact, when she first begins her travels she agonizes about dining alone. She feels inadequate and lapses into self-pity. She eschews dinner and pines in her hotel room until morning. The narrative opens in this manner in order to draw attention to the strong, confident woman who emerges post-travel. Rita Felski describes this type of transformation as a self-discovery narrative: [t]he protagonist moves away from a corrupt society, undergoes some form of powerful transfiguration or illumination of consciousness in exceptional circumstances and must decide whether or not to return to the community to pass on this knowledge. In all cases, however, self-discovery, whatever its ultimate consequences, is represented as a coming to consciousness of a latent female self.14

If, as Felski asserts, that escaping from the private sphere of “home” allows a protagonist to “test” herself against experiences that will then allow her to see boundaries of gender and identity with more clarity, then the importance of travel opportunities becomes an important way to discover a submerged self. Her divorce final, Gelman tells her reader as she leaves for Guatemala, “[b]ut I’m not running away. I’m running toward . . .toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity.”15 Like Steinbach, Gelman wants to create a new identity, combining the fragments of self that she wishes to retain with newly discovered skills and traits that she will acquire through her journeys. Judith Butler calls this “fashioning of self,” or the creation of a chosen self, a type of gender performance. Butler asserts that “[i]f that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the ‘integrity’ of the subject.”16 Thus, if gender can be defined as a performance, and patterns of repeated performance defines identity, then identity is fluid and can be changed, or redefined by a fresh patterning that may or may not instill the same gendered meanings. In Bali, Gelman bonds with native women by helping with the funeral foods. Gelman narrates: All day for three days, there are women sitting in groups, weaving the offerings, peeling shallots and garlic, making coconut milk by grating hundreds of coconuts and soaking the bits in water and finally squeezing the ‘milk’ out of the shredded ‘meat.’ I peel the shallots with the shallot peelers.17

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Butler might argue that through this repetitive performance Gelman is defining self. Though she has generally “done her own cooking,”18 she has not cooked in order to placate the spirit world on behalf of a dead friend, as she does now. Indeed, if as Butler posits, “the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the spatial metaphor of a `ground’ will be displaced” and the “ground” or “the foundation of identity building becomes amorphous.”19 Gelman cooks with the women because she is female, but she engages in ardent spiritual discussions with the Balinese men. She travels between traditional gender roles in Bali, in what Makowiecka calls the “nexus between the valorized feminine subject and the notion of a traveling woman—a woman as the subject of movement cannot be easily essentialized.”20 In Gelman’s narrative, her status as a “traveling woman” allows her to cook with the women, but to dine with the men. Gelman closes her travel narrative where she began: with a return to the U.S. Felski speaks of the work of self-discovery as circular: [i]dentity is not a goal to be worked toward . . . , but a point of origin, an authentic and whole subjectivity from which the protagonist has become estranged; the protagonist’s journey is a circular one in which the destination coincides with the starting point.21

Through her voyage of discovery, Gelman mapped out a path of selfdiscovery that ultimately led her home, with a newfound sense of selfassurance. However, she knows more about herself now, a large woman in touch with her body and spirit and she remarks, “My spirit gets nourished in faraway places. . . . I learn best and most happily by doing, touching, sharing, tasting.”22 Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia follows Elizabeth Gilbert on the path of narrative self-discovery, but Gelman has had more serious trauma than either Steinbach or Gelman. As with the other narratives, Gilbert’s opens with divorce. Following the divorce, Gilbert flies (flees) to Italy, where she confesses, “I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I declared a double major, really—in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).”23 A return to the physical body from the more abstract shock and trauma of divorce begins Gilbert’s search for meaning. While both Steinbach and Gelman search for new aspects of philosophical and spiritual identity, Gilbert wants more. Reminiscent of Chaucer’s pilgrims, she wants psychological healing and sound

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philosophical truths that will make up a personal credo, and she initiates that process by reconnecting with bodily senses. Littlewood points out Shirley Foster’s critique that “women who suffered nervous crisis and chronic ill-health in England found themselves able to endure, and even enjoy, the hardships of crossing the Alps or climbing Vesuvius once they got away from the restraints of home.”24 For Gilbert, forging an identity that eschews the traditional normatives of marriage and motherhood forces a search for an alternative way of being, of seeing the self not only in new contexts, but a changed self who could perceive of the world differently. Carolyn Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life suggests that: the woman who writes a life beyond convention, or the woman whose biographer perceives her as living beyond conventional expectations, has usually early recognized in herself a special gift without name or definition. Its most characteristic indication is the dissatisfaction it causes her to feel with appropriate gender assignments.25

Gilbert remembers her first spiritual crisis at the age of nine. She was getting ready to turn ten and she thought, “there was something about the transition from nine to ten—from single digit to double digits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast.”26 For the next twenty years, Gilbert struggled with traditional and gendered norms, but finally she confesses, “I did split myself into many Liz Gilberts, all of whom simultaneously collapsed in exhaustion on a bathroom floor in the suburbs one night, somewhere around the age of thirty.”27 Seeking solace from depression, Gilbert travels to an Ashram in India. Here, her guru instructs her to think of eating and food as spiritual expressions of the self, to “not extinguish the sacred fires of our bodies by dumping too much food into our digestive tracts too fast.”28 Gilbert’s nickname in the Ashram becomes “Groceries” when a fellow seeker notices her wolfing down her dinner. These ongoing moments of reconnecting to the spiritual through the physical, like Steinbach’s movement toward a personal philosophical in part though her physical connections, and Gelman’s understanding of self through her senses, the Ashram connects Gilbert to a physical self that, in turn, helps fashion a spiritual identity. She finds a description of ancient spiritual seekers, called “antevasin,” which means “one who lives at the border.”29 Through painstaking practice, Gilbert eventually achieves spiritual transcendence, and thus a sense of changing identity that she understands will remain a shifting parameter. She refers to herself as “a student on the every-shifting

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a philosophical discourse that articulates this experience and that gives women a voice. Ironically, though she pays homage to Beauvoir and studies her methodology, Holveck invests the kitchen with a value and transformative capacity that Beauvoir in The Second Sex does not assign to it. Both Holveck and Marshall transform the kitchen into a site of women’s empowerment, creativity, and intellectual engagement. In the process, they deconstruct the all-inclusive main dining table as a model of social progress. A study of the dining experience that centers particularly on the kitchen and dining room/main table takes us beyond the literal meaning of food and eating to reveal the flaws in our social structure, to question our ethics, to re-envision the social order, to consider the problems in doing so, and to interrogate the efficacy of creating a society in which all members sit and participate at one main table. As some writers and thinkers suggest, two or more tables may indeed be better than one.

Works Cited Anthony II, Susan B. 1943. Out of the Kitchen—Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama. New York: Stephen Daye. Barolini, Helen. 2005. “Appetite Lost, Appetite Found.” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 228-37. Big Night. 1998. Dir. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott. Screenplay by Stanley Tucci and Joseph Tropiano. 1996. DVD. Columbia Tristar. De Silva, Cara. 1996. Introduction. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín. Ed. Cara De Silva. Trans. Bianca Steiner Brown. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Di Donato, Pietro. 1993. Christ in Concrete. New York: Signet. Egerton, John. 1987. Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History. New York: Knopf. Farb, Peter, and George Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Fisher, M. F. K. 1976. How to Cook a Wolf. The Art of Dining. New York: Vintage. 185-350. Gates, Jr, Henry Louis. 1994. Colored People: A Memoir. New York: Knopf. Glaspell, Susan. 2005. Trifles. The Bedford Introduction to Drama. Ed Lee A. Jacobus. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 911-18. Haber, Barbara. 2005. “Follow the Food.” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking.

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drifts from meal to meal. She remembers; “Surrounded by their noise and banter, sated by a surfeit of food, I gradually became less numb. Sometimes two or three hours would pass when I did not think of Gavi . . . .I was slowly coming back to life.”35 Metaphorically, in this section of Reichl’s narrative, there are no mouthwatering descriptions of dinners, lunches or brunches. Instead, she finds a personal, comforting philosophy in Barcelona. She tells her friend and fellow food writer, “I didn’t really know why I was coming. But I do now. I needed to find out that sometimes even your best is not good enough. And that in those ties you have to give it everything you’ve got. And then move on.”36 Though Reichl does not begin her narrative by seeking spiritual truths like Gilbert, or to reshape the second half of her life like Steinbach and Gelman, Reichl too finds her path, and her voyage complete, she awaits her next delicious meal. Food, of course, in the hands of these women writers comes to mean so much more and so much less than a way to sustain life. Dining reconnects the women with the sensual, with the need to be nurtured, and cared for. It reestablishes some traditional gender roles at the same time that it allows the writers to question and indeed transcend those very boundaries. At the end of their travels, Chaucer’s pilgrims will surely return from Canterbury, Odysseus comes home to Penelope, and these travel narratives offer contemporary readers a chance to travel with Steinbach, Gelman, Gilbert, and Reichl as they journey to far away places and find their collective way home. They discover submerged or newly found aspects of identity, and become the first generation of women travel writers who find “a truth which has veritably built my bones over the last few years—I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.”37 And they had some fine meals along the way.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Gelman, Rita Golden. 2001. Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World. New York: Three Rivers Press. Gilbert, Elizabeth. 2006. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy. India, and Indonesia. New York: Penguin Books. Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1988. Writing a Woman’ Life. New York, Ballentine

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Books. Lazzaro—Weis, Carol. 1990. “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question.” NWSA Journal 2.1:16. (1990): Academic Search Premier. 24 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com. Littlewood, Ian. 2001. Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Makowiecka, Maria Hanna. 2007. The Theme of “Departure” in Women’s Travel Narratives 1600—1900. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.. Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. Reichl, Ruth. 2001.Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table. Random House. Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House.

Notes 1

Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. 166. 2 Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House. epigraph. 3 Lazzaro—Weis, Carol. 1990. “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question.” NWSA Journal 2.1:16. (1990): Academic Search Premier. 24 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com. 9. 4 Makowiecka, Maria Hanna. 2007. The Theme of “Departure” in Women’s Travel Narratives 1600—1900. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. 10. 5 Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House. 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Makowiecka. 2007. The Theme of “Departure.” 7. 8 Steinbach. 2000. Without Reservations. 43. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Littlewood, Ian. 2001. Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. 95. 11 Steinbach. 2000. Without Reservations. 202. 12 Ibid., 271. 13 Ibid., 276. 14 Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 143.

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15 Gelman, Rita Golden. 2001. Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World. New York: Three Rivers Press. 40. 16 Butler, Judith. 1999. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. 173. 17 Gelman. 2001. Tales of a Female Nomad. 170. 18 Ibid. 19 Butler. 1999. Gender Trouble. 178. 20 Gelman. 2001. Tales of a Female Nomad. 1. 21 Felski. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics. 143. 22 Gelman. 2001. Tales of a Female Nomad. 281. 23 Gilbert, Elizabeth. 2006. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy. India, and Indonesia. New York: Penguin Books. 63. 24 Littlewood, Ian. 2001. Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. 67. 25 Heilbrun, Carolyn G. 1988. Writing a Woman’ Life. New York, Ballentine Books. 96. 26 Gilbert. 2006. Eat, Pray, Love. 152. 27 Ibid., 153. 28 Ibid., 137. 29 Ibid., 203. 30 Ibid., 204. 31 Reichl, Ruth. 2001.Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table. Random House. 42. 32 Ibid., 148. 33 Ibid., 178. 34 Ibid., 185. 35 Ibid., 288. 36 Ibid., 296.. 37 Gilbert. 2006. Eat, Pray, Love. 329.

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Ibid., 99. Ibid. 39 Glaspell, Susan. 2005. Trifles, The Bedford Introduction to Drama, ed. Lee A. Jacobus, 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 913. 40 Ibid. 41 Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. 1986. Vibration Cooking or The Travels Notes of a Geechee Girl. New York: Ballantine. 210. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Barolini, Helen. 2005. “Appetite Lost, Appetite Found,” Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking, ed. Arlene Voski Avakian. Oxford: Berg. 234. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 235. 48 Ibid. 49 Nader, Rose B., and Nathra Nader. 1991. It Happened in the Kitchen: Recipes for Food and Thought. Washington, D.C.: Center for Study of Responsive Law. 10. 50 Ibid., 35. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 10. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 10-11. 55 Ibid., 23. 56 Ibid., 23-24. 57 De Silva, Cara. 1996. Introduction, In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, ed. Cara De Silva, trans. Beatrice Steiner Brown. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. xxvi. 58 Ibid., xliii. 59 Fisher, M. F. K. 1976. How to Cook a Wolf. The Art of Dining. New York: Vintage. 350. 60 Marshall, 1983. “The Making of a Writer,” 4. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 7. 63 Ibid., 3. 64 Ibid., 6. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Ibid., 12. 67 Ibid., 6. 68 Ibid., 7. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 71 Holveck, Eleanore. 1995. “Can a Woman Be a Philosopher? Reflections of a Beauvoirian Housemaid,” Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret A. Simons. University Park: Penn State UP. 77. 38

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began exploring the domestic sphere in more depth, and ultimately began questioning the arbitrariness of gender and familial distinctions. As she explores the worlds of marriage, spinsterhood, and family, Freeman probes the foundation of those distinctions, and in doing so she demonstrates their destructiveness while simultaneously searching for alternatives. When she creates characters who challenge the norm, for example, she questions the validity of both masculinity and femininity, of both paternity and maternity and effectively expresses the unease that many individuals felt at the time. One of the most powerful ways she exposes alternatives is by playing with readers’ preconceived notions regarding the long-held distinctions, and interestingly, she most often accomplishes this through a metaphorical use of food, appetites and kitchens. Her novel Pembroke offers glimpses of those alternative worlds—worlds in which masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity shift between men and women and cause disruption. In Pembroke Freeman creates a world of mirrors3 and inversions, complete with mistaken identities and the crossing of masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity. The result of the mirroring and inversions is a narrative rich in alternative possibilities. Touted as one of Freeman’s most sexual pieces of literature,4 Pembroke also makes some of its strongest commentary about appetites of all sorts through references to food. In fact, as Virginia Blum has pointed out, “Food is a central trope in relation to which most of her [Freeman’s] themes emerge”—a detail reflecting the Calvinistic preoccupation with the principle that “what one eats (how much, how expensive) has become the index of the state of one’s soul,”5 but also revealing Freeman’s more specific interest in gender and sexuality.6 One of the most sexually charged uses of food in the novel occurs during a cherry picking party at the home of Silas and Sarah Berry.7 The narrator tells us that for years the cherries have either rotted on their branches or been eaten by birds because the miserly Silas, who charged increasingly more and more for the fruit until the community finally stopped buying, refuses to sell it at a reasonable price, or to give it away. This year, however, Silas devises a plan that he believes will bring his sought-after capital. Even before the picking begins, readers recognize the danger in the plan; the daughter Rose’s burgeoning sexuality and the father’s determination to earn money from the highly symbolic fruit crop combine to create a dangerous situation. When Silas first approaches Rose with the picnic plan, for example, he finds her in the cherry orchard, “spreading out some linen to bleach…in a wide sunny space just outside the shade of the cherry trees.”8 Rose’s actions reflect her need to maintain

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a virginal appearance. Freeman articulates this through the color of the linen—a white made even whiter and purer by the sun. In contrast, the cherry trees offer shade, darkness, and the fertility symbolism of the fruit, all of which must be avoided if Rose is to accomplish her task effectively. That the linen is bleached in a cherry orchard—a place where staining from the fruit could so easily occur—however, seems ironic. In fact, the notion that the linen needs to be bleached at all suggests that as a symbol of Rose’s purity, it may reveal more than she wants it to. Similarly, the close proximity of the linen to the staining, fertile fruit, makes it nearly impossible to believe that the linen will come out as pure and white as Rose intends—a detail which foreshadows Rose’s own destiny and the activities of the party. At the picnic, both Rose and Rebecca Thayer demonstrate the irony of the earlier action, as Rose flirts shamelessly with the previously aloof Barney Thayer, and Rebecca makes her first step toward what will later become her social demise by pursuing William Berry. The picnic itself, and the fruit that constitutes the excuse for it, point to the overriding significance of food in Freeman’s narrative, in this case, representative of sexuality. We learn, for example, that “Rose went under the tree herself, pulled down a low branch, and began to eat” the cherries.9 The girls even replace the lunches that they brought in their baskets with cherries that, in many cases, have been picked by the young men.10 Silas’s role in this event is perhaps the most troubling, however. As the authority figure who sanctioned the party, Silas represents patriarchal control. He determines when and where the flirtations will occur that will later lead to marriages, and he does so both literally and metaphorically. His daughter’s status in the market makes him a leading player in the game, quite literally, but his stake in the cherry orchard and its financial future, demonstrates metaphorically the interest he has in her sexuality and eventual marriage. Freeman helps develop his character while surreptitiously commenting on the danger of such a system by placing him “on a great stone under a wild-cherry tree” in order to ensure that the young people do not pick from any of the other trees, and no doubt to enjoy the voyeuristic experience of watching the bacchanalian event .11 Later, Freeman emphasizes Silas’s greed and further comments on the patriarchal system in a scene that positions his wife, Hannah, against him. It begins when Hannah makes doughnuts for the guests and refuses to allow the men to carry them, fearful that they will eat them. It ends ironically, with Mr. Berry stealing and then concealing the extra ones left at the house, amplifying his miserly ways as well as the unchecked appetites of men.12

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Though the picnic scene contains numerous references to the budding sexuality of its youthful attendees that might have startled the novel’s nineteenth-century audience, the interactions between the two Berry children (Rose and William) and their father reveal the most significant challenge to and commentary on familial relationships at the time. First, Silas uses his children to lure in “customers” to his orchard. Though Silas originally tells Rose that the party will have access to four cherry trees at no cost, he later meets the group as they depart and presents a bill to the town’s wealthiest young person, Thomas Payne, who remarks that he hopes “’you’ll have as good luck selling your cherries next year.’ ”13 Payne’s sarcastic response to Silas’s unethical ways speaks both to the old man’s parsimony, and to his willingness to sell (metaphorically) his daughter’s sexuality. Rose, believing that her flirtations with Barney have as much as closed the business deal on her marriage, later remarks with concern and disbelief when Barney does not continue his attention and affection toward her. When Tommy Ray just happens to find Rose after Barney has rejected her, she surrenders herself to a passion without love. Freeman again chooses to employ food imagery to communicate the way that Rose’s surrender to sexual passions compromises her integrity when she writes that though Rose “had half scorned him [Tommy Ray]…she had one of those natures that crave love for its own sweetness as palates crave sugar.”14 Similarly, as Rose’s wedding to Tommy approaches, the narrator comments that she “was and would be happy enough; it was only a question of deterioration of character, and the nobility of applying to the need of love the rule of ordinary hunger and thirst, and eating contentedly the crust when one could not get the pie, of drinking the water when one could not get the wine.”15 Silas’s overwhelming desire to make money has led him to turn his daughter into a commodity, and this action has in turn marred the way she approaches relationships. Though Silas’s threat to William is not as direct, the miser’s behavior does lead the son into dangerous territory as well. After the episode with the bill, William catches up with Payne in order to pay him back. In this instance, William’s insistence that he not return Payne’s money, but actually re-pay him, brings the son into the game of economic exchange. By repaying Payne, William attempts also to reclaim his sister’s innocence. The stain, however, has already set, thereby beginning the series of events that will also lead to William’s downfall. As he speeds away from the scene, Rebecca catches up with him and “quite boldly…caught his arm again, and looked up in his face” then admits “I have always been terribly afraid lest you should think I was running after

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renounce is to possess the more,” a paradox further explored by Vivian Pollak (1990) and Jane Donahue Eberwein, (1985) among others. Pollak observes that the poet’s “food and drink imagery . . . describes a cycle of deprivation, self-deprivation, and attempted self-sustenance” by means of “the ideal constructs of her imagination.” Similarly, Eberwein explains that one of Dickinson’s strategies was a stern “determination to tailor her wants to possibilities, to cultivate minimal hopes”— as in Fr135/J159 in which the speaker affirms that “a little Bread—a Crust—a crumb” is adequate for survival in this world of time. Eberwein aphoristically adds that “loss became for Dickinson an instigator of appreciation” and concedes that metaphorical hunger and thirst “could and often did turn Dickinson’s mind toward heaven and its wished-for lasting values,” but also motivated her expression of “violent reactions to pent-up hope. The poet’s imagery of breadcrumbs supports Eberwein’s perception that Rather than substituting literature for religion, she used its resources as instruments of her own religious development. Despite her many deprivations, she had received gifts as well—chief among them being the verbal fluency and imagination that had been her delight since childhood.

As both literary and religious artifact, the Bible was a very major influence on Dickinson’s search for “her own sense of things.” In Cynthia Wolff’s valuable discussion (1986) of the importance of Christ’s Last Supper to Dickinson’s culture, she notes that the specific elements of bread, wine, and water are predominant in the poet’s food and drink imagery. It is noteworthy, however, that the word “crumb” appears more often than “bread” in Dickinson’s work. Perhaps another literary inspiration for such imagery is the story of the Gentile mother whose daughter is healed by Jesus, as recounted in Mark 7:24-30 and Matthew 15:21-28. (All quotations herein are from the King James or Authorized Version of the Bible). Strangely, Jesus at first ignores and then indirectly rejects the mother’s pleas in behalf of her daughter who lies at home tormented by a demon. Yet the woman firmly refuses to be diverted from her purpose even when Jesus says it is not right to cast the children's bread to the dogs. With an audacity akin to some of Dickinson's personae, she responds: "Truth, Lord, but the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table." In effect, she tells him he may call her anything he likes, if only he will cure her beloved daughter. Impressed by her quick-witted reply, Jesus at last answers her prayer: "For this saying, your daughter is healed."

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Mrs. Barnard attempts to correct his countless culinary “mistakes,” Cephas once again protests, telling her to “’ jest let me alone…I’m goin’ to make these pies, an’ I don’t need any help. I’ve picked the sorrel, an’ I’ve got the brick oven all heated, an’ I know what I want to do, an’ I’m goin to do it!’ ”23 Freeman presents possibly her strongest challenge to the nineteenth-century notion of separate spheres for men and women in this scene. According to Susan Mann, “Since many nineteenth-century women had little control over the world beyond their houses and yards,24 the control they retained over private living spaces was vitally important.”25 Not only does Cephas dictate what will happen in the kitchen, he steps in and actually does it, crossing an otherwise forbidden line between the public and the domestic. In doing so, we see Cephas begin to lose his patriarchal authority, prompting his wife actually to gain her own courage to resist his failing power. As Cephas continues to present his theory behind the exclusively vegetable diet, Mrs. Barnard suddenly argues against him. Such an act was quite unusual in the Barnard household; “She had never in her life argued with Cephas; but sorrel pies, after the night before, made her wildly reckless.”26 Later we learn that “Never before had she [Sarah Barnard] shown so much opposition towards one of her husband’s hobbies, but this galloped so ruthlessly over her own familiar fields27 that she had plucked up boldness to try to veer it away.”28 The crossing from one sphere into the other enables each of them to behave unconventionally, and consequently enables them to achieve a greater degree of balance in their relationship (though granted, Freeman couches all of this within the highly amusing, nearly absurd activity of Cephas). Sarah begins to find a voice,29 and Cephas learns to back down from his stubborn position and even attempts to repair the damage he has done to his daughter’s engagement. Their relationship, in fact, contrasts with the failed relationship between Barney and Charlotte. Certainly Barney’s behavior supports the notion of devouring or suppressing the feminine. He wholeheartedly resists the feminine influence of Charlotte after he argues with her father, and it is this resistance, claims Glasser, which makes their marriage impossible until the end of the novel.30 Ironically, but quite tellingly, Barney, who “was no cook, and…could purchase no cooked food in Pembroke…had subsisted mostly upon milk and eggs and a poor and lumpy quality of corn-meal mush.”31 Not coincidentally, when Barney reflects on Charlotte’s employment, the narrator tells us “That she should go out to work filled him with a fierce resentment. With a childish and masculine disregard for

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all except bare actualities, he could not see why she need to, why she could not let him help her.”32 Familial and gender inversions occur in the Thayer, as well as the Barnard household. Deborah’s dominance over every other member of her family resembles a patriarchal authority,33 and her husband Caleb’s meek demeanor and care for the children speaks to maternal tendencies. The familial inversion occurs throughout the text, and is supported by such examples as Deborah’s banning of first Barney, and later Rebecca from the house. When she tells Barney never to come back, she elicits the fear, not only of her son, but also of her husband. Despite Caleb’s evident sympathy for Barney, Deborah’s response causes him to look at her “with a scared expression” and to concede “Well, I s’pose you know what’s best, Deborah.”34 In addition to Deborah’s authoritative stance and Caleb’s subservient demeanor, Deborah uses food in an unconventional way to discipline her errant children even further. When Barnabas ignores Deborah’s command that he marry Charlotte, Deborah replies, “You sha’n’t ever sit down to a meal in your father’s and mother’s house whilst this goes on.”35 By rejecting the traditionally maternal role of nourishing through food, Deborah’s determination not to allow Barney to eat with the family signals yet another example of her lack of domestic and maternal influence. Deborah punishes Barney for his offensive actions, for the actions that Cephas connects to the consumption of meat, by refusing to feed him. Tellingly, however, Caleb adopts both the maternal and the culture of consumption by offering food to his banished son. After Deborah’s refusal, Caleb finds a way to sneak food to his son, who knew at once that his father had saved it from his own supper, had slipped it slyly into his pocket, and stolen across the field with it. His mother had not given him a mouthful since she had forbidden him to come home to dinner, and his sister had not dared.36 In order to get this nourishment to Barney, Caleb, importantly, had to do so without letting his wife know. Such clandestine maternal behavior signals the possibility that what Caleb does veers from what Deborah, and also what society would tolerate. Caleb’s lack of patriarchal authority and his somewhat feminine traits allow him to extend care to his children when their mother does not. According to Heather Kirk Thomas, however, Caleb’s behavior, which she sees as “Self-centered and petulant”37 causes him to fail most notably “as Rebecca’s guardian because he lacks the courage ever to take a stand.” 38 Though I agree that Caleb’s lack of authority limits his ability to protect his children as effectively as he might have, I don’t believe that a stronger

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adherence to patriarchal conventions would have solved the family’s various dilemmas. Instead, Freeman seems to suggest through her portrayals of both Deborah and Caleb that, as Lambert writes, “great destructiveness develops in a woman who carries out patriarchal injunctions.”39 Indeed, the intensity of the inversion demonstrates an uneasiness with patriarchal dominance of any sort, to the extent that Deborah’s dictator-like authority ultimately leads her to shun two of her children, believe that she killed the third, and eventually to die of a heartattack herself. By endowing Deborah with patriarchal authority and Caleb with maternal tendencies, however, Freeman is able to show the way that the strict adherence to those different roles damages individuals and families, regardless of an individual’s sex. Through the reversal Freeman manages to make her statement even clearer. A man who too late realizes that he “was a-snorin’ the whole time” that his son Ephraim was sledding and eating mince pie, and who then meekly chastises him, telling him that he “don’t s’pose you’d oughter have done it, Ephraim,”40 is as ineffective as a woman whose stern authority brings fear to everyone she encounters. The exaggeration depicted in both of these characters makes the portrayal even more powerful because of its unexpectedness. Deborah asserts her authority in many ways, but the most tragic is clearly the authority she asserts over her son, Ephraim. All of his life Ephraim has been protected from what his mother sees as a looming death. The early identification of a heart problem prompts her to limit his activities and his diet. While Deborah’s intentions may have been noble, ultimately her actions betray a selfishness that keeps her son from enjoying life.41 His limited diet, for example—“ Not a bit of cake was he allowed to taste”, nor could he even “pick over the plums for the pies” and “he could only sniff hungrily at the rich, spicy, and fruity aroma which came forth from the closet, and swallow at it vainly and unsatisfactorily with straining palate”—leads Ephraim (and readers) to believe that it comes “not so much from a solicitude for his health as from a desire to mortify his flesh for the good spirit.”42 Unsurprisingly, this depriving him of the little creature comforts which he loved, and of the natural enjoyments of boyhood, aroused in him a blind spirit of revolution which he felt virtuous in exercising. Ephraim was absolutely conscienceless with respect to all his stolen pleasures.43 Forbidden from experiencing a typical boyhood, Ephraim spends most of his time inside, taking his medicine and studying his catechism. Such a life inevitably leads him to rebel, at first in small ways, such as clandestinely eating plums, but later, in a rebellion that costs him his life.

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Breadcrumbs of Grace, Birdsongs of Joy: Emily Dickinson’s Gifts A kind behind the Door— The Southern Custom—of the Bird— That ere the Frosts are due— Accepts a better Latitude— We are the Birds that stay— The Shiverers round Farmer’s doors— For whose reluctant Crumb— We stipulate—till pitying Snows Persuade our Feathers home.

Here Dickinson gently observes that dying, the going home, is less painful than living without the departed loved one. She and her cousins are the birds who stay behind, shivering in the cold like those fed by her father in one of those moments indicating a compassionate heart beneath Edward Dickinson’s stern exterior. Although the tone is completely different from that of “A little Bread,” there is again the suggestion that if crumbs are all that can be had, they will suffice for the time being. Dickinson also uses bread imagery in one of her most analyzed poems, “I had been hungry all the years” (Fr439/J579), describing the difficulty of adjusting to the change from privation to plenty. At last bidden to dine, the speaker . . . trembling drew the Table near, And touched the Curious Wine— ............... ............ .. I did not know the ample Bread— ‘Twas so unlike the Crumb The Birds and I, had often shared In Nature’s Dining Room— The Plenty hurt me—‘twas so new— Myself felt ill— and odd— As Berry—of a Mountain Bush Transplanted—to the Road—

The speaker is no longer hungry as she was when gazing through windows at the full tables of other households, an excellent example of Dickinson’s paradoxical embracing of deprivation. In this case, instead of directly identifying with the birds, the speaker describes them as comrades sharing a “Crumb” with her in “Nature’s Dining Room,”—once again suggesting some shared fulfillment from this seemingly sparse repast.

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son, unchecked by the maternally inclined father, are actually endorsed when Caleb replicates his son’s activity. Most notably, however, the pie eating seems to be sanctioned by the community as well. When Ephraim collapses and dies after his mother whips him (his death occurs as a result of his sledding and pie eating, not the beating, though Deborah does not learn this for some time), Mrs. Ray, who has been called to the house, and the doctor’s wife “ate the remainder of poor Ephraim’s pie.”50 Freeman also uses food to explore the plight of the nineteenth-century spinster. A victim of her society’s social conventions, the character of Sylvia Crane nonetheless imparts an image of herself as getting by, both financially and emotionally, despite desperate economic challenges, and a relationship with Richard Alger that, not withstanding its length, has never turned into a marriage. As a single woman with no real means of financially providing for herself, Sylvia moves further and further into poverty and eventually must confront the reality of her situation. Without any income, she must leave her home and go to the poorhouse. Shortly before this event, however, her sister Hannah tells Sylvia that she, her daughter Rose, and the Barnard women will all come to tea at Sylvia’s. Sylvia immediately realizes that “Her sisters to tea meant hot biscuits and plum sauce and pie and pound-cake and tea” which would “reduce terribly her little period of respite and independence.” Nevertheless, Sylvia determines that they must come and that “all the food, which was the village fashion and as absolute in its way as court etiquette, must be provided” (262-63). Trapped within the confines of a nineteenth-century society that discouraged, if not prohibited, independence for women, Sylvia’s plight, particularly as it connects to the food, demonstrates the difficulties facing an unmarried woman. Sylvia faces her dilemma by nearly starving herself 51 so that she can present the type of “tea” that her guests (and society) will expect. In Sylvia, Freeman shows us an extreme example of the cult of domesticity, as well as its impact on women. Relegated to her separate, domestic sphere, Sylvia cannot provide for herself financially. Without a husband to collect an outside income, however, Sylvia finds herself quite at odds with the domestic system of which she is a part. Perhaps the most appalling aspect of Sylvia’s plight, however, is the fact that no one, not even her sisters, recognizes it, calling into question the very realm of the domestic as a haven for women. Melissa Pennell even goes so far as to suggest that Freeman “rejects the notion that the domestic sphere by itself offers a solution to women’s problem with identity,” noting that “for some of Freeman’s characters the expectations that form around the domestic sphere and from within the community of women are as destructive to the

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individual as those which arise in the male-dominated institutions of commerce and religion.”52 We see evidence of this destructiveness when the narrator tells us that “Nobody suspected, as they tasted the damson sauce with the thin silver spoons, as they tilted the green and white teacups to their lips, and ate the rich pound-cake and pie, what a very feat of renunciation and tragedy this was to poor Sylvia Crane.”53 No one has seen that time and a society that makes no room for unmarried women, have worn Sylvia as thin as the silver spoons which they use to stir their tea. Just as an impoverished spinster life has forced Sylvia to deny her literal appetite for food, she must deny her appetite for sexual gratification. Throughout the novel, her sexuality is, and in fact must be, repressed. During her long courtship with Richard Alger, she never gives in to her longings, and instead always acts the image of domestic purity. Even her home, guarded by an immense stone that she methodically rolls in front of the door, reflects her reluctance to submit to her sexual impulses. In addition to the metaphorical importance of the stone, readers learn that it has been “laboriously rolled” by generations of Crane women—a fact that reflects the longstanding repression of sexuality among women, making an escape from the pattern seem almost impossible. Contrary to its purpose of guarding the house, the stone can also easily be rolled away, allowing “the evil-disposed” to enter at will. Sylvia, in her innocence, believes that such an act would never occur because “Nobody ever did” dare to move it.54 Sylvia has been oppressed into believing that while she needs to “guard her house,” she only has to do so symbolically. Freeman does not present a completely static character in Sylvia, however. Though Sylvia does her best to control her passions and to conform to society’s expectations for an unmarried woman, she does have what sometimes appears to be a ravenous appetite. When the crisis between her niece Charlotte and Barney occurs, Sylvia is detained and cannot make it back to her house in time for Richard Alger’s weekly visit. This visit is particularly important because Sylvia believes that Richard will finally propose to her during it. When she eventually returns home, she laments: “I wish I hadn’t put the stone up…If I hadn’t, mebbe he’d gone in an’ waited.”55 Caught between the opposing forces of sexuality and the Victorian ideal for women, Sylvia realizes too late that her small defense may have been too much for Richard. Only much later, after Richard rescues Sylvia as she makes her way to the poorhouse, does he take the initiative. He actually “bent down and rolled away the stone. Sylvia had rolled it in front of the door herself, when she went out, as she

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supposed, for the last time. Then he opened the door, and took hold of her slender shawled arm, and half lifted her in.”56 Glasser notes that when Richard, in addition to accessing his sexually repressed self, saves Sylvia from entering the poorhouse, he begins adopting maternal characteristics, and such an adoption seems at the crux of Freeman’s narrative.57 Evidence of this type of adoption exists in his nurturing of Sylvia after they enter her home and also in the clothing he wears. The narrator tells us that “When Richard Alger went home he wore an old brown shawl of Sylvia’s over his shoulders. He had demurred a little. [but Sylvia insisted] They won’t know it’s my shawl. Men wear shawls.”58 Richard’s recognition of his sexual longings and of his need to offer Sylvia the type of nurturing she needs signals a significant shift in his character. That he is also willing to wear Sylvia’s shawl alerts readers to the fact that he is willing to display this feminine side. Though Richard does become more maternal, Freeman also gives Sylvia more “maternal authority,” as she calls it, which provides her with dominance over Richard that she previously never experienced. Richard submitted to it [Sylvia’s dominating force] as if it were merely natural that he should…A very passion of obedience and loyalty to Sylvia had taken possession of him…He had borne with his whimsical will against all his sweetheart’s dearest wishes during the better part of her life; now he would wear any insignia of bondage if she bade him.59 Their relationship, like the Barnard relationship, undergoes a transformation that endows the women with authority, while enabling the men to act more maternally.60 Mary Wilkins Freeman’s work, replete with its references to food and its challenges to the nineteenth-century constructions of gender and familial roles, marks a distinctive change in the role of literature. Written primarily for popular audiences and published in such mainstream venues as magazines, Freeman’s work appealed to a wide, often conservative audience, but nonetheless contained subtle challenges to the social conventions that many of her readers endorsed and perpetuated. Through her subtlety, Freeman successfully presents alternate views of what it meant to be a woman or a man, to be masculine or feminine, paternal or maternal. In doing so, she created worlds that, albeit bitter in many ways, prompt readers to reconsider the validity of rigid hierarchies and to begin to build new bridges of their own.

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adoration of “Him whom never Ragged – Coat/ did supplicate in vain”—a significant tribute from a poet who at other times expresses skepticism about God’s mercy. It is not the purpose of this article to take any firm stand on the vexed question of coherence within Dickinson’s fascicles. Although it seems worth noting that occasional poems with similar food imagery do appear in the same fascicle, it must also be noted that motifs of bread, crumbs, hunger, and fulfillment recur throughout the poet’s entire canon, without a clearly consistent pattern or order. However, certain bits of verse jotted on various scraps of paper relatively late in her career read very like mature reflections on the themes of much earlier poems. For example, Fr1106/J1077 (“These are the Signs to Nature’s Inns”) confidently affirms that Nature welcomes “Whosoever famishing / To taste her mystic Bread,” balancing the anxious longing of the speaker in “These are the days the Birds come back,” to taste the last of the summer’s “consecrated Bread” and “Immortal Wine.” Fr 1291/J1240 observes that “the Beggar at the Door for Fame / Were easily supplied,” but “Bread is that Diviner thing” much “harder to obtain.” Echoing this theme is Fr 1404/J1382, in which ‘Joy,” so often associated with bread in Dickinson’s imagination, comes and goes unexpectedly—a gift of grace unasked and unearned, so profound that it leaves behind a “sumptuous Destitution” (the phrase that caught Richard Wilbur’s attention). This quiet acceptance of the elusive nature of happiness suggests an inner strength developing over a lifetime. But Emily Dickinson always has another paradox lying in wait for her readers, for one of her most memorable references to bread crumbs appears in the relatively early Fr 314/J254, a particularly evocative poem celebrating the gallantry of a bird who “perches in the soul” and never pauses in its song to ask for a crumb at all: “Hope” is the thing with feathers— That perches—in the soul— And sings the tune without the words— And never stops—at all— And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard— And sore must be the storm— That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm— I’ve heard it in the chillest land— And on the strangest Sea—

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Blum. 1993. 73 & 75. Lorne Fienberg writes that “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, advanced a rather simple proposal for redesigning domestic space: one need only omit the kitchen to hasten the evolution of women’s economic situation” (491). 7 Even the family’s surname, Berry, conjures a combination of sexual and culinary imagery. 8 Freeman, Mary Wilkins. 1991. Pembroke. 123. 9 Ibid., 132. 10 Ibid., 133-34. 11 Ibid., 111. 12 Ibid., 134-35. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 Ibid., 181. 15 Ibid., 268. 16 Ibid., 141 & 142. 17 Additionally, the root of the family’s surname (barn) suggests a link to animals. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 54. 20 Eggs play another important role in the narrative—this time with Rebecca and William. Tellingly, she sells her eggs to him in exchange for sugar and when she does so, he gives her far more than seems reasonable, prompting his miserly father to protest (89). Later, when William gets the sugar, he “plunged the great scoop with a grating noise. He heaped it recklessly on some paper, and laid it on the steelyards” Ibid., 91. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Ibid., 50. 23 Ibid., 51. 24 She also notes that “The roles that men are given in her [Freeman’s] fiction make them appear diminished or they tend to be absent altogether. One important exception should be noted. Much like Jewett, Freeman is interested in male characters whose lives endorse women’s values. Although she features relatively few male protagonists in her short fiction, Freeman endows many of them with the same domestic qualities that her women possess” (Mann 51). 25 Freeman Ibid., 46-7. 26 Ibid., 52. 27 emphasis mine 28 Ibid., 56. The effect on their daughter, Charlotte, is similar. When Deborah Thayer visits the Barnards in an attempt to learn the reason for the argument, Charlotte breaks in and commands her father to “’keep still,’” adding that ‘I’ve never set myself up against you in my whole life before; but now I’m going to, because it’s just and right’” (60). 29 Glasser’s claims that Sarah “is powerless despite her moral superiority” and that Cephas “rules the household” are generally true, but the familial inversion that occurs in this scene grants Sarah a level of power that I believe Glasser does not take into account. Though Sarah has indeed “been trained to submit to his 6

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“A man makin’ pies out of sorrel!”: Exploring Issues of Gender and Family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke

[Cephas’s] power,” she finds a voice and the gumption to resist his power when the separate spheres begin to erode (105). 30 Glasser. 1991. 100. She also connects Barney’s struggle with gender to Freeman’s own life, and notes that though Freeman frequently attempted to normalize herself by claiming, for example, that she was not a suffragist. In a letter she points to the need for men to recognize their “origins,” and hence their connection to women, the feminine, and the maternal (Glasser. 1991. 102). 31 Freeman Ibid., 115. 32 Ibid., 312. 33 Though Glasser also argues that Deborah represents absolute authority, she sees that authority as matriarchal, not patriarchal and calls it “feminine power in destructive form” (107) that Freeman presents in the form of “a matriarchal monster” (106). Deborah’s actions and behavior, however, most closely resemble a destructive patriarchal force. 34 Freeman Ibid., 104. 35 Ibid., 103. 36 Ibid., 115-16. 37 Thomas, Heather Kirk. 1997. 29. 38 Though Thomas’s quote suggests that Caleb could use more patriarchal authority, her overall argument that “Pembroke cautions readers that emancipated New Women must seek the best qualities from both gender roles to achieve personal autonomy and that sound marriages and emotionally healthy children stem from an essentially egalitarian balance of power” (36) speaks to some of the same issues I raise in this chapter. Where I differ from her is in my belief that Freeman saw the benefit of embodying masculine and feminine, paternal and maternal characteristics for both sexes. 39 Freeman Ibid., 205. 40 Ibid., 234. 41 Glasser notes the parallel between Freeman’s and Ephraim’s lives. Pointing to the over-protection that Freeman experienced from her parents (the Wilkins’ lost several children, as did the Thayer’s, and both families lived in fear of losing the remaining ones), Glasser concludes that “Freeman’s tone is full of delight when Ephraim rebels” (5). 42 Freeman Ibid., 216. 43 Ibid., 100. 44 Ibid., 223-24. 45 Ibid., 224. 46 Ibid., 229. 47 Ibid., 231. 48 Ibid., 240. 49 Ibid., 233-34. 50 Ibid., 241. 51 In “The Selfishness of Amelia Lamkin,” we see another example of a woman denying herself nourishment so that others may have what they want. Amelia, the

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family’s matriarch, regularly eats the leftover scraps from everyone else’s meal. Her self-denial eventually causes her literally to fall over from exhaustion and malnourishment. 52 Freeman Ibid., 208. 53 Ibid., 269. 54 Ibid., 22. 55 Ibid., 22. 56 Ibid., 278. 57 Ibid., 123. 58 Ibid., 282. 59 Ibid., 282-83. 60 Notably, when Sylvia gains authority and when Richard begins accessing maternal and feminine characteristics, we learn that Sylvia begins to solve the dilemma imposed upon her by society. By abandoning the roles that society constructed for them, both Sylvia and Richard find ways to satiate their appetites for companionship and sexuality. In fact, as their relationship reaches its reconciliation, we learn of the primacy of Sylvia’s sexual and emotional appetites over her literal one. When Hannah attempts to feed Sylvia dinner, for example, we learn that Sylvia believed “that she never would want anything to eat again. She wanted to be alone in her old house, and hug her happiness to her heart, whose starvation had caused her more agony than any other” (Freeman. 1991. 287).

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Breadcrumbs of Grace, Birdsongs of Joy: Emily Dickinson’s Gifts

13:33). The influence of heaven’s kingdom upon earth is likened to the action of the yeast in the dough, working quietly and secretly. No one can hurry the rising yeast. One can only provide the right temperature and knead the dough with care, but then one must wait to see the risen loaf ready for baking. Breadmaking thus represents a combination of natural processes and human effort—and it is one of many tasks traditionally performed by women that must be continually repeated. As Emily Dickinson knew well, fresh bread must be eaten soon after it is made, and the supply must be constantly replenished. Within the institutional church, the invisible grace meant to sustain communicants throughout the week is symbolically renewed in the Eucharistic bread each week, but in Dickinson’s life and art the gifts of grace are as likely to be manifested in the making and sharing of “daily bread,” whether with loved ones, hungry robins, or future readers. The historian Gerda Lerner (1993)—whose very different religious heritage may indicate her objectivity—places Dickinson in a centuries-old tradition of women who have sought intellectual and spiritual development despite patriarchal constraints. More specifically, Lerner’s research traces a tradition of feminist biblical interpretation dating from at least the third century A. D., which she describes as widely unknown to this day even among biblical feminists. Whereas men's contributions to civilization are facilitated by the knowledge that they are standing "on the shoulders of giants" (a phrase originally used by Bernard of Clairvaux), Lerner observes that women repeatedly reinvent wheels because they lack knowledge of the achievements of women before them. To express this truth in another way, the basic realities of women’s experience, such as bread-baking and other culinary tasks, continue to be interwoven in women’s art in a vast tapestry of intertextuality, forming patterns not always visible to the creators themselves. Ironically, there could hardly be a better example of Lerner’s argument than the fact that Virginia Woolf, one of the most learned Englishwomen of her day and the mother of modern feminist criticism, apparently never knew of Emily Dickinson’s existence (even though a few volumes of the latter’s poems were indeed published in England during Woolf’s lifetime). Both Dickinson and Woolf were admired for their great skill in bread making, and the dinner party presided over by Mrs. Ramsay in Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927) is one of the great communal mealtime scenes in literature. One can only wonder how literary history might have been altered if Virginia Woolf could have overheard Dickinson’s repeated rejoicings over the bread crumbs of grace that she transforms into her “silver Chronicle” of song.

CHAPTER TWO: CONSUMING FILMS

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN: ANDERS THOMAS JENSEN’S THE GREEN BUTCHERS MARYANNE FELTER

The title of Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Green Butchers (De Gronne Slagtere) points comically and ironically to Western industrialized nations’ attitudes toward food consumption. The “green” of the title slyly conjures not only the environmental movement but also the move toward vegetarianism of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Green Butchers’ oxymoronic title indicates what Jay Antani argues in his review of the film: The Green Butchers demonstrates that “society at large delights in gorging on itself—getting fat on the recycled refuse of its materialistic (or, in this case, gastronomical) excess, and the idea that we, as individuals, cannibalize our pasts to feed our grudges in the present.”1 Although the film fits into the genre of off-beat, cult food films in which cannibalism is used comically (Eating Raoul, Delicatessen, Sweeney Todd are examples), Jensen’s use of the butcher shop as a metaphor within a traditional comic structure that ends in reconciliation, forgiveness, and harmony makes it different from those other films. This paper explores the ways that Jensen uses opposing poles of vegetarianism and cannibalism corresponding to specifically delineated spaces, to show the healing of the fractured natures of his characters’ lives and a restoration of harmony to the world in which they live. Meat, whether animal or human, works in this film as a metaphor to disrupt our physical, psychological, and even sociological comfort zones. Eating human “meat,” i.e. cannibalism, functions to create an “engagementdetachment”2 phenomenon that dislocates the audience and becomes the fulcrum on which the characters balance their difficulties in finding happiness. The lighter, comic elements of the plot are continually undercut by more serious, almost tragic ones; harmony is restored to the world of this film in the traditionally comic resolution of a kind of marriage and “happy family” united at the end in spite of the horrors through which they have lived. The main characters are hemmed in by their past circumstances: it is a comic, social integration, and understanding

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of forgiveness and the imperfections of humanity, finally, which brings these characters out of their various boxes (rooms, sanatorium, butcher shop, graves) into the natural, open world of the beach at the end of the film. As C. Richard King argues in “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique,” “an array of scholars, artists, and activists have invoked cannibalism to fashion critical perspectives on Western cultural practices [which do little to] enhance understanding of the contexts in which individuals and institutions deploy them [tropes of cannibalism].”3 It would be a mistake to make this dark comedy into a serious analysis of the nature of Western society. I do not want to try to force this film into making sweeping statements about political systems or apocalyptic redemptions. Green Butchers is a film about human nature, frailty, and broken relationships. What I want to examine in this essay is how Jensen disrupts the audience’s expectations through his contrasting of cannibalism and vegetarianism, using metaphors of enclosure and openness within a classic tragi-comic structure to bring his broken modern characters to a state of harmony with themselves and with each other. The story centers around two butchers, Svend and Bjarne, who, tired of being abused by their boss Holger, decide to pool their resources to open their own butcher shop. No one comes to their shop until Holger, in need of chicken for a dinner party he is giving, decides to buy his meat from his old employees—mostly to taunt them on the emptiness of their shop and, perhaps, to see what kind of competition they will provide him. The meat they sell him is so successful that news spreads, and Svend’s and Bjarne’s shop is jammed with people who cannot get enough of their “chickiewickies.” But unbeknownst to their customers, the meat they are selling is human flesh, and Svend is sure this is what makes them successful. He must find a way to keep a steady supply of such flesh coming into the butcher shop, and he does. The plot twists and turns to its resolution: it is not the human flesh that people love, it is Svend’s marinade. The film is further complicated by a subplot in which Bjarne tries to rid himself of his comatose, retarded brother so he can take his inheritance to invest in the shop and bury the pain of his past and his hatred of his brother. Green Butchers examines a number of broken relationships that are resolved into a final harmony where all’s well that ends well. Importantly, these butchers are isolated, alienated creatures. Two major spaces correspond to the two plot-lines of the film: the butcher shop itself and a sanatorium. Both spaces are cold, white, sterile areas, and both are isolated in some way from the general society. The sanatorium, in which Bjarne’s brother Eigel lies comatose, is far out of town in a park-

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like setting, remote and removed from the common stream of life. The butcher shop, though on a street in town, brings with it historical connotations. Butchers have, for centuries, been portrayed as necessary but somehow crude and barbaric. Considered “a special case” by medieval food guilds, butchers (along with fishmongers) often faced regulation that required they set up their shops outside city walls or separate from other town commerce in a particular area of the city.4 Although this might seem self-evident, the original word “butcher” denoted not only someone who sold meat in a shop but someone “whose trade is the slaughtering of large tame animals for food; one who kills such animals and sells their flesh” (OED). As early as 1529, the word came to be used metaphorically for “one who slaughters men indiscriminately or brutally; a ‘man of blood’; a brutal murderer” (OED), while the definition for the verb furthers this idea of brutality: “To slaughter in the manner of a butcher, or in a brutal and indiscriminate manner” (OED). More than this, the word by 1642 had picked up more violent connotations: “To torment, inflict torture upon” (OED). Today in America, although we do not regulate where our butchers may open their shops, we do segregate them, in a sense: few Americans actually go to a butcher, picking their meat up in supermarkets, already shielded from the brutality of the act of butchering. Modern carnivores select prepackaged “disembodied cuts of meat”5 from supermarket counters, disconnecting the relationship between the meat and the animal. European butchers, however, and those we see in this Danish film, do often have relationships with their customers and less of the “brutality” of the profession is hidden. But these butchers, Svend and Bjarne, are still isolated psychically and physically. Svend’s relationship with everyone around him is, and always has been, fractured, and early in the film, his girlfriend breaks up with him. Bjarne’s family are all dead, except for his comatose brother. Bjarne lives alone in a room filled with animal skeletons and throughout the course of the film tries to establish a relationship with a woman he meets in a cemetery. More than this, the butchery itself takes place behind closed doors while pristine cuts of meat are arranged in the front of the shop for the customers. Both butchers are, then, isolated and alienated, or at least separated, from most of the people around them. The focus on butchers puts meat in the center of the film. Although “carnivorism” and “cannibalism” are clearly two distinct actions, the line between them is blurred in Jensen’s film. And even though most vegetarians (invoked by the “green” of the title) , even vegans, would not go so far as to equate the two, many see moral, not just medical, reasons to avoid eating meat, reasons that push the two concepts more closely

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Dining Well: Food, Identity, and Women’s Travel Narratives

remove herself from her conventional behavior and try on new dishes and newer aspects of self. Steinbach describes their dining experience: Naohiro asked if he could order for both of us. I said yes. Wine appeared; a Bordeaux. Then one by one the elegant dishes arrived: Saigon chicken rolls, steamed ravioli with smoked goose, lobster prepared with ginkgo leaves, and a mysterious, delicious dessert flavored with hazelnuts.8

Steinbach vocalizes her assent to try new food (and ideas); indeed, she celebrates her need for a “declaration of independence from ‘looking into the mirror that others hold up to me’ was a deft description of what I was after on this trip.”9 The dining experience symbolizes Steinbach’s movement beyond the conventional margins of normativity for a fiftysomething, American, middle-class woman. She begins to transcend her restricted identity of self, and incorporate new aspects of identity, including her desirability and her internal capacity for adventure. Steinbach embarks on a physically intimate and satisfying relationship with Naohiro, an aspect of self that had been dormant in the States. Ian Littlewood, in Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex, acknowledges that “[s]ex is a part of the pilgrimage because it is part of travel”; he goes on to note that “[t]he idea that it might be more than this, that sex itself might be the source of enlightenment, belongs to a separate tradition, which runs strongest in those travelers, often women or homosexuals, whose erotic interests at home have been most severely curtailed.”10 In Steinbach’s narrative, however, she moves confidently into Littlewood’s first (male) ideology of intimacy and travel; she does not seek the physical relationship for enlightenment, but rather as a part of creating (perhaps of honoring) a newfound sense of self. Steinbach wines, dines, and enjoys herself through France, England, and Italy. She meets new friends, tries exciting dishes such as “baked omelet with artichoke hearts”11 and finally develops a personal philosophy for her expanded self. As she leaves a cemetery outside Venice, she decides that “[i]t is more useful to remember that we must live.”12 As she waits in the airport to return to the U.S., some fellow travelers ask her if she is going someplace interesting. “Yes,” she responds, “I’m going home.”13 Home, the place that she needed to leave, has become a more interesting place to which she can return, not because the U.S. has changed, but because Steinbach has. Her dining moments have played an integral part of her changed self; she has fed her body and spirit. Like Steinbach’s narrative, Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World opens with Rita Golden Gelman’s reevaluation of her life. At forty-seven, Gelman, a successful children’s author in the midst of a

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electrician who comes into the shop to fix the lights in the cooler (another enclosed space) is accidentally locked in by Svend, who, distracted, leaves for the night, forgetting the electrician is inside. By morning he is a frozen black of human flesh. Although Bjarne suggests they admit the accident to the police, the door to the cooler opens to animal carcasses surrounding the electrician, hanging on a meat hook—clothed, one leg missing, the other one shoe-less. If the viewer did not see cannibalistic undertones in Bjarne’s action toward Eigel in the previous scene, the symbol becomes flesh in this scene. And since Svend’s and Bjarne’s old employer, Holger, needs thirteen pieces chicken for his dinner that night with the Board of Directors, Svend sees an opportunity for revenge against his old employer who made his life miserable for so many years. When Bjarne comes to work the next day, a queue stretches around the corner. Holger’s party was a success and now everyone in town wants this meat. “I don’t want to disappoint them, so I’m selling a bit more of him,” says Svend. Bjarne’s response: “I’ll kill you.” Svend: “It doesn’t matter whether we use the bone crusher or sell him. It’s the best way to get rid of him. You said it yourself.” Bjarne: “Can’t you see that you need help?”

Svend sells the electrician as “chickie-wickies” to the line of customers. Human flesh has become the “new white meat.” A series of human fillets follows: “House Hans,” the overfed realtor who has sold Bjarne and Svend the butcher shop, Svend’s old girlfriend who insulted him and left him, and “a small Swede from the park.” Svend is convinced that his success as a butcher is due to his customers’ unwitting taste for human flesh. And having spent his whole life starved for affection and feeling pathetic, Svend glories in his new-found success. Svend seems to have very little problem with what he is doing though Bjarne tries to distance himself, calling Svend crazy. While Svend sees only the long line of customers and great success, Bjarne is tortured by what they are doing and tries to stop Svend. But Svend feels as if his life’s dream has finally taken shape, and he will do anything to maintain it. In fact, his butchering of fellow human beings, some serendipitously, others in vengeance, and his feeding of these humans to his arch-rival and former tormenter Holger, is reminiscent of the kind of behavior described by Margaret Mead in her study of the significance of food: The fear of cannibalism that hovered over northern peoples might be elaborated into cults of fear, or simply add to the concern that each member of a group had for all, against a terrible background that extremity might become so great that one of the group might in the end be sacrificed.

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But cannibalism could also be elaborated into a ritual of vengeance or the celebration of victories in war [….] 8

Svend’s motives for serving up human flesh are a kind of “ritual of vengeance”; his customers, however, just like the meat. And, of course, they have no ideas their “chickie-wickies” are really human flesh. This apparently “gustatory” cannibalism is exposed to other characters in another subplot of “survival” cannibalism. Pastor Willumsen, his plane crashing on his honeymoon, had to eat his own dead bride to survive. “He survived because he ate her,” says Bjarne’s new girlfriend Astrid, a young woman whose own parents died in car crash, and who now boards with Willumsen. Willumsen tells Butcher Holger, “with all due respect for your otherwise excellent dinner, I didn’t care for your chicken [….] it has a peculiar aftertaste [….] it made me think of Grethe. I actually thought it tasted like Grethe.” Black comedy shocks the viewer: Grethe’s flesh saves Willumsen; Svend’s “chickie-wickies” save the new butcher shop. In a reversal of the phrase, these “exotic” meats “taste like chicken,” a euphemistic phrase often used to describe strange meats one fears tasting. If Willumsen needed Grethe to survive, Svend believes he must keep a steady supply of human flesh in his butcher shop to compete with the onetime more popular Holger. In a sense Svend sees his use of human flesh as a kind of survival cannibalism. This shop is his last chance to make something of himself. Rejected by his family, by his lover, by his old boss, Svend believes the only way people will come to love and accept him is if he is a successful butcher. He tells Bjarne that his parents died when he was young, he was not popular at school, and he was beaten up every day. His fellow classmates hit him and stole his lunch money. Exaggerating, he goes on to say that he didn’t get anything to eat before his training as a butcher. Classmates hit him with “stuff”: “with wood […]with flashlights […] with a green bicycle pump […]with belts.” For Bjarne, as for the audience, this is too much. But Svend goes on: “I’ve never been loved. And today— here—what I had here today behind the counter, Bjarne. It was fantastic. It was great. People spoke to me differently. They smiled at me. Suddenly I was someone else. And I really liked that. We can’t open tomorrow without meat.” Svend is so desperate to be accepted and liked that he will go to any length—even murder and the breaking of a strong social taboo against cannibalism. But Svend’s character, if pathetic, is also humorous: he sweats his inadequacies profusely, causing him to slip in his own pools of sweat when he bowls. His appearance, his behavior, his ideas are so absurd that they become funny. Bjarne’s attempt to survive, on the other hand, by killing his own brother and using the inheritance is never clearly

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comic. Bjarne has survived the car accident his brother caused, but Bjarne’s young wife did not. He will survive as a butcher because he is willing to kill his own twin brother to fund the new shop. The BjarneEigel story is darker than the Svend plot-line. Here, the term “survival” becomes ambiguous. The plot links this film to a long line of films about cannibalism as well as to food films in general. Diana Negri argues that food films like Babette’s Feast, Moonstruck, Chocolat, or Like Water for Chocolate are films where food becomes a vehicle for representing and cementing familial and quasifamilial bonds, playing out a nostalgic, recuperative response to the way that “the household, in effect, is undergoing structural, discursive, systematic, and semiotic recombination in late capitalism.”9

While typical food films, according to Negri, often “encode family solidarity through a matriarchal or patriarchal figure who symbolically dedicates himself or herself to the family’s emotional needs through food,”10 Green Butchers works in a different way. Here, the main characters are butchers, not cooks. Svend uses his meat not to serve his family’s needs but his own. But it is through his success as a butcher that he finds acceptance, and, from his perspective, love and connection with other people. Customers line up outside his shop. Holger is jealous of his success. Svend’s use of human flesh, so he thinks, has bonded him to the other outcast, Bjarne, in a familial way; and although Bjarne constantly calls Svend crazy and is disgusted by Svend’s continued use of human flesh in the shop, ultimately, Bjarne himself succumbs. When Eigel survives having the plug pulled in the sanatorium, Bjarne coldly complains to the doctor: “Give him a shot or something. We had a deal.” The doctor turns psychiatrist: Eigel is “obsessed with animals,” she tells Bjarne, “And you became a butcher.” The doctor thinks Bjarne has a problem and, ironically, if he won’t get help, she’ll have to tell Svend: “He’s the only sane person that you’ll listen to.” Immediately the film moves to the back room of the butcher shop, and a disgusting bloody, white bucket with hunks of raw flesh in it. We cut to a shot of the doctor hanging in meat cooler, hook in her mouth, white lab coat still on. Bjarne, too, has found a way to use the butcher shop to suits his own needs. The food films Negri writes about focus on cooks, not butchers. She discusses films where “the prevailing industrialized, alienated, and anxious relationship to food undergoes a fantasy conversion to an artisanal mode in which food becomes a powerful form of emotional capital [….] in which we imagine that the food we eat is the transparent reflection of the

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philosophical truths that will make up a personal credo, and she initiates that process by reconnecting with bodily senses. Littlewood points out Shirley Foster’s critique that “women who suffered nervous crisis and chronic ill-health in England found themselves able to endure, and even enjoy, the hardships of crossing the Alps or climbing Vesuvius once they got away from the restraints of home.”24 For Gilbert, forging an identity that eschews the traditional normatives of marriage and motherhood forces a search for an alternative way of being, of seeing the self not only in new contexts, but a changed self who could perceive of the world differently. Carolyn Heilbrun in Writing a Woman’s Life suggests that: the woman who writes a life beyond convention, or the woman whose biographer perceives her as living beyond conventional expectations, has usually early recognized in herself a special gift without name or definition. Its most characteristic indication is the dissatisfaction it causes her to feel with appropriate gender assignments.25

Gilbert remembers her first spiritual crisis at the age of nine. She was getting ready to turn ten and she thought, “there was something about the transition from nine to ten—from single digit to double digits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast.”26 For the next twenty years, Gilbert struggled with traditional and gendered norms, but finally she confesses, “I did split myself into many Liz Gilberts, all of whom simultaneously collapsed in exhaustion on a bathroom floor in the suburbs one night, somewhere around the age of thirty.”27 Seeking solace from depression, Gilbert travels to an Ashram in India. Here, her guru instructs her to think of eating and food as spiritual expressions of the self, to “not extinguish the sacred fires of our bodies by dumping too much food into our digestive tracts too fast.”28 Gilbert’s nickname in the Ashram becomes “Groceries” when a fellow seeker notices her wolfing down her dinner. These ongoing moments of reconnecting to the spiritual through the physical, like Steinbach’s movement toward a personal philosophical in part though her physical connections, and Gelman’s understanding of self through her senses, the Ashram connects Gilbert to a physical self that, in turn, helps fashion a spiritual identity. She finds a description of ancient spiritual seekers, called “antevasin,” which means “one who lives at the border.”29 Through painstaking practice, Gilbert eventually achieves spiritual transcendence, and thus a sense of changing identity that she understands will remain a shifting parameter. She refers to herself as “a student on the every-shifting

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as if the butchery will “cure” Eigel not only of his vegetarianism and love of animals but also, somehow, it will be a “sane” step toward closing the gap between the two brothers. Eigel learns quickly and carries the freshly killed chickens to Bjarne as a kind of peace offering. But Svend pushes the chickens away, instead taking Eigel and Astrid to the meat locker, thinking he will please Bjarne by “taking care of” the “useless, bothersome twin and the girlfriend who has taken Eigel’s side against Bjarne. Bjarne arrives in time to save them. For the first time, Bjarne, who believes he is too late to save Eigel, realizes he loves his brother. Eigel’s love of animals, his obsession with the zoo and with stuffed animals, and his horror of killing animals is clearly juxtaposed with his twin brother’s butchery--both the business itself and the animal skeletons decorating Bjarne’s room. The brothers represent two opposing poles on a culinary continuum that moves from vegetarianism to carnivorism to cannibalism. Vegetarians often claim that they are involved in a political statement not just a culinary or healthy lifestyle: vegetarianism is seen to be more ecologically friendly than other eating patterns. “Vegetarians reverse the traditional hierarchy of foods which privileges meat as a source of potency and animal vitality (Fiddes 1991), but their motivations are complex. Some see vegetarianism as closest to nature and less destructive of the environment. For others their repugnance for animal exploitation and suffering is the driving force and they may see a moral issue about the relationship between people and the natural world.”13 Eigel’s gentle nature seems far-removed from Bjarne’s cold, twisted personality. Eigel the vegetarian and animal–lover is also retarded, and although he himself is a gentle soul, he has accidentally killed both his parents as well as his sister-in-law. Eigel’s initial horror of Bjarne’s butchering of animals differs little from Bjarne’s initial horror of Svend’s butchering of humans and Eigel’s inadvertent killing of the people Bjarne loved. The vegetarianism and cannibalism are set up as two extremes on the food chain, with “normal” butchery smack in the middle, the place in which the two extremes finally come to rest. Both extremes must come together in the space of the butcher shop. The Eigel subplot is more than a comic comment on the main action. Eigel, in fact, is at the center of Bjarne’s story. His gentle, animal-loving nature as well as his total rejection by his brother draw the audience into sympathy for this poor lost soul. Astrid’s attempt to care for Eigel and to reconcile the brothers mirrors the audience’s reaction to Eigel’s situation. In contrast to Svend’s blatantly crazy human butchery and Bjarne’s more insidious violence, Eigel’s position and his character evoke much more sympathy. In fact, without Eigel, this film would become a cult black

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comedy with little except its quirky humor to recommend it. It is in Eigel’s story that the issue of eating meat becomes the focal point of this moral examination of relationships between people and the world in which they live. The lines drawn between killing animals and killing humans have been blurred to the extent that when Eigel becomes a chicken-killer, who no longer carries a huge stuffed giraffe around town but an actual pig’s head, he is somehow more “normal”—or at least more acceptable to the characters in this world. When Eigel arrives at the shop with his dead chickens, his peace offering to his brother, Bjarne is not there to receive it. But the offering is the first step in what Astrid has recognized: that only in forgiving Eigel can Bjarne begin to forgive himself. And it is only through such forgiveness that these characters can move beyond the limits of themselves to embrace (not eat) the “other.” Forgiveness and toleration may not be necessary to survival, but they are of key importance in living a good life. Eigel’s butchering of the chickens shows Bjarne that Eigel has accepted his twin’s butchery and meat-eating. Simultaneously, Bjarne must accept Eigel for who he is: a twin who, because he is retarded and lacks any other family, needs Bjarne to take care of him—not to shove him in a corner in some distant sanatorium, or, even worse, into an early coffin. Jensen’s use of settings underscores this point. Most of the action takes place in indoor enclosed spaces paralleling the closed off natures of his main characters. Only four outdoor scenes exist in the film: the opening scene in Svend’s backyard (also enclosed) during an unsuccessful barbecue, scenes between Bjarne and Astrid in a cemetery (presumably above the enclosed caskets of the dead), a scene with Bjarne, Astrid, and Eigel in an enclosed courtyard of Pastor Willumsen’s house, and the final (open) scene of the film at a lake. Three of these four outdoor settings echo the enclosures of all the indoor settings. The butcher shops are cold, sterile white boxes (with boxes—coolers—within boxes behind closed doors). The cooler shows slabs of meat/human flesh locked in and hanging on meat-hooks. The refuse of the butcher block is thrown into the bone crusher, another large box that compacts its contents for disposal. Scenes of the sanatorium are constantly spliced into scenes of the butcher shop and the parallels are blatant not just in the editing but also in the set design. The sanatorium is made up of huge white rooms like operating rooms. Eigel has been “locked in” and the doctors work behind scenes just as the butchers do. Bjarne, too, has done his own kind of therapeutic behind-the-scenes work. After the accident that killed his wife and parents, Bjarne has roamed around at night killing animals and saving their skeletons. It is this

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behavior that put him in Holger’s butcher shop to begin with; the police, trying to find a way to channel Bjarne’s energies, had handed him over to Holger where he could kill and butcher animals legally. When Bjarne brings Astrid home for the first time, opening his life to her, she sees the mess that the accident created. Bjarne’s room is dark and cluttered: in contrast to the neatly ordered white rooms of both the sanatorium and the butcher shop, Bjarne’s is cluttered with the everyday mess of life but also with skeletons of those animals he killed. He has reassembled the skeletons as one might do in a museum of “natural” history, and posed them in various places everywhere in his room. It is a room Bjarne must break out of. The only other indoor scene takes place at Pastor Willumsen’s. Willumsen, who found a way to survive an accident by eating his dead wife, has lived on to an old age. He seems comfortable, happy, and wellrespected. He takes care of Astrid when her parents are killed in a car crash, housing her, acting as a surrogate father, and having her tend the plots in the cemetery by his house and church. He has spent his life cultivating a hothouse of lush foliage, an indoor garden he tends every day and of which he is very proud. His is the only indoor scene in which we see life—life so profuse and vital that it is almost overwhelming in the context of the other sterile and dead indoor settings of the film. And there is no meat here—no animals; instead Willumsen has focused on his green and gorgeous plants. Willumsen eats meat and grows plants. In Willumsen we see the two opposing poles centered in one character. How has he achieved this balance? One might argue that in eating his wife to survive, he has had to accept the fact that life sometimes deals us poor choices, hard situations. And we must learn to accept ourselves: Willumsen has learned that we always do the best we can, we never do the best we could. Here we see that survival is a compromise between the ideal and the real. We live in a world that is not black and white but grey, where we must make, and live with, difficult decisions. We justify our behavior by developing rationales, rituals, and accommodations, often sublimating our real motives and desires. It is a world in which “green” and “butcher” can coexist in the same description. It is a foreshadowing of the kind of open, greenworld that Bjarne, Eigel, and Svend must come to inhabit by the end of the film. The final reconciliation scene takes place in the butcher shop where Svend has locked up Astrid and Eigel. Looking for Astrid, apparently trying to make up with her after she breaks the relationship because of the way he has treated Eigel, Bjarne discovers them in the cooler. Bjarne pulls Astrid out; she pulls away: “You are crazy. Psychos. Stay away from me.”

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Books. Lazzaro—Weis, Carol. 1990. “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question.” NWSA Journal 2.1:16. (1990): Academic Search Premier. 24 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com. Littlewood, Ian. 2001. Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. Makowiecka, Maria Hanna. 2007. The Theme of “Departure” in Women’s Travel Narratives 1600—1900. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.. Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. Reichl, Ruth. 2001.Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table. Random House. Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House.

Notes 1

Orbach, Susie. 1978. Fat is a Feminist Issue. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. 166. 2 Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House. epigraph. 3 Lazzaro—Weis, Carol. 1990. “The Female Bildungsroman: Calling It into Question.” NWSA Journal 2.1:16. (1990): Academic Search Premier. 24 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com. 9. 4 Makowiecka, Maria Hanna. 2007. The Theme of “Departure” in Women’s Travel Narratives 1600—1900. Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. 10. 5 Steinbach, Alice. 2000. Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman. New York: Random House. 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Makowiecka. 2007. The Theme of “Departure.” 7. 8 Steinbach. 2000. Without Reservations. 43. 9 Ibid., 44. 10 Littlewood, Ian. 2001. Sultry Climates: Travel & Sex. Cambridge: Da Capo Press. 95. 11 Steinbach. 2000. Without Reservations. 202. 12 Ibid., 271. 13 Ibid., 276. 14 Felski, Rita. 1989. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 143.

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than as sensate human creatures reaching out for connection, they come to value each other and begin to treat each other in more humane, loving ways. For Jensen’s characters, it takes a full-force smack in the face where cannibalism becomes literal, not metaphorical, before they realize how they have come to cannibalize the people in their lives. It is the realization and acknowledgment of this fact that brings them face to face with their humanity.

Works Cited Antani, Jay. 2006. “The Green Butchers: a film review.” Film Criticism.com. 8/2/06 < http:www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf > Atkins, Peter and Ian Bowler. 2001. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. London: Arnold. Flanderin, Jean-Louis and Massimo Montanari, eds. 2000. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Penguin. Hartwig, Joan. 1972. Shakespeare’s Tragi-comic Vision. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. Jensen, Anders Thomas, writer and director. 2005. De Gronne Slagtere (The Green Butchers). Denmark, 2004. in Danish with English subtitles. DVD. Sony Pictures. King, C. Richard. 2000. “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” diacritics 30.1 (spring 2000): 106-23. Mead, Margaret. 1997. “The Changing Significance of Food.” in Carol Counihan and Penny van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Cultural Reader. New York: Routledge. 11-19. Negra, Diana. 2002. “Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television.” Velvet Light Trap. Fall. 62-74.

Notes 1

Antani, Jay. 2006. “The Green Butchers: a film review.” Film Criticism.com. 8/2/06 < http:www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf > 2 The terms are taken from Joan Hartwig’s 1972 discussion of Shakespeare’s last plays in Shakespeare’s Tragi-comic Vision. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. 3-33. 3 King, C. Richard. 2000. “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” diacritics 30.1 (spring 2000): 106-23.

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4 Flanderin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari, eds. 2000. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Penguin. This differed from other guild regulations: most vendors were allowed to set up their shops anywhere that was convenient for the customer. 5 Atkins, Peter, and Ian Bowler. 2001. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. London: Arnold. 241. 6 Atkins and Bowler. 2001. Food in Society. 284. Interestingly, traditional gardeners in tropical areas call their farming methods “eating the forest.” 7 Jensen, Anders Thomas. 2004. The Green Butchers. Denmark. In Danish with English subtitles. All quotes from the film are taken from the subtitles on the video version. 8 Mead, Margaret. 1997. “The Changing Significance of Food.” In Carol Counihan and Penny van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Cultural Reader. New York: Routledge. 11-19: 13. 9 Negra, Diana. 2002. “Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television.” Velvet Light Trap Fall: 62-74. 10 Ibid., 63. 11 Ibid., 64. 12 Atkins and Bowler. 2001. Food in Society. 241. 13 Ibid., 241.

LISTENING TO SILENCE: FORBIDDEN FRUITS IN CLARICE LISPECTOR’S “THE BODY”1 RICK J. SANTOS

Listen to me. Listen to my silence. That, which I speak of, is never what I speak but something else […] Capture this other thing, which in truth I speak of, since I am not allowed.2 —Clarice Lispector

In Brazil, the existence of a lesbian literary corpus created by women has not been properly acknowledged and recognized by academic critics. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey points out that the reason for this supposed lack of tradition is the taboo that, still, stigmatizes homosexual relations in Latin America and, consequentially, fosters a process of censorship— often internalized—that prevents the expression of lesbianism in literature by contemporary women writers. Ferreira-Pinto further speculates that lesbian characters and erotic desire among women can on the one hand point to the author’s latent homosexuality or lead to the labeling of her writings as pornographic (Ferreira Pinto-Bailey 2002)3. Furthermore, in an early study on Brazilian gay literature, Sapê Grootendorst observed that: In Brazil, “gay literature” is in general considered to be something forbidden, pornographic, in bad taste and of poor quality. It may serve emancipatory purposes, but in general, it belongs to the ghettos of a forbidden world.4

In this paper, we would like to suggest an alternative, queer, point of entry for reading the acclaimed Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (19251977). We would like to analyze the significance of food and food

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began exploring the domestic sphere in more depth, and ultimately began questioning the arbitrariness of gender and familial distinctions. As she explores the worlds of marriage, spinsterhood, and family, Freeman probes the foundation of those distinctions, and in doing so she demonstrates their destructiveness while simultaneously searching for alternatives. When she creates characters who challenge the norm, for example, she questions the validity of both masculinity and femininity, of both paternity and maternity and effectively expresses the unease that many individuals felt at the time. One of the most powerful ways she exposes alternatives is by playing with readers’ preconceived notions regarding the long-held distinctions, and interestingly, she most often accomplishes this through a metaphorical use of food, appetites and kitchens. Her novel Pembroke offers glimpses of those alternative worlds—worlds in which masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity shift between men and women and cause disruption. In Pembroke Freeman creates a world of mirrors3 and inversions, complete with mistaken identities and the crossing of masculinity and femininity, paternity and maternity. The result of the mirroring and inversions is a narrative rich in alternative possibilities. Touted as one of Freeman’s most sexual pieces of literature,4 Pembroke also makes some of its strongest commentary about appetites of all sorts through references to food. In fact, as Virginia Blum has pointed out, “Food is a central trope in relation to which most of her [Freeman’s] themes emerge”—a detail reflecting the Calvinistic preoccupation with the principle that “what one eats (how much, how expensive) has become the index of the state of one’s soul,”5 but also revealing Freeman’s more specific interest in gender and sexuality.6 One of the most sexually charged uses of food in the novel occurs during a cherry picking party at the home of Silas and Sarah Berry.7 The narrator tells us that for years the cherries have either rotted on their branches or been eaten by birds because the miserly Silas, who charged increasingly more and more for the fruit until the community finally stopped buying, refuses to sell it at a reasonable price, or to give it away. This year, however, Silas devises a plan that he believes will bring his sought-after capital. Even before the picking begins, readers recognize the danger in the plan; the daughter Rose’s burgeoning sexuality and the father’s determination to earn money from the highly symbolic fruit crop combine to create a dangerous situation. When Silas first approaches Rose with the picnic plan, for example, he finds her in the cherry orchard, “spreading out some linen to bleach…in a wide sunny space just outside the shade of the cherry trees.”8 Rose’s actions reflect her need to maintain

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contrary to the sharing complicity present in the relationship between the women Carmen and Beatriz. Thus, in order to create a real space for and to make possible the strong feelings shared by the women in this apparent patriarchal triangle, it would be necessary to dismember, i.e., deconstruct, the grotesque body of the macho who stands between them. Initially, the women attempted to carry on their relationship within the private sphere in double secrecy: Their connection to the patriarch provided them a cover and protection from society’s scrutiny and while Xavier worked hard to provide “good food/grandes comidas” to the three, the women would lie in bed and make love to each other during the day. However, As their union gained flesh [the presence of the patriarch in between the two women became unbearable and forced them to make drastic and dangerous decisions to remove him from their lives] they would not have killed [Xavier], if there had been another option.9

As Marilyn Frye points out, “if a conceptual scheme excludes something, the standard vocabulary of those whose scheme it is will be adequate to the defining of a term which denotes it.”10 Therefore, it is not surprising that in “The Body” as well as in the Brazilian cultural context in the seventies, a lesbian relationship could and would not be openly defined as so by society at large. In this story, as it is customary in all of Lispector’s texts, the relationship between the female characters—in this case a lesbian relationship, we argue—is displaced to the realms of silence. As the author hinted at in the epigraph quoted above from Água Viva,11 what she says is never what she says in as much as the act of speaking is defined and constrained by patriarchal norms and limitations. It is then in a rhetorical space constructed by silence that the unspeakable/o indizível gains signification and materiality camouflaged and/or invisible to the dominant eye. It is left to the reader the task of listening to the silences that break away from the standard gender expectations for both the characters and the writer, who writes explicitly about female desire not directed to or controlled by males. It is in the silence that sits heavily on all relationships in the story—the triangle (Xavier, Carmen, Beatriz) and society, Xavier and the prostitute,12 Carmen and Beatriz—that the reality of the relationship is confirmed in all its fragility or (veiled) determination. In the preface of the collection (which is written in an epistolary form, as if to confess to the reader and explain the stories to follow), Lispector unveils hints as to the nature of an imminent “danger” hidden deep in the text. As the narrative develops, she warns her reader and confident that within the textual labyrinth she, like Daedalus, constructed to hide away

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social perversities and problems, lies a monster that cannot be controlled or held back: “if there are dirty things in these stories, it is not my fault … I am an honest woman.”13 Soon, she reveals that the “danger” from which honest people, like herself and her reader, must be protected is moral transgression of the customs and dogmas of hetero-patriarchal society: Xavier was a bigamist: he lived with two women. Each night he had one. Sometimes the two of them the same night. The one left over would watch. One was not jealous of the other.14

In the preface, the author advises the reader that given the “dangerous nature” of the issues raised in the collection, she would have to create a simulacrum to elude censorship and escape social reproaches. “People will stone me…. So I told my editor: I will only publish this under a pseudo name.”15 However, faced with the impossibility of hiding behind a pen name, the author opted to escape to the field of silence and from that position—one of false submission—articulate in a veiled way those “things” and “indecencies,” which could compromise her status as an “honest woman.” Through a resistance tactic identified by Josefina Ludmer as the “tricks of the weak,”16 Lispector establishes a silent complicity with her reader, which grows parallel to the development of a secret lesbian love between the female characters expressed: 1) through the women’s performance (or lack of) during the sexual attacks by Xavier and the pretense that they are satisfied by his coitus/comida. 2) And, metaphorically, through the preparation, sharing, and consumption of food amongst themselves. These silent games of complicity and simulacrum create the possibility for the materialization of another type of body, normally erased by the patriarchal subject. Like Carmen and Beatriz’s kitchen, the entire story is filled with metaphors and an aroma of food and drinks, which points to sex or its “products.” Verbs such as to eat or to drink are constantly used metaphorically as sexual acts: “Xavier had to work very hard to provide good food to all three.”17 In Portuguese the noun for food, comida, is homologous to the participle form of the verb to eat, which also carries a vulgar double sense, meaning either “eaten,” “fucked,” or “the fucked one” according to context. In accordance to traditional patriarchal roles (which reinforce male dominance and privilege), Xavier pays for, while the women prepare and serve him his food/comida. In this powerunbalanced relationship, the women are also the ones who are literally comidas/fucked. In that society, they cannot provide their own comida/food and each night they have to allow themselves to be consumed or comidas/fucked in order to satisfy Xavier’s gastronomic desires. On a

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surface level, the women in the story assume an apparently passive position of resignation towards taking on the objectified and subaltern role imposed on them by the insatiable macho. However, though overt opposition to patriarchal dominance and objectification is absent, they reconceptualize and construct resistance in secrecy and silence: the two women slow cook a separate dish/relationship of their own, beyond the patriarch’s field of vision and, by extension, control. Apparently, the triangle ate, or comiam, together, however without Xavier’s knowledge Carmen and Beatriz sat at the table with him, but the women shared their food/comida, while watching, in disgust, Xavier satiate his bestial appetite: That day, Sunday, they ate lunch at three in the afternoon. Beatriz, the voluptuous one, cooked for them. Xavier drank French wine. He ate a whole rotisserie by himself. The two women ate another rotisserie. The rotisseries were filled with raisin and plum stuffing—they were both moist and tasty.18

Of Silence Since it is impossible for a woman to speak not as a subaltern or a negative counterpart of man in the male dominated societies of the West as both post colonial and feminist scholars have shown us,19 let us, then, not speak of words, i.e. spoken words, fixed identities, or labeled sexualities. As we imagine and conceptualize resistance to compulsory heterosexuality and essentialist patriarchal gender system that erases multiplicity, normalizes human beings and classify them into binary categories of straight or gay, let us turn our eyes to veiled possibilities cooked in slow fire under the master’s surveilling eye, in “his own” kitchen. As we read Lispector’s story, let’s shift our eye from the center of the text/plot to the blank of the margins and the silences inscribed in between the words on the page, so that we may “capture that other thing [she has been forbidden to] speak of.”20 For, as many radical lesbian feminist scholars have argued, heterosexist discourse does not invest speech with materiality or society outside its limits and boundaries, thus limiting all resistance to reform21. One is permitted to speak against the system, as long as the parameters of the speech-act originated from and is contained within that master system. According to this system of domination, “danger” does not stem from opposition or transgression of the values imposed by its logic-structure and order, but from the challenging of the system’s meaning/truth generating monopoly. This way Xavier’s transgression of social norms of marriage is tolerated and

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“A man makin’ pies out of sorrel!”: Exploring Issues of Gender and Family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke

you, but I ain’t afraid now.”16 The two then embrace, publicly, and begin a courtship that will lead them to disgrace and to a comparatively unhappy life. Emboldened by the shame that William felt over his father’s actions, Rebecca enters into a relationship that will eventually lead her to lose her identity. The Berry family’s cherry picking party, however, is not the only event in the novel that utilizes food imagery in order to present a larger commentary on gender roles and familial relations. Freeman also depicts the Barnard17 family as one whose interest in, and rules surrounding the consumption of food leads them to be, in Deborah Thayer’s estimation, not “like other folks.’ ”18 Most notably, the father Cephas’s determination to eliminate his family’s consumption of any animals or animal byproducts, sets the Barnards apart from the rest of the community. Cephas’s decision, however, stems from an argument that he and his daughter Charlotte’s fiance, Barney Thayer, had over “politics.” According to Cephas’s reasoning, the argument (and Barney’s subsequent jilting of Charlotte) would never have taken place if both parties had taken more care to nurture their spiritual, rather than their animal tendencies. “It’s better for us to eat some other kind of food, if we get real weak and pindlin’ on it,” he rationalizes, “rather than eat animal food an’ make the animal in us stronger than the spiritual”19. The dichotomy that Cephas articulates—animal versus spiritual—clearly parallels the dichotomy perceived between men and women, with women aligning with the animal, and men aligning with the spiritual. Cephas furthers this notion when he explicitly bans milk and eggs20—two food products associated almost exclusively with women—from their diet, claiming that they “are jest as much animal as meat.”21 With this emphatic inclusion, Cephas seems to suggest that by eating milk and eggs, a person effectively devours, rather than nurtures the feminine side. It also suggests, however, that he sees clearly defined distinctions between men and women, masculine and feminine, or paternal and maternal as arbitrary. If items with such a close association with the feminine are as much “animal as meat,” those distinctions would appear to be mere societal conventions. Cephas’s realization of this enables him to transcend the boundaries that have hitherto limited his life. Cephas’s denouncement of animal food also leads him to shift his own status from the patriarchal to the matriarchal, from the public to the domestic. Faced with a wife and daughter who insist that food cannot be prepared without at least a bit of animal fat, Cephas determines to prepare his own meals. “‘I’m a-goin’ to make them sorrel pies myself,’ he shouted out, ‘if none of you women folks know enough to.’ ”22 When

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That Carmen and Beatriz are forced to cover up their relationship, metaphorically moving it from the “living room,” where the privacy of the household is at times scrutinized by social visitors, into the domestic secrecy of the “kitchen.” In other words, the lesbian relationship between the women is cooked in silence and behind public acknowledgement: The days were long. Sometimes the two women would lie in bed. And, although they were not [my emphasis] homosexuals, the two would get excited and make love to each other.24

Although Lispector could not speak openly of lesbianism without compromising her status as “an honest woman,” the questions that echoes from the silence “That dare not speak its name” and cannot easily be stifled by phallocentric discourse are: if they were not homosexuals, what were they? Girls just wanting to have fun? Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios/Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown? If they were not homosexuals, why would Lispector tell us that Carmen and Beatriz would “make love” on a regular basis while with Xavier they simply “went to bed.” There is another pertinent question That troubles the free-love, liberal reading of a happy triangular relationship mutually satisfying for all parties involved: once Xavier found out That the women had been making love to each other in his absence during the day, he demanded That they do it in his presence, so That he could voyeuristically participate. However, Lispector tells us That although the women daily watched Xavier have sex, or comer/eat the one he would choose for the night, they could not (or did they refuse to?!) make love to each other in his presence. Our arguments runs that their lovemaking was a secret meal they refused to share! Lispector makes it very clear that it is only the intrusion of the patriarch which spoils the women’s appetite for each other. That same night Xavier told them to have sex in order to satiate his voyeuristic and bestial hunger to devour the women with his eyes (come-las com os olhos), “they went to bed successfully later”25 after they were left alone and free from his command to perform.

Beyond the border: loving without speaking In the preface to the collection Lispector invites the reader to become her accomplice/confident in this via crucis of “dangerous” narratives. As we read on, thus accepting the invitation to lose ourselves in a labyrinth of hidden transgressions, we become part of a veiling game that will displace the patriarchal body and create a space of multiplicity where the lesbian relationship between Carmen and Beatriz will materialize. Once we

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refocus our vision from center to the margins, from the obvious to the simulated, from the concrete to the implied, we notice that in “The Body” the presence and relevance of the macho body, personified by Xavier, dilutes diachronically and inversely proportionately to the materialization of the lesbian body, i.e. the relationship between Carmen and Beatriz. So as the love between the women solidifies and gains mass which demands space, Xavier’s presence becomes intolerable. His bad table manners, his bestial appetite, and his domineering presence in the relationship grew disproportional, like a cancer: Xavier had bad table manners: he would eat with his hands, made noise as he chewed, and did not close his mouth to eat. Carmen, who was the more classy of the two, would feel nauseated and embarrassed.26

As the narrative of this unconventional “marriage” develops the women slowly realize that they no longer need (maybe never ever needed) him. Xavier becomes marginalized and even problematic in their relationship. The loving space of domesticity becomes too small for three players. Xavier, who initially demanded for himself and occupied the center of the triad as the “eater”/ o comedor, was simply devoured by the women’s silent love That dared not say its name: How about Xavier? What should we do with him? […] Should we wait for him to die a natural death? Asked Beatriz. Carmen thought for a while and said: I believe we should take action.27

Action took the form of a funeral banquet that combined murder, potato salad and strong coffee freshly brewed to confirm, solidify, and toast the afterlife and immortality of the lesbian relation between the two women. In one last supper preparation Carmen and Beatriz kill Xavier and then cook for each other a mutually nourishing meal that will strengthen them to finish the process of ridding themselves of the patriarch’s body, which lay in between them for so long: [After eating the potato salad Beatriz had made for them] The two women went to the back yard and with two shovels they opened a tomb in the garden. And, in the darkness of night they carried the [macho’s] body [depositing it in mother earth’s oven]. They put the huge body in the tomb and covered it with moist and fragrant dirt. Then, they went back into the house, brewed a fresh pot of coffee to re-strengthen themselves.28

This moment marks the turning point when Carmen and Beatriz stop being consumed and eaten/comidas to start cooking for themselves.

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Symbolically they stop being objects of patriarchal consumption and take on the subject role as agents of their own (lesbian) history. As the lesbian relationship gains flesh, the “big and heavy” body of the patriarch that initially occupied the central referential point for all intimate relations in the short story is deconstructed and digested: The women’s silent love devours the patriarch. Xavier leaves the scene mute, saying nothing, and thus making room for another space of signification, where the women will go on living their lives beyond the control and borders of hetero-patriarchal society (without having to say the L-word). It is significant to point out that the murder of the patriarch was not discovered by the police; it was the women who took it upon themselves to confess their crime. This could metaphorically be read as a defiant act of coming out to the law, which would be either forced to socially recognize their existence in order to be able to punish their crime or let them escape patriarchal judgment and constraints (prison). Basically the “silent lesbians” turned the law of the father inside out and used its limitations for their own advantage and emancipation. And now what? Said one of the policemen. Now we have to arrest the two women. Look, said the other policeman to the astonished secretary, the best thing to do is pretend nothing happened or else there will be a lot of problems, bureaucracy, and gossip. You two, said the other policeman, pack your bags and go live in Montevideo I do not want any more trouble from you. The two women replied: Thenk you, sir. And Xavier said nothing. After all there was nothing left to speak.29

Thus, by the end of the story we return to silence (actually without ever leaving it). It is this subversive silence that Lispector offers as a banquet to her reader and the only nourishing food/comida in this lesbian story to counter the starvation, for a lesbian couple, of patriarchal domination. It is left to the reader the final task: to listen to the silences she speaks of even when she is not allowed to speak.

The film’s translation of silence: spectator’s limits As discussed, in Lispector’s short story silence translates, on the one hand, the interdiction to female/lesbian sexuality while, on the other hand, it ploughs the land for ultimate female transgression of that veto. In other words, if silence, as a result of silencing, suggests the obscene status of female pleasure in male-dominating society, “The Body” clearly voices

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silence as a signifying assertive practice. On the plot line, the story enhances the women’s trajectory from an original state of ignorance sheer reification: body as food, food as commodity - to acknowledgement of autonomous desire within the domestic premises and to overt ostentation of their loud desire on the public scene and before the eyes of the Father. We have already suggested, there is a substantial shift in that signification from the original short story to the film version. We understand that dislocation is primarily wrought by the flattening out of the tension found in the very “body”, understood as symbolic area of signification. To start out with the signifier “body” in the title, it stands for “living organism” and for “corpse”. Submissive bodies (devitalized corpses) give way to triumphant bodies that desire a life of their own and are willing to pay whatever price is charged. The intertwining of life and death operated by food metaphors and sacrificial rituals in Lispector’s story seem to undergo attenuation in Garcia’s film version, in the sense that the development of a pathological portrayal of the two women is at play at the expense of their celebratory vindication.

Assertion of female/lesbian desire: between normalization and deviation Beginning at the end, we have defended that, on the plot level, the exile imposed on Beatriz and Carmen results from a positive visibility the two women gain in the process of self-discovery and assertion. As they expose Xavier’s body/corpse to the law figures, they rescue their own bodies from commodification and their sexuality from obscenity. Producing a body/corpse – the male’s – comes full circle with transforming the female’s body/meal into their speaking body of desire. Xavier’s heavy and dominating body is stabbed to death as a sacrificial offer in the females’ rite of passage from commodities to desiring subjects. Significantly, the tools are the very kitchen knives the women used to feed their vegetating bodies in their oppressive/oppressed relation. While Lispector’s story end with the scene in the back yard when they confess the crime and are sentenced to Garcia’s film adds one last scene sequence at the airport. As Carmen and Beatriz board the plane, the viewers see the two women taking their seats in a row of three with a male passenger occupying the middle seat in between them. The eloquent silence of the trio and their significant exchange of sexually charged glances suggest a resolution of female/lesbian desire as either: 1) “lack” – they lack a husband/man, miss one, and look forward to a new one, or 2) “pathology”

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“A man makin’ pies out of sorrel!”: Exploring Issues of Gender and Family in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Pembroke

When Ephraim spontaneously decides to abandon the reclusive and repressive life that his mother has created for him, he does so completely. On a cold night in the middle of winter, Ephraim is overcome with a desire to escape from the confines of his home. At night, as he lay in bed watching the other boys coasting down Pembroke’s famous sledding hill, he feels an insuppressible urge to join them. Freeman describes the scene in sexual terms. “The moonlight lay on his bed,” she writes, and describes its influence as the same one which “moves the soul of the lover to dream of love and yearnings after it” and which also “increased the longing in the heart of one poor boy for all the innocent hilarity of his youth.”44 As he listens to his parents sleeping in their bedroom, Ephraim’s longing intensifies, and he finds himself uncontrollably drawn to the “frost night air, the sled, and the swift flight down the white hill as never lover longed for his mistress.”45 Giving in to this desire, Ephraim sneaks out of the house, takes Barney’s old sled from the shed, and spends the next two hours blissfully coasting down the well-known hill. When he returns, he feels “free,”46 so free in fact, that he decides to help himself to some of his mother’s forbidden mince pie. Once again, Freeman describes Ephraim’s activity in purely sexual terms. In his bedroom, he “sat on the edge of his bed and devoured his pie. The rich spicy compound and the fat plums melted on his tongue, and the savor thereof delighted his very soul…For the first and only occasion in his life he had had a good time.”47 Ephraim’s coming of age ironically occurs a day before his death, and is nearly prohibited (and certainly made more complicated) by the exaggerated roles that his parents maintain within the family unit. Freeman’s representation of Deborah and Caleb, combined with the fates of their children, seems to suggest that the aggressive dominance of Deborah cannot result in anything positive. As not only the authority, but also the phallic figure in the home—Deborah disciplines Ephraim by whipping him; she “raised her stick, and brought it down on him”48 even though the doctor had strictly forbidden it—Deborah presents an unconventional example for her children to follow. When Ephraim, alive with the sexual longings of adolescence, directs his desire in a conclusively oedipal move toward nature and food, it is his mother, not his father who disciplines him. In fact, his father later reinforces and unconsciously condones Ephraim’s behavior by indulging in the same pie. We’re reminded, however, that Caleb “would never have dared take the pie without permission had his wife been at home” and that his “ideas of hygienic food were primitive. He believed, as innocently as if he had lived in Eden before the Prohibition, that all food which he liked was good for him, and he applied his theory to all mankind.”49 The appetites of the

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Paris): he took it for an X-rated film. He did not realize that was the story of a desperate man.”33. “Not understanding” the film, as it is the case in the short story, costs Xavier his life, if Last Tango is taken as a metaphor for life at large. The narrator’s understatement on the male character’s constraints can be seen as an ironic or bitter comment on hostile and misguided macho/military reception and censorship to art in Brazil in the 70’s. We have already seen that Xavier is a poor reader and poor readers, or spectators, are usually incapable of broad textual perspectives and of comprehending nuances in both gender and genre horizons. Instead of approaching reading as active textual interlocutors, they remain unchanged receptacles, capable only of reproducing flat, monodimensional readings with predictable and linear outcomes.

Tragedy announced: emancipation or expiation? Film language develops a whole set of visual and verbal signs of premonitory nature, which symbolically bind characters’ action and development to a fate announced. A close up of the kitchen knife the women use to kill the poultry for dinner, a last supper’s icon on the dining room wall, and a periquite’s lottery [realejo] are added to the “last tango” motif opening the film: Xavier: Crazy girl! Shot the guy to death at the end. [Later at the restaurant] Xavier: Tonight is “last tango’s night” Carmen: Is that a promise or a threat? [Later in bed that same night] Beatriz: Nobody killed you at the end. We have to Thenk God for such happiness!34

Unless we can conceive of transgression of genre/gender laws, the spectator, like the characters themselves, turn out to be sheer followers of pre-existing laws (created by literary imagination, humans, gods, or what forces may be). Is there no room for chance and agency?

Obscene love making and scenic sex: whose pleasure is it? We have already discussed how Lispector’s text elaborates distinctive accents between the relation the two women have with each other and with Xavier; eroticism is wrought in the former, but not in the later. It must be highlighted that Beatriz and Carmen’s discovery of their own bodies is an authentic and organic process. Making love results from the women’s

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autonomous desire and decision, not from the male’s command. Whether love making happens in the presence of Xavier, for revenge for his lies, or behind his back depends on the women’s newly-acquired body consciousness and erotic autonomy. The film’s editing procedures, however, come to trouble this subtle and distinctive tension accomplished in the story, especially when Xavier’s relation with a “terrific prostitute” comes into play. The conservative nature of the ménage is confirmed in the sense that Beatriz and Carmen unfold one and the same relation in two bodies: they are actually domestic and domesticated women who own their fetishistic existence to the complementary figure of the whore—their equally commodified other. Beatriz and Carmen’s lovemaking is suggested in a scene where Carmen kisses Beatriz’s nape and, with their arms intertwined, the female partners toast to their erotic alliance. Neither their “successful lovemaking” behind Xavier’s back nor their “frequent spontaneous” daily/domestic love making is portrayed in the film for the spectator. While one could argue that this “clean” aesthetic option is also extended to the elimination of the scenes Xavier has sex with his two wives, this argument does not hold true in face of the graphic ostentation of Xavier’s orgasms with Monique, the prostitute. Two consequences derive from film language portraying the array of gender relations and roles: first, the celebration of heterosexual relations; female pleasure is exotic and obscene. It cannot be shown or seen. Second, the legitimation of male pleasure; visual exploitation of the female body as a commodity/food for male gaze (spectator’s voyeuristic pleasure), is reiterated in the insertion of two rendezvous between Xavier and Monique, culminating with graphic sex scenes. The added scenes between Xavier and the prostitute in a nightclub environment with parading go-go girls and transvestites, meet the same voyeuristic demand. Let’s also push the quotation from the short story we have made a bit further, including a last telegraphic comment: The days were long. Sometimes the two women would lie in bed. And, although they were not homosexuals, the two would get excited and make love to each other. Sad love. [emphasis added]35

The visual deletion of Beatriz and Carmen’s affective/erotic relation is reinforced by addition operations. Verbal accounts for their homoerotic involvement point in the opposite direction forged in the story. In the film version Carmen comments: “Sad is love without a man.”36 The ambiguity of the comment in Lispector’s original occurs before the two women tell Xavier about their lovemaking, fact which might suggest other reasons for

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that sadness, including the obscene condition of their affair. In the film, the explicative comment occurs chronologically at the point when they find out about Xavier’s “betrayal” and decide to take revenge. When taunted by Xavier about her desire for women, Beatriz replies “it’s not about women, just Carmen.”37 Conversely, whereas they do refuse to go on “feeding” Xavier – both sexually and gastronomically – the female characters in the film version lose motivation to cook at all. Moved by external/male determinations, the female characters in the film version give up eating and loving. “Potato salad just for the two of us?” says Carmen.38 Compare that to Lispector’s original version: On the following day they told him they would not go on cooking for him any longer. He might as well see about it with the third woman. The two women would cry sometimes and Beatriz fixed both a potato salad with mayo.In the afternoon they went to the movies. They dined out and came back home at midnight.39

In Garcia’s film, both practices/pleasures are then a prerogative of the male role. Given that food is a pervading and productive metaphor for gender roles in the story, eating and/or loving between females materialize in Lispector’s version, through eloquent silences, but not in the film. In conclusion, one could claim that there is an overt critique of institutions like the bourgeois family, the Church and the police in the film version. For example, the sheriff is not interested in punishing criminals, but is personally concerned with undesirable extra work an investigation would demand on his part and with the equally undesirable commotion female homoerotic desire must spur in the city. However, a careful analysis of film language can unveil ideological layers on the discourse that help delude the more immediate textual discussion of female/lesbian desire into an array of visual and verbal signs that respond to and favor male-centered and heterosexual expectations. Normalizing and pathologizing effects are obtained in the visual elision of the female homoerotic scenes and the verbal addition of explications, both of which make female/lesbian relations result from either a lack of social alternatives or a distortion, consonant with other symptoms of psychic anomaly. Finally, the reification of the status quo tends to prosper whenever the frontiers between gender and genre laws are naturalized, leaving little or no room for breaking textual limits. Listening to silence requires, then, a lot more than aural attention. It calls for watching for the interplay between what is allowed in and exiled from the combination between verbal and visual enactment, especially

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supposed, for the last time. Then he opened the door, and took hold of her slender shawled arm, and half lifted her in.”56 Glasser notes that when Richard, in addition to accessing his sexually repressed self, saves Sylvia from entering the poorhouse, he begins adopting maternal characteristics, and such an adoption seems at the crux of Freeman’s narrative.57 Evidence of this type of adoption exists in his nurturing of Sylvia after they enter her home and also in the clothing he wears. The narrator tells us that “When Richard Alger went home he wore an old brown shawl of Sylvia’s over his shoulders. He had demurred a little. [but Sylvia insisted] They won’t know it’s my shawl. Men wear shawls.”58 Richard’s recognition of his sexual longings and of his need to offer Sylvia the type of nurturing she needs signals a significant shift in his character. That he is also willing to wear Sylvia’s shawl alerts readers to the fact that he is willing to display this feminine side. Though Richard does become more maternal, Freeman also gives Sylvia more “maternal authority,” as she calls it, which provides her with dominance over Richard that she previously never experienced. Richard submitted to it [Sylvia’s dominating force] as if it were merely natural that he should…A very passion of obedience and loyalty to Sylvia had taken possession of him…He had borne with his whimsical will against all his sweetheart’s dearest wishes during the better part of her life; now he would wear any insignia of bondage if she bade him.59 Their relationship, like the Barnard relationship, undergoes a transformation that endows the women with authority, while enabling the men to act more maternally.60 Mary Wilkins Freeman’s work, replete with its references to food and its challenges to the nineteenth-century constructions of gender and familial roles, marks a distinctive change in the role of literature. Written primarily for popular audiences and published in such mainstream venues as magazines, Freeman’s work appealed to a wide, often conservative audience, but nonetheless contained subtle challenges to the social conventions that many of her readers endorsed and perpetuated. Through her subtlety, Freeman successfully presents alternate views of what it meant to be a woman or a man, to be masculine or feminine, paternal or maternal. In doing so, she created worlds that, albeit bitter in many ways, prompt readers to reconsider the validity of rigid hierarchies and to begin to build new bridges of their own.

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Notes 1

Unless otherwise noted, all English language quotes refer to my own unpublished translation of Lispector’s short story “O Corpo”/”The Body,” in Clarice Lispector, 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 2 Lispector, Clarice. 1973. Água Viva. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. 34. 3 Pinto-Bailey, Cristina Ferreira. 2002. “O Desejo Lesbiano no Conto de Escritoras Brasileiras Contemporâneas.” Revista Mulheres e Literatura, no 7. www.letras.ufrj.br/litcult (accessed May 4, 2007). 4 Grootendorst, Sapê. 1993. “Literatura gay no Brasil: Dezoito escrotrores brasileiros falando da temática homo-erótica.” manuscript, University of Utrecht, Holland. 52. 5 Lispector, Clarice. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo ( São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova, 1974). 6 Manzor-Coats, Lillian. 1994. "Introduction." In Latin American Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. ed. David William Foster and Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. xv-xxxvi. 7 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 23. 8 Ibid, 23. 9 Ibid, 23. 10 Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theories. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press. 154 . 11 Lispector, Clarice. 1973. Água Viva. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. 12 At some point in the middle of the story, not satisfied with two women Xavier starts an affair with a prostitute unbeknownst to his two “wives.” 13 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 7. 14 Ibid, 23. 15 Ibid, 1974. 7-8. 16 See Josefina Ludmer, 1980. “Las tretas del débil,” in La sartén por el mango, ed. Patricia González and Eliana Ortega. Puerto Rico: Huracán. 17 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 24. 18 Ibid, 24. 19 See the works of Maria Mies, Gayatri Spivak, Trinh Min Ha, Sarah Hoagland, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Marilyn Frye, and others. 20 Lispector, Clarice. 1973. Água Viva. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. 34. 21 The U.S. lesbian philosopher Sarah Hoagland explains why radical, progressive change must go beyond mere reform of oppressive systems. Drawing on the work of Kathryn Pyne, Hoagland distinguishes between reform and revolution: “the task of moral reform … is the preservation of values. But the aim of moral revolution is the creation of value,” in 1992 Lesbian Ethics. Palo Alto, CA: Institute of Lesbian Research. 24. Thus, although reforms might bring some change to a give system, its ultimate goal is to keep the system in place.

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22 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 23. 23 Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5:4 . (Summer, 1980): 638. 24 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 26. 25 Ibid, 26. 26 Ibid, 26. 27 Ibid, 30. 28 Ibid, 30. 29 Ibid, 32. 30 Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 150. 31 Ibid, 155. 32 In Portuguese, the word gênero goes for both “genre” and “gender” (and even “genus”), which helps us develop the notion of readability of conventions as coextensive to both sexual roles and literary horizons of expectations. 33 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 35. 34 O Corpo. 1992. DVD, directed by José Antônio Garcia. Brazil: Olympus Film Production: Embrafilme. 35 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 26. 36 O Corpo. 1992. DVD, directed by José Antônio Garcia. Brazil: Olympus Film Production: Embrafilme. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 39.

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Blum. 1993. 73 & 75. Lorne Fienberg writes that “Charlotte Perkins Gilman, advanced a rather simple proposal for redesigning domestic space: one need only omit the kitchen to hasten the evolution of women’s economic situation” (491). 7 Even the family’s surname, Berry, conjures a combination of sexual and culinary imagery. 8 Freeman, Mary Wilkins. 1991. Pembroke. 123. 9 Ibid., 132. 10 Ibid., 133-34. 11 Ibid., 111. 12 Ibid., 134-35. 13 Ibid., 140. 14 Ibid., 181. 15 Ibid., 268. 16 Ibid., 141 & 142. 17 Additionally, the root of the family’s surname (barn) suggests a link to animals. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 54. 20 Eggs play another important role in the narrative—this time with Rebecca and William. Tellingly, she sells her eggs to him in exchange for sugar and when she does so, he gives her far more than seems reasonable, prompting his miserly father to protest (89). Later, when William gets the sugar, he “plunged the great scoop with a grating noise. He heaped it recklessly on some paper, and laid it on the steelyards” Ibid., 91. 21 Ibid., 51. 22 Ibid., 50. 23 Ibid., 51. 24 She also notes that “The roles that men are given in her [Freeman’s] fiction make them appear diminished or they tend to be absent altogether. One important exception should be noted. Much like Jewett, Freeman is interested in male characters whose lives endorse women’s values. Although she features relatively few male protagonists in her short fiction, Freeman endows many of them with the same domestic qualities that her women possess” (Mann 51). 25 Freeman Ibid., 46-7. 26 Ibid., 52. 27 emphasis mine 28 Ibid., 56. The effect on their daughter, Charlotte, is similar. When Deborah Thayer visits the Barnards in an attempt to learn the reason for the argument, Charlotte breaks in and commands her father to “’keep still,’” adding that ‘I’ve never set myself up against you in my whole life before; but now I’m going to, because it’s just and right’” (60). 29 Glasser’s claims that Sarah “is powerless despite her moral superiority” and that Cephas “rules the household” are generally true, but the familial inversion that occurs in this scene grants Sarah a level of power that I believe Glasser does not take into account. Though Sarah has indeed “been trained to submit to his 6

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“We don’t make meatballs here anymore”: Reel Italian American Foodways in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush

chef’s father and former owner—vendetta freddo per due cafoni. 3As Jennifer Freely, one of New York’s most important food critics said recently to Gigino’s new owner Udo: “Unbelievable. Only in New York can you count on a double murder to triple your business. You’ll be booked solid for a year!” So-come to Gigino’s—a true family business owned by three generations of the Cropa family where you’ll find the perfect mix of vino, vitello, and vendetta—all served con amore. And remember—the vendetta at Gigino is best eaten cold! That first section up to the “great Italian food” quote is the heading on the on-line menu of the real Gigino’s Trattoria at 323 Greenwich St. in the TriBeCa neighborhood in New York City. The specials of the day list and the quote near the end (with my own little tagline in the middle) are uttered by wait-staff at Gigino’s and a fictional New York food critic played by Sandra Bernhard in director Bob Giraldi’s 2001 film Dinner Rush. The screen play is written by Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaughnessy with lots of input from Giraldi. The movie was filmed on location at the actual Gigino’s Tratorria co-owned by Giraldi, who along with Phil Suarez (also a co-producer of the film), owns other restaurants in New York, London and Hong Kong. Giraldi established his filmic re-known as a music video director for Michael Jackson, Pat Benatar and Lionel Ritchie, and as director of the films Hiding Out (1987) and National Lampoon Goes to the Movies (1983). Dinner Rush is an Italian American cultural production that represents the dynamic processes and aesthetic innovations of ethnic identity in twenty-first century America by emphasizing the fluid dynamic mobility in the percorso of Italian American identity—but with a specific focus on a discrete site of ethnic self-fashioning—a New York City Italian restaurant. 4 The film’s depiction of the intergenerational handing over of the control of a family restaurant business and the retirement of an Italian American man from mob-related activities signals an example of a transitional moment in the percorso of American italianita. Dinner Rush offers a post-immigrant paradigm that can be explored for current meanings of American Italian cultural adaptation. But instead of representing the usual suspects of Italian-American Mafia clichés, the film offers fresh representations of intergenerational Italian American family relationships and food ways. Though the film also includes elements of the stereotypical Italian American identity— family centered conflicts food obsessed people, gangsters, or paesans, pasta, and La cosa nostra —its representational complexity of the characters and de-mystification /remystification of mobster life functions to resist the social packaging and

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consumption of commodities stamped with imagined Italianita, especially food value related commodities. 5 The perception of Italian Americans as mob-linked, food obsessed, family focused, sensual and emotional individuals is a set of images that have been represented in a range of cultural productions, such as films and television shows like HBO’s The Sopranos and certainly Dinner Rush contains these elements.6While some Italian American groups lament the link between mama and the mob, veal and vendetta, scam and scamozza, these images have also been used by a range of businesses, such as restaurant chains to sell their version of vicarious mega-caloric immersions in Italian American culture via an “Italian” culinary experience. Advertisements for these chains emphasize ingredients that are a range of “authentic” identifiable ethnic characteristics linked to food consumption in an “Italian restaurant. Food chains love to proclaim their “authenticity”, with a wide range of supposed authentic “Italian” traits—loud, expressive, passionate, family centered people with New York /Jersey accents seriously prone to hyperbole in their advertisements, menu rhetoric, and restaurant ambience to re-assure consumers that the massive plate of prefabricated food that they can wallow in is indeed “Italian”. They trot out the usual suspects the general public associates with Italian Americans, including garish murals, gigantic portions, and by-lines like that proclaimed by the General Mills owned “Hospitaliano” of Olive Garden’s “When you’re here you’re family” advertisements. As a result, Italian American relationships to food have been trivialized, simplified, reduced to identifiable stereotypes and commodities and consumed in “Italian” chain restaurants.7 With Italian food ways being “Wal-Marted” and homogenized in an endless chain of corporate restaurants like Olive Garden, Carabba’s and Buca di Beppo, it is refreshing to watch independent Italian American films such as Giraldi’s Dinner Rush and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night (1996) represent the complex interconnections of food ways and ethnic identity. 8Both films represent the joys, tensions, and passionate complexities of the preparation and consumption of food as well as the problematic percorso of American italianita, the on-going transformation and adaptation of Italian la via vecchia (the old way) to American Italian il vio nuovo (the new way). According to screenwriters Shaughnessy and Kalata, their original script idea for Dinner Rush arose from a discussion about “why good restaurants with good food are such a huge social focus”. 9 They suggest that they wanted to portray “to the chefs, food and cooking is an art, a form of self expression, even though they argued about women and gambling problems most of the time.”10 Giraldi’s input with the script

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“We don’t make meatballs here anymore”: Reel Italian American Foodways in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush

focuses the story’s attention on the tensions in the Italian American world of Louis Cropa and his relationship to his son Udo (as well as input from his own experiences as a New York restaurateur). In an interview with Sacha Molitorisz, Giraldi admits to the realistic depiction of restaurant life in the film: "Everything in there right down to all the chefs and the womanizing and the fucking in a corner, that's all based in truth. It's all either metaphorically or literally accurate, and a lot of it is autobiographical.”11 Giraldi also admits to Molitorisz that the mob storyline notion of direct contact with the New York branch of cosa nostra was not merely poetic license or a fictional embellishment to the filmplay, but based on his actual experience as a restaurant owner in TriBeCa. Giraldi says, At Gigino's, we were approached by the supposed Mob when we opened about the sanitation and the laundry and the cleaning. That's how they begin to get to you. But we held our ground. I knew a Mob lawyer who made a few phone calls, and the threat vanished. And really, they don't bother you too much, unless you're in Little Italy. They have better things to do than torching people's restaurants.12

Giraldi also asserts to Molitorisz that the realistic range of situations that he incorporated into his representation of the filmic Gigino’s is based on actual experiences in running the real Gigino’s. Giraldi says, “Everything in there right down to all the chefs and the womanizing and the fucking in a corner, that's all based in truth. It's all either metaphorically or literally accurate, and a lot of it is autobiographical.”13 Dinner Rush chronicles one eventful night at Gigino's Trattoria, an Italian restaurant in the TriBeCa neighborhood of New York owned by Louis Cropa (Danny Aiello) whose is also a soon to be retired-bookie. Gigino’s is undergoing an identity crisis as it changes from Little Italy type trattoria to a hot “huppie” (hungry urban professional) hangout and a successful “place with the buzz” because of the reputation and culinary artistry of Louis’s rising star chef son Udo (Edoardo Ballerini). The restaurant is clearly an urban space in transition. Louis built the business, started by his grandfather and father, based on serving traditional Southern Italian American food cooked by his now deceased wife. Udo, however, is a demanding culinary school trained chef intent on developing hybrid Italian American nouvo (new) cuisine for Gigino’s. He is also a bright new light in the New York food world, showered with both public and critical acclaim. Nicknamed “King Cropa”, by the wait staff, Udo rules his kitchen like il duce, firing one employee for a dull prep knife by saying “This kitchen will not be the last refuge for misfits” and telling

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“We don’t make meatballs here anymore”: Reel Italian American Foodways in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush

the claustrophobic, frenetic downstairs kitchen, food lockers, cluttered business office, narrow backstairs and the close quartered, earth toned, upstairs dining spaces. Several scenes underscore ongoing crises –mainly conflicts between Louis and Udo as Udo demands more control of the restaurant and expresses ongoing frustration at his father lack’s of recognition of his culinary skills. And Black and Blue arrive to demand a partnership in the restaurant and collect from Duncan, the Gigino sous chef who cooks traditional Italian food for Louis. Duncan is a "pathological gambler" in debt to Black and Blue for $13,000! The two mob thugs are invited to the restaurant by Louis who plans to give them the bookmaking operation. But they have their own ideas—a “business proposition” for Louis—they want to own a large percentage of the trattoria. They threaten Louis—"We're not leaving here until we're partners in the food business." Louis says, "OK the book is yours.” “Never the restaurant!” Now finish your dinner and leave” They don’t. Black and Blue decide to hang around until Louis has a change of heart—devouring the delectable cuisine that Gigino’s has to offer—and waiting for the moment when they can force Louis to capitulate to their demands. All the while, patrons are coming in and out of the bustling eatery and they add a bit more bedlam to the already chaotic night. The customers include arrogant art gallery owner Fitzgerald (Mark Margolis) and his entourage of “important” artists and sycophants who expect to be treated as celebrities the moment they show up. And the food critic described by Udo as “the most important food writer in New York”— Jennifer Freely (Sandra Bernhard) shows up unannounced with her companion known as “the food nymph” (Sophie Comet) to review the place. Also arriving at Gigino’s are New York police Detective Drury (Walt McPherson) and his wife (Ellen McEldruff)—invited by Louis for dinner so the officer can arrest Black and Blue. As the dinner rush continues, a waitress Marti (Summer Phoenix) observes the interaction between Louis, Black and Blue and the New York City detective and his wife and comments to the maitre’d, “Champagne for the cops, dinner for the crooks. Something is not right here.” John Corbett plays Wall Street trader Ken (who we are surprised to find moonlights on the side) who sits and eats at the bar and functions in the film as a commentator on much of the nights action, the restaurant’s theater like ambience and the over-the-top food plating and presentations. When asked by the bartender why he is lingering for much of the night, Ken responds:” I’m just curious watching all the people. Star gazing potential. I wonder when it all changed—When did eating dinner become a Broadway show?” Later when given an entrée with an over the top

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presentation, he says “That sure is pretty. I don’t know whether to eat it or fuck it.” By the night’s end—all family business is settled by Louis. Despite his expressions of exasperation at Udo’s food and the direction of the restaurant, it’s revealed that Louis planned to give Udo the run of the place on this very night. But before he can bring in the new, he needs to ring out the old! The bookmaking operation is given to Black and Blue (but “never the restaurant!”) Duncan’s gambling debt is paid by Louis, and Louis gets to eat some vendetta freddo at Black and Blue’s expense. The movie has a surprise dramatic resolution. Ken, the Wall Street trader moonlights as a hit man and in a surprise scene in the downstairs bathroom, shoots and kills both Black and Blue with a silencer. The wife of Detective Drury discovers the bodies as she goes downstairs to the rest room, and police and reporters descend on the restaurant. As the bodies of Black and Blue are carted out, food writer Freely tells Udo, “Unbelievable. Only in New York can you count on a double murder to triple your business. You’ll be booked solid for a year!” The film ends with Louis paying off the hit man outside the restaurant in his car, and telling his accountant “You know what they say-Revenge is a dish best eaten cold.” As I noted in the above synopsis, Gigino's is a third-generation family place that is undergoing an identity crisis and clearly in transition. Louis' traditional ideas about Italian American values of food collides with chef Udo's new-school cuisine, as he perceives the old Little Italy type neighborhood restaurant being replaced by a hipper, trendier crowd. The simple, Southern Italian based peasant fare that helped establish Gigino’s for three generations in TriBeCa has been replaced by Udo’s culinary school inspired ideas of Italian pan-regional, hybrid cuisine and flamboyant plating. Udo is portrayed in Dinner Rush as what David Kamp in his book on American food ways The United States of Arugula (2006) terms “the culinary elites,” a celebrity chef “suffused with feelings of boundless possibility, having liberated themselves from the old strictures and prejudices that hemmed in their predecessors.” 14Dinner Rush also portrays a city in transition by offering a range of images of New York past and present--the old-time mob infiltrated Italian neighborhood New York, the socialite art and fashion world New York, and the new ethnic New York, represented by the diverse ethnic ensemble of restaurant employees (a restaurant staff of an Indian maitre de, an Asian hostess, an English bartender, black, white and Latino servers, and a kitchen with Italian, White Anglo Saxon Protestant, and Latino cooks). The film also portrays two types of Italian American perspectives living and working in New York coming together in conflict and understanding in a

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heterogeneous ethnic space—a Manhattan restaurant, and facing changing values long removed from the immigrant or the ethnic enclave experience. The clash between old “Little Italy” values and new, global -conscious, sophisticated American Italian food ways is evident in the restaurant's menu, clientele and function as the main conflict at play in the relationship between Louis and Udo and the complications of Louis’s mob connected past (what Udo calls “gangsters in the balcony”). A central scene that occurs early in the movie resonates with a range of issues including intergenerational conflict, past and present, and tradition versus creative adaptation and hybridity in food ways. In this scene Udo and Louis discuss issues pertaining to the restaurant and their personal and professional relationship. In this scene, Udo has no problem asking his father for money in one breath and in the next offering a jeremiad underscoring his contempt for the spaghetti and meatballs, sausage and peppers based cuisine Louis loves. Udo comes upstairs from his culinary domain in the basement to his father’s table in the corner of the restaurant that he terms “the godfather’s table” to ask for some cash to buy supplies and new kitchen help: Udo: I need money Louis: Money? What for? Udo: I need a new mixer, I need new Lenox china, I need to take care of a couple of guys in the kitchen Louis: What guys? Udo: Gabrielle and a couple of Latinos you don’t know. Louis: Of course, why would there be Italians in an Italian kitchen? Okay, you got the money. Udo: Why do I have to come to the Godfather’s table begging all the time? Louis: It’s tough being a star isn’t it? Pretty soon this’ll all be your and you can do whatever the Hell you want. Udo: When? Louis: When you stop asking when. Udo: Why don’t you stick with the bookmaking, let me run the restaurant. Louis: I’ve had this restaurant for longer than you’ve been alive and I still have it and it’s my money. Udo: People squeeze through that door because of my food, not because it’s your place. Louis: [He picks up the menu with a tone of contempt in his voice as he reads] Yeah, let’s see. Snapper carpaccio with blood orange juice, pumpkin risotto with chestnuts, rabbit piedmontese wine reduction with chocolate… You call this shit food? Udo: Something for the critics. Louis: Your mother made food not for the critics. Simple. Elegant. This place smelled like heaven!

TOP OF THE FOOD CHAIN: ANDERS THOMAS JENSEN’S THE GREEN BUTCHERS MARYANNE FELTER

The title of Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s The Green Butchers (De Gronne Slagtere) points comically and ironically to Western industrialized nations’ attitudes toward food consumption. The “green” of the title slyly conjures not only the environmental movement but also the move toward vegetarianism of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Green Butchers’ oxymoronic title indicates what Jay Antani argues in his review of the film: The Green Butchers demonstrates that “society at large delights in gorging on itself—getting fat on the recycled refuse of its materialistic (or, in this case, gastronomical) excess, and the idea that we, as individuals, cannibalize our pasts to feed our grudges in the present.”1 Although the film fits into the genre of off-beat, cult food films in which cannibalism is used comically (Eating Raoul, Delicatessen, Sweeney Todd are examples), Jensen’s use of the butcher shop as a metaphor within a traditional comic structure that ends in reconciliation, forgiveness, and harmony makes it different from those other films. This paper explores the ways that Jensen uses opposing poles of vegetarianism and cannibalism corresponding to specifically delineated spaces, to show the healing of the fractured natures of his characters’ lives and a restoration of harmony to the world in which they live. Meat, whether animal or human, works in this film as a metaphor to disrupt our physical, psychological, and even sociological comfort zones. Eating human “meat,” i.e. cannibalism, functions to create an “engagementdetachment”2 phenomenon that dislocates the audience and becomes the fulcrum on which the characters balance their difficulties in finding happiness. The lighter, comic elements of the plot are continually undercut by more serious, almost tragic ones; harmony is restored to the world of this film in the traditionally comic resolution of a kind of marriage and “happy family” united at the end in spite of the horrors through which they have lived. The main characters are hemmed in by their past circumstances: it is a comic, social integration, and understanding

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to re-connect with the virtuosity and diversity of Italian continental cuisine “the task at hand was to undo the cultural effects of three generations of assimilation [in America]” with food “as the integral part of that effort.”16 Many scholars, food writers and chefs who study Italian and Italian American food ways point out that Italian, as well as Italian American cuisine is a heterogeneous set of cuisines, rather than a homogenous national cuisine that fits under a general, generic term such as “Italian food.” Kamp suggests that the very notion of food strictly categorized as Italian is a “phony construct.”17 Kamp notes that “Italy, in truth, was a country predicated more on regional identity than a national one—people, and cuisines were Bolognese, or Tuscan, or Neapolitan.” 18Kamp is observing the central tenet of “Italian food” by important Italian food writers such as Marcella Hazan. In her work The Classic Italian Cookbook (1983), Hazan introduces her collection of recipes with the observation that The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually does not exist. “Italian cooking” is an expression of convenience rarely used by Italians. The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and hostile states.19

Italian American cuisine, on the other hand, is a hybrid food form based initially on traditional food ways of the specific regions or villages of immigrants, but transformed into a heterogeneous cuisine as a result of the pressures of acculturation, urban, suburban and rural inter-ethnic interaction, and adaptation to American prosperity, geographic settlement patterns, and the abundance and variety of food sources in America.20 Louis’s stubborn clinging to what he believe are traditional Italian values (or as Udo states—("there’s no give and take with you!”) is contrasted with Udo’s desire for his father’s recognition, his own independence, as well as the more ephemeral desires of culinary fame and critical praise. Since the average new New York restaurant lasts about 18 months and the real bottom line purpose, according to star chef and multiple New York restaurant owner Mario Batali is to “to buy food, fix it up, and sell it at a profit,” Louis’ anxieties about Udo’s cooking is not only about cultural continuity or familial unity, but the material concern that Gigino's will survive the ephemera of restaurant critical popularity and the more immediate tensions of Udo’s ego and mob attempts at procuring a percentage of the restaurant profits.21 Louis also fears that deeply rooted traditions are being dismissed, destroyed or forgotten by values that change shape with every new cultural wind. Louis worries that

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Gigino’s as a “trendy Tribeca eatery with its “Star chef” may not have the sustaining power of his wife’s traditional food ways that focused on sustenance and nourishment for both body and soul. Modes of food preparation connect Louis to the past, the memory of his late wife, and concerns for the disappearing Italian-ness of New York. But Udo wants to adapt Gigino’s culinary milieu in the present with an eye on the restaurant’s and his own future. For Udo, his food preparation is his key to his future and symbolic of the convergence of art and commerce that the new Gigino’s underscores. Louis, however, openly expresses to Udo that he feels threatened by Udo’s new culinary direction. Louis says, “You know sometimes I’d like to take this place back to what it was when your mother ran it, but we can’t, can we?” Udo responds by complaining to his father “Why do you always live in the past?” Louis reminds Udo that the money that has underwritten his culinary education and has provided the over-all financial solvency of Gigino’s in the past has been not only food sales, but book-making and mob-related activity. Louis replies—“No past, no money for school, no star chef” and of course, unspoken is—no restaurant, no traditions to adapt to new world realities. Louis is ambivalent about the direction his son is taking the cuisine of Gigino’s, but he is not a cook! And, it’s evident that he raised Udo to be independent, educated, creative, passionate, and pragmatic. Dinner Rush portrays the connection between father and son and family as emotionally informed by food traditions, something that is an important element of American italianita. Food, specifically ideas about the authenticity, preparation and presentation of “Italian food” at Gigino’s is ostensibly the source of both vital connection and disconnection between Louis and Udo. Udo’s cuisine resists the constrictions and misperceptions of “Italian food” as overflowing plates of spaghetti drowning in a morass of “red lead” sauce, crowned by mega-meatballs. Louis ultimately questions the Italian-ness of Udo’s cooking and chef practices. The irony is that Louis’s notions of Italian cooking in the restaurant is more accurately the “red sauce zone” variety of Italian American cooking with a focus on Southern Italian culinary traditions. He loves Duncan’s preparation of sausage (bought at “Spargelli’s”) and peppers food that Udo tells Duncan “stinks” (although he is careful to remind Duncan as he cooks Louis’s sausage “Don’t burn the sausage”). Despite Udo’s contempt for the food styling that Louis craves and Duncan cooks, he tells his father, “It’s strange huh? Work my whole life to become a chef and my own father wants somebody else to cook his food.” The sacred, almost spiritual nature of food preparation and consumption is reflected in Louis’ comment to Udo that when his mother

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cooked the restaurant “smelled like heaven.” Food in Louis’s mind is treated as a sacred medium, a tangible connection and expression of family communion. This is threatened by the purgatorio of cross-cultural, panregional foods created by Udo and what Louis perceives as his obsession with culinary fame. Udo, on the other hand, believes that his father’s sausage- peppers-meatballs-red sauce food traditions are a form of pandering to static, vulgar out dated culinary notions of Italian American cuisine. Louis’s “heaven” is a form of professional purgatory or hell for Udo. Udo thinks that traditional food “stinks. But Udo, in other forms expresses and embraces his Italian identity, as a fourth generation American of Italian descent. He tells the “food nymph” the origins of the restaurant name by pointing to the picture on the menu of Louis with Udo’s great grandfather in New Jersey and explains that Gigino means little Gigi, short for Luigi’s, Louis birth name. He tells her “Italians are crazy about nicknames” Unlike his father he speaks the Italian language fluently and is not bound by values arising from some displaced sense of campanilismo, evident in Louis’ desire for things “Italian” to remain in his restaurant.22 The irony is that many of Udo’s creations has much more in common with diverse regional Italian culinary artistry, than the American Italian / Southern Italian hybrid foods for which Louis sustains passionate and profound memories. Food preparation becomes central in the drama of affirmation or rejection of tradition. He ostensibly seems to believe that Udo’s culinary virtuosity at Gigino’s threatens family continuity or demonstrates a type of disloyalty to the memory of his mother’s more traditional Southern Italian culinary traditions. At least, that is what he appears to demonstrate for much of the film (until it’s revealed that he planned to legally transfer the majority ownership of the restaurant to Gigino’s on this very night. If the kitchen was heaven when Louis’s wife cooked, in his mind he considers the current spiritual status of Gigino’s nuovo cuisine to be an artificial paradise concerned more with critical praise, bottom lines, and innovation for innovations sake, rather than deeply rooted values informed by powerful memories. But it is those values that impel Louis—Gigi—to protect his family, his son, and his future and sustain his family business. In a line straight out Puzo’s “Godfather” Louis says “A real man takes care of his family”—and he means it with a passion and a willingness to sever elements of his past that threaten it-by serving some very old fashioned Southern Italian values of vendetta on those that threaten to disrupt his family’s future and murdered Enrico. If he seems to think Udo’s food threatens that sacred memory, in the end he reveals his great pride and confidence in Udo by giving him the run of restaurant. Louis

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together than some would be comfortable with. In fact, some of the language of food culture includes metaphors that use the concept of cannibalism as a way to separate groups. Peter Atkins and Ian Bowler, for instance, cite bell hooks’ term “eating the other” as a phrase used by cultural critics in referring to the growing popularity of ethnic restaurants.6 The characters in this film are indeed eating each other. Jensen’s comic film portrays cannibalism blatantly and rather gorily. Butcher underling Svend is constantly criticized by his boss, the butcher Holger, owner of a shop, famous for its sausages. Svend and Bjarne work in the back room of the shop, cutting up the meat. Holger is a trying boss who constantly demeans his employees; Svend’s anger surfaces in a remark he makes early in the film to one of the customers: “It’s almost mythological to kill an animal and then mock it by sticking it in its own intestine. Can you imagine anything worse than being stuck up your own ass? […] That’s one of our small pleasures.”7 From the start, Jensen connects the blood and guts violence of butchery to a more abstract metaphor: sometimes a sausage is not just a sausage. The imagery Svend uses here blurs the distinction between pig and man. When Svend and Bjarne decide to open their own shop to get out from under Holger’s fat thumb, Bjarne realizes the only way for him to come up with his million to fund the enterprise is to pull the plug on his comatose, mentally-retarded twin brother Eigel, thus inheriting the money his parents, killed in a car crash, had left for the care of Eigel. The literal, bloody goriness of the butchers’ profession is no bloodier than Bjarne’s willingness to exact revenge by killing his twin brother to fund his new shop. Jensen makes Bjarne’s sacrificing of Eigel to his own dreams of success a clear case of metaphoric cannibalism. When Bjarne goes to the Fjeldstad Sanatorium, to see about “taking care” of Eigel, Jensen’s camera cuts from the sterile white-tiled back room of the butcher’s shop to the beautiful, huge country estate of the sanatorium. But when we enter the sanatorium, we see that the interior, an enormous, white-tiled room, in which Eigel lies comatose on a clinical white hospital bed, differs very little from the back-room of the butcher shop. In fact, after Bjarne asks the doctors to euthanize Eigel, Jensen cuts immediately to a scene of huge red carcasses of meat being rolled into the “sterile” white backroom of Bjarne’s and Svend’s new butcher shop. Bjarne’s and Svend’s world is carnal, primal, brutal, and terrible. Butcher shops, like empires, are built on the backs of the “refuse” of society. And Bjarne’s cold, inhuman treatment of his brother is a clinically calculated, brutal and terrible act. The metaphors are clear, and the scene is set. But what the viewer sees next undercuts the pathos of the sanatorium scene with black humor. The

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to cook something “interesting with pasta, but with “Absolutely no butter!”24 Working with Duncan, Udo creates and dramatically plates a dish that he describes to Freely and the food nymph as “Montauk lobster and rock shrimp in a champagne shallot sauce with vanilla bean, garnished with salmon caviar, and a Tobiko caviar which has a wasabi flavor and some chives—and no butter!” But despite his admission that some of his food is “for the critics” he adheres to strict personal standards and seems genuinely concerned with creating aesthetically pleasing food creations that also satisfy. The notion of relaxed eating in a family owned trattoria, often a site for celebrating or strengthening family ties has been usurped by the notion of restaurant as theater presentation— not only a place to eat good food, but a place to engage in power plays indicating your higher or lower status in the social and cultural food chain. For Louis, the restaurant experience is meant to be a participation in a sort of primal tribal culinary gathering, a site for strengthening or celebrating familial bonds, talking personally to the chef, and knowing the owner by name. His concern is that Udo’s culinary fame has somehow usurped these nostalgic notions by functioning as the place to see or be seen, for striking poses, or the social power maneuver of getting a reservation at a moment’s notice, securing the best table, or having the chef prepare something “off the menu.” The film portrays the reality that in many places, sustaining nostalgia laden food ways have been replaced by overly dramatic narcissistic presentations and exotic ingredients and a sort of Iron Chef “whose cuisine reigns supreme” approach to cooking in sating the critics and fickle customers. The film has been touted by some film critics as standard Italian American fare by saying that the film’s mob / food plot link makes it a The Sopranos / Big Night hybrid film experience. But, for me, Dinner Rush is a clever re-interpretation in an urban setting of the paesans, pasta, and la cosa nostra triad of American italianita signifiers, so often represented in a range of texts and films. The film, however, includes a presentation of the relationship between Italians, food, and the mob that both de-mystifies and emphasizes the relationship between American italianita food ways and the mob—two cultural forms that have undergone a process of commodification and transformation. Louis not only retires from his mobrelated book-making business, but actively verbally de-constructs mob mystique, and resists attempts by low life Queens based mobsters to take over a portion of his restaurant by serving up a little old fashioned cold vendetta next to his son’s hot nuova cucina. In Dinner Rush the present father /son relationship represents a potential gap between past and future that portrays a problematic solution in a final old world value laden

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action—vendetta—murder for hire. But the vendetta that is served and is eaten cold by Louis results in the hot restaurant getting hotter! In an odd way, adaptation and innovation is advanced by killing-in this case radically severing the link, or the imagined link to the mob—one that is being forced on Louis and Udo. Any notion of the mob mystique is not only deconstructed in Dinner Rush, but literally and violently resisted. The end of the film may unsettle some (it certainly was a surprise to me and many who watch it), but it does a neat job of doing away with what Annabella Sciorra calls “the same old mafia shit” while using it as a means of advancing its narrative as well as the success of the fictional Gigino’s— on purpose.25 Like Big Night, you may leave a viewing of Dinner Rush hungry (I made my first timpano after watching Big Night)—but you end up also oddly satisfied—not only because of the food imagery--but the image of mobster thugs Black and Blue getting literally taken out. There is no actual dessert offered to them at Gigino’s (like the torta di mandorle that Louis takes out to share with Natalie)—but these are two characters that clearly get their just desserts! Black and Blue are two characters that would not be out of place in the fictional New Jersey cosa nostra world of Tony Soprano--they are presented as violent amoral thugs. Louis describes them to Udo in a way that deconstructs the mob myth and emphasizes the reality of decline of the early twenty-first century cosa nostra: “They want a piece of the trattoria. You see, they don’t see themselves as gangsters. Those creeps see themselves as entrepreneurs.” Some questions that go unanswered in the film, however, are: Why does Louis arrange the hit in the restaurant on the night that he plans to hand over its operation to Udo? Is it a signal to other mob wanna-bes that he’s very serious about keeping the restaurant in his family and out of mob connected hands? Or a brilliant business move for his son’s future? These questions are never clearly answered in the film, but it leave you with a strong impression that, not unlike a mythical mob figure like Don Vito Corleone, Louis has the power and connections (that he denies) to deal with every threat to his family or his business. At one point in the film, Louis verbally deconstructs the mob connection myth to Natalie (Polly Draper) the daughter of his partner Enrico who was murdered by Black and Blue for not giving them their bookmaking operation. Earlier in the film there’s a brief power outage at the restaurant. Natalie tells Louis that she mourns her father death and says, “I know you miss him as much as we do. It’s just hard for me because I fell like my father died for absolutely nothing. You know— garbage.” And --in a great cinematic move by Giraldi --at the moment the lights go back on-- she enlightens Louis with a great commentary on the

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nature Louis’ old world ideas and connections: “The problem with your world is that it is one that no one gives a shit about it any more—right? Welcome to the new world!” Louis calls her later and in a great little conversation deconstructs the mob myth : Natalie: “My father was big boy. He knew what the life was” Louis: There was no life” Natalie: C’mon Lou” Louis: Look. We weren’t saints –we were just 2 guys trying to make a couple of bucks. Natalie: Yeah, you guys were a couple of Robin Hoods, I know that. Louis: If we were part of a family the bastards who killed your father would be hanging from the Queensboro Bridge right now. There was no family. No mob. All an illusion. Natalie I never held a real gun in my hand. I don’t think your father did either.”

But Louis’s actions later in the film, as he arranges for Black and Blue to be killed by Wall Street trader, moonlighting hit man Ken, seem to contradict his own mob connection narrative. Just when the viewer thinks that the mob mystique has been adequately deconstructed (by Louis’s explanation to Natalie) and the restaurant issues are potentially resolved by the passage of the majority of the ownership to Udo---the specter of the mob pulls you back in! Keeping the restaurant alive ostensibly means making the mob connection dead—literally! Dinner Rush plays up and against the reduction of the Italian American experience to just paesans, pasta and la cosa nostra. It celebrates virtuosity and interrogates the false entrepreneurship of mob-wanna be thugs in Modern New York. But it also stresses that are some values worth fighting for in life—and maybe even killing for! Giraldi seems to be willing to admit that sometimes Italian Americans for all their fuming over stereotyping images of Italians and Mafia, that there may be willing to have it both ways! It’s almost like Louis—by hiring a hit man to eliminate Black and Blue on the same night that he hands over the ownership of his restaurant to Udo is eliminating the Goodfellas /Donnie Brasco, /Sopranos idea of low-life greedy, vicious gangsters and attempting to return to the mythic world of patriarchal family devoted family values represented in The Godfather where loyalty, honor, vendetta and omerta undergird daily interaction. It’s the connection between minestrone and Mean Streets, and Mafiosi and mozzarella that Louis seems to sacrifice for Udo’s future and his own peace of mind in the end. In the film, instead of the new ringing out the old, it is the more traditional value informed Mafioso who eliminates the Soprano- like thug-new world- mob- wanna- bes in order to

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comic. Bjarne has survived the car accident his brother caused, but Bjarne’s young wife did not. He will survive as a butcher because he is willing to kill his own twin brother to fund the new shop. The BjarneEigel story is darker than the Svend plot-line. Here, the term “survival” becomes ambiguous. The plot links this film to a long line of films about cannibalism as well as to food films in general. Diana Negri argues that food films like Babette’s Feast, Moonstruck, Chocolat, or Like Water for Chocolate are films where food becomes a vehicle for representing and cementing familial and quasifamilial bonds, playing out a nostalgic, recuperative response to the way that “the household, in effect, is undergoing structural, discursive, systematic, and semiotic recombination in late capitalism.”9

While typical food films, according to Negri, often “encode family solidarity through a matriarchal or patriarchal figure who symbolically dedicates himself or herself to the family’s emotional needs through food,”10 Green Butchers works in a different way. Here, the main characters are butchers, not cooks. Svend uses his meat not to serve his family’s needs but his own. But it is through his success as a butcher that he finds acceptance, and, from his perspective, love and connection with other people. Customers line up outside his shop. Holger is jealous of his success. Svend’s use of human flesh, so he thinks, has bonded him to the other outcast, Bjarne, in a familial way; and although Bjarne constantly calls Svend crazy and is disgusted by Svend’s continued use of human flesh in the shop, ultimately, Bjarne himself succumbs. When Eigel survives having the plug pulled in the sanatorium, Bjarne coldly complains to the doctor: “Give him a shot or something. We had a deal.” The doctor turns psychiatrist: Eigel is “obsessed with animals,” she tells Bjarne, “And you became a butcher.” The doctor thinks Bjarne has a problem and, ironically, if he won’t get help, she’ll have to tell Svend: “He’s the only sane person that you’ll listen to.” Immediately the film moves to the back room of the butcher shop, and a disgusting bloody, white bucket with hunks of raw flesh in it. We cut to a shot of the doctor hanging in meat cooler, hook in her mouth, white lab coat still on. Bjarne, too, has found a way to use the butcher shop to suits his own needs. The food films Negri writes about focus on cooks, not butchers. She discusses films where “the prevailing industrialized, alienated, and anxious relationship to food undergoes a fantasy conversion to an artisanal mode in which food becomes a powerful form of emotional capital [….] in which we imagine that the food we eat is the transparent reflection of the

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Chadwell, Sean. 2002. “Do Large Italian American Families Really Eat at the Olive Garden? Ethnic Food Marketing and the Consumption of Authenticity”, Studies in Popular Culture, 24, 3, April 2002: 1-15. Coyle, Margaret. 2004. “Il Timpano—“To Eat Good Food is to be Close to God”: The Italian American Reconciliation of Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night, in Reel Food, ed. Anne L. Bower. New York: Routledge. 41-59. DeAngelis, Rose and Donald Anderson. 2005. “Gastronomic Miscuglio: Foodways in Italian American Narrative,” Italian Americana, vol. 23: 48-68. Diner, Hasia. 2001. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the age of Migration. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Dinner Rush. 2001. Dir. Bob Giraldi. Perf. Danny Aiello, Edoardo Ballerini, Vivian Wu and John Corbett. DVD. Access Motion Picture Group. Ferraro, Thomas. 2005. Feeling Italian (New York: New York University Press. Gabaccia, Donna. 2001. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Gardaphe, Fred. 2004. Leaving Little Italy. Albany, State University of New York Press. Trattoria, Gigino homepage. 2006. http://www.gigino-trattoria.com Accessed January 18, 2006. Girardelli. Davide. 2004. “Commodified Identities: The Myth of Italian Food in the United States,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 28 (October, 2004): 307-324. Goode, Judith, Janet Theophano, and Karen Curtis. 1985. “A Framework for the Analysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Socio-cultural rules for Food Use: The Italian American Pattern,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 66-88. Hazan, Marcella. 1973. The Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. —. 1978. More Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. 2001. “The New World of Italian American Studies,” American Literary History, vol. 13: 141-57. Hostert, Anna Camaiti. 2002. “Big Night, Small Days,” in Screening Ethnicity, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Tamburri. Boca Raton: Bordighera Press. 249-258.

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Kalata, Brian S. and Rick Shaughnessy, 2001. “Dinner Rush,” Scr(i)pt, July / August (2001):38-39, 59-60. Kamp, David. 2006. The United States of Arugula. New York: Broadway Books. Malpezzi, Frances and William Clements. 1992. Italian American Folklore. Little Rock: August House. Molitorisz, Sacha. 2002. “Kitchen sink drama,” October 25 2002. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/24/1035416932059.html, accessed 12, December, 2006. Negra, Diane. 2002. “Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 50 (2002):6276. Poole, Gaye. 1999. Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press. Sciorra, Annabella and Joseph Sciorra, 2002. “Una Chiacchierata,” in Screening Ethnicity, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Tamburri. Boca Raton: Bordighera Press.

Notes 1

See the Gigino Trattoria homepage at http:///www.gigino-trattoria.com for the current menu, directions, history, and current chef biography. Accessed 18, January, 2006. 2 This is dialogue transcribed from Dinner Rush. Dir. Bob Giraldi. Perf. Danny Aiello, Edoardo Ballerini, Vivian Wu and John Corbett. DVD. Access Motion Picture Group, 2001. All subsequent quotations are transcribed by the author from the DVD of the film. 3 “Cold revenge for two peasant morons,” my translation. 4 Here I have in mind a theory of Italian American ethnic identity that I term the percorso (circuitous route) of American italianita. What I term American italianita (American Italian-ness) is a general term for the hybrid cultural mix of Italian and American ethnic identity. My view of fluid Italian American ethnic is also articulated by Italian American scholars such as Josephine Hendin who suggests in her essay “The New World of Italian American Studies” that Italian American identity, like all ethnic identity, “is not fixed and immutable but an open, unfolding social process of exploration and self-fashioning”, 42. Her argument that the innovative aesthetics of Italian American literature are “part of a larger concern for more fluid cosmopolitan models of ethnicity” are an important element in understanding what I term the percorso of American italianita. For Hendin’s full argument see Josephine Gattuso Hendin, “The New World of Italian American Studies,” American Literary History, vol. 13 (2001): 141-57.

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“We don’t make meatballs here anymore”: Reel Italian American Foodways in Bob Giraldi’s Dinner Rush

Here I have in mind a theory of Italian American ethnic identity that I term the percorso (circuitous route) of American italianita. What I term American italianita (American Italian-ness) is a general term for the hybrid cultural mix of Italian and American ethnic identity. My view of fluid Italian American ethnic is also articulated by Italian American scholars such as Josephine Hendin who suggests in her essay “The New World of Italian American Studies” that Italian American identity, like all ethnic identity, “is not fixed and immutable but an open, unfolding social process of exploration and self-fashioning”, 42. Her argument that the innovative aesthetics of Italian American literature are “part of a larger concern for more fluid cosmopolitan models of ethnicity” are an important element in understanding what I term the percorso of American italianita. For Hendin’s full argument see Josephine Gattuso Hendin, 2001 “The New World of Italian American Studies,” American Literary History, vol. 13: 141-57. 6 See Fred Gardaphe’s chapter “Linguine and Lust: Notes on Food And Sex in Italian American Literature” in 2004 Leaving Little Italy. Albany, State University of New York Press. 137-150. See also Rose DeAngelis and Donald Anderson, 2005 “Gastronomic Miscuglio: Foodways in Italian American Narrative,” Italian Americana, vol. 23: 48-68 for a discussion of the representation of Italian Americans and Italian American foodways in novels such as Pietro di Donato’s 1939 Christ in Concrete , Jerre Mangione’s Mount Allegro(1943), John Fante’s Wait Until Spring Bandini (1938) , Louis DeSalvo’s Vertigo(1996), Helen Barolini’s Umbertina(1979) and the film Big Night (1996). 7 See Diane Negra, 2002 “Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 50:62-76 for an analysis of ethnic theme chain restaurants, food films, and television cooking shows. 8 Big Night, 1996. Dir. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott. Perf. Stanley Tucci and Tony Shaloub. Samuel Goldwyn Company. For detailed critical analyses of Big Night see Margaret Coyle, “Il Timpano—“To Eat Good Food is to be Close to God”: The Italian American Reconciliation of Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night, in Reel Food, ed. Anne L. Bower (New York: Routledge, 2004) 41-59; Thomas Ferraro, Feeling Italian (New York: New York University Press, 2005): 181-197; and Anna Camaiti Hostert, “Big Night, Small Days,” in Screening Ethnicity, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Tamburri (Boca Raton: Bordighera Press, 2002): 249-258. 9 See Brian S. Kalata and Rick Shaughnessy, 2001 “Dinner Rush,” Scr(i)pt, July / August (2001):38-39, 59-60. 10 Ibid, 59. 11 Giraldi’s discussion of Dinner Rush and his relationship to New York and Hollywood is in Sacha Molitorisz, “Kitchen sink drama,” October 25 2002. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/24/1035416932059.html, accessed 12, December, 2006. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid.

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comedy with little except its quirky humor to recommend it. It is in Eigel’s story that the issue of eating meat becomes the focal point of this moral examination of relationships between people and the world in which they live. The lines drawn between killing animals and killing humans have been blurred to the extent that when Eigel becomes a chicken-killer, who no longer carries a huge stuffed giraffe around town but an actual pig’s head, he is somehow more “normal”—or at least more acceptable to the characters in this world. When Eigel arrives at the shop with his dead chickens, his peace offering to his brother, Bjarne is not there to receive it. But the offering is the first step in what Astrid has recognized: that only in forgiving Eigel can Bjarne begin to forgive himself. And it is only through such forgiveness that these characters can move beyond the limits of themselves to embrace (not eat) the “other.” Forgiveness and toleration may not be necessary to survival, but they are of key importance in living a good life. Eigel’s butchering of the chickens shows Bjarne that Eigel has accepted his twin’s butchery and meat-eating. Simultaneously, Bjarne must accept Eigel for who he is: a twin who, because he is retarded and lacks any other family, needs Bjarne to take care of him—not to shove him in a corner in some distant sanatorium, or, even worse, into an early coffin. Jensen’s use of settings underscores this point. Most of the action takes place in indoor enclosed spaces paralleling the closed off natures of his main characters. Only four outdoor scenes exist in the film: the opening scene in Svend’s backyard (also enclosed) during an unsuccessful barbecue, scenes between Bjarne and Astrid in a cemetery (presumably above the enclosed caskets of the dead), a scene with Bjarne, Astrid, and Eigel in an enclosed courtyard of Pastor Willumsen’s house, and the final (open) scene of the film at a lake. Three of these four outdoor settings echo the enclosures of all the indoor settings. The butcher shops are cold, sterile white boxes (with boxes—coolers—within boxes behind closed doors). The cooler shows slabs of meat/human flesh locked in and hanging on meat-hooks. The refuse of the butcher block is thrown into the bone crusher, another large box that compacts its contents for disposal. Scenes of the sanatorium are constantly spliced into scenes of the butcher shop and the parallels are blatant not just in the editing but also in the set design. The sanatorium is made up of huge white rooms like operating rooms. Eigel has been “locked in” and the doctors work behind scenes just as the butchers do. Bjarne, too, has done his own kind of therapeutic behind-the-scenes work. After the accident that killed his wife and parents, Bjarne has roamed around at night killing animals and saving their skeletons. It is this

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church bells) and by extension the village and region. Campanilismo ruled the psyche of the immigrants who brought their territorial identities to the New World where they tended to congregate and often re-create their regional identities in the Little Italies scattered all over America. This resulted in culturally diverse groups of Italians in America that strove to maintain identification with their regional origins and values. But (to make a very complex story short) through economic and social interaction, inter-marriage, social mobility and acculturation, gradually Americans of Italian descent were identified less by their regional loyalties and origins and more by the label Italians or Italian Americans. But campanilismo is still a feature of Italian American identity, and this concept has been re-configured and re-imagined in a range of textual forms in American italianita, and its foodways. 23 Hazan, Marcella. 1978. More Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. 3. 24 See Poole, Gaye. 1999. Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press for a discussion of the theatrical presentation of filmic food images. Poole observes that filmic images of food and food preparation function to effectively communicate a range of ideas and emotions. Poole writes, “Because the preparation of food requires thought, labour, time and in some cases love, it is an ideal conduit for emotional language” and “the perfect conveyor of sub-text”,3. Poole connects the performativity of actors on a screen in a restaurant with the actual theatrical elements of food preparation and presentation in actual restaurants. Poole notes that the filmic representation of restaurant life “creates a double meta-theatricality”, 123. I would argue that Dinner Rush offers a triple meta-theatricality by not only dramatizing the theatrical elements of New York restaurant culture with a star chef at the helm, but portraying the imaginary Gigino’s using interiors from the real Gigino’s as its movie set. 25 See Annabella Sciorra and Joseph Sciorra, 2002 “Una Chiacchierata,” in Screening Ethnicity, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Tamburri. Boca Raton: Bordighera Press: 339-351. In a discussion with her brother Joseph about Italian American cultural productions, Sciorra argues that despite a range of “new ways of being Italian American, new cultural expressions” of Italian Americanness, “we just keep getting the same old mafia shit over and over again”, 340. In the same interview, Sciorra, describes her role as a character on The Sopranos, as “the best character that anyone has ever written for me” and calls the overall writing of the show “complex and exciting”, 344.

“YOU GOTTA EAT SOMETHIN’”: FOOD, VIOLENCE, AND PERVERSITY IN SCORSESE’S URBAN FILMS MARLISA SANTOS

The urban worlds of Martin Scorsese’s films are populated by violent crime, ethnic subcultures, and a general struggle for survival. In films such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Departed, the nature of these urban worlds are underscored by the depiction of food, not as simple nourishment but rather a signifier of violence and the desperate struggle for the individual to find meaning in the urban jungle. Whether this struggle is tied to the urban subcultures of cabbies, boxers, or organized criminals, food is used in all of these films to indicate the failure of individuals to subsist in an urban environment indifferent to human wellbeing. In these films, food is ubiquitous, but is usually depicted as either unappetizing, unfulfilling, or as instruments and by-products of violence. Food therefore becomes not a signifier of life, but a harbinger of death, as it represents the perverse reversals that characterize city life and make it unhealthy and unnatural. One way that Scorsese explores the effect of urbanity’s violence on the human spirit is the conflict that characters face as their identities shift between human and animal. One of the characters in whom this is most evident is Travis Bickle. In Taxi Driver, Bickle (Robert De Niro) is portrayed as a wandering loner who would search for meaning in the world, but is not even sure if such a thing is worthwhile or even possible, and thus becomes mired in the “scum” of the city that he despises. His eating habits and the depiction of food in the film parallel the organic decay of the city environment and the decay of Travis himself. He resides in what Patricia Patterson and Manny Farber call “his animal-lair room”1 that is small, sparsely furnished, with peeling walls and broken furniture. The meals that he typically eats in this room reflect what one would consider to be a poor man’s urban diet—fast food hamburgers, chips, sodas, etc. Interestingly, though Travis’ lifestyle suggests abject poverty, more than one reference is made to the 12-hour days he works. Both

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objects of his affection, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) and Iris (Jodie Foster) receive gifts and money from him, about which he comments, “What else am I going to do with my money?” This suggests that money is less of an issue in terms of the decayed life that he leads than his own submergence into the rotted urban landscape. While Travis complains about the “animals, whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queers, fairies, dopers, junkies” and other marginalized residents who roam the streets, he fails to recognize that he himself is part of this marginalization. As Leonard Quart argues, “those same streets are still pathways that energize him, allowing his consciousness no rest. Their danger attracts Travis, immersing him in their corruption while, at the same time, he rails at the scum who inhabit the street.”2 Travis’ above voice-over occurs as he rolls past kebab, sausage, and sandwich shops brightly lit with neon and reflected in the rain-slicked streets. He expresses a desire to flush “the whole filthy mess down the toilet,” as if the city inhabitants were the offing of an indigestible meal, but fails to realize that he is part of the seedy repast as well. His exposure to what he views as the most disgusting aspects of the city are partly his own doing, as he himself admits: “I go all over. I take people to the Bronx, Brooklyn, I take ‘em to Harlem. I don’t care. Don’t make no difference to me. It does to some.” Add to this that his only public activity outside of working is going to porn theaters, where he mindlessly eats Chuckles, popcorn, and Coke, but wants jujus “‘cause they last longer.” Travis exists only to pass the time, absorbed in an entropy of wandering; though he is constantly in motion, ironically he is in perpetual stasis. The food he eats is generally mobile as well—sandwiches, candy, and beverages in portable containers—but he eats absent mindedly. Though he professes, “I don’t believe that one should devote one’s life to morbid self-attention,” this attention to self motivates his actions for the film’s entirety; when he is not drifting in aimless apathy, he is engaged in pursuit after pursuit to give form to some kind of identity that would give meaning to himself. Each of these pursuits involve consumption, or its lack. One of these is his desire for Betsy, who he characterizes as appearing “like an angel out of this filthy mess.” His approach is a peculiar mixture of beguiling charmer and innocent brute, the former inducing her to accept his invitation for an late afternoon meal at Child’s Coffee Shop. Travis’ voiceover outlines in careful detail what each of them ate: “I ordered black coffee and apple pie with a slice of melted yellow cheese. I think that was a good selection. Betsy had coffee and a fruit salad dish. She could have had anything she wanted.” Food functions here as a vehicle to entice Betsy, not because of its sensual aspects, but because of its representational

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than as sensate human creatures reaching out for connection, they come to value each other and begin to treat each other in more humane, loving ways. For Jensen’s characters, it takes a full-force smack in the face where cannibalism becomes literal, not metaphorical, before they realize how they have come to cannibalize the people in their lives. It is the realization and acknowledgment of this fact that brings them face to face with their humanity.

Works Cited Antani, Jay. 2006. “The Green Butchers: a film review.” Film Criticism.com. 8/2/06 < http:www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf > Atkins, Peter and Ian Bowler. 2001. Food in Society: Economy, Culture, Geography. London: Arnold. Flanderin, Jean-Louis and Massimo Montanari, eds. 2000. Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Penguin. Hartwig, Joan. 1972. Shakespeare’s Tragi-comic Vision. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. Jensen, Anders Thomas, writer and director. 2005. De Gronne Slagtere (The Green Butchers). Denmark, 2004. in Danish with English subtitles. DVD. Sony Pictures. King, C. Richard. 2000. “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” diacritics 30.1 (spring 2000): 106-23. Mead, Margaret. 1997. “The Changing Significance of Food.” in Carol Counihan and Penny van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Cultural Reader. New York: Routledge. 11-19. Negra, Diana. 2002. “Ethnic Food Fetishism, Whiteness, and Nostalgia in Recent Film and Television.” Velvet Light Trap. Fall. 62-74.

Notes 1

Antani, Jay. 2006. “The Green Butchers: a film review.” Film Criticism.com. 8/2/06 < http:www.filmcritic.com/misc/emporium.nsf > 2 The terms are taken from Joan Hartwig’s 1972 discussion of Shakespeare’s last plays in Shakespeare’s Tragi-comic Vision. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University. 3-33. 3 King, C. Richard. 2000. “The (Mis)uses of Cannibalism in Contemporary Cultural Critique.” diacritics 30.1 (spring 2000): 106-23.

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(Leonard Harris), are prepackaged versions of human beings, their banter and outlook on life seemingly clever, but substantially void. Many of Travis’ idle moments are consumed with television watching—anything from American Bandstand to soap operas. A televised interview with Palantine, who spews feel-good platitudes, shares the same scene as a grotesque meal that Travis prepares for himself, namely torn-up pieces of bread, over which he pours peach brandy, sugar, and milk to make a bizarre sort of “cereal.” This, like most of Travis’ meals, is assembled and consumed absent-mindedly and reflects the anti-nourishment from which he suffers, and ironically, the emptiness that surrounds him, not only in his little cell of an apartment but also in the underworld-like city and in the antiseptic Palantine campaign world. All this perhaps accounts for Travis’ deadly resolution to assassinate Palantine, as he first declares that “too much abuse has gone on for too long . . . There will be no more pills, no more bad food, no more destroyers of my body. From now on will be total organization.” Travis becomes lean, muscular, and obsessed with death, evidence of which is found in the gun-buying scene with “Easy” Andy (Steven Prince). The training that he devises for himself, much like that of Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, is masochistic, as he holds his fist above a gas flame as an endurance test. In the midst of this “training,” he connects with the child prostitute Iris who, as Mark Nicholls points out, “is a perfect counterpart for him,” since in his “desperation to preserve an idealised identity in the face of urban decay, Travis appears naïve and infantile.”4 However, Travis also tries to act as father-protector to her, displaying no sexual desire toward her and wanting to spirit her out of the corrupt environment. When he pushes her to meet with him outside her prostitute role, she suggests having breakfast the next day, at which she displays childish eating habits much like those of Travis: spreading jam on toast, then sprinkling sugar on top and folding to eat as a sandwich. The medium shot at the scene’s end reveals their table spread with juice, pancakes, and coffee, after Travis has made his speech about being “square.” Again, a “normal” meal presides, mimicking the one that Travis had with Betsy, as Travis attempts to find an identity by investing in a woman who signifies to him something higher (or potentially higher) than the life in which he exists. He envisions himself as a martyr, as he tells Iris that he “might be going away for a while” as he contemplates the results of his assassination attempt of Palantine. But the failure of that leads him to the desperate attack on Sport, Iris’ pimp (Harvey Keitel), and her john for that evening. Seemingly miraculously, he is spared death from his numerous wounds and is hailed as a hero by the media—a new identity found. However, he

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is subsumed by a different urban sub-culture—vigilantism—and appropriated an identity rather than internalizing one by choice. He has been consumed by the city and found digestible. The interplay of the urban milieu and self-destructiveness is evident as well in Jake La Motta’s search for his identity. Food and its lack of nourishment are an integral part of this search as Jake’s identity as a boxer is dependent both on characteristics of the urban environment (organized crime) and on his physical stature (control of his weight). In the opening fight scene of Raging Bull, Jake (Robert De Niro) KO’s his opponent, but loses on “decision”—i.e., Mafia fix; in his stubbornness and anger, he refuses to leave the ring. This frustration is what Jake is speaking of in the subsequent scene, which is framed by his first wife cooking him a steak in their cramped Bronx apartment. He is admonishing her not to overcook it, because “You overcook it, it’s no good. It defeats its own purpose.” Jake’s preference of his meat towards the rare parallels what the viewer has already witnessed: a taste for the brutal and animal. Blood is integral to his profession, the eliciting of both his own and of others. The steak then becomes a weapon in this scene, as his wife practically threatens him with it, saying “You want your steak?” prior to throwing it on the plate. Jake’s response is to become enraged and overturn the table, displacing the food from where it would provide him nourishment. His downstairs neighbors yell up and call him a “crazy animal.” Later in the same scene, even Joey (Joe Pesci), Jake’s brother, tries to calm him down by saying “You can’t fuckin’ eat and drink like an animal. You can’t keep doin’ this.” Jake is an animal, of course—he can’t be anything but, in order to do what he does. But this is also only the first instance of Jake’s tortured relationship to food and his own body, and it comes directly before the exchange with Joey in which Jake laments his “small hands….girl’s hands” and asks him to punch him in the face. Jake is, according to Lizzie Borden, “inarticulate, driven by powerful emotions that he can only express through spontaneous explosions of violence.”5 Jake can only use his body to express emotion and so is most frustrated when even that fails him, as in his inability to fight Joe Louis even though he’s “better than him” because of his small hands. The fist fight with Joey is the only way that he can reinforce his own virility, though it is a self-destructive and pathetic attempt to do so. This behavior is typical of the character: those elements that could potentially fortify him are twisted by Jake to become his ruin. Jake’s choice of his second wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), is a similar self-destructive act. Both her age—supposedly 15—and her association with the local gangsters, who, as David Thomson points out, “are Jake’s enemies, and who control the network of compromise, gambling, and

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fight-rigging that he will eventually have to stomach to get his shot at the title,”6 are factors against his possession of her. He is able to lure her, but cannot keep her, and their relationship is framed by Jake’s rejection of sex, first voluntarily, in order to retain his power for fighting, and later, seemingly involuntarily, as his jealousy and self-doubt about his body make sex an impossibility. The only real sex scene portrayed between him and Vickie involves her kissing the many cuts and bruises on his face and body, with him encouraging her to “Kiss the boo boos. Make ‘em better.” Jake’s body in this way becomes a perverse food, as Vickie puts her mouth to the bloodied spots on his chest as though by tasting them, she can consume them and take them away. Then, when Jake’s arousal becomes too great, he douses his penis with ice water. What is put on Jake’s body throughout the film is often more important than what he puts into it—his body becomes like raw meat to be devoured either by Vickie or by his opponents, water becoming not a hydrating force but one that will control and suppress its natural functions. The further Jake progresses in his fighting career, and the more complicated his relationship becomes with the gangsters whom he has to “stomach,” the more problematic Jake’s relationship with food becomes, highlighting his self-destruction. Joey admonishes Jake to bring his weight down from 168 to the required 155 so that he can fight Tony Janiro (Kevin Mahon), since “‘there’s nobody left for [him] to fight’” and then he’d have to be given a shot at the title. Joey tells him, “If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win. Just get down to 155 lbs., you fat bastard. Just stop eatin’!” Jake’s anxiety about the fight is compounded by his jealousy over Vickie’s offhand remark about Janiro’s good looks, a sore subject displayed in a subsequent conversation between Jake and mob heavy Salvy (Frank Vincent), in which their banter conflates fighting with sex. Jake says, “I’m gonna open his hole like this. Please excuse my French. I’m gonna make him suffer. I’m gonna make his mother wish she never had him—make him into dog meat...He’s a pretty kid, too. I mean I don’t know, I gotta problem, if I should fuck him or fight him.” In this exchange, the perverse mixture of food, sex, and violence all come together, wrapped inside the dark cloud of mob pressure that informs Jake’s every move. As it turns out, Jake does beat Janiro to a bloody pulp, making “meat” of his unmarked face. Jake is like a cannibal, consuming his enemies to make himself stronger, or like an animal who eats his own kind. Also like an animal, Jake’s fierce pride will not allow him to sacrifice his masculine image even to obtain the title shot, which is the one thing in the world that will solidify his identity as a fighter. In the fight with Billy Fox (Eddie Mustafa Muhammad), which Jake needs to throw in

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metaphors in her 1974 short story, “O Corpo” [“The Body”]5 as a way to understand the construction/portrayal of a veiled field of signification for transgressive female desire. The additional comparative reading of the movie version by José Antônio Garcia provides us with important inter semiotic tools to dwell on what we consider to be a central issue in the original version. It is our suggestion that the “obscene” nature of lesbianism presses for a semantic shift in the film version, attenuating and reducing the transgressive force of the two women’s silence and resistance to heteronormativity. Throughout the entire (original) story, the processes of sharing, consuming, and preparing food are used to subvert the traditional submissive female gender role as homemaker and caregiver, concealing—while simultaneously creating room for—women’s rebellious subjectivities and alternative worlds of forbidden female desires. In a historical place and time where and when “the lesbian exists in a vacuum of unreadability and unnamability both socially and sexually,”6 the representation of female desire capable of sustaining itself—even when disguised/immersed in a world that denies its existence—takes on a subversive role, questioning concepts of “invisibility,” traditional patterns of submission and, thus, postulates alternative, liberating modes to imagine and live gender transgression in spite of oppressive structures of normalization.

The vision As we first look at “The Body,” by Clarice Lispector, we encounter Xavier: “A truculent and sanguine man. A very strong man.”7 “The Body” is the only short story in the 1974 collection A Via Crucis do Corpo that addresses directly the issue of female homosexuality. Since this issue is a “dangerous topic” and a forbidden fruit, Lispector purposefully and immediately throws her reader face to face with the minotaur-figure of the patriarch, Xavier—a man, who stands apart from the “sweet and perfumed” female household/universe he shares with his two wives. As the story develops, Xavier’s identity is constructed and revealed through his (unilateral) needs to sexually ingest and consume—in Portuguese Lispector uses the verb comer, to eat, which conveys a vulgar sexual connotation—his women: Carmen, Beatriz: Everybody knew that Xavier was a bigamist.8

The structures and movements which give materiality to this macho body with its insatiable appetite, gestures, and (bad) behaviors follow a natural order of animalization and dominance directly opposed and

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that Jake has replaced sex with food—only enrages Jake more, leading him after Joey leaves to confront and slap Vickie and then walk to Joey’s house and pull him from his own dinner table, beating him savagely on the floor. As a result of this outburst, Jake loses his best friend and protector, and begins his final spiral descent that is catalyzed by his title loss to Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) and his “retirement” to Miami Beach. Jake gains enough weight to make himself virtually unrecognizable, opens up a seedy nightclub, and finally loses Vickie and their children as she divorces him. He cannot seem to control his own destruction, and soon is arrested on charges of underage pandering, for which he cannot even procure the bribe money to clear himself, since he has ruined the value of his championship belt by hammering out the jewels to hock instead. Jake’s lowest point seems to come as he is wrestled into the Dade County stockade cell, and beats his head against the wall, crying out that he is not an animal. As Barbara Mortimer points out, in both this instance and the early one in the film with his first wife, “Jake insists that he is not an animal. Yet what not being an animal might mean is left completely unanswered.”7 Mortimer goes on to compare these declarations by Jake as similar to Travis Bickle’s desire to become “a person like other people.” This is a sound connection, since both characters are struggling to reconcile their search for a human identity against all forces, including their own self-destructive impulses, conspiring against them. Jake is the raging bull, born out of the seething Bronx tenements, but cannot live in a world of men. Goodfellas’s Henry Hill finds his origins in poor urban Brooklyn and also struggles with issues of identity framed by violence, as well as ethnicity. The viewer gets an early snapshot of life with his many brothers and sisters, his Irish father and his Sicilian mother. Seeing the way that Paulie Cicero’s gangsters at the nearby cab stand seem to lead powerful lives, Henry (Ray Liotta) begins to divorce himself from the working class “suckers” that surround him. This is “Mafia street theater,” according to Kathleen Murphy, “in which he longs to play an important role.”8 He matter-of-factly relates his father’s beating of him when he is reported as truant for three months from school by saying, “Everyone takes a beating sometime.” He sees the physical violence inflicted upon him by his father as a due sacrifice to lead the kind of life he desires. Henry prizes the fact that he “didn’t have to wait at the bakery for fresh bread on Sunday” and passionately describes neighborhood kids carrying his mother’s groceries for her “outta respect.” Fear and respect are not separate and distinct concepts for Henry, and food in Goodfellas signifies the struggle for

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identity that Henry experiences and defines what it means to be “civilized.” The violence and death that is so much a part of the everyday lives of the gangsters—and an integral part of their maintaining their lifestyle—is intimately entwined with rituals of food that seem antithetical to the anti-life activities in which they engage. Scene after scene in Goodfellas reveals food as an indicator of wealth and power. Whether platters of cold cuts for hungry card-players, peppers and onions frying in skillets, or sausages crisping on a grill, there is hardly a scene in which food does not seem a character in itself. We make the rounds through Henry’s eyes at the Bamboo Lounge and take in long tables full of food, as Henry explains: “For us to live any other way was nuts. Uh, to us, those goody-good people who worked shitty jobs for bum paychecks and took the subway to work every day, and worried about their bills, were dead.” And these were the fruits of their success: neverending food and drink, rolls of cash, cars, clothes. But there is a clear price to pay for this. When the Bamboo Lounge starts to fail and is taken over by Paulie (Paul Sorvino), it is chewed up and spit out, set on fire by Henry and Tommy (Joe Pesci) when it has no more to give and no usefulness. The mixture of food and violence often appears as a perverse indicator of Henry’s struggle to find his way in this difficult but seductive life. For instance, after Tommy and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) beat Billy Batts (Frank Vincent) to a pulp in Henry’s lounge, they and Henry are in quest of a shovel and end up at Tommy’s mother’s house in the middle of the night, at which point she proceeds to make them a full meal. They sit down at the table as if it were the most normal thing in the world, while the half-dead man writhes in the trunk of the car outside. Tommy even takes a knife from the table, telling his mother that he needs to take it to “hack” off the paw of a deer that hit the car. The structure of this traditional meal includes impromptu cooking in the dead of night and using the same utensils for eating as you do for killing. Not once does Tommy’s Sicilian mother ever question any of these circumstances, because there is nothing necessarily strange about them to her. However, Henry is the only one who is silent throughout the meal, and his discomfort is clear. The elements of food and death become even more horrifyingly mixed when, six months later, Jimmy, Tommy, and Henry have to move Batts’ body because it is in danger of being found. Tommy is desensitized to such an enterprise and mocks Henry as he vomits: “Hey Henry, hurry up—my mother’s gonna make some fresh peppers and sausage for us . . . . Here’s a leg—here’s a wing. Hey, what do you like, the leg or the wing, Henry? Or do you still go for the old hearts and lungs?” Food and death

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are one and the same—vehicles of sustenance and survival. As the scene, which is bathed in blood-red light, comes to an end, Henry has had his fill of death here and regurgitates the violence, but ironically it is for violating the code of killing a “made” guy that gets Tommy killed himself in the end. Paulie is concerned about the incident, not knowing about the involvement of Jimmy, Tommy, and Henry, and when Henry and his family are over for Sunday dinner, Paulie questions him about the murder; literally, in one breath, he is talking about Batts’ murder and in the next he’s calling, “Let’s eat.” Food and the ritual of meals are just as much used for binding everyone together as are the codes of violence that rule their lives. The dichotomy of food being portrayed as a result of violence, but representing symbolic “civilizing” power is evident in the prison scenes when Henry explains how wiseguys did not really suffer in prison. Henry says, “In prison, dinner was always a big thing. We had a pasta course, and then we had a meat or a fish . . . .Paulie did the prep work . . . he had a wonderful system for doing the garlic. He used to slice it so thin that it used to liquefy in the pan with just a little oil.” Though they could not subvert the criminal justice system entirely to avoid imprisonment, the gangsters are able to exert their power in prison to eat and drink fairly well, as is evident from the bottles of liquor and the boxes of steaks and lobsters on ice that they procure. When Henry bribes the guards so that he can leave the compound, he returns with bread, Scotch, cheese, salami, and most importantly, wine, which when in Paulie’s hands, he pronounces, “Now we could eat.” The brutality of their actions is coupled by a ritualistic concern for civilized behavior, preserved even under these conditions at all costs. Henry comments, “Everybody else in the joint was doing real time, all mixed together, living like pigs. But we lived alone. And we owned the joint.” An even more striking dichotomy between violence and food comes in the climactic sequence on the day that Henry is arrested by FBI narcotics agents. A drugged-up, paranoid Henry is trying to juggle unloading stolen guns, moving a shipment of cocaine, and cooking dinner for his family, the last of which takes an equal priority as the other tasks. He is planning an extensive menu: ziti with “meat gravy,” roasted peppers, string beans with olive oil and garlic, as well as some veal cutlets “cut just right” to fry as an appetizer. He has to balance getting dinner started—braising the “beef, pork butt, and veal shanks for the tomato sauce”—with doing a multitude of errands. One might question why Henry did not take any shortcuts on the dinner, if anything had to give, but he runs himself ragged trying to make dinner turn out just right as much as he is trying to stay

102 Listening to Silence: Forbidden Fruits in Clarice Lispector’s “The Body”

surface level, the women in the story assume an apparently passive position of resignation towards taking on the objectified and subaltern role imposed on them by the insatiable macho. However, though overt opposition to patriarchal dominance and objectification is absent, they reconceptualize and construct resistance in secrecy and silence: the two women slow cook a separate dish/relationship of their own, beyond the patriarch’s field of vision and, by extension, control. Apparently, the triangle ate, or comiam, together, however without Xavier’s knowledge Carmen and Beatriz sat at the table with him, but the women shared their food/comida, while watching, in disgust, Xavier satiate his bestial appetite: That day, Sunday, they ate lunch at three in the afternoon. Beatriz, the voluptuous one, cooked for them. Xavier drank French wine. He ate a whole rotisserie by himself. The two women ate another rotisserie. The rotisseries were filled with raisin and plum stuffing—they were both moist and tasty.18

Of Silence Since it is impossible for a woman to speak not as a subaltern or a negative counterpart of man in the male dominated societies of the West as both post colonial and feminist scholars have shown us,19 let us, then, not speak of words, i.e. spoken words, fixed identities, or labeled sexualities. As we imagine and conceptualize resistance to compulsory heterosexuality and essentialist patriarchal gender system that erases multiplicity, normalizes human beings and classify them into binary categories of straight or gay, let us turn our eyes to veiled possibilities cooked in slow fire under the master’s surveilling eye, in “his own” kitchen. As we read Lispector’s story, let’s shift our eye from the center of the text/plot to the blank of the margins and the silences inscribed in between the words on the page, so that we may “capture that other thing [she has been forbidden to] speak of.”20 For, as many radical lesbian feminist scholars have argued, heterosexist discourse does not invest speech with materiality or society outside its limits and boundaries, thus limiting all resistance to reform21. One is permitted to speak against the system, as long as the parameters of the speech-act originated from and is contained within that master system. According to this system of domination, “danger” does not stem from opposition or transgression of the values imposed by its logic-structure and order, but from the challenging of the system’s meaning/truth generating monopoly. This way Xavier’s transgression of social norms of marriage is tolerated and

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anywhere.” However, this freedom turns out to be illusory, as he was always bound by the terrible necessities of violence, death, and Mafia code, and this false freedom leads to a greater confinement than even prison. The richness of the food and the intensity of the violence that he previously knew have been traded for the very identity that he feared growing up in Brooklyn as a young boy: that of a “schnook” who has to “wait around like everyone else.” Scorsese’s most recent film, The Departed, continues this trend of urban violence linked to food perversity. From the opening scene, food is an important signifier of the anti-nourishment and criminality of city life. The Park Luncheonette, featured both in the opening scene and in a second scene during the first hour of the film, serves as the entré location of both William Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) into the gang of Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). For Sullivan, this occurs when he is a boy eating lunch at the counter, and Costello, following his collection conversation with the owner, pays for a bag of groceries for him. Costello also offers young Colin the following advice: “When I was your age they would say we can become cops, or criminals. Today, what I'm saying to you is this: when you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?” The film’s essential conflict of the line between cop and criminal is articulated right away in this moment that Costello provides sustenance to Sullivan as a boy, presumably thereafter winning his loyalty and gang participation. In this country—or more accurately, this city—according to Jean-Pierre Gorin, “we deal in corruption at age 12, when wide-eyed eighth-graders can be bought with three loaves of Wonder bread, three cartons of milk, some cold cuts, some mayo, a comic book and a fistful of chump change. There is something so complete, so absolute, and so unstylish about the buying of Colin Sullivan’s soul.”9 The food that Sullivan accepts parallels his acceptance of a life in which he will exploit the worst qualities of the cops to serve the criminals. For William Costigan, a criminal-turned cop-turned cop criminal, the Park Luncheonette, many years and a new owner later, turns into the scene in which he will find his way to Costello. After accepting his undercover assignment from Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen), Costigan sets up a drug deal with his ne’er-do-well cousin that leads him to Costello’s lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone). However, his first meeting with Costello himself comes as a result of his savagely beating two Mafia thugs from Providence as they try to collect from the Park’s owner. Costigan finishes eating and pays for his lunch before beating up both men and breaking his arm in the process. This episode brings him to Costello, who says that he will intercede for Costigan’s life, but he wants him to work for him. In

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only one of many brutal scenes involving Costello, he repeatedly slams Costigan’s casted arm into a table as he reiterates his question of whether or not Costigan is still a cop. This type of “loyalty brutality” is common in Scorsese films involving the mob, and the viewer recognizes this as an appropriate initiation into Costigan’s new double life. The initiation continues when Costigan is summoned to Costello’s apartment for a discussion. Costigan drinks coffee while Costello eats a lobster lunch and drinks white wine. The seeming sophistication and elegance of this meal are juxtaposed with Costello’s vulgar brutality. He first poses the example of John Lennon’s famous 1971 quote to Rolling Stone: “I’m an artist. You give me a fuckin’ tuba, I’ll get something out of it.”10 Costello then proceeds to extract a bloody severed hand from a plastic bag and use it to emphasize his words, continuing, “The point I’m makin’ with John Lennon is a man could look at anything and make something out of it. For instance, I look at you and I think, what could I use you for?” Costello can almost be perceived as a cannibal in this scene, as the human hand becomes an ancillary part of his meal—a garnish, if you will, of the violent grotesque on the side of culinary classiness. The point that Costello is making to Costigan also reinforces this feeling, as it becomes evident that Costello consumes people as part of his organization—he is trying to figure out what kind of meal that Costigan would make, what kind of nourishment he would provide. This encounter foreshadows the confrontation later between Costello and Costigan when Costello is trying to discover the identity of the informer in his gang. After a tense conversation in which Costigan asserts that he is not a rat, the following exchange occurs: Costello: You know what I like about restaurants? Costigan: The fuckin’ food? I don’t know—what? Costello: You learn a lot watchin’ things eat.

Costello quips the last, by the way, as he appears to lick the remains of an insect he just crushed off his palm. This is the culminating scene in which Scorsese uses food as a metaphor for brutal inhumanity. We didn’t need this scene to tell us this about Frank Costello, but Scorsese does not let us forget. Costello makes it clear to Costigan that the two of them are both eating creatures of the same kind, but if Costigan believes he can eat Costello—even though he says he could “be” Costello—he is quite mistaken. As he departs the bar, Costello tells Costigan, “eat somethin’ for Christ’s sake.” But this comment seems less a gesture of concern for Costigan’s well-being and more of a threat—similar to the lines spoken by Sonny Corleone (James Caan) in The Godfather when encouraging the

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traitorous driver, Paulie, to eat and then directing Clemenza (Richard Castellano) to “take care of that son of a bitch right away….I don’t want to see him again.” Costello has fixed on the idea that when “things” eat, they let their guard down. Costello’s business is capitalizing on such weakness—that of the players in his own criminal world, as well as the FBI. As one who has been consumed by Costello, Sullivan is attempting to forge an identity for himself independent of the hold that Costello has on him and his conflicts and frustrations with this struggle are also represented by conflicted relationships with food. On his first date with police psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), they eat dinner at an upscale French restaurant. They order an ornate chocolate tower for dessert, and when it is served, Sullivan comments, “They got this, but they don’t got duck l’orange.” Madolyn asks him if his meal—lobster—was o.k., and he responds, “Oh yeah, but since this was a French restaurant, I thought. . . you know.” Sullivan’s working class language is incongruous with the setting, and his fixation with what should be traditional or appropriate French food is an indicator of his desire to rise above not his elite State Police detective status, since that is artificial, but rather his blue-collar gangster identity, which at this point, is his true self. Lobster, which in previous New England centuries, was working-class food, is not nearly as preferable as duck l’orange. Costigan, on the other hand, is merely trying to get out of his situation alive. As an undocumented State Police informant, he is in constant danger of execution by Costello and his gang or loss of identity even if he survives. Each side wants their piece of him, and he is being torn apart in the process. Upon learning that Costello is an FBI informant, Costigan goes to Queenan and is visibly upset. Queenan tries to calm him down by telling him that his wife left some supper out and they could eat and talk in the kitchen. Though Queenan at times exhibits this folksy, fatherly behavior toward Costigan, there is still something sinister about this kind of overture. Gorin points out the artistry in the way that Scorsese captures this scene: “DiCaprio, like a rag doll on the bench with the family pictures on the wall, every Queenan an Irish cop as far as the eye can see, and Martin Sheen, pointing out the image of his son, a chip off the old block, attempting to lather some salve on Billy’s wounded soul, his arm stiffly half-extended to coax him into the kitchen for some home cooking left on the stove. There’s nothing here that gets us from A to B. It’s a moment of resonant evil, more terrifying than Frank Costello’s antics: Queenan the ruthless handler prepping Billy with a bit of retread Father O’Malley hokum for a few more hours of service and a few more steps toward a

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death foretold.”11 The banality of Queenan’s evil as compared to Costello’s is exactly the mirroring that Scorsese sets up from the opening scene and begs the question of which version of corruption is more deeply nefarious. It is fitting that at the end of the film, Dignam kills Sullivan, who is not even the direct orchestrator of Costigan’s death, but whose actions made it possible, as he returns home with a bag of groceries. All nourishment in this world of urban perversity is short-lived. As we consider the grotesque eating habits of Travis Bickle, the sadomasochistic eating habits of Jake LaMotta, and the murderous eating habits of Henry Hill and Frank Costello, it is clear that Scorsese is using food as a metaphor of the anti-consumption that occurs in the urban environment—where the use of food devours the eater, instead of the other way around, and functions as a symbol of the most basic need being transformed into a perverse representation of that need. These characters are not physically starving, but are emotionally empty, an emptiness that manifests itself in the violent and death-driven depictions of food in these films.

Works Cited Bull, Raging. 1980. dir. Martin Scorsese, prod. Robin Chartoff, Irwin Winkler. Hollywood: United Artsts. DVD. Departed. The. 2006. dir. Martin Scorsese, prod. Brad Grey, Graham King, Gianni Nunnari, Brad Pitt. Hollywood: Warner Brothers. DVD. Driver, Taxi. 1976. dir. Martin Scorsese, prod. Philip M. Goldfarb, Julia Phillips, Michael Phillips. Hollywood: Columbia Pictures. DVD. Goodfellas. 1990. dir. Martin Scorsese, prod. Irwin Winkler. Hollywood: Warner Brothers. DVD.

Notes 1 Patterson, Patricia and Manny Farber. 1998. “The Power and the Gory: Taxi Driver,” Film Comment 34, no. 3: 30-44. 2 Quart, Leonard. 1995. “A Slice of Delirium: Scorsese’s Taxi Driver Revisited,” Film Criticism 19: 67-71. 3 Mortimer, Barbara. 1997. “Portraits of the Postmodern Person in Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and The King of Comedy,” Journal of Film and Video 49, no. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1997): 28-38. 4 Nicholls, Mark. 2004. Melancholia and the Mob. North Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia. 87.

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refocus our vision from center to the margins, from the obvious to the simulated, from the concrete to the implied, we notice that in “The Body” the presence and relevance of the macho body, personified by Xavier, dilutes diachronically and inversely proportionately to the materialization of the lesbian body, i.e. the relationship between Carmen and Beatriz. So as the love between the women solidifies and gains mass which demands space, Xavier’s presence becomes intolerable. His bad table manners, his bestial appetite, and his domineering presence in the relationship grew disproportional, like a cancer: Xavier had bad table manners: he would eat with his hands, made noise as he chewed, and did not close his mouth to eat. Carmen, who was the more classy of the two, would feel nauseated and embarrassed.26

As the narrative of this unconventional “marriage” develops the women slowly realize that they no longer need (maybe never ever needed) him. Xavier becomes marginalized and even problematic in their relationship. The loving space of domesticity becomes too small for three players. Xavier, who initially demanded for himself and occupied the center of the triad as the “eater”/ o comedor, was simply devoured by the women’s silent love That dared not say its name: How about Xavier? What should we do with him? […] Should we wait for him to die a natural death? Asked Beatriz. Carmen thought for a while and said: I believe we should take action.27

Action took the form of a funeral banquet that combined murder, potato salad and strong coffee freshly brewed to confirm, solidify, and toast the afterlife and immortality of the lesbian relation between the two women. In one last supper preparation Carmen and Beatriz kill Xavier and then cook for each other a mutually nourishing meal that will strengthen them to finish the process of ridding themselves of the patriarch’s body, which lay in between them for so long: [After eating the potato salad Beatriz had made for them] The two women went to the back yard and with two shovels they opened a tomb in the garden. And, in the darkness of night they carried the [macho’s] body [depositing it in mother earth’s oven]. They put the huge body in the tomb and covered it with moist and fragrant dirt. Then, they went back into the house, brewed a fresh pot of coffee to re-strengthen themselves.28

This moment marks the turning point when Carmen and Beatriz stop being consumed and eaten/comidas to start cooking for themselves.

CHAPTER THREE: MULTICULTURAL TASTES

“KNOWLEDGE IS AS FOOD”: FOOD, DIGESTION, AND ILLNESS IN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST DARLENE FARABEE

Two short moments in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674) provide the reader with the major incidents around which the entire text circles. When Eve takes a bite of the fruit, the text baldly states, “she pluck’d, she eat” (9.781) and forces the reader to hear “eat” in the particularly shortened past-tense word which we might write as “et.”1 When Adam eats, we once again have a truncated experience, and “he scrupl’d not to eat” (9.997). Thus, Paradise Lost portrays the end of paradise, sounds the fall of humankind, and begins that which we know (in Milton’s text) as history. Not only at the moment of eating the fruit but throughout the text, Paradise Lost uses a Galenic model of digestion to portray multiple versions of ingestion and digestion. Nutritional literature of the mid-sixteenth century reprinted Galen’s dietary descriptions; his physiology of digestion was accepted and promulgated by Renaissance writers.2 As Ken Albala describes in Eating Right in the Renaissance, “Galen […] first defined the four temperaments and linked them to specific humors and elements in nature” (20). Later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nutritional texts question the practicality of Galen’s terms but still rely on his framework. “That is, while the façade of orthodox Galenism may have been crumbling, its internal structure remained unscathed” (Albala 42).3 The primary model for understanding ingestion and digestion in the early modern period posits four temperaments, humors, and natural elements that related to one another in the way Galen describes. Galen’s description of the humors establishes the four basic fluids that must be evenly balanced within the body: blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. The four qualities (hot, cold, wet, and dry) interact with the fluids and resulting imbalances produce the four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic. The four natural elements (water, air, fire, and earth) interact with the temperaments linking the individual body with the wider world in which it functions.

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The basic correspondences for the temperaments are as follows: sanguine (warm and moist), choleric (hot and dry), melancholic (cold and dry), and phlegmatic (cold and moist). Relationships between humors and many other controlling influences were often asserted; for example, linking to the humors the natural elements, astrological signs, times of life, seasons, the winds, the major planets. Thomas Walkington’s The Opticke Glass of Humours (1607) provides a circular humoral diagram which divides the four quadrants of a circle and attributes the portions of the circle to the four temperaments and rings of the circle to the various factors. Robert Burton’s compendious The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628) went into six editions in his own lifetime (1577-1640). While not strictly a dietary text (but closer to a catalog of follies), the popularity of Burton’s text reinforces the early modern common language of humoral physiology based on Galen’s description.4 Galen offers a model of the physiology of the human digestive process which posits that control of ingestion allows, to some degree, control over health. Galen’s texts, for the most part medical in nature, presume illness. Generally, the humoral system organizes physiological causes and effects in relationships to one another in such a way that the human condition always predetermines an imbalance of some sort. Whether because of time of life, astrological sign, eating habits, or any of the other wide variety of factors, the humors are continually imbalanced. In this paradigm, health relies less on maintaining a perfect achievable balance of healthfulness than on mitigating or lessening illness. In “The First Anniversary,” John Donne describes the dilemma: “There is no health; physicians say that we/ At best, enjoy but a neutrality” (l 91-2).5 Despite this presumption, Paradise Lost uses the Galenic model to describe a place where illness should not exist. The emphasis on digestive terms for God’s creation of the world, for the ways the world sustains itself, and for descriptions of the angels’ eating, places the reader firmly in the midst of a Galenic physiology of existence. In what follows I propose reading the ingestion and digestion in Paradise Lost to examine the dichotomy of using a model of digestion which presumes illness to portray health in prelapsarian Eden—a dichotomy Satan utilizes to convince Eve that she needs to eat the fruit to gain health. I then explore the implications of this dichotomy for the moment in the text when the literal act of eating and the metaphoric act of eating are the same.

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– murder is the inexorable part and parcel of their newly-found “crooked” way of living their desire. Normalization strategies, as the first hypothesis might suggest, are usual mechanisms that help evade consequential discussion of alternative sexualities. Confirmation of the norm by an initial acknowledgement of the exception empties full assertion of female/lesbian autonomous desire, as in the case in point. Visibility of non-hegemonic desire is granted only if it can be identified as a “stage” to be overcome before “normal” and celebrated desire is finally restored. The main rhetorical figure at stake here, is inoculation. To resort to Barthes’s expression, it “consists in admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution the better to conceal its principal evil. One immunizes the contents of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledeged evil.”30 The basis for this teleological mythical horizon proves to be strongly theological in the sense that “the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possession.”31 If we embrace this hypothesis, we ought to admit that Carmen and Beatriz are now “redeemed” and can start from scratch. Redemption, again, involves the naturalization of the female body’s reification and submission to male desire, whether in monogamous or bigamous relations. Pathologizing strategies, on their turn, comprise mechanisms of overgeneralization by which a constellation of character deformities are ascribed to the “pathological identity”; tis, those traits are accounted for as unquestionable results of female/lesbian sexuality. In the film version under examination, the cause-effect nexus between non-hegemonic sexuality and psychopathologies portrays Carmen and Beatriz as potential serial killers because of their lesbian desire. We are arguing the film, as opposed to the short story version, fosters a combination of the two sets of strategies – normalization and pathologizing - and, therefore, weakens Lispector’s eloquence of silence as potential room for female transgression of hegemonic sexuality. Let’s first examine how ambivalences in the story proper to the interplay gender/genre are spelled out in the film version.

Gender/genre conventions If we look at Lispector’s Xavier’s “blindness” to gender perspectives, as already discussed, we shall sure find a provocative correlate, in the short story alone, in his failure to read genre determinations as well.32 In Lispector’s story, Xavier “did not understand the film (Last tango in

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“Dinner-Party” scene, Ann Torday Gulden shows that Eve “knows precisely how to gather food, how much to prepare […], and the proper ceremony to be attached to its presentation” (140).7 Similarly, Galenic models of consumption require these skills for preparation and presentation of food. Burton says in The Anatomy of Melancholy, the first consideration for curing an ill is a diet, “in which we must consider substance, quantity, [and] quality” (ii.22); as Gulden shows, Eve has these considerations well in hand. As all three begin eating, the narrative voice explains how Raphael eats: […] So down they sat, And to their viands fell, nor seemingly The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss Of Theologians, but with keen dispatch Of real hunger, and concoctive heate To transubstantiate; what redounds, transpires Through Spirits with ease […] (5.433-9)

Milton’s text makes clear the difference between this description of angelic consumption and the “Theologian’s gloss” by emphasizing the “real hunger” and the “concoctive heate.”8 Heat, while necessary for digestion, must be maintained in a balance. Burton describes concerns about the production of heat: “all spices inflame the blood, solitariness, waking, agues, study, meditation, all [of] which heat” and should be carefully moderated (i.377). The “concoctive heate” provides a description of angelic ingestion that uses the Galenic model.9 Raphael makes it clear that the angels banquet on a “sweet repast” of “Angels Food” (5.630, 631). Despite the difficulties of portraying angelic intake, the angels “eate, they drink, in communion sweet/ Quaff immortalitie and joy” (5.637-8). The angels are “secure/ Of surfet where full measure onely bounds/ Excess” (5.638-40) and thus are able to ingest without the constricting boundaries of digestion. The boundaries of digestion, always a consideration for human consumption, are employed in a simile: But knowledge is as food, and needs no less Her temperance over Appetite, to know In measure what the mind may well contain, Oppresses else with Surfet, and soon turns Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Winde. (7.126-30)

The importance of “temperance over Appetite” cannot be underestimated here.10 As is still the case, strictures on consumption in nutritional

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literature emphasize moderation. Milton’s text links knowledge to food and health and figures knowledge as an item for consumption in moderation. As “Wisdom” can be turned to “Folly,” so can “Nourishment to Winde.” Burton remarks that certain foods can fill the brain with “gross fumes, breed black, thick blood, and cause troublesome dreams” (i.222). Nourishment can also be turned to the “Winde” of flatulence which Burton describes as “crudities by defect of concoction, and for want of exercise the superfluous vapours cannot exhale” (i.302). Consumption and digestion in this Edenic banquet scene encompasses not only angelic eating but also knowledge itself. We as readers have already seen how Adam’s “vapors” relate to his consumption and digestion: “for his sleep/ Was Aerie light from pure digestion bred,/ And temperat vapors bland (5.3-5). Adam’s rest depends on the “pure digestion” he enjoys in his paradisial existence. Burton notes that fruits can be useful edibles because “after meals, at second course, they keep down vapours” (ii.25). Controlling or reducing vapors helps to maintain the precarious healthful balance of nourishment and wisdom alike.

Dreaming and eating Satan utilizes this link between knowledge and eating to tempt Eve. Satan whispers to Eve in her dream and alters her perception of eating and tasting. Eve describes her dream to Adam and recounts how Satan “with ventrous Arme/ He pluckt, he tasted” (5.64-5). Her visceral response to his ingestion of the fruit—“mee damp horror chil’d” (5.65)—allows us to see the medicinally corrupt effects of improper eating. The effect on Eve is illness: a “damp horror.” This “phlegmatic” reaction to Satan handling the fruit initially debilitates Eve until she sees the possibilities available by consuming the fruit. Satan offers Eve the possible vision of the “life the Gods live” (5.79). Even in her dream, the physical response to the fruit encourages her so that “the savourie smell/ So quick’nd appetite, that I, methought,/Could not but taste. (5.83-5). She wonders, as she is raised up by Satan, at the “prospect wide” (5.88) which her eyes, even in her dream state, are now able to see. Eve realizes, despite her unfallen state, the possibility of increased health and, thus, its corollary: the possibility of illness. Those possibilities allow the hypochondriac thoughts on which Satan depends. When Satan, inhabiting the body of the serpent, speaks to Eve and lures her to the tree, he demands that she reexamine her ideas of the fruit and knowledge. He continues:

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Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe, Why but to keep ye low and ignorant, His worshippers; he knows that in the day Ye Eate thereof, your Eyes that seem so cleere, Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then Op’nd and cleerd, and ye shall be as Gods. (9.703-8)

As spurious as his logic may be here, the invitation to “Eate thereof” offers her the possibility of perfect vision from eyes which “shall perfectly be then/ Op’nd and cleerd.” Thus, Satan introduces the possibility of illness or at least malfunction of the senses and medication of that illness through food: in this instance, the fruit. As a Galenic prescription, Satan’s offer seems like a possibility. He has diagnosed her as yet unrealized malady, and he offers her this remedy—the “fair fruit” that encapsulates “Wisdom” as well as the “enclos’d/ Knowledge of Good and Evil.” Satan argues not only that the fruit should not be withheld from humankind, but also that to ban eating this “fair fruit” leaves unmet a medicinal need. I would like to stress here the dichotomy Satan depends on: Eve in paradise has perfect vision and yet he convinces her that she mistakes her own perfect perception. And, Satan’s description convinces her. Before she tastes the fruit Eve imagines in medicinal terms what she will gain from it: Here grows the Cure of all, this Fruit Divine, Fair to the Eye, inviting to the Taste, Of virtue to make wise: what hinders then To reach, and feed at once both Bodie and Mind? (9.776-9).

Only by imagining herself in need of a “Cure of all” does the desire to taste the fruit overwhelm her. Whether hypochondriacal or real suffering, the imagined illness or hunger sufficiently convinces her that this fruit will “feed at once both Bodie and Mind.” As Eve eats, “Earth felt the wound and Nature from her seat/ Sighing through all her Works gave signs of Woe” (9.782-3). Nature herself “through all her works” feels illness enter the world.11 As Eve eulogizes the effect the fruit has on her, she wonders if—with her new clarity of vision—her appearance in Adam’s eyes will be altered: “But to Adam in what sort/ Shall I appeer” (9.816-7). Eve recognizes the “sciential sap” of the plant, and imagines that this medicine has altered her (9.837).12 Adam’s heart, without knowledge of her actions, “divine[s] of something ill” (9.845); the “ill” remains to be outlined to him, but the intimation of medicinal misstep discomfits him. The truncated moment of Eve’s fall carries with it the digestive implications from the earlier descriptions in the text. Adam’s decision to

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that sadness, including the obscene condition of their affair. In the film, the explicative comment occurs chronologically at the point when they find out about Xavier’s “betrayal” and decide to take revenge. When taunted by Xavier about her desire for women, Beatriz replies “it’s not about women, just Carmen.”37 Conversely, whereas they do refuse to go on “feeding” Xavier – both sexually and gastronomically – the female characters in the film version lose motivation to cook at all. Moved by external/male determinations, the female characters in the film version give up eating and loving. “Potato salad just for the two of us?” says Carmen.38 Compare that to Lispector’s original version: On the following day they told him they would not go on cooking for him any longer. He might as well see about it with the third woman. The two women would cry sometimes and Beatriz fixed both a potato salad with mayo.In the afternoon they went to the movies. They dined out and came back home at midnight.39

In Garcia’s film, both practices/pleasures are then a prerogative of the male role. Given that food is a pervading and productive metaphor for gender roles in the story, eating and/or loving between females materialize in Lispector’s version, through eloquent silences, but not in the film. In conclusion, one could claim that there is an overt critique of institutions like the bourgeois family, the Church and the police in the film version. For example, the sheriff is not interested in punishing criminals, but is personally concerned with undesirable extra work an investigation would demand on his part and with the equally undesirable commotion female homoerotic desire must spur in the city. However, a careful analysis of film language can unveil ideological layers on the discourse that help delude the more immediate textual discussion of female/lesbian desire into an array of visual and verbal signs that respond to and favor male-centered and heterosexual expectations. Normalizing and pathologizing effects are obtained in the visual elision of the female homoerotic scenes and the verbal addition of explications, both of which make female/lesbian relations result from either a lack of social alternatives or a distortion, consonant with other symptoms of psychic anomaly. Finally, the reification of the status quo tends to prosper whenever the frontiers between gender and genre laws are naturalized, leaving little or no room for breaking textual limits. Listening to silence requires, then, a lot more than aural attention. It calls for watching for the interplay between what is allowed in and exiled from the combination between verbal and visual enactment, especially

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“parcht with scalding thurst and hunger fierce,” mistakenly believe that they will feed on fruit (10.556). Instead, they find that they: Chewd bitter Ashes, which th’ offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayd, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugd as oft With hatefullest disrelish writh’d thir jaws With soot and cinders fill’d; so oft they fell (10. 566-70)

The fallen angels, unable to discern the reality from the assumed result, continue to taste the bitter ashes. They may not expect particular medicinal results other than sustenance from their eating, but their perception blurs as deceptively as Eve’s does.15 Adam’s lamentation in book ten depends on his own realization that “All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,/ Is propagated curse” (10.728-9). His realization of the digestive implications of the fall emphasizes once again the physiological framework within which the edenic events function. His confession of culpability in allowing Eve to be exposed to the dangers of Satan depends on figuring Eve’s “frailtie and infirmer Sex” (10.956). Adam reiterates the possibility of illness before the fall—by accepting Satan’s idea of Eve’s infirmity— which displays Adam’s own misunderstanding of the medicinal benefits Satan deceptively offers.16 The rest of the world adjusts to the fall in ways similar to these individual responses. Eve knows that Death will feed on their as-yetunborn offspring and argues to Adam that they might break the food chain as it feeds on them. She worries that their young will become Food for so foule a Monster, in thy power It lies, yet ere Conception to prevent The Race unblest, to being yet unbegot. Childless thou art, Childless remaine: So Death Shall be deceav’d his glut, and with us two Be forc’d to satisfie his Rav’nous Maw. (10.986-91)

Her description of the gluttonous desire that drives Death to search for food utilizes the phrases of consumption and digestion which infuse descriptions of Death attempting to “stuff this Maw, this vast unhidebound corpse” (10.602).17 Eve’s misconceived idea of preventing conception to force Death’s abstention relies on Galenic emphases on temperance and control of appetite. In Eve’s description, Death here becomes a consuming beast participating in the Galenic appetites of so much of the poem.

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The banishment of Adam and Eve from paradise relies on metaphoric description that similarly relies on humor physiology. God responds to the Son’s plea for humankind by explaining, But longer in that Paradise to dwell, The Law I gave to Nature him forbids: Those pure immortal Elements that know No gross, no unharmonious mixture foule, Eject him tainted now, and purge him off As a distemper, gross to air as gross, And mortal food, as may dispose him best For dissolution wrought by Sin, that first Distemperd all things, and of incorrupt Corrupted. […] (11.48-57)

The “mixture foule” brings to mind the digestive mixtures which must be purged. The “mortal food” linked to “distemper” emphasizes the necessity for temperance of appetite. If it is necessary to “Eject him tainted now, and purge him off/ As a distemper” (11.52-3), Milton’s text figures humankind—after the fall—as an illness to be treated with dispatch. The repercussions of the digestive transgression will be felt by the entirety of the human race. Michael reveals to Adam all of the future illnesses of humankind released by “th’inabstinence of Eve” (11.476). Michael’s description of the varieties of maladies includes the physical and mental imbalances that Burton describes so carefully in The Anatomy of Melancholy. Michael shows Adam a scene and, A Lazar-house it seemd, wherein were laid Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies Of gastly Spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick Agonie, all feavorous kinds, Convulsions, Epilepsies, fierce Catarrhs, Intestin Stone and Ulcer, Colic pangs, Daemonic Phrenzie, moaping Melancholie And Moon-struck madness, pining Atrophie, Marasmus, and wide-wasting Pestilence, Dropsies, and Asthma’s, and Joint-racking Rheums. (11. 479-88)

This list, with its mental illnesses of “moaping Melancholie” and “heartsick Agonie,” seems to represent the worst of the ills for which the Galenic system offers prescription. Galenic humoral philosophy refuses to separate the mental repercussions from the physical symptoms of illness

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which allows Milton’s text to fuse the two. The physical action of eating the fruit remains inseparable from the far-reaching repercussions of sin.

Return to the Fall The quotidian action of eating and the subsequent digestive processes provide the means by which sin takes place. In Eden, Adam and Eve must eat for sustenance and this occurs in a manner both Edenic and Galenic. Satan’s temptations of Eve (both in her dream and at the moment of her eating) depend on Satan invoking her desire for gains in health. Eve then reproduces this logical framework to convince Adam to eat the fruit. The ramifications of the fall of humankind similarly privilege and reiterate the Galenic physiological model. The text describes Satan’s punishment in terms of ingestion, figures death itself ingesting and consuming, depends on digestive metaphors for Adam’s lamentation, and utilizes digestivebased illnesses to describe the wide-range of ills of humankind. The description of Eve’s fall depends for its effect less on a rich description of the physical experience of eating and more on the truncated diction that the syntax forces on the reader. When Eve mistakenly decides that nothing “hinders then/ To reach, and feed at once both Bodie and Mind” (9.778-9), the description of her subsequent action relies less on a succulent description of her ingestion and more on the shortened immediacy of the experience: So saying, her rash hand in evil hour Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck’d, she eat. Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe, That all was lost. […] (9.780-4)

The immediate cosmological response rather than alimentary delight reinforces the far-reaching effects of her action. Additionally the syntax of the sentence requires that the reader hear “she eat” in the archaic pasttense form of the verb to eat which we might write “et.” Eve “knew not eating Death” as she ingested the fruit, but the description carries none of the adjectival richness of the earlier banquet scenes or even the metaphorical tastiness of the cosmological descriptions. Instead, the description depends on the embedded physiological understanding of Galenic health to provide the thudding moment of the fall. In Milton’s Grand Style, Christopher Ricks shows how Milton’s syntax can be profitably analyzed to better understand how the poem generates its meanings. Ricks emphasizes the circular momentum of the verse:

114 Listening to Silence: Forbidden Fruits in Clarice Lispector’s “The Body”

22 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 23. 23 Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5:4 . (Summer, 1980): 638. 24 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 26. 25 Ibid, 26. 26 Ibid, 26. 27 Ibid, 30. 28 Ibid, 30. 29 Ibid, 32. 30 Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 150. 31 Ibid, 155. 32 In Portuguese, the word gênero goes for both “genre” and “gender” (and even “genus”), which helps us develop the notion of readability of conventions as coextensive to both sexual roles and literary horizons of expectations. 33 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 35. 34 O Corpo. 1992. DVD, directed by José Antônio Garcia. Brazil: Olympus Film Production: Embrafilme. 35 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 26. 36 O Corpo. 1992. DVD, directed by José Antônio Garcia. Brazil: Olympus Film Production: Embrafilme. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 Lispector, Clarice. 1974. “O Corpo,” in A Via Crucis do Corpo. São Paulo: Editora Arte Nova. 39.

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Kerrigan, William. 1983. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Mintz, Susannah B. 2003. “‘On an empty stomach’: Milton’s Food Imagery and Disordered Eating” in Reassembling Truth: Twenty-FirstCentury Milton. Charles W. Durham and Krisin A. Pruitt, Eds. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna UP. 145-72. Ralegh, Sir Walter. 1971. The History of the World. Ed. C.A. Partrides. Philadelphia: Temple UP. Ricks, Christopher. 1999. Milton’s Grand Style. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1963. Schoenfeldt, Michael. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge, Cambridge UP. Walkington, Thomas. 1607. The Optike Glasse of Humours: Or The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature, or the Philosophers Stone to Make a Golden Temper. London: Martin Clerke. STC 24967.

Notes 1

All quotations taken from The Riverside Milton edited by Roy Flannagan, whose footnote points out this probable pronunciation. 2 Galen of Pergamum (CE 129-200/216). See, Mark Grant’s introduction to Galen on Food and Diet. 3 Readings of Paracelsus’s model often did little other than replace the four humors with three chemical elements: salt, sulfur, and mercury (Albala 42). The focus of this paper rests outside the debates between Galenists and Paracelsians. 4 I depend on Burton’s text for examples of Galenic thinking, but I do not insist on a strict correlation between descriptions in Milton’s text and those in Burton’s text. However (in the introduction to the 1932 edition of Burton’s text), Holbrook Jackson notes “Wharton’s discovery that Milton was not above taking hints from Burton, when composing Il Pensoroso” (Burton xxvii). 5 The next two lines of Donne’s poem explicitly address the human condition under this physiological description: “And can there be worse sickness, than to know/ That we are never well, nor can be so?” (l 92-3). I thank Lois Potter for drawing to my attention this description. 6 I am indebted to Schoenfeldt’s study which explores how early modern texts examine “the mysteries of psychological inwardness that are folded into the stories of the body told by contemporaneous medicine” (2). Schoenfeldt argues that “Milton’s characterization of the Fall demands that one imagine body and soul as continuous” because of the combination of “Plato and Galen, medical prescription and moral admonition, philosophical materialism and Judeo-Christian myth” (150). Schoenfeldt compellingly argues that “Milton’s emphasis on the virtue of

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temperance in the conclusion of his epic depicting the Fall as a moment of dietary transgression thus provides a moment where the spiritual demands of Christianity seem to merge effortlessly with the moral exigencies of classical philosophy” (167). My interest in the moment of the fall focuses on the pairing of the physiological system with the truncated diction of the description. 7 Gulden’s argument in “Milton’s Eve and Wisdom: The ‘Dinner-Party’ Scene in Paradise Lost” compares Eve’s preparations for (and actions during) the banquet to harsh stereotypes advanced by conduct books (contemporary with Paradise Lost); she concludes that this scene shows “a creative autonomy in the actions of Eve” which mitigates those harsh stereotypes (136). Gulden’s argument addresses other issues of food preparation and specifically links Eve’s knowledge to descriptions of household competency, but her work emphasizes the importance of health knowledge in Milton’s text. 8 Schoenfeldt remarks: “By using the term ‘transubstantiate,’ Milton reveals angelic digestion to be a far greater miracle than the transubstantiation at the center of the Catholic Mass” (140). 9 In The Sacred Complex, William Kerrigan traces the differences between Galenic “heat” and Paracelsian “heat” for a much larger description of psychological implications of Milton’s wishes in the invocation to light (217-22). Kerrigan’s description shows that these differences display Milton’s interest in the new science which incorporates Paracelsian epistemology with existing Galenic understanding. My interest here rests on the relationship between the description of the moment of sin and the larger emphasis on digestion in the poem as a whole. 10 In “Milton’s Aesthetics of Eating,” Denise Gigante points out that “Milton himself was aware of the epistemological implications of taste, whereby the Latin sapere can mean both ‘to taste’ and ‘to know’” (89). Gigante focuses on the links between the scenes of ingestion in the poem and aesthetic judgments (of both characters within Paradise Lost and critics commenting on the poems) to show how subjects define themselves within the confines of both types of taste. Gigante argues that eating, prepares one to be eaten in the midst of a “consumptive economy” where the consumer “find[s] its being through eating” (98). 11 In “The Alimentary Structures of Incest in Paradise Lost” Minaz Jooma views the “consumption in Paradise Lost—especially the eating of the forbidden fruit— as a metaphorical counterpart to the poem’s representations of sexuality”; this relationship between consumption and sexuality complicates Eve’s transgression (28). Jooma’s argument uses a psychological approach to link the incestuous relationship between Satan and Sin to the relationship between Eve and her “appetite for the Father’s fruit” (38). She outlines “points of contact between those fatherly voices that frame a daughter’s desire and the satiation of a father’s libidinous appetite” (38). The psychological implications of appetite are outside the frame of the argument here, but Jooma’s discussion raises useful questions about the “oral/aural seduction of Eve” (38). 12 The Oxford English Dictionary uses this instance of “sciential” to illustrate “Of or pertaining to knowledge or science”—a science, I argue, of digestion.

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13 Flannagan emphasizes the health-related overtones here when he remarks in his footnote on this line that “Eve’s unhealthy flush should give away her distempered or unbalanced temperament” (9.887 fn255). 14 This definition: “remedy” (n) 1.a. Oxford English Dictionary. 15 Sir Walter Ralegh uses a similar image of a mouthful of gravel in a description of someone facing death in his History of the World: It is therfore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himselfe. He tells the proud and insolent, that they are but Abiects, and humbles them at the instant; makes them crie, complaine, and repent, yea euen to hate their forepassed happinesse. He takes the account of the rich, and proues him a begger; a naked begger, which hath interest in nothing, but in the grauell that filles his mouth. (396) Here, the realization of death removes all other considerations except “the grauell” that ruins the oral sensations. 16 Flannagan remarks here that “confessing to her, Adam admits that in allowing her to go out he exposed her to danger. In alluding to her ‘frailtie and infirmer Sex,’ Adam is supposed to be speaking what the reader should perceive as the absolute truth about Eve’s nature, even given more recent opinions about sexual roles to the contrary” (10.957 fn 311). Flannagan does not remark on the medical implications of “infirmer.” 17 Schoenfeldt notes the appetite of Death in the poem but relates the description more closely to a reversal of the bounty of the banquet which Eve prepared for Adam and Raphael (153). 18 Ricks does not examine the syntax of this moment but he similarly analyzes Adam’s presumptuous thinking after the Fall. Ricks says, “The important thing about the syntax there is the way that the brusque simplicity of ‘who can please him long?’ and ‘whom will he next?’ is played against the grand inversions of ‘Fickle their State…’ and ‘Mee first he ruined.’ The laconic and the colloquial burst out all the more strongly” (37).

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consumption of commodities stamped with imagined Italianita, especially food value related commodities. 5 The perception of Italian Americans as mob-linked, food obsessed, family focused, sensual and emotional individuals is a set of images that have been represented in a range of cultural productions, such as films and television shows like HBO’s The Sopranos and certainly Dinner Rush contains these elements.6While some Italian American groups lament the link between mama and the mob, veal and vendetta, scam and scamozza, these images have also been used by a range of businesses, such as restaurant chains to sell their version of vicarious mega-caloric immersions in Italian American culture via an “Italian” culinary experience. Advertisements for these chains emphasize ingredients that are a range of “authentic” identifiable ethnic characteristics linked to food consumption in an “Italian restaurant. Food chains love to proclaim their “authenticity”, with a wide range of supposed authentic “Italian” traits—loud, expressive, passionate, family centered people with New York /Jersey accents seriously prone to hyperbole in their advertisements, menu rhetoric, and restaurant ambience to re-assure consumers that the massive plate of prefabricated food that they can wallow in is indeed “Italian”. They trot out the usual suspects the general public associates with Italian Americans, including garish murals, gigantic portions, and by-lines like that proclaimed by the General Mills owned “Hospitaliano” of Olive Garden’s “When you’re here you’re family” advertisements. As a result, Italian American relationships to food have been trivialized, simplified, reduced to identifiable stereotypes and commodities and consumed in “Italian” chain restaurants.7 With Italian food ways being “Wal-Marted” and homogenized in an endless chain of corporate restaurants like Olive Garden, Carabba’s and Buca di Beppo, it is refreshing to watch independent Italian American films such as Giraldi’s Dinner Rush and Stanley Tucci’s Big Night (1996) represent the complex interconnections of food ways and ethnic identity. 8Both films represent the joys, tensions, and passionate complexities of the preparation and consumption of food as well as the problematic percorso of American italianita, the on-going transformation and adaptation of Italian la via vecchia (the old way) to American Italian il vio nuovo (the new way). According to screenwriters Shaughnessy and Kalata, their original script idea for Dinner Rush arose from a discussion about “why good restaurants with good food are such a huge social focus”. 9 They suggest that they wanted to portray “to the chefs, food and cooking is an art, a form of self expression, even though they argued about women and gambling problems most of the time.”10 Giraldi’s input with the script

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Frenchness of food captures the French ethos about food; French cuisine ebbs and flows, but certain foods and certain preparations are eternal. These iconic dishes contain their Frenchness deeply within them, and read as French across class differences, historical change, and regional variation. History enters into my reading, as does sociology, but the method of representation of these dishes by French and non-French authors is primary. My approach minimizes (but does not ignore) the importance of current French eating habits; I leave that work to others. Ferguson declares that “the nationalization of French cuisine...came through its textualization, and it depended on the readers of culinary texts as much as on the cooks or the consumers of the material preparation.”2 She refers to Escoffier, Antonin Carême, and Grimod de la Reynière but the “culinary texts” that form the basis of my argument are literary and just as ably represent the ways of French eating, but in a manner that intends to celebrate food as artistic product, as bound up with emotion, metaphorical as much as historical. Roland Barthes writes confidently of the place of blood-red beef in French cuisine in Mythologies (1957), declaiming its undeniable association with blood, part of the “mythologie sanguine” he associates with wine. For Barthes, “le bifteck” symbolizes meat in it purest form; its force derives from assimilation of this essential substance, from which the eater absorbs “la force taurine.”3 Blood and force evoked by this food have clear resonance for the construction of a culinary identity, as does the method of cooking steak—in Barthes’ evocation, the meat will be cooked over fire and will necessarily retain its bloodiness. As Barthes notes, French steak is cooked bleu (very rare; literally “blue” evoking venous blood), saignant (rare; literally “bloody”), or à point (medium-rare; literally “just right”). Steak is French, “nationalisé plus encore que socialisé” (nationalized even more than socialized)4 for its appearance on tables of every social class and class of restaurant from bourgeois to haute cuisine.5 It is also “un élément de base,” achieving a union of economy and efficiency, of mythology and substance, of succulence and simplicity.6 It is, according to Barthes, “la chair même du combattant français, le bien inaliénable qui ne peut passer à l’ennemi que par trahison” (the very flesh of the French fighter, the inalienable good that can only fall into the hands of the enemy by betrayal)7 It is the basis of French communal consumption and elemental in the French themselves. Anchored in the blood of the French, steak is a comprehensible cultural metaphor, the force of which is tempered somewhat by Barthes’ subsequent evocation of the French fry (frite) as “le signe alimentaire de la ‘françité’”( the alimentary symbol of ‘Frenchness’).8 There is no sanguine element to fried potatoes,

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“French Food Texts and National Identity: Consomme, Cheese Souffle, Francite?”

although Barthes relates the anecdote that after the armistice was reached in Indochina, General de Castries asked for fried potatoes as his first meal, making a link to patriotism. This elemental food does, however, share the universality at table that steak has, appearing on menus of all classes, albeit in different forms. The French fry is, of course, not French but of Belgian origin, limiting the nationalistic force of this alimentary symbol. But the French fry belongs to the French culinary identity because it begins with the potato, a humble food from the earth that is refined by means of a specific cooking process. Escoffier gives ten recipes for fried potatoes, many evocatively named (Chatouillard, Pont-Neuf), and each with a specific shape. Refinement is key to the conception of the French culinary identity here and in the following examples. The Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987), based on the Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) story of the same name, presents 19th-century French food as imagined by the Danish director Gabriel Axel. In the well-known film, Babette, the former head chef of the famed Café Anglais in Paris, now working as a housekeeper for two sisters who lead a religious sect founded by their father, wins ten thousand francs in the lottery and offers to serve her frugal and ascetic Danish hosts a “real French dinner” in gratitude for having employed her for fourteen years. The details of the feast do not appear in the original short story; in the film, Babette prepares and serves turtle soup, blini Demidoff with caviar and crème fraîche, caille en sarcophage (quail in a pastry “tomb”), a salad of endives, a cheese and fruit course, and baba au rhum with fresh figs. The meal is meant to replicate the finest of traditional French fine dining in the late 19th century, and its components are certainly typical of the period but curious as a marker of French identity. Ferguson underlines the foreign approbation of French cuisine evident in the film: “Gabriel Axel's film, quite unlike Dinesen's narrative, is a fable for the French, an iconic projection of and for French culinary culture. ...Its very foreignness allows Babette's Feast the greater testimony to the prestige that continues to accrue to French cuisine abroad as well as at home.”9 Jean-Pierre Poulain admires the film’s portrayal of French culture in general, calling it “une des plus éloquentes traductions de ce qu’est le goût dans la culture française” (one of the most eloquent translations of what taste means in French culture).10 Yet the specific dishes presented in the film, elegantly French in their bleak Danish setting, represent France as mild and feminine. The live turtle in the kitchen frightens the sisters, but the film does not show the preparation of the beast for eating (a process that involves butchering and bleeding the turtle), and the resulting dish is an unassuming clear broth, unremarkable to all but one diner, General Loewenhielm, a Swede who has spent time in

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France. With the exception of the quail, the other dishes are similarly subtle; the general identifies and “translates” each dish for his fellow diners, on whom this food would otherwise make little impression. Deciphering the Frenchness of the food, therefore, requires language and narrative to which the Danes are not privy. The dishes do not announce themselves as French, and in fact most of them belong to another national cuisine. The blini are identified by their Russian name, and the cake is not named at all but appears to be a baba au rhum—an adaptation of the Alsatian Kugelhof cake with a non-French name and a Polish inventor.11 Even turtle soup, says the Larousse gastronomique, was “imposed” on French cuisine by the English.12 Babette’s meal as a whole lacks a center, and is conspicuously missing a meat dish. In fact, no red meat enters the meal at all. The quail are a poor substitute for the beef, veal, or lamb one would expect at a celebratory French dinner. They are diminutive birds, encased in pastry and stuffed with foie gras and slices of black truffle, and they hide this ostentation and identifiable Frenchness deep inside them. The untrained Danish eaters agreeably consume the birds, but cannot be expected to recognize these ingredients or appreciate their significance.13 The Frenchness of this food is hidden, accessible only to those who speak its language. At a distance from France, the meat of French cuisine (literally and figuratively) disappears. What remains is ostentation, ephemeral impressions, and a tableau of soft, small, and sweet. Even the French chef who brings this food to Denmark is a woman, a historical impossibility but of remarkable significance here. Babette produces non-threatening French food as a humble servant, at home in the kitchen. Her hands are not bloodied by red meat nor burned at the roasting brazier; her dishes are boiled or baked, perfectly acceptable female preparations. They are accepted in kind by the peaceable Danish sisters and their pious friends. There is a sharp contrast between the French food served here and the conflict on French soil, the repression of the Parisian Commune of 1871, that sent Babette to Denmark in the first place, and her meal thus bears precious little similarity to the beef and potatoes that for Barthes speak of French soldiers and French patriotism. The blood of recognizably French cuisine, it seems, is not sauce or earthy truffles, but beef. Current sociological work on French food identifies a reduction in the popularity of “masculine” foods such as organ meats and charcuterie and the rising consumption of milk products and yogurt, deemed “feminine” or “infantile.”14 Products rising in popularity in a study of French food purchases between 1965 and 1991 include cheese, yogurt, and frozen fish, while beef, veal, and table wine are declining.15 Cheese and other milk

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the claustrophobic, frenetic downstairs kitchen, food lockers, cluttered business office, narrow backstairs and the close quartered, earth toned, upstairs dining spaces. Several scenes underscore ongoing crises –mainly conflicts between Louis and Udo as Udo demands more control of the restaurant and expresses ongoing frustration at his father lack’s of recognition of his culinary skills. And Black and Blue arrive to demand a partnership in the restaurant and collect from Duncan, the Gigino sous chef who cooks traditional Italian food for Louis. Duncan is a "pathological gambler" in debt to Black and Blue for $13,000! The two mob thugs are invited to the restaurant by Louis who plans to give them the bookmaking operation. But they have their own ideas—a “business proposition” for Louis—they want to own a large percentage of the trattoria. They threaten Louis—"We're not leaving here until we're partners in the food business." Louis says, "OK the book is yours.” “Never the restaurant!” Now finish your dinner and leave” They don’t. Black and Blue decide to hang around until Louis has a change of heart—devouring the delectable cuisine that Gigino’s has to offer—and waiting for the moment when they can force Louis to capitulate to their demands. All the while, patrons are coming in and out of the bustling eatery and they add a bit more bedlam to the already chaotic night. The customers include arrogant art gallery owner Fitzgerald (Mark Margolis) and his entourage of “important” artists and sycophants who expect to be treated as celebrities the moment they show up. And the food critic described by Udo as “the most important food writer in New York”— Jennifer Freely (Sandra Bernhard) shows up unannounced with her companion known as “the food nymph” (Sophie Comet) to review the place. Also arriving at Gigino’s are New York police Detective Drury (Walt McPherson) and his wife (Ellen McEldruff)—invited by Louis for dinner so the officer can arrest Black and Blue. As the dinner rush continues, a waitress Marti (Summer Phoenix) observes the interaction between Louis, Black and Blue and the New York City detective and his wife and comments to the maitre’d, “Champagne for the cops, dinner for the crooks. Something is not right here.” John Corbett plays Wall Street trader Ken (who we are surprised to find moonlights on the side) who sits and eats at the bar and functions in the film as a commentator on much of the nights action, the restaurant’s theater like ambience and the over-the-top food plating and presentations. When asked by the bartender why he is lingering for much of the night, Ken responds:” I’m just curious watching all the people. Star gazing potential. I wonder when it all changed—When did eating dinner become a Broadway show?” Later when given an entrée with an over the top

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favor among French consumers.21 The introduction of pasteurized Camembert in the 1950s, fostered by the new interest in food science, meant factories with machine-cut and -poured curd. The industrial Camembert found in French supermarkets today bears little resemblance to the original cheese, a regional product of Normandy that retained its “barnyardy” odor (likened to body odor and even sexual odor) and rustic appearance. In this manifestation, it is an acquired taste, almost defiantly resisting appreciation. Camembert is among the few food products that are recognized as good when they smell bad, allowing a counter-intuitive and almost illicit pleasure. For Boisard, the change illustrates the gulf between the French desire to retain remnants of its culinary myth and current practice: “the nation cherishes a nostalgia for its rural past and its countryside unspoiled by industrialization, but it has irrevocably turned a page in its history.”22 As such, Camembert is a “messenger from the past to remind French of their peasant origins”23 Present-day Camembert can only weakly imitate those origins, but Camembert as metaphor begins to appear regularly in literature in the late 19th century, when the cheese finally attained national familiarity.24 Proust illustrates the cheese’s ultimate ubiquity in a passage from Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922): Marcel wishes to correct the doorman who has mistakenly announced Madame de Cambremer as “Madame de Camembert” and reasons that le nom de Camembert lui avait paru d'autant plus vraisemblable que, ce fromage étant universellement connu, il ne fallait point s'étonner qu'on eût tiré un marquisat d'une renommée aussi glorieuse, à moins que ce ne fût celle du marquisat qui eût donné sa célébrité au fromage.25 the name Camembert seemed to him very logical since, this cheese being universally well known, one wouldn’t be a bit surprised that a royal title had been derived from its glorious fame, unless it was the fame of the royal title that gave its celebrity to the cheese.

Camembert’s earlier presence in literature more closely approximates the importance of French cheese as French culture, and its literary representation celebrates its pungent aroma. The Goncourt brothers affirm Camembert’s odiferous fame when they report in one of their Journal entries (1896) that a certain Baron Imbert de Saint-amand earned the nickname “camembert de Saint-amand” for his dirtiness and his odor.26 In Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Zola gives an extensive word-portrait of a stunning array of cheeses in a cheese shop in Les Halles in Paris; Camembert stands out pointedly because of its odor. Zola enumerates the

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quality of twenty-one cheeses; even among the nine other cheeses classified as “puanteurs” (stenches), the shop’s patrons notice the smell of the Camembert first. None of the cheeses merit an adoring description: the livarot are “terribles à la gorge comme une vapeur de soufre” (horrible in the throat like a whiff of sulfur ) and the Roquefort “veinées de bleu et de jaune, comme attaqués d'une maladie honteuse de gens riches qui ont trop mangé de truffes” (veined with blue and yellow, as if afflicted with an embarrassing illness like wealthy people who have eaten too many truffles).27 But the Camembert triumphs over the others with its “fumet de venaison” (venison smell) and “une abondance surprenante d’haleines gâtées” (a surprising abundance of rancid breaths).28 Zola puts the cheeses on display as if in a jewelry case, and their negative descriptors only make them more authentic, more desirable, and more French. Of the pleasurable bad smells in this French cheese shop, the Camembert is king, the cheese becoming iconic in a literary work for the characteristic it has lost in the real world. Beef as the culinary symbol of France finds support in Marcel Rouff’s La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant (1924), whose carefully prepared menu for the Prince of Eurasia, intended to demonstrate the superiority of French cuisine, is centered around the perfect pot-au-feu. There is enormous support for the pot-au-feu as the French national dish, from no less an authority than the Larousse gastronomique: “Pot-au-feu” is defined as an “apprêt spécifiquement français, qui fournit à la fois un potage (le bouillon), de la viande bouillie (de boeuf surtout), et des légumes (raves et feuilles)” (a specifically French dish, that gives at once a soup (the broth), boiled meat (usually beef), and vegetables (roots and greens)).29 The Frenchness here seems to be in the recipe’s all-purposeness: one pot produces a first course, a main course, and a side dish. Ferguson calls the multiplicity of the pot-au-feu a “culinary synecdoche”30 because it represents at once the meat and the broth derived from the meat, but also because its name evokes at once the container, the thing contained, and the method of cooking. The pot-au-feu has multiple applications, equally at home in daily life as in a celebration; this observation is borne out in its literary manifestations. Moreover, the pot-au-feu can be earthily peasant, comfortably bourgeois, and with some modifications, noble and refined; it resists classification by social status and thus permeates French society at all levels. Indeed, Carême called pot-au-feu “proprement national” and an “oeuvre de l’intégration, de l’incorporation, de l’assimilation” (work of integration, incorporation, and assimilation).31 The pot-au-feu appears in every region in France under a different guise: in the Lorraine, the potée or soupe au lard; in Brittany, kig ha farz; in Marseille, bouillabaisse.32

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The visceral sanguinity of the beef is preserved only in principle in pot-au-feu, since the long term of cooking will dissipate the beef juices into the bouillon, in distinct contrast to Barthes’ bloody beef. The pot-aufeu demands different cuts of beef as well. The “heart of the meat” evoked by Barthes is not appropriate here; rather, the dish is best with a mixture of lean and fatty cuts, gelatinous cuts, and marrow bones. Instead of barely transformed blood and flesh, the pot-au-feu privileges the meat that remains after long cooking, having lent its essence to the broth. The marrow bones are served separately, and evoke the elemental in a more primitive way than the fresh blood of the steak. Beef is essential to the pot-au-feu: this principle is supported in texts from the 17th century forward. In Physiologie du goût (1825), Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin defines pot-au-feu as “un morceau de boeuf destiné à être traité à l’eau bouillante légèrement salée, pour en extraire les parties solubles” (a piece of beef to be cooked in lightly salted boiling water, to dissolve its soluble parts into the water);33 Charles Driessens, culinary authority in the 19th century, forbids the addition of veal because young meat lacks sufficient albumin and will cloud the broth.34 The right meat for traditional pot-aufeu is clearly mature beef, and toughness is a virtue. At the end of cooking, pot-au-feu is divided into bouillon, used for soup, and bouilli or boiled beef. The traditional vegetables included in potau-feu are root vegetables, firmly anchored in the French terre and therefore terroir. Larousse, for example, suggests carrots, turnips, parsnips, onion, leeks, and celery, and notes that potatoes are not essential but should be cooked separately. The 18th-century Encyclopédie (17511772) lauds in particular the turnip, calling it “pure” and “medicinal” and proposing that bouillon de navet (turnip broth) might well replace meat broth as a medically prescribed food for the sick.35 Brillat-Savarin identifies as French the soups (potages) made from bouillon, implying that an additional refinement of the base dish is required to make it noteworthy. But history and myth, bound up in the pot-au-feu, make these French soups superior to all others. Jean-Robert Pitte confirms the role of soup and by extension pot-au-feu in preserving and maintaining traditional cooking methods, calling each dish “un véritable plat national” (a truly national dish).36 Alexandre Dumas testifies to the central importance of bouillon in French cuisine in Petit dictionnaire de la cuisine (1882): “Il n’y a pas de bonne cuisine sans bon bouillon; la cuisine française, la première de toutes les cuisines doit sa supériorité à l’excellence du bouillon français” (There is no good cooking without good broth; French cuisine, first among all cuisines, owes its superiority to the excellence of French broth).37 The Encyclopédie contains countless references to the

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Udo: You say you’re a businessman. This place is packed every night! Louis: He boffs one scary food writer and suddenly he’s mobbed. Udo: It’s hard for you to accept that they love my food, isn’t it? Louis: Food? These people wouldn’t know food if it hit them on the ass. Put a meatball on their plate and they think it’s a miniature bowling ball. I want food! There’s nothing left to eat here. I need something… What? nourishing! Udo: What traditional? You want tradition? Louis: Yeah—traditional. Substantial. Something that tastes good, that smells good. Udo: I’m getting outta here. We don’t make meatballs here anymore! Louis’s exclamations are more than lamentations over the loss of lasagna, but rather offer an expression of deep frustration over the inevitability of change and the potential for tradition to be openly ignored, diluted or victimized by historical amnesia. For Louis, it is the food ways of la via vecchia di mi famiglia (the old ways of my family) challenged, mutated, or discarded in the basement kitchen of his own restaurant, by his own flesh and blood!

The status of the continuity of la cucina italiana (the Italian kitchen) in twenty-first century America is a resonant, dynamic element in this film, for both Louis and Udo. The film’s setting is pre 9/11 New York, over a full century after the great trans-Atlantic relocation of millions of Italians immigrants to the United States and after over a century of ongoing social, cultural and economic transformations of Americans of Italian descent. Dinner Rush takes place in an ethnically diverse globalized urban space that is also a central nexus of Italian American history and memory—New York City. The film posits a range of food way questions about the authentic status of Gigino’s as a distinctly Italian American space in twenty-first century New York. Is Udo merely capitulating in the name of fame, vanity or capitalism to what Thomas Ferraro terms “the cult of anything goes hybridity” in Italian American food culture?15 Is Udo’s food a diminishment of essential American italianita—a type of amorphous hybrid cuisine with little relation to past food ways of Udo’s Southern Italian family? Or, since food ways are considered one of the most persistent features of ethnic identity is Udo’s food a ritorno (return) or continuation to the artistic virtuosity, improvisation and food preparation craft of his mother and grandfather, by-passed by Louis who chose the life of a mob-linked bookmaker in Little Italy. These are the questions, most unanswered by the plot, that resonate throughout Dinner Rush’s narrative. Cultural observer Donna Gabaccia points out that in order for individual “new ethnic” chefs like Udo to transform older Italian American traditions of food production, preparation and presentation and

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sensibility in the reader, just as knowledge of culinary “grammar” is demanded of the French eater. Faced with a prison meal of black bread, raw onions, and old cheese, Danglars in Dumas’ Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1846) reminisces not about a specific dish but about the sauces Robert his chef used to prepare.45 The sauce Robert contains finely chopped onion softened in butter, white wine, and demi-glace and is therefore the culinary evolution of the raw onion that Danglars dismissively calls “affreuse alimentation du sauvage” (horrible food of the savage).46 Transformed into a sauce Robert it is cultured, refined, and nuanced--everything the raw onion, food of the savage, is not. Proust recalls the France of bygone days in his staid representations of meals at Madame de Guermantes’ table in Le Côté de Guermantes (1920), including asperges sauce mousseline47 and gigot à la sauce béarnaise.48 These sauces are among the most traditional, part of a rigidly conservative and proper cuisine; to the illuminated reader, they fit perfectly in this context. Jacques-Emile Blanche similarly limns atmosphere with sauce in his autobiographical Mes Modèles (1928), referring to the scent of an inauthentic “sauce dite ‘espagnole’” that permeates a rundown boarding house. Fine cuisine cannot be expected in this stuffy house, lacking a bathroom, run by the sister of a “plantureuse méridionale” (hillbilly),49 and these women cannot be expected to replicate or even recognize a true sauce espagnole, the first of the “grandes sauces de base” in Escoffier. As culinary symbol, French sauces represent an effete gesture at the opposite end of the spectrum from bloody beef. For Brillat-Savarin and Dumas, the French identity is reflected in broth or potage, at a significant distance from the “taurine essence” of the beef at its origin. In fact, Brillat-Savarin remarks that professeurs never eat bouilli because they recognize that boiled beef is “la chair moins son jus” (flesh without its juices).50 His explicit use of the term “flesh” is noteworthy in confirming the evocation of meat as a base element, and both his and Dumas’ glorification of the bouillon is logical, since the elemental “jus” will have been disseminated into it. Bouillon or potage is preferable as a signifier of French potency than consommé in this line of reasoning, since this last term refers to the fact that the meat, having rendered its essential juices into the cooking water, has been used up or “consumed.”51 In culinary use, consommé is a step beyond bouillon, clarified and cooked longer so that it contains more of the gelatin from the meat and gels when chilled. Potage is still virile, then, and more nuanced than pure beef as a representation of the French because it has been refined into a product of French cuisine, codified by a recipe to which an author and therefore a national identity can be attached. Brillat-Savarin

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declares that nowhere can better soups be found than in France, and explains: “Ce résultat ne doit point étonner, car le potage est la base de la diète nationale française, et l’expérience des siècles a dû le porter à sa perfection” (This fact should not be surprising, since soup is the basis of the French national diet, and centuries of experience have brought it to its perfection).52 Brillat-Savarin elsewhere lauds the ability of the French to create and disseminate masterful food, from salads to truffled turkey. Rather than evoke the baseness of the raw materials in French food and therefore Frenchness, his writing emphasizes the continuing evolution and perfection of French cuisine. “Bouilli” fares better in the Encyclopédie than in Physiologie du goût: especially valued when made of beef, it is deemed “un des alimens de l'homme le plus succulent & le plus nourrissant... On pourroit dire que le bouilli est, par rapport aux autres mets, ce que le pain est par rapport aux autres sortes de nourriture” (one of the most succulent and nourishing foods of man… One could say that boiled meat is, in relation to other dishes, what bread is in relation to other types of food).53 The meat from pot-au-feu emerges in the eighteenth century, then, as elemental and essential as bread. But if we read this designation literally, boiled beef becomes an accompaniment, not a main dish; in theory and in practice, bread makes the French meal but a meal cannot be made with bread alone. The result is hardly flattering for the French culinary identity. Furthermore, boiled meats are historically and mythologically set up against roasted meats, the former representing the interior, home, and femininity and the latter representing the exterior, outward movement, and masculinity.54 Indeed, women, and specifically bourgeois women, are given the care of pot-au-feu in the 19th century. The first published recipe for pot-au-feu is attributed to Carême in his L’Art de la cuisine française of 1833, a tome said to glorify la cuisine bourgeoise and especially the housewife55 Dumas (as cited above) attributes the superiority of French cuisine to its bouillon but goes on to say that the success of this bouillon is due to women: “cette excellence résulte d’une espèce d’intuition donnée je ne dirai pas à nos cuisinières, mais à nos femmes du peuple” (this excellence is the result of a sort of intuition given not to women cooks but to our women of the people).56 The gift for good cooking, at the heart of the French nation, is carried on not just by female cooks but by women at home, women of the middle and lower classes. A magazine dedicated to domestic cooking named Potau-feu made its début in Paris in the late 19th century,57 publishing culinary lectures attended by bourgeois housewives, who made up the magazine’s reading public. In 19th century French literature, accordingly,

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pot-au-feu comes to symbolize marriage, domestic life, and a comfortable standard of living. E. J. Delecluze speaks dismissively in his Journal (1828) of young Parisian women who think only of getting married and whose “imagination est continuellement fixée sur l'idée d'un pot-au-feu qui bout tous les jours” (thoughts are always fixed on the idea of a pot-aufeu simmering every day).58 Edmond and Jules Goncourt similarly equate pot-au-feu and domesticity in their Journal of 1878: “L' homme peut rester bohème toute sa vie. La femme, à quarante ans, cesse la vie de bohème. Elle aspire au pot-au-feu” (A man can be a bohemian all of his life. A woman, at forty, ends the bohemian life. She aspires to pot-aufeu).59 For Hippolyte Taine in Notes sur Paris (1867), pot-au-feu is home cooking and marriage is the end of eating out: [Aux yeux d’un homme] l' amour est agréable comme la cuisine; à côté d' un restaurant, il y a d' autres restaurants. Quand il y aura soupé jusqu' à trente ans, il songera au pot-au-feu, c' est-à-dire au mariage.60 [In a man’s eyes] love is pleasing like fine food; next to one restaurant, there are other restaurants. When he has eaten there until the age of thirty, he will dream of pot-au-feu, that is, of marriage.

The pot-au-feu is set up against suspicious Parisian haute cuisine (even though this cuisine is also French) in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857): the pharmacist Homais responds to news that Léon is moving to Paris by evoking the questionable safety of Parisian food as compared to “un bon pot-au-feu” and declaring that “la cuisine bourgeoise” is healthier.61 Principally associated with the bourgeoisie in these examples, pot-aufeu can belong to any class, depending on the ingredients and mode of preparation. In the 19th century, the dish was prepared with pork in the country (as in the potée lorraine), with beef by the bourgeois of the cities, and with fowl by the elite classes, who normally consumed only the bouillon.62 The pot-au-feu classique is not exclusive to the middle classes in its early representations in literature. Madame de Sévigné’s 17th-century correspondence reveals that she enjoyed pot-au-feu and recommended it to her daughter, although the term “pot-au-feu” seems still in transition. Sévigné expressed a distinct preference for pot-au-feu or oille63 over consommé, noting in a letter to her daughter of 1673, “Je vous souhaite une oille au lieu d'un consommé; un consommé est une chose étrange” (I hope you have an oille rather than a consommé; a consommé is a strange thing).64 In a letter of the same year she writes that she prefers eating oille to eating meat by itself, and later describes a pot-au-feu that consisted of

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cooked the restaurant “smelled like heaven.” Food in Louis’s mind is treated as a sacred medium, a tangible connection and expression of family communion. This is threatened by the purgatorio of cross-cultural, panregional foods created by Udo and what Louis perceives as his obsession with culinary fame. Udo, on the other hand, believes that his father’s sausage- peppers-meatballs-red sauce food traditions are a form of pandering to static, vulgar out dated culinary notions of Italian American cuisine. Louis’s “heaven” is a form of professional purgatory or hell for Udo. Udo thinks that traditional food “stinks. But Udo, in other forms expresses and embraces his Italian identity, as a fourth generation American of Italian descent. He tells the “food nymph” the origins of the restaurant name by pointing to the picture on the menu of Louis with Udo’s great grandfather in New Jersey and explains that Gigino means little Gigi, short for Luigi’s, Louis birth name. He tells her “Italians are crazy about nicknames” Unlike his father he speaks the Italian language fluently and is not bound by values arising from some displaced sense of campanilismo, evident in Louis’ desire for things “Italian” to remain in his restaurant.22 The irony is that many of Udo’s creations has much more in common with diverse regional Italian culinary artistry, than the American Italian / Southern Italian hybrid foods for which Louis sustains passionate and profound memories. Food preparation becomes central in the drama of affirmation or rejection of tradition. He ostensibly seems to believe that Udo’s culinary virtuosity at Gigino’s threatens family continuity or demonstrates a type of disloyalty to the memory of his mother’s more traditional Southern Italian culinary traditions. At least, that is what he appears to demonstrate for much of the film (until it’s revealed that he planned to legally transfer the majority ownership of the restaurant to Gigino’s on this very night. If the kitchen was heaven when Louis’s wife cooked, in his mind he considers the current spiritual status of Gigino’s nuovo cuisine to be an artificial paradise concerned more with critical praise, bottom lines, and innovation for innovations sake, rather than deeply rooted values informed by powerful memories. But it is those values that impel Louis—Gigi—to protect his family, his son, and his future and sustain his family business. In a line straight out Puzo’s “Godfather” Louis says “A real man takes care of his family”—and he means it with a passion and a willingness to sever elements of his past that threaten it-by serving some very old fashioned Southern Italian values of vendetta on those that threaten to disrupt his family’s future and murdered Enrico. If he seems to think Udo’s food threatens that sacred memory, in the end he reveals his great pride and confidence in Udo by giving him the run of restaurant. Louis

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pot-au-feu is essentially meat enhanced with meat. Rouff’s pot-au-feu reaches the apogee of refinement and is carefully comprised of French ingredients and techniques. Even in its early form, the pot-au-feu is recognized as a marker of civilization exclusive to the French. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in her 1691 account of her travels in Spain, appreciates much of the Spanish culture and food at court but laments the state of the lodging provided for her: Lorsqu'on y arrive fort las et fort fatigué, rôti par les ardeurs du soleil ou gelé par les neiges (car il n'y a guère de milieu entre ces deux extrémités), l'on ne trouve ni pot-au-feu, ni plats lavés.70 When one arrives there thoroughly weary and tired, roasted by the beating sun or frozen by the snow (since there is hardly a middle ground between these two extremes), one finds neither pot-au-feu nor clean dishes.

She associates warm hospitality with this dish of comfort food, and therefore metonymically expresses her regret for France, since she writes appreciatively about the Spanish oille that would, in principle, serve as substitute. In the first of two accounts of court suppers that include an oille, d’Aulnoy observes that “Ce qu'ils ont de meilleur, ce sont des pigeons, des gelinottes, et leur oille qui est excellente” (The best things they have are pigeons, grouse, and their oille that is excellent).71 D’Aulnoy describes the primitive kitchens in the Spanish houses she has visited, equipped with a hole in the roof permitting smoke to escape and a fire in the middle of the room over which meat is roasted on tiles or hung from the ceiling to dangle over the fire.72 The Spanish peasants have neither the culinary acumen nor the kitchen equipment required to produce French pot-au-feu; the emphasis on roasted food marks them as uncivilized and even barbaric.73 Her description of the kitchen workers makes her judgment clear: sans compter cette fumée horrible, qui aveugle et suffoque, ils sont une douzaine d'hommes et autant de femmes, plus noirs que des diables, puants et sales comme des cochons, et vêtus comme des gueux.74 leaving aside this horrible smoke that blinds and suffocates, there are a dozen men and as many women, blacker than devils, smelly and dirty as pigs, and dressed like beggars.

In the 18th century Voltaire again associates hospitality and good manners with pot-au-feu in his Dictionnaire philosophique (1764). Cu-Su and Kou compare the customs of several lands, among the most

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inhospitable being “le grand-Thibet” where visitors find “ni lit ni pot-aufeu; cela peut dégoûter de la politesse” (neither bed nor pot-au-feu; it can make their politeness distasteful).75 In a letter of 1870 from Flaubert to his niece living in England, Flaubert criticizes the climate in London and expresses fear for his niece’s health; he writes, C'est une ville qui me fait peur: et puis, je doute que la nourriture te soit bonne: pas de pot-au-feu! Ni mille petites choses auxquelles nous sommes habitués.76 It’s a city that frightens me: and what’s more, I doubt that the food will be good for you: no pot-au-feu! Nor a thousand other little things to which we are accustomed.

London is by no means a foreign or exotic place for the French, but it is nevertheless deemed inhospitable to them, principally because it lacks potau-feu. For practical purposes, pot-au-feu leaves haute cuisine definitively in the 20th century when the recipe is no longer included in Escoffier’s Guide culinaire of 1903.77 The higher standard of living experienced by most French people after the Second World War made roasted or grilled meat more accessible and more popular than cheaper cuts of boiled beef. Grignon and Grignon report that “the most frequently purchased foods in 1982 were beef to roast or broil (by and large the beef steak) and butter”; beef steak remains sixth of the ten most commonly purchased products in 1991.78 Consequently, “le ‘bifteck-frites’ s’est substitué au pot-au-feu comme image du plat bien français” (steak-frites’ has replaced pot-au-feu as the image of the typical French dish).79 This assessment coincides with Barthes’ pronouncement that steak is French and renders the pot-au-feu part of the mythological French past, relegated to an act of ceremony. But the pot-au-feu remains firmly in place in the imaginary in texts like Rouff’s. The pot-au-feu has a mythical resonance beyond the simple act of purchasing meat to eat. Its presence in literature and its importance stems from its continued association with the hearth as center of family life, even in texts as recent as the nineteenth century. In her autobiographical work of 1855, George Sand writes tenderly of her mother’s sparsely furnished apartment, small and dark but with a potau-feu simmering over the fire.80 After ruining her marriage with imprudent spending, Sand’s mother is here painted sympathetically for her return to simple ways, and the pot-au-feu signifies parsimony and frugality, and yet it provides substantial nourishment and is recognizable as a proper French meal. Sand later remarks that her mother cannot give

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her the sweets to which she has become accustomed in her life outside her mother’s home (she lives with her grandmother), but the pot-au-feu that serves as breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack provides more than mere calories. Her joy in rediscovering this food and this manner of eating is evident: Avec quel plaisir je retrouvai mon assiette de terre de pipe! Jamais je ne mangeai de meilleur coeur. J'étais comme un voyageur qui rentre chez lui après de longues tribulations et qui jouit de tout dans son petit ménage.81 With such pleasure I took up again my dish made of clay! Never had I eaten with better appetite. I was like a traveler who returns home after long struggles and who finds great pleasure in every part of his little household.

Jean-Claude Kauffman’s present-day sociological studies of food in the French family supports the notion that the pot-au-feu remains the mythical center of family gatherings. The subject of one interview (“Eugénie”) reports that her grown children rarely come home, but that the offer of a pot-au-feu for dinner becomes “le prétexte et le déclencheur” (the pretext and the motivator) for their visit; Kauffman concludes that this family has “ritualisé le pot-au-feu, transmué en emblème de la rencontre” (ritualized the pot-au-feu, transformed into the symbol of the gathering).82 And Michel Guérard—one of the current star French chefs, owner of a sparestaurant in Eugénie-les Bains, and author of the 1976 best-selling book Cuisine minceur (Cuisine of Slimness)—named his first bistro in Asnières “Pot-au-feu.” The evocation of the pot-au-feu in modern-day France, then, reflects the place and practice of centuries past, even if 21st century practice relies more heavily on the mythology of the dish. For Poulain French cuisine distinguishes itself systematically from other European cuisines: “par son degré de complexité, elle est une véritable langue disposant de plusieurs niveaux de différenciation” (by its degree of complexity, it is a veritable language with several levels of differentiation).83 The organization of dishes on a menu becomes a code or language, decipherable only to those fluent in it, as demonstrated by Babette’s feast and the Prince of Eurasia’s failed meal for Dodin-Bouffant. The Prince has not understood and cannot replicate the rules of French cuisine as Dodin-Bouffant and his chef can; the French in Rouff’s novel are so gastronomically fluent that they can create a new version of the classic pot-au-feu and still maintain culinary logic. Although Axel’s Danish-French food misses the mark, perfection in culinary grammar is possible for outsiders: Rouff hailed from Switzerland. His rendering of the pot-au-feu as the perfect French meal succeeds where Babette’s Feast did

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action—vendetta—murder for hire. But the vendetta that is served and is eaten cold by Louis results in the hot restaurant getting hotter! In an odd way, adaptation and innovation is advanced by killing-in this case radically severing the link, or the imagined link to the mob—one that is being forced on Louis and Udo. Any notion of the mob mystique is not only deconstructed in Dinner Rush, but literally and violently resisted. The end of the film may unsettle some (it certainly was a surprise to me and many who watch it), but it does a neat job of doing away with what Annabella Sciorra calls “the same old mafia shit” while using it as a means of advancing its narrative as well as the success of the fictional Gigino’s— on purpose.25 Like Big Night, you may leave a viewing of Dinner Rush hungry (I made my first timpano after watching Big Night)—but you end up also oddly satisfied—not only because of the food imagery--but the image of mobster thugs Black and Blue getting literally taken out. There is no actual dessert offered to them at Gigino’s (like the torta di mandorle that Louis takes out to share with Natalie)—but these are two characters that clearly get their just desserts! Black and Blue are two characters that would not be out of place in the fictional New Jersey cosa nostra world of Tony Soprano--they are presented as violent amoral thugs. Louis describes them to Udo in a way that deconstructs the mob myth and emphasizes the reality of decline of the early twenty-first century cosa nostra: “They want a piece of the trattoria. You see, they don’t see themselves as gangsters. Those creeps see themselves as entrepreneurs.” Some questions that go unanswered in the film, however, are: Why does Louis arrange the hit in the restaurant on the night that he plans to hand over its operation to Udo? Is it a signal to other mob wanna-bes that he’s very serious about keeping the restaurant in his family and out of mob connected hands? Or a brilliant business move for his son’s future? These questions are never clearly answered in the film, but it leave you with a strong impression that, not unlike a mythical mob figure like Don Vito Corleone, Louis has the power and connections (that he denies) to deal with every threat to his family or his business. At one point in the film, Louis verbally deconstructs the mob connection myth to Natalie (Polly Draper) the daughter of his partner Enrico who was murdered by Black and Blue for not giving them their bookmaking operation. Earlier in the film there’s a brief power outage at the restaurant. Natalie tells Louis that she mourns her father death and says, “I know you miss him as much as we do. It’s just hard for me because I fell like my father died for absolutely nothing. You know— garbage.” And --in a great cinematic move by Giraldi --at the moment the lights go back on-- she enlightens Louis with a great commentary on the

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Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. 1825. Physiologie du goût. Paris: Flammarion. 1982. Carantino, Georges. “Voyage en pot-au-feu” in Csergo, ed. pp. 35-66. Csergo, Julia, ed. 1999. Pot-au-feu: convivial, familial: histoires d’un mythe. Paris: Autrement. Delecluze, Etienne-Jean. 1828. Journal. Paris: Grasset. 1948. Diderot, Denis and Jean d’Alembert, eds. 1751-1772. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres. 17 vols. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/ (accessed September 15, 2007). Dumas, Alexandre. (Père). 1846. Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Ed. J.H. Bornecque. Paris: Garnier. 1956. —. 1882. Petit dictionnaire de la cuisine. Paris: A. Lemerre. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2004. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. U of Chicago P. —. 1999. “Le Pot-au-feu: un plat qui fait la France?” in Csergo, ed. 13-19. Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance-1870. Paris: L. Conard. 1926-1954. —. 1857. Madame Bovary. Ed. R. Dumesnil. Paris: les Belles Lettres. 1945. Goncourt, Edmond et Jules. 1959. Journal T. 2 [1878], T. 4 [1896] Ed. A. Ricatte. Paris, Flammarion. Grignon, Claude and Christine Grignon. 1999. “Long-Term Trends in Food Consumption: A French Portrait.” Food and Foodways 8.3: 151174. Kauffman, Jean-Claude. 2005. Casseroles, amour et crises: Ce que cuisiner veut dire. Paris: Armand-Colin. Larousse gastronomique. 2000. Paris: Larousse. Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: U of Illinois P. Montanari, Massimo. 1994. The Culture of Food. Trans. Carl Ipsen. Oxford: Blackwell. Ory, Pascal. 1998.Le Discours gastronomique français des origines à nos jours. Paris: Gallimard. Pitte, Jean-Robert. 1991. Gastronomie française: Histoire et géographie d’une passion. Paris: Fayard. Poulain, Jean-Pierre. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. Paris: PUF. Proust, Marcel. 1920. Le Côté de Guermantes. Ed. P. Clarac, A. Ferre, T.2. Paris: Gallimard. 1961.

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—. 1922. Sodome et Gomorrhe. Ed. P. Clarac, A. Ferre, T.2. Paris: Gallimard. 1961. Rouff, Marcel. 2002. The Passionate Epicure [La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, gourmet 1924] Trans. Claude [sic]. New York: Modern Library. Sand, George. 1855. Histoire de Ma Vie In Oeuvres Completes, T.40,41,42,43. Paris: Calmann-Levy. 1879. Sévigné, Mme de. 1696. Correspondance T. 1 1646-1675. Paris: Gallimard. 1978. Taine, Hippolyte. 1867. Notes sur Paris. [] Paris: Hachette. 1921. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet). 1764. Dictionnaire Philosophique. Ed. J. Benda, R. Naves. Paris: Garnier. 1954. Weiss, Allen. 1997. “The Ideology of the Pot-au-feu” in Taste, Nostalgia. Ed. Allen Weiss. New York: Lusitania. Zola, Emile. 1873. Le Ventre de Paris. In Rougon-Macquart. Ed. A. Lanoux, H. Mitterand, T.1. Paris, Gallimard. 1963.

Notes 1

Ferguson. 2004. Accounting for Taste. 4. Ibid., 34. 3 Barthes. 1957. Mythologies. 72. 4 All translations from the French, except for citations from Marcel Rouff, are my own. 5 Barthes. 1957. Mythologies. 73. 6 Ibid., 74. 7 Ibid., 74. 8 Ibid., 74. 9 Ferguson. 2004. Accounting for Taste. 196. 10 Poulain. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. 212. 11 The baba au rhum is said to have been invented by Stanislas Leszczynski, king of Poland from 1677-1766, who was exiled in Lorraine for a time. He found the traditional Kugelhof (also spelled “Kouglof”) too dry and decided to soak it in rum, naming the dish after Ali Baba from the Thousand and One Nights of which he was a fan (Larousse gastronomique, 162-163). Ferguson erroneously identifies the dessert in Babette’s Feast as a “Nesselrode pudding” (201), a frozen ice cream confection made with dried fruit. In the film, Babette ladles warm rum into the center of the cake, impossible with a frozen dessert. 12 Larousse gastronomique. 2000: 2439. 2

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Having been warned by the sisters about the decadent and potentially sinful meal, the dinner guests agree to eat the food but not to “taste” it—that is, to take no pleasure in eating it. In spite of themselves, it is clear from their expressions that they do enjoy this food. Enjoyment at face value, however, does not construe appreciation of the Frenchness of this food. 14 Poulain. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. 30. 15 Grignon and Grignon. 1999. “Long-Term Trends in Food Consumption: A French Portrait.” 153. 16 Poulain. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. 243. 17 Cited in Pitte. 1991. Gastronomie française. 142. 18 See Pierre Boisard’s 2003. Camembert: A National Myth. Berkeley: U of California P. for a thorough presentation of the history of Camembert. 19 Boisard. 2003. Camembert: A National Myth. 54. 20 Ibid., 142-143. 21 Ibid., 79. 22 Ibid., 176. 23 Ibid., 226. 24 Boisard attributes the arrival of Camembert on the national stage to the development of the railroad system (Camembert: A National Myth. 42). 25 Proust. 1920. Sodome et Gomorrhe. 825. 26 Goncourt and Goncourt. 1959. Journal T.4: 967. 27 Zola. 1873. Le Ventre de Paris. 827. 28 Ibid., 830. 29 Larousse gastronomique. 2000: 1946. 30 Ferguson. 2004. “Le Pot-au-feu.” 18. 31 Cited in Ferguson. 2004. “Le Pot-au-feu.” 15. 32 Csergo. 1999. Pot-au-feu. 17. 33 Brillat-Savarin. 1825. Physiologie du gout. 81. 34 Csergo. 1999. Pot-au-feu. 206. 35 “Un aliment si pur, & si propre à tous les sujets, ne sauroit exercer chez quelques uns une vertu véritablement médicamenteuse. Si quelque médecin se proposoit cependant de soutenir un malade par un aliment doux, léger, pur, de prescrire une diete plus tenue que celle des bouillons de viande; les bouillons de navet pourroient être regardés comme remplissant très - bien cette vûe” (A food so pure, and so useful in all cases, could serve for some as a true medicinal benefit. If a doctor hoped to fortify a sick patient with a soft, light, pure food, to prescribe a diet better maintained than that of meat broths, turnip broths could be seen as filling this need very well.) Encyclopédie, “Navet” 11.49. 36 Pitte. 1991. Gastronomie française. 46, 50. 37 Dumas. 1846. Petit dictionnaire de la cuisine. 141. 38 Cited in Poulain. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. 211. 39 Montanari. 1994. The Culture of Food. 119. 40 Pitte. 1991. Gastronomie française. 130.

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Chadwell, Sean. 2002. “Do Large Italian American Families Really Eat at the Olive Garden? Ethnic Food Marketing and the Consumption of Authenticity”, Studies in Popular Culture, 24, 3, April 2002: 1-15. Coyle, Margaret. 2004. “Il Timpano—“To Eat Good Food is to be Close to God”: The Italian American Reconciliation of Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night, in Reel Food, ed. Anne L. Bower. New York: Routledge. 41-59. DeAngelis, Rose and Donald Anderson. 2005. “Gastronomic Miscuglio: Foodways in Italian American Narrative,” Italian Americana, vol. 23: 48-68. Diner, Hasia. 2001. Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the age of Migration. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Dinner Rush. 2001. Dir. Bob Giraldi. Perf. Danny Aiello, Edoardo Ballerini, Vivian Wu and John Corbett. DVD. Access Motion Picture Group. Ferraro, Thomas. 2005. Feeling Italian (New York: New York University Press. Gabaccia, Donna. 2001. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Gardaphe, Fred. 2004. Leaving Little Italy. Albany, State University of New York Press. Trattoria, Gigino homepage. 2006. http://www.gigino-trattoria.com Accessed January 18, 2006. Girardelli. Davide. 2004. “Commodified Identities: The Myth of Italian Food in the United States,” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 28 (October, 2004): 307-324. Goode, Judith, Janet Theophano, and Karen Curtis. 1985. “A Framework for the Analysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Socio-cultural rules for Food Use: The Italian American Pattern,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 66-88. Hazan, Marcella. 1973. The Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. —. 1978. More Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. 2001. “The New World of Italian American Studies,” American Literary History, vol. 13: 141-57. Hostert, Anna Camaiti. 2002. “Big Night, Small Days,” in Screening Ethnicity, ed. Anna Camaiti Hostert and Anthony Tamburri. Boca Raton: Bordighera Press. 249-258.

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Aulnoy. Relation du voyage d’Espagne. 91. Ibid,, 439. Some distinctions between the Spanish oille as described in d’Aulnoy’s text and the French pot-au-feu should be noted: first, d’Aulnoy encounters oille only in the context of the court, but associates pot-au-feu with the people; second the Spanish oille here is always served with (and perhaps made of) poultry (partridges, pigeons, pullets, and grouse are named) unlike the resolutely beefy French pot-au-feu. 72 Ibid., 93. 73 On the association between roasted or boiled meat and degrees of civilization, see Carantino. “Voyage en pot-au-feu,” 41-42 and Montanari, 1994. The Culture of Food, 22. See also Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1978: “The Culinary Triangle” in The Origin of Table Manners: Mythologiques Volume 3. New York: Harper & Row. 471-495. 74 Aulnoy. 1691. Relation du voyage d’Espagne. 93. 75 Voltaire. 1764. Dictionnaire philosophique. 83. 76 Flaubert. Correspondance-1870: 153. 77 Weiss. 1997. “The Ideology of the Pot-au-feu.” 100. 78 Grignon and Grignon. 1999. “Long-Term Trends in Food Consumption: A French Portrait.” 155. 79 Carantino. “Voyage en pot-au-feu.” 65. 80 Sand. 1855. Histoire de ma vie. 306. 81 Ibid., 309. 82 Kauffman. 2005. Casseroles, amour, et crises. 161. 83 Poulain. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. 204. 71

“ARCHITECTURAL HORS D’OEUVRES” ANNETTE CONDELLO

Hors d’œuvres have always a pathetic interest for me…they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be likeņand during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’œuvres. Don’t you love watching the different ways people have of entering a restaurant? —Saki, “Reginald at the Carlton,” (1904)1

Hors d’œuvres, almost canonically, connote food: small morsels to be consumed in advance of a meal’s main course. When coined in the sixteenth century, however, the term hors d’œuvres originally denoted buildings and other architectural objects that garnished not dishes, but constructed landscapes. These buildings, in turn, were imitated in food, to be eaten off a plate. Today, the connections between architecture, hors d’œuvres and food more generally have been obscured, if not lost–perhaps save for the proliferation of coffee-table books on “hip” restaurants. Recently, however, Mark Morris revivified hors d’œuvres’ architectural connotations: Hors d’œuvres and appetisers from fanciful canapés to prosaic pigs-in-ablanket are preciously constructed objects that are offered as proof of the calibre of subsequent courses. The one rule to all hors d’œuvre recipes is that it must be portioned in such a way as to be eaten whole with the

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fingers, in one bite. Whimsy and artifice is their main attraction. Even when these do not resemble miniature structures on their own, their presentation on triple-tiered silver platters resembles a savoury cityscape.2

Although resonant metaphorically with Morris’ concerns this chapter attempts to unravel the literal connections between architectural and gastronomic hors d’œuvres.3 And, in parallel, it seeks to recover and reestablish the dialogue between architecture and cuisine.4

“Hors d’œuvres”: From architectural to culinary usage Hors d’œuvres is a slippery concept.5 Before its culinary subsumption, the term first appeared in the French language in 1596. Vitally, this initial appearance was made within in an architectural context: drawings of small constructions and other works to be built outside a main palace were labelled hors d’œuvres. Translating into English as “outside the work,” hors d’œuvres thus describes buildings of a particular kind.6 Commonplace even today in French architectural vocabularies, hors d’œuvres were built objects, detached from the main structure and set within the broader estate. A garden pavilion, for instance, would be one example of such an “architectural hors d’œuvres.” As they sometimes served functional purpose, these hors d’œuvres are not necessarily synonymous with follies.7 Hors d’œuvres were novel in that they were “excessive,” or superfluous, and usually extravagantly-designed. As will be seen, however, such “architectural hors d’œuvres” could also be found contained within a house. That is, some could be considered buildings within buildings. Early linking cuisine to architecture, some hors d’œuvres made provision for food storage and accommodated the elites’ luxurious lifestyles. “Architectural hors d’œuvres” were often venues for extravagant consumption.8 Around 1690, nearly a century after its architectural genesis, hors d’œuvres appeared in an explicitly culinary context and its definition enlarged to include the familiar “appetizer” in its scope. Willi Bode attributes the invention of this new hors d’œuvres type to French chefs then working in Russia.9 It is important to distinguish, however, that purveyors of fine food have always had an insatiable appetite for things small, tasty, and decorative. Long before the French, for example, the ancient Sybarites consumed fishy delicacies, the Russians served caviar as their zakuski and the Florentines arranged their antipasti. Then, as now, these luxuries attracted as indicators of refinement.10

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14 See David Kamp, 2006. The United States of Arugula. New York: Broadway Books. xi. 15 Ferraro, 182. 16 See Donna Gabaccia, 2001. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 176. Gabaccia’s discussion of the role of “new ethnics” in food production, marketing, presentation, and consumption focuses on the nostalgic desires of Americans of ethnic decent, two or three generations removed from the immigrant experience of their ancestors to reconnect with the “authentic” values of “food identity and community” lost in the assimilation and acculturation process in the dominant American culture, 176. See also Judith Goode, Janet Theophano, and Karen Curtis, “A Framework for the Analysis of Continuity and Change in Shared Socio-cultural rules for Food Use: The Italian American Pattern,” in Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity, 1985 ed. Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press: 66-88 for a study of the impact of assimilation on Italian American foodways. 17 Kamp, 228. 18 Ibid. 19 Hazan, Marcella. 1973. The Classic Italian Cookbook. New York: Knopf. 1. 20 For a detailed survey of the history of Italian and Italian American foodways see Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the age of Migration, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2001), 21-83. Diner argues that for the millions of Southern Italian immigrants who arrived in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries, the daily life Southern Italy was one marked by “past hunger, scarcity, or limitation”, 39. The abundance and variety of food choices in America, (that they associated with the rich land owners in Italy)was a major factor in the transformation of traditional regional focused foodways into “the emergence of their new [Italian American] identity” Diner suggests that food in America “played a role in making immigrants from the scattered towns and villages of the Italian peninsula into Italians” (49). Diner cites food as an important element in the “dense nexus” of Italian identity in America, especially for immigrants for whom “food culturally emerged as a pillar if identity” that connected them to “being Italian in the complex new American world. See also Frances Malpezzi and William Clements, 1992. Italian American Folklore. Little Rock: August House. :221-245 for a study of Italian American foodways. 21 These are the three “essential principles” of the kitchen according to chef and restaurant owner Mario Batali qtd. in Bill Bruford 2006. Heat New York: Knopf. 13. 22 Historically, Italians have always had a stronger sense of regional loyalty or campanilismo than a sense of national identity or an awareness of an “imaginary community” called the Italian nation. Italians are Abruzzese, Napolitanos, Toscanos, Sicilianos, Calabrese first and Italians second. The term campanilismo is derived from campanile (bell tower) which indicates that the primary place of Italian public identity was the local parish (a space marked by the sound of the

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Figure 3.1 Section through interior hors d’œuvre with “flying table” at the Small Hermitage, Russia. Source: Peter Hayden, Russian Parks and Gardens. London: Frances Lincoln, 2005.

Velten’s sectional view represents an interior architectural hors d’œuvre in action, a variation of the flying table inspired by French dining chambers. Peter Hayden explains: On the ground floor there was a machine to raise and lower the central section of the dining table with its fourteen walnut place mats. All the service, course by course, was provided on the ground floor, and the meal could be freely enjoyed without the inhibiting presence of servants. Through the windows there were splendid views of the park and the Gulf of Finland, and an outstanding collection of pictures covered the walls.16

Such architectural hors d’œuvres provided places and means for sumptuous, dramatic dining without the disruption of servants. Ultimately, the Small Hermitage was an architectural hors d’œuvre in a double sense: a building within a building set amidst a splendid parkland, transforming royal dining into an architectural spectacle.

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Drawings of hors d’œuvres The table-top itself, flying or otherwise, has long been a nexus for architecture and cuisine. In seventeenth-century Rome, for instance, edible constructions replete with gods on chariots and elaborate garden surrounds were used as table centrepieces. Similarly sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Italian porcelain sculptures and edible miniatures often appeared in the form of built ruins or fountains and featured in architectural tabletop spectacles.17 Importantly, architects or cooks often made small-scale spatial models and drawings of such hors d’œuvres in advance of constructing the actual objects. As well, drawings might be made afterwards to document the artefact. These graphic representations also encapsulate architectural hors d’œuvres. As registered by such drawings, royal and papal banquets merged architecture and cuisine and associated them with permanence and indulgent luxury. Nichola Fletcher explains these lavish “architectural” affairs: The banqueting course was often referred to as a collation [meaning a light meal which was taken up in a monastery]…huge tables were covered with elaborate swirls of candied and fresh fruits, interspersed with dishes of colourful sweetmeats stacked up into tall columns or pyramids. Their forms echoed the towering centrepieces portraying classical allegorical scenes; these were often edible too. Some accounts of Italian outdoor events boasted entire paths ands flowerbeds made of cured sausages and sweetmeats.18

Such intricately presented small-scale architectural ensembles would have undoubtedly impressed the food taster. As an architectural and cuisine affair, the “collation” demonstrates how light meals emerged from the kitchen and entered public space to become architectural hors d’œuvres.

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Figure 3.2. Cuccagna’s land of plenty by Remondini (1747) Source: Author’s postcard.

Remondini’s etching (1747) of Cuccagna’s Discritione del paese di Chvcagna (Cuccagna’s land of plenty) features a similar architectural hors d’œuvres. These later metamorphosed to become a chateaux’s building foundation, illustrating literal hors d’œuvres in a theoretical treatise by architect Viollet-le-Duc (see figure 3.2). In eighteenth-century Madrid, an illustration (1747) of a cake in the shape of a building foundation records edible architecture’s burgeoning scale. These images of food ensembles are as important as the reality they represented: composed and drawn in an architectural manner, they likely were made by architects. Hors d’œuvre drawings such as these, as shall be seen, would later inspire Antonin Careme.

Exterior architectural hors d’œuvres Beyond the dining room and the house itself, architectural hors d’œuvres could also be found out of doors in the garden. Early exterior architectural hors d’œuvres such as icehouses literally link cuisine with functional architecture and were later imitated in food bound for royal tables. The origins of icehouses can be traced to Renaissance Italy when “the Roman custom of using snow to add to wine and to chill food that was revived by the new wealthy and cultured classes. Underground ‘snowpits’ with thatched roofs were soon devised in order to store compacted snow and ice throughout the summer.”19 Icehouses were thus architectural hors d’œuvres that functioned to preserve food and ice which, like sugar,

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quickly became a novel luxury amongst the elites. Icehouses evolved from underground chambers into more elaborate, free-standing constructions. Beginning with the first royal example at Versailles (1664), icehouses became increasingly more elaborate. In Italy, for instance, the ghiacciaia at the villa Ranuzzi-Cospi at Bagnarola (1700), was even designed by an architect, Sebastiano Bertelli.20 As exterior, detached buildings containing food within, icehouses were “double” hors d’œuvres.

Figure 3.3. Elevation of Monsieur Monville’s Broken Column House as an exterior hors d’œuvre. Source: Diana, Ketcham. Lé Desert de Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century French Folly Garden, The Artful Landscape of Monsieur de Monville. London, MA: The MIT Press, 1997.

Emanating from the pragmatic, utilitarian origins of the icehouse, exterior architectural hors d’œuvres soon increased in scale and took on decorative dimension. Francois Racine de Monsieur Monville famously included an array of exterior architectural hors d’œuvres in his picturesque landscape garden, Desert de Retz (1775-1788). Amongst these, his dwelling, known as the Broken Column House (1780), was the most spectacular. Based upon illustrated editions of antiquity (see figure 3.3), the design of this four-storey, architecturally excessive hors d’œuvre took the form of a ruinous Greek column, its walls cracked and roof jagged. 21 The ruinous appearance of the house, along with its seemingly fractured roof, almost persuades one to believe hors d’œuvres provide no shelter.

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Above all, the Broken Column House exemplifies another type of excessive architectural hors d’œuvre: a garden folly, albeit one that functions. One visitor to Monville’s Desert de Retz left particularly impressed: celebrated French chef Antonin Careme (1783-1833).22 And, in his pastry cooking drawings and picturesque pastries, Careme would fuse architecture and cuisine.

Fusion of interior and exterior hors d’œuvres: Antonin Careme’s pastry cooking drawings The dialogue between architecture and edible hors d’œuvres is multifaceted. For Careme, pastry cooking was a culinary and picturesque, architectural art. Indeed, Careme had learnt drafting from the architect, Charles Percier.23 Under Percier’s tutledge, Careme developed a keen interest in picturesque gardens and ruins. This preoccupation led him to study the architectural embellishment of, for instance, Paris and St Petersburg. In Russia and France, architectural hors d’œuvres often took the form of garden follies, as exemplified by those excessively luxurious constructions at Peterhof, Versailles and the Desert de Retz. Although follies are often only decorative, they can be interpreted as functioning to educate the public about the culinary arts. Eventually, Careme would publish two volumes on architecture.24 The celebrity French cook soon adopted an architectural approach to the design of the pastry constructions, studying the history of foreign foods and architecture. Careme’s cooking drawings were no less elaborate than the pastries they represented. His depiction of food hors d’œuvres might easily be mistaken to represent exterior architectural hors d’œuvres or follies. Careme published his drawings of pastry creations or, as he called them, extraordinaires, in a book entitled Le patissier pittoresque (first published in 1815 and then in 1842).25 These visual templates or rustic “place mats” instruct a cook or architect in the decoration of food or architecture. Careme’s pastry constructions are at once food and architectural hors d’œuvres, imitating and transforming functional “follies” into miniature function-less palaces. The most direct example of Careme’s edible metamorphosis is his pastry drawing of an Athenian ruin (Ruine d’Athenes) (see figure 3.4).

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Figure 3.4. Antonin Careme’s drawing of the Athenian ruinņa fusion of an interior/exterior hors d’œuvre. Source: Careme, Antonin. Le patissier pittoresque, including essays by Allen Weiss. Paris: Mercure de France, 2003.

In this image of a partial temple facade, the last of its three columns is broken and lacks a capital. Undoubtedly, his visit to Monville’s Broken Column House had provided the chef with a model. Typically, Careme’s extraordinaires were to be made of sugary substances and pastry. Some of his pastries, however, also included inedible materials, becoming a foreign melange of architectural hors d’œuvres. Frivolous to the connoisseur, Careme’s drawing of the picturesque Athenian ruin could also be considered emblematic of luxury itself. Similarly, many of his sumptuous architectural hors d’œuvres appear half-eaten, left-over, if not abandoned. Of course, they were not; their ruinous appearance merely camouflaged material wealth. Careme’s peers certainly recognised the architectural sensibilities underpinning his culinary creations. Gastronome Louis Marquis de Cussy, for instance, characterised Careme as “the Palladio of the kitchen.”26 Similarly, as Ian Kelly recently asserted, Careme “always argued that food was very like architecture, the final construction in both cases relying upon a balance of well-organised elements.”27 Careme’s architectural

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approach, however, eventually exceeded the limits of cuisine. Novelist and food writer Marion Halligan observes: Careme’s architecture turned creams and jellies into classical temples and country house follies…These great set pieces were so elaborate and costly that certain miserly rich men made their chefs present the same ones at dinner after dinnerņtheir servants were supposed to dissuade guests from eating them. This is food as unlike food as possible not meant to be eaten but only admired.28

Careme’s “set pieces” were either made for aristocratic Sybarites or meagre ascetics. As they convey architectural information, these “set pieces” or extraordinaires qualify as graphic representations of hors d’œuvre confections, as opposed to picturesque assemblages of food structures. Allen Weiss identified the pervasiveness of garden imagery within Careme’s work. Indeed, the chef himself revealed: “I would have ceased being a pastry chef if I blindly gave in to my natural taste for the picturesque genre, as I conceive of it for the embellishment of the parks of princes and for private gardens.”29 Revealing this passion, Careme carefully studied the architectural plates at the cabinet des estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Weiss argues: [Careme was i]nspired by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s five orders of architectureņTuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Compositeņhis spun-sugar creations in the form of pavilions, rotundas, temples, towers, fortresses, mills, hermitages, and ruins of all sorts were created in the greatest diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gaelic, and Egyptian. All this was finally combined in an imaginative melange whose results transgressed the historical limits of both architecture and cuisine.30

Careme’s “imaginative melange” of architecture and cuisine celebrated ancient Sybaritic myths concerning excessive luxury. These, in turn, underpinned his career as a both a cook and as an architect. With respect to the latter pursuit, Weiss assesses Careme’s various design proposals for Paris as being: as much in keeping with the great buildings and constructions for public festivals, both royal and revolutionaryņutopian architectural fantasies such as those of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and JeanJacques Lequeuņas it is with the art of pastry decoration.31

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fight-rigging that he will eventually have to stomach to get his shot at the title,”6 are factors against his possession of her. He is able to lure her, but cannot keep her, and their relationship is framed by Jake’s rejection of sex, first voluntarily, in order to retain his power for fighting, and later, seemingly involuntarily, as his jealousy and self-doubt about his body make sex an impossibility. The only real sex scene portrayed between him and Vickie involves her kissing the many cuts and bruises on his face and body, with him encouraging her to “Kiss the boo boos. Make ‘em better.” Jake’s body in this way becomes a perverse food, as Vickie puts her mouth to the bloodied spots on his chest as though by tasting them, she can consume them and take them away. Then, when Jake’s arousal becomes too great, he douses his penis with ice water. What is put on Jake’s body throughout the film is often more important than what he puts into it—his body becomes like raw meat to be devoured either by Vickie or by his opponents, water becoming not a hydrating force but one that will control and suppress its natural functions. The further Jake progresses in his fighting career, and the more complicated his relationship becomes with the gangsters whom he has to “stomach,” the more problematic Jake’s relationship with food becomes, highlighting his self-destruction. Joey admonishes Jake to bring his weight down from 168 to the required 155 so that he can fight Tony Janiro (Kevin Mahon), since “‘there’s nobody left for [him] to fight’” and then he’d have to be given a shot at the title. Joey tells him, “If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win. Just get down to 155 lbs., you fat bastard. Just stop eatin’!” Jake’s anxiety about the fight is compounded by his jealousy over Vickie’s offhand remark about Janiro’s good looks, a sore subject displayed in a subsequent conversation between Jake and mob heavy Salvy (Frank Vincent), in which their banter conflates fighting with sex. Jake says, “I’m gonna open his hole like this. Please excuse my French. I’m gonna make him suffer. I’m gonna make his mother wish she never had him—make him into dog meat...He’s a pretty kid, too. I mean I don’t know, I gotta problem, if I should fuck him or fight him.” In this exchange, the perverse mixture of food, sex, and violence all come together, wrapped inside the dark cloud of mob pressure that informs Jake’s every move. As it turns out, Jake does beat Janiro to a bloody pulp, making “meat” of his unmarked face. Jake is like a cannibal, consuming his enemies to make himself stronger, or like an animal who eats his own kind. Also like an animal, Jake’s fierce pride will not allow him to sacrifice his masculine image even to obtain the title shot, which is the one thing in the world that will solidify his identity as a fighter. In the fight with Billy Fox (Eddie Mustafa Muhammad), which Jake needs to throw in

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Attention to one such American example is an apt conclusion to this chapter. For one evening in 1903, Louis Sherry’s New York Hotel ephemerally metamorphosed into an architectural hors d’œuvre, fusing interior with exterior and architecture with cuisine (see figure 3.5). On 28 March, American millionaire C. K. G. Billings hosted an extravagant banquet, not only for his guests, but also their horses. More than thirty horses were “hauled up the fourth floor in the freight elevator.”33 Upon arrival at the restaurant, the guests and their mounts encountered a pastoral scene, replete with actual turf, recreated within a skyscraper. Billings’ elevated horseback banquet perhaps epitomises an interior/ exterior architectural hors d’œuvreņan oneiric hoist or surreal “flying table,” and in the process, captures one’s imagination.

Works Cited Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques. 1579. Les Premier volume des plus excellents bastiments de France. Farnborough: Gregg, 1972. Artschwager, Richard. 2005. Hors d’œuvre: Ordre Et Desordres De La Nourriture Exposition Du 9 Octobre 2004 Au 13 Fevrier 2005. France : CAPC Musee d’art contemporain de Bordeaux. Bode, Willie. 2000. European Gastronomy: The story of Man’s food and eating customs. London: Grub Street. Careme, Antonin. 2003. Le patissier pittoresque, including essays by Allen Weiss. Paris: Mercure de France. Condello, Annette. 2007. “Sybaritic Panoramas: Architectural Hors d’œuvres in Eighteenth-century France.” Paper published in the Panorama to Paradise, XXIVth International Conference Precedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, (SAHANZ) Adelaide, in Australia, September 2007. De Bastide, Jean-Francois. 1996. The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, translated and introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. De Montclos, Jean-Marie Perouse. 1972. Vocabulaire de l’architecture: Methode et vocabulaire, Paris : Imprimerie Nationale. El-Khoury, Rodolphe. 2004. “Delectable Decoration: Taste and Spectacle in Jean-Francois Bastide’s La Petite Maison” in Eating Architecture, edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press. Fletcher, Nichola. 2004. Charlemagne’s Tablecloth: A Piquant History of Feasting. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

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that Jake has replaced sex with food—only enrages Jake more, leading him after Joey leaves to confront and slap Vickie and then walk to Joey’s house and pull him from his own dinner table, beating him savagely on the floor. As a result of this outburst, Jake loses his best friend and protector, and begins his final spiral descent that is catalyzed by his title loss to Sugar Ray Robinson (Johnny Barnes) and his “retirement” to Miami Beach. Jake gains enough weight to make himself virtually unrecognizable, opens up a seedy nightclub, and finally loses Vickie and their children as she divorces him. He cannot seem to control his own destruction, and soon is arrested on charges of underage pandering, for which he cannot even procure the bribe money to clear himself, since he has ruined the value of his championship belt by hammering out the jewels to hock instead. Jake’s lowest point seems to come as he is wrestled into the Dade County stockade cell, and beats his head against the wall, crying out that he is not an animal. As Barbara Mortimer points out, in both this instance and the early one in the film with his first wife, “Jake insists that he is not an animal. Yet what not being an animal might mean is left completely unanswered.”7 Mortimer goes on to compare these declarations by Jake as similar to Travis Bickle’s desire to become “a person like other people.” This is a sound connection, since both characters are struggling to reconcile their search for a human identity against all forces, including their own self-destructive impulses, conspiring against them. Jake is the raging bull, born out of the seething Bronx tenements, but cannot live in a world of men. Goodfellas’s Henry Hill finds his origins in poor urban Brooklyn and also struggles with issues of identity framed by violence, as well as ethnicity. The viewer gets an early snapshot of life with his many brothers and sisters, his Irish father and his Sicilian mother. Seeing the way that Paulie Cicero’s gangsters at the nearby cab stand seem to lead powerful lives, Henry (Ray Liotta) begins to divorce himself from the working class “suckers” that surround him. This is “Mafia street theater,” according to Kathleen Murphy, “in which he longs to play an important role.”8 He matter-of-factly relates his father’s beating of him when he is reported as truant for three months from school by saying, “Everyone takes a beating sometime.” He sees the physical violence inflicted upon him by his father as a due sacrifice to lead the kind of life he desires. Henry prizes the fact that he “didn’t have to wait at the bakery for fresh bread on Sunday” and passionately describes neighborhood kids carrying his mother’s groceries for her “outta respect.” Fear and respect are not separate and distinct concepts for Henry, and food in Goodfellas signifies the struggle for

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Saki. 1904. “Reginald at the Carlton,” in Reginald. London: Methuen. Singley, Paulette. 2004. “Hard to Swallow: Mortified Geometry and Abject Form,” edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley. Eating Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press. Tannahill, Reay. 1973. Food in History. London: Eyre Methuen, Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene Emmanuel. 1875. Description du Chateau de Coucy. Paris: Imprimeries Reunies. Young, Carolin. 2002. Apples of Gold in Setting of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art. New York: Simon & Schuster. Young, Hilary. 2002. “Porcelain for the Dessert,” in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, Phillipa Glanville and Hilary Young, eds. London: V & A Publications. Weiss, Allen. 1998. Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradictions in Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Notes 1

Saki, “Reginald at the Carlton,” in Reginald, 1904; and also quoted in Arnauld Malgorn’s Hors d’œuvre: Froids et chauds, potages, 1998. 2 Morris, Mark. 2001. “Architecture, Yum!,” in Room 5: 41. 3 I am grateful to my partner and colleague Christopher Vernon for his encouragement and support. John Dixon Hunt, Michel Baridon, Michael Levine, Darra Goldstein and Marco Frascari also provided helpful insights into my research. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Quantitative Gastronomy, First International Conference, Ecole Nationale d’Ingenieurs des Travaux Agricoles de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (May, 2006); Place, Taste and Sustenance: The Social Spaces of Food and Agriculture, Annual Meeting of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Boston University (June, 2006); and Panorama to Paradise, XXIVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, Adelaide (September 2007). 4 On the connections between architecture and cuisine see Marco Frascari, “Semiotica ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” in Eating Architecture, 2004; and The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, eds. Petra Hagen Hodgson and Rolf Toyka, 2007. 5 Paulette Singley considers the term “hors’d’œuvres” but only metaphorically as a sub-theme in architecture. See “Hard to Swallow: Mortified Geometry and Abject Form,” in Eating Architecture, 2004, 353. On the connections between art and the hors’d’œuvre see Richard Artschwager, 2005. Hors d’œuvre: Ordre Et Desordres De La Nourriture Exposition Du 9 Octobre 2004 Au 13 Fevrie.

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6 See Paul Robert, 1985. Dictionnaire Alphabetique et Analogique de la Langue Francaise, 256. The term hors d’œuvre also appears in contemporary French building manuals. 7 The Oxford English Dictionary defines “folly” as a popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder (Fr. folie). Many French houses still bear the name La Folie, http://dictionary.oed.com (accessed August 2, 2007). On garden follies see John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002. 8 Jacques Androuet Du Certeau, Les Premier volume des plus excellents bastiments de France, 1972. Historically, French treatises suggest multiple meanings of the architectural term. Jacques Androuet Du Certeau’s Le Plus Excellents Bastiments de France (1579), labelled outlying garden buildings as dehorsņmeaning outside the main part of a building. Also, see Jean-Marie Perouse de Montclos, Vocabulaire de l’architecture: Methode et vocabulaire, 1972. De Montclos defined hors d’œuvre as a pavilion or interior walls enclosing staircases within a château (my translation). Viollet-le-Duc, Description du Chateau de Coucy, In his Description du Chateau de Coucy (1875), the celebrated French architect and theorist illustrates the foundations of the palace outside the main building and labels them hors d’œuvres. Elsewhere in the text, Viollet-le-Duc also identifies hors d’œuvres as outlying constructions, separate from the main part of the building (my translation). 9 My translation. Paul Robert, 1985, 256. Willi Bodes writes: “Originally, hors d’œuvres were served from the side tables of the reception room, or in the anteroom before the guests entered the large dining hall…At this time, French culture and language were very prominent in Russiaņas elsewhere in Europeņand the cuisine francaise was highly regarded as part of good culture and good living. French chefs were accustomed to the highest praise for the composition of their dishes, the skill with which they combined flavours, and the absolute artistry and splendour of their service and presentation.” See Willi Bode, European Gastronomy: The Story of Man’s Food and Eating Customs, 2000, 132. 10 Bode, 2000, 134-135. Published in Paris, Francois Massialot’s Le Cuisiner royal et bourgeois (1691) specifically refers to culinary dishes as hors d’œuvres. 11 Tannahill, Reay. 1973. Food in History, 335. 12 On “flying tables” see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, “Making Sense of Food in Performance: The Table and the Stage,” in The Senses in Performance, 2006. 13 Quoted in Rodolphe El-Khoury, “Delectable decoration: Taste and spectacle in Jean-Francois Bastide’s La Petite Maison” in Eating Architecture, 2004, 64-65. Also see Jean-Francois de Bastide, The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, trans. and introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury, 1996, note 3, p.122; and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, “Making sense of food in performance: the table and the stage,” 2006. 14 See Note 3 in Jean-Francois de Bastide, The Little House: An Architectural Seduction, translation and introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury, New York:

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Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, 112; and David A. Hanser, Architecture of France, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2005, 296. 15 Hayden, Peter. 2005. Russian Parks and Gardens, 30. 16 Ibid. 17 On porcelain figures see Hilary Young, “Porcelain for the Dessert,” in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, 2002, 90-91. 18 Fletcher, 2004. Charlemagne’s Tablecloth, 138. 19 Hildyard, Robin. 2002. “Ice-cream” in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, 86. 20 Ray, Mary-Ann. 1997. Seven Partly Underground Rooms and Buildings for Water, Ice, and Midgets, 67. 21 Ketcham, 1994, 1. The garden’s authorship is unclear, but Ketcham believes Monville was responsible for its design, and others attribute it to Francois Barbier. Ketcham, 1997, 14, 32, fig. 7. 22 Kelly, Ian. 2003. Cooking for Kings: The Life of Antonin Careme, the First Celebrity Chef, 39. 23 Hayden, Peter. 2005. Russian Parks and Gardens, 140. 24 The Projects for the Architectural Embellishment of St. Petersburg (1821) and The Projects for the Architectural Embellishment of Paris (1826). 25

Careme, Antonin. 2003. Le patissier pittoresque, including essays by Allen Weiss. 26 Young, Carolin. 2002. Apples of Gold in Setting of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art, 206, 216; and see Kelly, Cooking for Kings, 37. 27 Kelly, 2003. Cooking for Kings, 38. 28 Halligan, Marion. 1990. Eat My Words, 118-119. 29 Allen Weiss cites Careme. Weiss, Allen. 1998. Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradictions in Landscape Architecture, 129. 30 Ibid,131. 31 Ibid. 32 See Barbara Jones, 1947. “The Decoration of Food,” in The Architectural Review, Vol. CII, No.609, September, 1947: 100-102. 33 Fletcher, 2004: 203.

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away from the surveillance helicopter and distribute his illicit packages. Henry even jokes that his poor brother has been either “watching sauce or watching helicopters all day”; watching both is equally important to him because both making the traditional dinner and moving the drugs and guns are integrally related. Adding Henry’s wheelchair-bound brother to the narrative at this point is significant; we have not seen any of Henry’s family since the childhood scenes, except a brief shot of his parents at the wedding, but now, in a time of ultimate crisis appears his brother, whose disability during their childhood was one of their father’s main sources of frustration and anger with the limitations of his working-class life. The dinner represents how far Henry has come, but also presages his fall. After he is out on bail, Henry knows that he must attempt to reconcile himself with Paulie, who Henry has felt to be a surrogate father to him since he was a teenager. Paulie had previously warned Henry to stay away from dealing drugs after he got released from prison because of the danger that they posed to the organization as a whole. Paulie adheres to a more traditional mindset, as is also evident when he counsels Henry that he has to make peace with his wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), after she found out about his affair, saying that “there’s no other way. You’re not gonna get a divorce. We’re not animali.” Again, the difference between what is human and what is animal, what is civilized and what is brutal, seems to often be a blurred distinction. Animali get divorced, but humans commit torture, murder, and dismemberment. Henry stubbornly tries to straddle the line between the traditional wiseguy philosophies that he learned from Paulie as a kid and the newer, more brutal tactics of Jimmy and Tommy. His struggling to cook the very traditional dinner for his family on the night of his arrest illustrates this conflict, and ultimately, his failure to walk that line. In his last meeting with Paulie, Paulie cooks sausage and peppers in a skillet, gives him $3200, and says he has to turn his back on him. “3200 bucks for a lifetime,” Henry muses. “It wasn’t even enough to pay for the coffin.” Henry’s identity and worth as a player has now become a liability—at best, he has become someone to be ignored and at worst, a threat to those like Jimmy, who, over a meal at the diner that they have frequented throughout the film, tells Henry about a setup that Henry believes will likely lead to his own assassination. Henry’s final punishment seems fitting: relocated to the witness protection program, living in a cookie-cutter house, he is alive, but trapped in suburban, whitewashed hell. He comments, “There’s no action . . . . I can’t even get decent food. Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup.” As a teenager, Henry gloated that because of his ties to Paulie and his crew, he could “go

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that Indian soup…simmered to perfection,” the first known reference to the soup, according to the trusty Anglo-Indian dictionary Hobson-Jobson was in 1784, not surprisingly the same year “currystuff” or a combination of spices also became available in Britain.4 Dr. Kitchiner, physician and gourmet, in his The Cook’s Oracle (first published in 1817) testified to the growing popularity of the newly “invented” soup and opined that though “Mullaga-tawny…the more familiar name of curry soup” may not yet have “sufficient of the charms of novelty to seduce [a restaurant goer] from his much loved Mock Turtle. It is a fashionable soup, and a great favourite with our East Indian friends.”5 Indeed, so popular was this soup among the British residents of the Madras presidency that “mull”—a contraction of mulligatawny—“was applied as a distinctive sobriquet to members of the Service.”6 But a mere sixty years later, writing in 1878, Wyvern, one of the most respected and successful of cookery writers in the Indian Empire, was of the opinion that “a really well-made mulligatunny is, comparatively speaking, a thing of the past.”7 As we shall see, in the following pages, however, the announcement of its demise had been greatly exaggerated. The fortunes of this soup has to be traced on two registers—on the one hand, the greater familiarity, even growing popularity, of Indian curry recipes in Britain throughout the nineteenth century made mulligatawny a household soup. The regularity, with which recipes were sought, exchanged and shared in a variety of women’s weekly and monthly periodicals attest to this fact.8 Starting out as an item of haute cuisine, enjoyed by the Prince Regent and his aristocratic set, it gradually became part of ordinary household menus.9 In India, on the other hand, among the Anglo-Indians, it proved to be a dividing line of class and caste. Though the adaptation, even incorporation, of Indian cuisine to suit British taste owed much to British women traveling between metropole and colony, in India, as Anglo-Indian wives, for the most part they shunned Indian cuisine, preferring to serve pies, roasts and potted meats in order to distance themselves from those they governed, and distinguish themselves from those with whom they governed, the Anglo-Indians (that is, British residents of India). The rise and fall of the popularity of mulligatawny, its adoption and rejection, it’s asynchronous though linked histories in Britain and in India, serves as the barometer for measuring British attitudes towards India. But more generally, it allows us to think about histories of cultural exchange, and helps reveal the linkages between food, identity and power. Often synonymous with curry soup, no purveyor of domestic advice in the nineteenth century could afford to ignore the mulligatawny soup.

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Indeed, all the great writers of cookery books of that period had their own recipe for the soup, this “most celebrated of Anglo Indian dishes” as David Burton calls it.10 Curry, that other peculiar British concoction, and the one invariable ingredient in all the myriad variations of the soup, it should be noted, was commercially available in London by 1784. As early as 1733, the Norris Street Coffee House at Haymarket was serving something called “curry” though it’s popularity was both limited and doubtful. The earliest recipe for curry and for mulligatawny (“mulagatwy”) is probably Stephana Malcolm’s in 1791 which she seems to have obtained from her brothers, all ten of whom were working in India.11 By 1809, Dean Mahomed had opened the first Indian restaurant, “The Hindostanee Coffee-House” near Portman Square in London, for “the Nobility and Gentry” where he served “Indian dishes, in the highest perfection…unequalled to any curries ever made in England.”12 The Domestic Economy and Cookery for Rich and for Poor (1827) included recipes for the soup with the view “of introducing a less expensive, a more wholesome, and a more delicate mode of cookery.” 13For Wyvern, writing in the 1870’s, mulligatawny was “really excellent, and at times, most invigorating soup.”14 Coming from a man of discriminating palate, and one who preferred French to Indian cooking, this was high praise indeed. Mulligatawny, as we shall see, proved to be a versatile, adaptable menu item, sometimes prepared with expensive meats and a whole host of condiments and at other times, made with left-overs and common vegetables. One of the attractions of this soup, especially for those with limited income, was its ability to provide sustenance economically. As such, it proved to be a great boon to frugal housewives who made the lowly broth the repository of disparate ingredients, some left over from previous meals, others that could easily be found in local markets. Soups, in general, share this virtue, of course, but mulligatawny, in particular, having no “classical” version, displayed an ability to move up or down the scale of snobbery--from the simple broth to a sophisticated, even extravagant, item of haute cuisine. The difficulty of producing a good stock under less than ideal conditions in India was compounded by the inability of Indian cooks to make a “clear soup’ which necessitated greater skills in cutting the vegetables in uniform pieces and producing a broth of “good colour.” Mulligatawny was a protean creation. Starting out as a “native” dish which was eaten with quantities of boiled rice, the English “added other condiments, with chicken, mutton &c., thickened the liquid with flour and butter and by degrees succeeded in concocting a soupe grasse of a decidedly acceptable kind.”15 In a recent article in the PMLA, Bruce Robbins notes the sudden

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proliferation of commodity histories, all purporting to have changed the world: Tobacco: A cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World or Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World.16 Robbins perspicuously observes the underlying narrative formula of these commodity histories, both popular and academic: they are at times, the rags to riches story of a humble plant or fish or mineral that struggles mightily against aristocratic prejudices to finally find favor among one and all. “In effect,” writes, Robbins, “each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism’s story.”17 Commodity histories, thus, in many ways, are effective capitalist propaganda (as Robbins notes): “What a wondrous system this is, you are told, that has brought to your doorstep or breakfast table all these things you never would have known existed, yet things without which you would not, you suddenly realize, be yourself.”18 But there is another, less sensational, tradition of writing about commodities. Sidney Mintz, for example, in his classic Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History looked not so much at the expansionist triumph of sugar from an expensive and exotic item to the most commonplace of ingredients in our diet, as he laid bare the horrific history of slavery via which sugar made fortunes for the upper-classes. Mintz, in his account of the ubiquitous presence of sugar in modern life, carefully linked the institution of slavery to the British working-class and their acquired habit of sweetening tea. In unveiling the concealed social relations between the production of the commodity and its circulation, he reminds us that the “creation of a radically new diet cannot possibly be explained by reference to some single narrowly confined cause.”19 By his example, Mintz teaches us to be attentive to shifts in diet which are connected to and often signal much larger social and economic processes at work. The story of mulligatawny I wish to trace follows this latter example on a muted note. My ambition in this essay is modest: I wish to look at the creation of this soup—mulligatawney—in the British-Indian Empire. I do so not to confect a story of triumph, nor to produce an insidious tale of the exotic invading, occupying and overwhelming the delicate cuisines of the west, but to try and explain the “origin” creation, and popularity, and its current ubiquitous presence on menus in “Indian” restaurants. The history of this soup is a history, not so much of the clash of civilizations as an internecine skirmish within and among AngloIndians to define themselves. It is, I hope to show, a story of class struggle at the level of the dinner-table and it is a story, inevitably, about gender.

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traitorous driver, Paulie, to eat and then directing Clemenza (Richard Castellano) to “take care of that son of a bitch right away….I don’t want to see him again.” Costello has fixed on the idea that when “things” eat, they let their guard down. Costello’s business is capitalizing on such weakness—that of the players in his own criminal world, as well as the FBI. As one who has been consumed by Costello, Sullivan is attempting to forge an identity for himself independent of the hold that Costello has on him and his conflicts and frustrations with this struggle are also represented by conflicted relationships with food. On his first date with police psychiatrist Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), they eat dinner at an upscale French restaurant. They order an ornate chocolate tower for dessert, and when it is served, Sullivan comments, “They got this, but they don’t got duck l’orange.” Madolyn asks him if his meal—lobster—was o.k., and he responds, “Oh yeah, but since this was a French restaurant, I thought. . . you know.” Sullivan’s working class language is incongruous with the setting, and his fixation with what should be traditional or appropriate French food is an indicator of his desire to rise above not his elite State Police detective status, since that is artificial, but rather his blue-collar gangster identity, which at this point, is his true self. Lobster, which in previous New England centuries, was working-class food, is not nearly as preferable as duck l’orange. Costigan, on the other hand, is merely trying to get out of his situation alive. As an undocumented State Police informant, he is in constant danger of execution by Costello and his gang or loss of identity even if he survives. Each side wants their piece of him, and he is being torn apart in the process. Upon learning that Costello is an FBI informant, Costigan goes to Queenan and is visibly upset. Queenan tries to calm him down by telling him that his wife left some supper out and they could eat and talk in the kitchen. Though Queenan at times exhibits this folksy, fatherly behavior toward Costigan, there is still something sinister about this kind of overture. Gorin points out the artistry in the way that Scorsese captures this scene: “DiCaprio, like a rag doll on the bench with the family pictures on the wall, every Queenan an Irish cop as far as the eye can see, and Martin Sheen, pointing out the image of his son, a chip off the old block, attempting to lather some salve on Billy’s wounded soul, his arm stiffly half-extended to coax him into the kitchen for some home cooking left on the stove. There’s nothing here that gets us from A to B. It’s a moment of resonant evil, more terrifying than Frank Costello’s antics: Queenan the ruthless handler prepping Billy with a bit of retread Father O’Malley hokum for a few more hours of service and a few more steps toward a

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40, 000 Europeans, mostly British, living in India. Of these, by far the largest number was made up of soldiers in Company employ, 1,000 East India Company Civil servants and about 2,000 merchants, lawyers and adventurers.25 Through the first decades of the nineteenth century, Britain continued to consolidate its territorial possessions in India via military conquest and by a network of treaties and alliances with indigenous ruling regimes. With this consolidation of power came greater insulation from the governed population After the opening up of the Suez Canal in 1869 which facilitated the increasing presence of British women in the Indian colony, the idea of a unitary English identity came into direct conflict with social class within the ranks of the Anglo-Indian community. Presidency towns and even remote military cantonments became home to sizeable British communities where not just race but class belonging became a boundary issue. Women certainly did not cause this schism, but as Margaret Strobel has argued, the maintenance of an exclusive imperial identity became possible once women began to arrive: “women in their social roles as wives and hostesses, maintained the hierarchy within the European community… by elaborate rituals.”26 They were held responsible for standing in direct and visible contrast to the “natives” (“No collector’s wife,” writes Wilfred Blunt, “will wear an article of Indian manufacture…and all her furniture, even to her carpets, must be of English make”27). Englishwomen were also expected to reform home and husband since, especially in the case of the latter, as Emily Eden noticed with some dismay “their poor dear manners are utterly gone—jungled out of them.”28 There was an obsessive attention to vigilance along the borders of race—racially mixed (“Eurasians”) were to be shunned as much as the class of bureaucratic servants of empire, the English-educated Indians. Even though frenetic socializing (“promiscuous sociability” as Maud Diver termed it) helped remedy the ennui that set in, the British in India maintained as rigid a caste hierarchy as the Hindus.29 There was a line drawn between the members of the covenanted services (judges, commissioners, collectors—that is, the top officials of the British Indian bureaucracy) and the uncovenanted (clerks, assistants, lower rungs of the service) and, as Emily Eden, in Up the Country, commented, “we with our pure Norman and Saxon blood, cannot really think contemptuously enough of them.”30 Not surprisingly, food--the cooking, serving and eating of it--was one ritual among many where the British in India sought to reproduce and maintain the caste system of imperial life. The dinner party, especially, helped reinforce social boundaries, set the tone for social etiquette and interaction by attending to such weighty questions as

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whether guests should be exempted from wearing white gloves in hot weather, where the Director of Smoke Nuisance should be seated at dinner or whether mulligatawny ought to be served at parties or best left for “cosy dinners.” The upper echelons of the British administrative class led unimaginably pampered lives, traveling the country with huge entourages, hunting, shooting and golfing, “eating salmon from Scotland and sardines from the Mediterranean, and observing that St. Cloup’s potage a la Julienne was perhaps better than his other soups...”31 It was, as Emma Roberts observed as early as 1835, in her famous Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, “the best display of the grandeur and magnificence of India which the Asiatic style of living could produce.”32 Socializing centered on the “burra khana” [“big meal”] and it was there “on their dinner tables that the British in India most extravagantly displayed wealth and status.”33 In the early days of British presence in India, everyday meals were an unmanageable hodge-podge of European and Indian dishes. Meals were displays of abundance which, as Padre Ovington observed, attempted “to please the Curiosity of every Palate.”34 The fabulously wealthy merchants of John Company, “the Nabobs,” who were “envied yet despised” in England reveled in their ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption, freely adopting the extravagant lifestyles of the Indian ruling classes. “The receipt of an Indian dinner appears to be,” commented the ever-acerbic Emma Roberts, “to slaughter a bullock, and a sheep and place all joints before the guest at once, with poultry &c to match.”35 But lurking behind these scenes of fantastic grandeur, were the mundane lives of mid-to-low level workers in the service of Empire. The quotidian problems of life in alien, inhospitable places often do not feature in the many travel narratives of the nineteenth century. What we do find in Eden and Roberts and others—as well as post-colonial critical writing—is the chasm between the governor and the governed. The India of these narratives has an “Arabian nights” feel of exoticism, abundance and splendor contrasted, every now and then, with the India of squalor and chaos. It is through close readings of recipe books that dispensed advice to the young housewife with an inelastic household budget but who, nonetheless, was enjoined to keep up appearances that we catch glimpses of the lives of lowly Company servants and begin to understand the distinctions of class within the British community in India. While senior merchants feasted on opulent meals, junior officers and subalterns often had to make do with frugal fare, punctuated by compulsory fasts on high holy days. The diet of the common soldier in

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“You Gotta Eat Somethin’”: Food, Violence, and Perversity in Scorsese’s Urban Films

Borden, Lizzie. 1995. “Blood and Redemption,” Sight and Sound 5: 12. Thomson, David. 1998. “The Director as Raging Bull,” Film Comment 34, no. 3: 52-63. 7 Mortimer. 1997: 31. 8 Murphy, Kathleen. 1998. “Made Men,” Film Comment 34, no. 3: 64-67. 9 Gorin, Jean-Pierre. 2006. “Dramatis Personae,” Film Comment 42, no. 6: 30-33. 10 A probably unintentional irony about Costello’s Boston accent in these lines: it sounds as though he is saying “tuber” instead of “tuba,” which would be an interesting further connection to food—and Irish food at that. 11 Gorin. 2006: 32. 6

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of the item. Cookery and household management books which began to proliferate in very significant numbers could not afford not to provide its own version of the mulligatawny soup. The recipes ranged from a quick and simple clear broth to the most elaborate collection of vegetables and meats that took hours to cook. The first recipe for mulligatawny, as I have noted was Staphana Malcolm’s. By mid-century, mulligatawny had already entered the cookery lexicon, spawning as many variations of the recipe as ways to spell it. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the most famous and best known of such manuals, first published in volume form in 1861 included a recipe for mulligatawny. Her targeted audience was the Englishwoman in England, which would explain why the recipe required “lin[ing] the stewpan with bacon.” 43 The vegetable version of the soup, she tells her readers “is made with veal stock, by boiling and pulping chopped vegetable marrow, cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes, and seasoning with curry powder and cayenne.”44 Her predecessor, Eliza Acton, in her Modern Cookery in All It’s Branches (1845) which was primarily directed at middle-class English households (and subsequently American ones), included not one but three recipes for the soup. Not only does Acton devote more space to the elaboration of this soup than any other, what is particularly striking is that the recipe is not listed under foreign cookery. She does make oblique references to the delicate palates of her readers, unaccustomed to certain flavors and condiments: “Unless precise orders to the contrary have been given,” she warns, “onions, eschalots and garlic, should be used in seasoning with great moderation” since these are “very offensive to many eaters” and “to persons of delicate habit their effects are sometimes extremely prejudicial.” Perhaps the most important reason for exercising moderation with onions and garlic (the basic ingredient not only in almost all mulligatawny recipes, but Indian curries in general), is that “it is only in coarse cookery that their flavour is allowed ever strongly to prevail.” 45 In other words, Acton’s suggestions point the way to the domestication of exotic and foreign menu items to the more cautious British palate and plate. The incorporation of the soup into British food habits was well under way. As is characteristic of her, Acton included commentary, alongside her recipe. For her version of mulligatawny she estimated for her readers the average cooking time (two hours), average cost (1s. 6d per quart), the appropriate season (winter). The recipe itself is quite distinctive and appears wedged between her directions for pheasant soup and “an excellent green pea soup.” The instructions begin innocuously enough for any soup recipe—“slice and fry gently in some good butter three or four

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large onions, and when they are of a fine amber-colour, lift them out with a slice…” What might give one pause is the next step: “throw a little more butter…and then brown lightly in it a young rabbit.” The rabbit can be substituted, we are told, with prime joints or a fowl. An hour or two of patient tending to the broth and the addition of lemon juice and “two heaped tablespoonful of currie powder” produces the desired dish. “Serve it very hot,” advises Acton, “and send boiled rice to table with it.” The soup is prepared with “part of a pickled mango and is much recommended by persons who have been long resident in India.”46 The rather less adventurous palates of her primary readership (British and American), she acknowledges, have made her modify the recipe and include the “sort of receipt commonly used in England.” But, she tells her readers, “a much finer soup maybe made by departing from it.”47 The variant she recommends calls for three or four ounces of grated cocoa-nut “which will impart a rich mellow flavour to the whole” and for meat, “the flesh part of calf’s head previously stewed almost sufficiently…with sweet-bread also stewed or boiled in broth tolerably tender…will make an admirable mulligatawny.” Ever mindful of expense, Acton adds, “The flesh of a couple of calves’ feet, with a sweet-bread or two, may, when convenient, be substituted for the head.”48 In a subsequent, revised edition of Acton’s recipe book, published in 1900 titled, The People’s Book of Modern Cookery further concessions are made to expenditure: “the scalp or skin only of a calf’s head will make an excellent mulligatawny.”49 We have come a long way, indeed, from the austere pepper water of southern India! It should be noted that in addition to recipe writers, the most famous chefs of the nineteenth century, Alexis Soyer and Charles Elmé Francatelli, each had their own recipe for mulligatawny. Soyer, chef de cuisine at the Reform Club in London and perhaps the most celebrated cook in Victorian England, published his book of recipes, Modern Housewife in 1849 in which his recipe for mulligatawny begins, “Cut up a knuckle of veal, which put in stewpan, with a piece of butter, half a pound of lean ham, a carrot, a turnip, 3 onions and six apples.”50 Soyer ends his recipe with the observation “ox-tails or pieces of rabbit, chicken &etc leftover from a previous meal” would be equally acceptable. Francatelli, chief cook to Queen Victoria, included his own version of the mulligatawny in The Cook’s Guide. Unremarkable for the most part, the recipe borders on the more extravagant, calling for a dozen onions, six unpeeled apples and poultry, game, veal or pork and the addition of Crosse and Blackwell’s curry paste, which, in Francatelli’s opinion, was the best available.51 Of all the early mulligatawny recipes, it is Soyer’s which, having weeded out the more exotic ingredients, with the exception of the

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hallmark “curry paste,” created a recipe which is European in its basic idiom. Acton’s recipes and advice were directed at creating a “refined modern table” by deliberately “intermingl[ing] many foreign recipes and elements.”52 Since rice, which was usually served at table with the soup, was not a usual item of consumption in England, her recipes for the Mulligatawny included a separate section on how to boil rice for the soup. Here, she advises her reader that the “The Patna, or small-grained rice, which is not so good as the Carolina” nonetheless, goes well with the soup. While her various versions of the mulligatawny called for marrow, cucumber, apple and cocoanut, Mrs. Beeton substituted cocoanut with ground almond. Some “clear” versions of the soup listed coriander, cumin, fenugreek and cinnamon as required ingredients. Alexis Soyer, added ham, thyme and apple to his recipe, thereby producing a soup that’s a far cry from the “original” mulligatawny. A combination of commodities—Carolina or Patna rice, cocoa-nut and curry powder, cardamom and ground almond—make the nineteenth century English larder a reflection of the globalized economy of England. These recipes which called for a mixing of the familiar with the unfamiliar, were exercises in creating a cosmopolitan sensibility commensurate with the ambitions and disposable incomes of the rapidly increasing middle-class which, throughout the nineteenth century, grew corpulent and rich on the surplus of Empire. Mulligatawny recipes reflected the circulation and availability of exotic items for consumption in the metropolis and the hegemony of the middle-class in dictating the terms of sophistication and taste. As Burnett points out, “England had become very largely their England.”53 In the colony, however, cookery and household management books were always conscious of the rigid class/caste differentiations that had to be maintained between Britain and India in the first instance, and also between the upper and lower classes of Britons. For the British in India, especially after the Mutiny of 1857, the maintenance of an aloof, imperial persona was much recommended. There was the dual anxiety of either appearing to have gone native (“junglee”), or to reveal oneself to be common. In Britain, curries in general began to be assimilated into the diet, but in India, its proximity to the “natives” resulted in its downward spiral in popularity. While Acton’s and Beeton’s manuals laid the foundation for middle-class living in Britain, for the Indian Empire the classic work was, of course, Flora Annie Steel’s Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. First published in 1888, it went through ten editions and remained in-print till Indian independence. Steel arrived in

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The basic correspondences for the temperaments are as follows: sanguine (warm and moist), choleric (hot and dry), melancholic (cold and dry), and phlegmatic (cold and moist). Relationships between humors and many other controlling influences were often asserted; for example, linking to the humors the natural elements, astrological signs, times of life, seasons, the winds, the major planets. Thomas Walkington’s The Opticke Glass of Humours (1607) provides a circular humoral diagram which divides the four quadrants of a circle and attributes the portions of the circle to the four temperaments and rings of the circle to the various factors. Robert Burton’s compendious The Anatomy of Melancholy (1628) went into six editions in his own lifetime (1577-1640). While not strictly a dietary text (but closer to a catalog of follies), the popularity of Burton’s text reinforces the early modern common language of humoral physiology based on Galen’s description.4 Galen offers a model of the physiology of the human digestive process which posits that control of ingestion allows, to some degree, control over health. Galen’s texts, for the most part medical in nature, presume illness. Generally, the humoral system organizes physiological causes and effects in relationships to one another in such a way that the human condition always predetermines an imbalance of some sort. Whether because of time of life, astrological sign, eating habits, or any of the other wide variety of factors, the humors are continually imbalanced. In this paradigm, health relies less on maintaining a perfect achievable balance of healthfulness than on mitigating or lessening illness. In “The First Anniversary,” John Donne describes the dilemma: “There is no health; physicians say that we/ At best, enjoy but a neutrality” (l 91-2).5 Despite this presumption, Paradise Lost uses the Galenic model to describe a place where illness should not exist. The emphasis on digestive terms for God’s creation of the world, for the ways the world sustains itself, and for descriptions of the angels’ eating, places the reader firmly in the midst of a Galenic physiology of existence. In what follows I propose reading the ingestion and digestion in Paradise Lost to examine the dichotomy of using a model of digestion which presumes illness to portray health in prelapsarian Eden—a dichotomy Satan utilizes to convince Eve that she needs to eat the fruit to gain health. I then explore the implications of this dichotomy for the moment in the text when the literal act of eating and the metaphoric act of eating are the same.

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Britain, in India would have rendered the soup uncomfortably close to its “native” root. Acton, by the mere juxtaposition of her recipe of “excellent green pea soup” with mulligatawny, the latter redolent with heaping spoons of curry and cocoanut, emphasizes simultaneously the domestic and the exotic. steel’s recipes are variations of Soyer’s and of Francatelli’s. Her dismissive tone, the introduction of poached rice quenelles in place of plain boiled rice, the substitution of the tropical mango with the temperate apple, are her attempts at camouflaging the “native,” and make it pass as a European, and therefore more sophisticated, dish. What is noteworthy, also, is first, Steel’s modification both of the recipe and of cooking instructions. Having experienced life in remote settlements of the British Indian Empire, Steel makes several concessions to reality on the ground. Though she addresses the British mistress of the household, she knows perfectly well that the labor of cooking will be carried out by ill-trained cooks and so she advises the reader to write out “some simple rules founded on this chapter…in the vernacular [to be given] to the cook.”59 While Acton advises that the cook “skim the soup thoroughly when it first begins to boil,” Steel is entirely dismissive of this extra step and concluding that good stock needs no skimming.60 In addition to simplifying the recipe, Steel substitutes fine joints and rabbit meat with whatever left-over meat was available in the larder. In this, Steel is distinctly different from the other famous dispenser of advice, Wyvern. While her male contemporary Wyvern’s lofty prose, elaborate instructions and endless commentary on good taste and sophistication make for amusing reading, Steel’s cut and dried style aims at practicality and what in today’s parlance we might call, user-friendliness. Always sensitive to the trying circumstances under which “English” habits had to be preserved, practiced and displayed, Steel often simplifies her recipe and menu recommendations. In the Preface to her first edition, for example, she makes the claim, (albeit a stock-in-trade of all such books), that there was a felt need for a practical guide for young housekeepers in India. They come to India unprepared and inexperienced and “find themselves almost as much at sea as their more ignorant sisters” with little help from “the crowd of idle, unintelligible servants…”61 While cookery books in England included “Indian receipts” with some fanfare, her inclusion of a few “native dishes” is grudging and comes with the warning: “The following native dishes has been added by request. It may be mentioned incidentally that most native recipes are inordinately greasy and sweet and that your native cooks invariably know how to make them fairly well.”62 She does not elaborate, of course, as to who might have requested such dishes, we would not be far wrong to surmise that despite her best efforts,

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curries and mulligatawny were still being relished at Anglo-Indian meals. Read within the context of her milieu, Steel’s recipes for mulligatawny are an instance of the delicate calibration of class and culture that was at the very centre of British Indian identity in the second half of the nineteenth century: on the one hand, the reality of food habits of the British residents and on the other the hauteur of a British imperial persona that wished to distance itself from anything with the slightest Indian flavor. For the most part, Steel’s recipes are European with liberal use of French names and techniques, even if simplified for “primitive” Indian kitchens; her recipes recommend carlton soup, macaroni, and chiffonades. By the time of her writing, it should be remembered, menus in Britain were being written entirely in French. This new fashion, transported to India made for some curious translations: Indian curd was transformed into gros lait and Indian gourd in brown gravy became the exoticsounding podolongcai au jus. Steel’s attempt is not a synthesis of East and West (as in some of the earlier cookbooks) but like Wyvern, about whom I will have more to say later, her desire is to reproduce European (especially French) cuisine in primitive Indian kitchens. If “Indian” recipes are selectively, indeed, reluctantly included, her opprobrium is equally directed at Anglo-Indian habits of food and entertaining. Breakfast in India, she found to be “for the most part horrible meals.”63 She was not better impressed by that peculiar mid-day meal, so beloved of the British in India, the tiffin: “Heavy luncheons and tiffins have much to answer for in India…It is no unusual thing to see a meal of four or five distinct courses placed on the table when one light entree and a dressed vegetable would be ample,” is her unamused opinion.64 But she was uncompromising on her stance that even under the most difficult conditions, Englishness must never be abandoned. Her manual is a reassurance to the young, inexperienced housewives that with advice from “an old India hand” such as herself, any Englishwoman, even in the remotest corner of the Indian empire could run a household worthy of the ruling race. “We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness, “ she avers, “but an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.”65 Antonin Carême had inaugurated the turn towards French cuisine as a mark of a sophisticated palate in Britain. In India, the figure undoubtedly was Wyvern who Nancy Forbes in her introduction to a new edition of his famous cookery book, credits with having “supplied the grammar of classical French cuisine” in British India. 66 One of the most distinctive, and certainly the most amusing, cookery writer of Anglo-India was Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert or Wyvern whose Culinary

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Jottings or A Treatise in Thirty Chapters on Reformed Cookery for Anglo Indian Exiles, first published in Madras in 1878, was so popular it went through five editions in seven years. Dedicated to the “Ladies of Madras,” many of the recipes had already appeared in newspaper columns. The book is equal parts cookery recipe, social commentary, and advice with more than a dash of snobbery. Like Steel, Wyvern, in the fourth edition of the Jottings (published in Calcutta in 1883) reluctantly included “three articles on curries and mulligatunny which appeared in the Pioneer.” Despite his own caution that a “really well-made mulligatunny is comparatively speaking a thing of the past” he, nonetheless embarks on a commentary of “this really excellent soup.” The announcement of its demise, along with its preparers (“The old cooks, who studied the art, and were encouraged in its cultivation have passed away to their happy hunting grounds”) as we shall see, is more wish fulfillment than fact. But this premature—even presumptive—announcement, allows Wyvern to provide a fulsome obituary. Mulligatawny, he tells us, is “an old standing dish to commence a luncheon party” but he warns his contemporaries “he who partakes of it finds the delicate powers of his palate vitiated.” 67 So unimpressed is he with this soup that his strong advice is to “reserve the mulligatani for your luncheon at home alone, enjoy it thouroughly, rice and all—and nothing more.”68 It is a “soup maigre” which English culinary genius, with the addition of various ingredients, has transformed into “a soupe grasse of a decidedly acceptable kind.” Even a casual reader of Culinary Jottings would quickly realize that Wyvern, here, is damning the soup with faint praise. His culinary philosophy emphasized delicacy, style and expertise. His description of the soup displays the values he most abhorred: food that is coarse, common and devoid of any nuance: “The pepper-water is, of course, eaten with a large quantity of boiled rice and is a meal in itself.”69 To underscore the lowly caste status of mulligatawny, he informs his readers that the soup “in its simple form…[is] partaken by the natives of Madras.”70 Wyvern mocks and cajoles in order to push the reader towards a more “sophisticated” dining habit. He was outraged at the “careless and slovenly cooking” of his compatriots who relied far too much on tinned food and advised them to grow marjoram, parsley, celery and thyme in their kitchen gardens. If Lady Canning used bolts of chintz to transform a Calcutta living room, for Wyvern growing an English herb garden in India would have the same effect. In this new sensibility of dining, the place of curry was now at private homes, “only licensed to be eaten at breakfast, at luncheon, and perhaps at the little home dinner, when they may, for a change, occasionally form the piece de resistance of the cosy meal.”71

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literature emphasize moderation. Milton’s text links knowledge to food and health and figures knowledge as an item for consumption in moderation. As “Wisdom” can be turned to “Folly,” so can “Nourishment to Winde.” Burton remarks that certain foods can fill the brain with “gross fumes, breed black, thick blood, and cause troublesome dreams” (i.222). Nourishment can also be turned to the “Winde” of flatulence which Burton describes as “crudities by defect of concoction, and for want of exercise the superfluous vapours cannot exhale” (i.302). Consumption and digestion in this Edenic banquet scene encompasses not only angelic eating but also knowledge itself. We as readers have already seen how Adam’s “vapors” relate to his consumption and digestion: “for his sleep/ Was Aerie light from pure digestion bred,/ And temperat vapors bland (5.3-5). Adam’s rest depends on the “pure digestion” he enjoys in his paradisial existence. Burton notes that fruits can be useful edibles because “after meals, at second course, they keep down vapours” (ii.25). Controlling or reducing vapors helps to maintain the precarious healthful balance of nourishment and wisdom alike.

Dreaming and eating Satan utilizes this link between knowledge and eating to tempt Eve. Satan whispers to Eve in her dream and alters her perception of eating and tasting. Eve describes her dream to Adam and recounts how Satan “with ventrous Arme/ He pluckt, he tasted” (5.64-5). Her visceral response to his ingestion of the fruit—“mee damp horror chil’d” (5.65)—allows us to see the medicinally corrupt effects of improper eating. The effect on Eve is illness: a “damp horror.” This “phlegmatic” reaction to Satan handling the fruit initially debilitates Eve until she sees the possibilities available by consuming the fruit. Satan offers Eve the possible vision of the “life the Gods live” (5.79). Even in her dream, the physical response to the fruit encourages her so that “the savourie smell/ So quick’nd appetite, that I, methought,/Could not but taste. (5.83-5). She wonders, as she is raised up by Satan, at the “prospect wide” (5.88) which her eyes, even in her dream state, are now able to see. Eve realizes, despite her unfallen state, the possibility of increased health and, thus, its corollary: the possibility of illness. Those possibilities allow the hypochondriac thoughts on which Satan depends. When Satan, inhabiting the body of the serpent, speaks to Eve and lures her to the tree, he demands that she reexamine her ideas of the fruit and knowledge. He continues:

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prepared by the incompetent “mootooswami.” Haute cuisine identified with refinement and class, by contrast, is produced and presented within the private space of the household where the Englishwoman’s task was to “make the bungalow an island of Englishness, secure from a noxious India.” If Steel is concerned about contingencies of British Indian life, for Wyvern, there is only the leisurely, lavish meal that must be produced as the fundamental unit of a civilized living. As Margaret Beetham notes, “The location of women in domestic rather than in the public sphere of men’s work meant that management was differently inflected for women. Whereas men’s place was in the public world of work and their economic role was production, women were located in the domestic and their role in the economy was to manage consumption.”77 The call for new taste in dining signaled a sea change in the “habitus” of middle class life. The recipes necessitated the use of modern gadgets and utensils and a new geography of the kitchen itself. The very architecture and design of the household needed to be rearranged to accommodate the emergent sense of sophisticated modern “self.” The making of the recommended pastries, in all their delicate intricacies, the mixing of sauces, the controlled heating and cooling of puddings and soups required a different kind of kitchen, different tools, equipment and of course, training. The expertise required to make delicate patisseries was beyond the ken of the much-reviled Indian cook. The best tool for any household to acquire, Wyvern confidently urged, was the “small yet very excellent Anglo-American cooking range.”78 Not one to mince words, Wyvern advises his readership that “The delicate cookery which day by day gains popularity in India demands a clean airy room, properly furnished, with plenty of light, and many accessories borrowed from civilized Europe.”79 When we look back to William Kitchiner’s aim, “to render Food acceptable to the Palate, without being expensive to the Purse, or offensive to the Stomach…constantly endeavoring to hold the balance even between…Epicure and Economist” we begin to see the distance recipe and advice books about cooking and entertaining have traveled.80 It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Anglo-Indian households converted to French cuisine at the exhortation of Wyvern and Steel. The emphasis on “common fare” and on the importance of frugality continues through the century in recipe books that stand in marked contrast to Wyvern’s. Take for example Indian Cookery “Local” for Young Housekeepers, (1887), the anonymous “authoress” an exact contemporary of both Wyvern and Steel, who assures her readership that “should any lady have, on an emergency, to do for herself, she will find that, with an Oil stove and this book for a

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Guide, she can not only pull through a trying time, but manage quite satisfactorily.”81 Originally published in 1883, and therefore a forerunner of Flora Annie Steel’s best selling manual but on the shelves at the same time as Wyvern’s, the writer makes clear she wrote the book as a matter of contingency. Most recipe books available, she tells us, “are guides to English kitchens and hence very little use practically to the Indian Mistresses.” Aligning herself to the advice of Dr. Riddel, whose Indian Domestic Economy “contains a large amount of valuable information, and a great number of useful recipes,” she recommends her own since it contains not only “more expeditious methods” but that her “modes have both simplicity and economy.” She thus separates herself, on the one hand, from the recommendations and advice of Wyvern (through her advertisement of simplicity and economy) and from Dr. Riddle, whose recipes, she implies, is less usable in the Indian context with exotic recipes “never seen on local tables,” and whose methods are “far too troublesome to be adopted.”82 In marked contrast to Wyvern’s attempts at epic prose (“Lo! the wings of my ambition have melted, and I have fallen into the sea of blighted hope. I am conscious of failure…”),83 she pointedly assures her readers, her manual is written in “plain language.” Without flourish, she has “detail[ed] each step in the process of preparing each dish, so that no person, however ignorant she may be in such matters…” will have difficulty in reproducing any of the dishes.84 The anonymous author of Cookery does indeed localize her advice—“tropicalising,” as it were, English cookery in India. Like a great many others, Indian Cookery “Local” is part recipe book and part housekeeping manual, in which not style but frugality takes centre stage. Where Wyvern in his insincere modesty hopes that the ladies of Madras will “discover here and there a word of assistance when perplexed with their daily orders,” the anonymous authoress is straightforward and reassuring: “Every housewife may not be able to procure the finest, most expensive kinds of food. But she has it greatly in her power to make the most of what she does procure.”85 Like Wyvern, and Steel (after her), there is a great deal of concern expressed about the condition of the kitchen, which she acknowledges, are usually inhospitable, damp spaces. But unlike Wyvern who calls for a complete redesign of the kitchen and pantry and more, she urges the mistresses, however, to visit them regularly and to encourage the servants to keep it clean. Kitchen essentials are basic and include scales and weights, good supply of clean water, knife, stones for the daily grinding of curry paste, iron plates for the roasting of coffee and “mussala.” The spices that need to be readily available are dry red chillies, jeera, turmeric, “cummin seed.”

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In other words, the spice rack required for these recipes are indistinguishable from any middle-class Indian kitchen of that time. Unlike most of the cookery books I have mentioned thus far, Cookery “Local” offers no translation for jeera, and no explanatory note accompanies tamarind, which is called for in a number of recipes. Aubergine is referred to as “benjall” (brinjal) and here, unlike in previous recipe books, do we find instructions for three kinds of vindaloo: duck, fowl and beef. This book, then, is an instance of what we might truly call an “Anglo-Indian” cookbook--one that is clearly aimed at the modest households of great numbers of the uncovenanted government servants whose food habits of necessity had incorporated Indian spices, vegetables and created a distinctly hybrid and a distinctly recognizable group of dishes which now are so closely identified as “Indian.” The recipes and suggestions are addressed to “memsahibs” and the concerted effort, throughout, is the adaptation of known recipes (English) to local (Indian) conditions. A similar spirit of populism and concern for the not so well-off can be detected in The People’s Indian Cookery Book published in 1900. The author, Olivia Fritzgerald points out, that the recipes she has compiled are “practical” and that “for a period of twelve years they have been in daily use more or less.”86 Similarly, The Cookery Book: A Practical Handbook to the Kitchen in India provided recipes for a “poor man’s champagne” (“put a pint of scotch ale into a jug and a bottle of good ginger beer”). In these household advice books, Indian recipes rub shoulders with English ones; the pages are a jumble of bael sherbet and raspberry ice, Christmas plum pudding “the Indian way” and rice Blanc Mange, or such curiously hybrid innovations as Jellaby pudding. For the most part unremarkable in its compilation of recipes and advice, what we do see in The Practical Handbook and a host of other cookery books beginning to crowd the bookshelves, is a tug of war to define “English” life in India. . For Steel and for Wyvern, what seems to be at stake is as much the recipe for a particular dish as the receipt for being a member of the ruling race. What is on their menus is not simply a combination of food items but the display of British identity. In this endeavor they were not alone. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo Indian “domestic literature” had become quite sizeable and included, in addition to cookery books, manuals on every aspect of life in India. Higginbotham and Company advertised a complement of such books: “Manner for Women” by Mrs. Humphrey, “The Lady’s Every Day Book, a practical guide” and “What Shall I Say? A Letter-Writer for Ladies,” among others, designed to school the uninitiated women in proper etiquette in dress, deportment and dinner. The

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“parcht with scalding thurst and hunger fierce,” mistakenly believe that they will feed on fruit (10.556). Instead, they find that they: Chewd bitter Ashes, which th’ offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayd, Hunger and thirst constraining, drugd as oft With hatefullest disrelish writh’d thir jaws With soot and cinders fill’d; so oft they fell (10. 566-70)

The fallen angels, unable to discern the reality from the assumed result, continue to taste the bitter ashes. They may not expect particular medicinal results other than sustenance from their eating, but their perception blurs as deceptively as Eve’s does.15 Adam’s lamentation in book ten depends on his own realization that “All that I eat or drink, or shall beget,/ Is propagated curse” (10.728-9). His realization of the digestive implications of the fall emphasizes once again the physiological framework within which the edenic events function. His confession of culpability in allowing Eve to be exposed to the dangers of Satan depends on figuring Eve’s “frailtie and infirmer Sex” (10.956). Adam reiterates the possibility of illness before the fall—by accepting Satan’s idea of Eve’s infirmity— which displays Adam’s own misunderstanding of the medicinal benefits Satan deceptively offers.16 The rest of the world adjusts to the fall in ways similar to these individual responses. Eve knows that Death will feed on their as-yetunborn offspring and argues to Adam that they might break the food chain as it feeds on them. She worries that their young will become Food for so foule a Monster, in thy power It lies, yet ere Conception to prevent The Race unblest, to being yet unbegot. Childless thou art, Childless remaine: So Death Shall be deceav’d his glut, and with us two Be forc’d to satisfie his Rav’nous Maw. (10.986-91)

Her description of the gluttonous desire that drives Death to search for food utilizes the phrases of consumption and digestion which infuse descriptions of Death attempting to “stuff this Maw, this vast unhidebound corpse” (10.602).17 Eve’s misconceived idea of preventing conception to force Death’s abstention relies on Galenic emphases on temperance and control of appetite. In Eve’s description, Death here becomes a consuming beast participating in the Galenic appetites of so much of the poem.

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to which is added ginger, mustard, cumin coriander, and even turmeric and curipalli. These mulligatawny recipes, as well as the ones provided by “An Old Lady Resident” or that of Henrietta Hervey, return us to the “original” South Indian concoction; they are closer to the tamil “rasam” than Steel and others’ anglicized soup full of apple and marrow and with so much attention to and anxiety about the color and consistency of the stock. For Steel and Wyvern, the inclusion of mulligatawny recipes is a begrudging acknowledgement of the indigenized dinner table. But while they insist on replacing curries and other “Indian” dishes by continental, especially French, recipes, mulligatawny continued to appear on formal menus as clear mulligatawny, or reincarnated as “potage de Madras, consommé mulligatawny or under the even more pretentious, “consommé a l’indienne.” For those less snobbish, mulligatawny soups moved closer to the original South Indian concoction. But no matter what version was favored by any particular recipe writer, the undeniable fact was that mulligatawny had become part of the syntax of meals in an Anglo-Indian household. *** In 1846, Thackeray anonymously published “Kitchen Melodies— Curry” in Punch. 90 A closer look at the actual recipe the poem describes reveals it to be a restatement, with only slight variations, of Eliza Acton’s recipe for mulligatawny soup: Three Pounds of veal my darling girl prepares, And chops it nicely into little squares; Five onions next prepares the little minx (The biggest are the best her Samiwel thinks). And Epping butter, nearly a pound, And stews them in a pan until they’re brown’d91

In this very domestic scene, “the dexterous little girl” preparing the dish puts “curry powder, table-spoonfulls three” to be “stewed for half-anhour,/ A lemon’s ready juice she’ll o’er it pour” to produce “A dish for emperors to feed upon.”92 This poem, as Susan Zlotnick has usefully argued, announces the incorporation of curry to the everyday diet of even the cockney “Samiwel.”93 One should remember that soups at this time were a relatively new food item for the working class who, “traditionally…had given sloppy or liquid meals a wide berth, on the sensible ground that they lacked the cooking facilities to make them, not

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to mention the crockery and cutlery to eat them with.”94 Yet, here, the steaming bowl of soup with “beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish;/Lobsters or prawn or any kind of fish” offers the working class Samiwel more than sustenance: it offers him a taste of urbane sophistication and feeds on his class fantasy of a partnership in Britain’s imperial project. The spicy soup, prepared so lovingly by his “darling girl,” blends together the domestic and the imperial and connects upper class taste with working class aspirations. The changing palate of the English, as we have seen in the many variations of the soup recipe, is the end result of domesticating the exotic, which in turn transformed the domestic. Mulligatawny stands, here, as a synecdoche for the reciprocal and constitutive process of cultural transmission which produced composite, national identities. The distinctive inflections in mulligatawny recipes—and one could easily continue to add more to the mix, from Frannie Farmer’s rather stolid American version at the turn of the twentieth century to the Soup Nazi’s upscale, contemporary version calling for pistachios and cashews, eggplant and roasted red peppers—are instances of what Phillippa Pullar in describing British cookery has called a “a strange and hybrid affair [a] mongrel tradition.”95 I do not wish to suggest that cookery books and the recipes they recommend should be seen as an accurate reflection of what people actually ate, but as Nicola Humble puts it, “they represent an attempt to popularize new foods, new methods, fresh attitudes. They tell us more about the fantasies and fears associated with foods than about what people actually had for dinner at a particular date.”96 The changing status and changing recipes for mulligatawny are snapshots of time; they reveal something about the historical moments in which they appear. In some of the recipes we find an ever-present, if often unstated, war between economy and extravagance. Some times they are invitations to display via “conspicuous consumption” the status of the producer and at other times, by paring down the ingredients; they exhibit Steel’s properly Victorian values of “economy, prudence, efficiency.” When allowed at table for dinner parties, as did Mrs. Beeton in her recommendation for set menus, mulligatawny recipes included a wide array of meats: calf’s head, veal rabbit, joints, fowl and even shell fish. Some recipes were elaborate, even laborious with great attention paid to the delicate browning of onions, the constant stirring of ingredients, the long slow bubbling of the broth and the precise addition of spices and meats in an ostentatious show of labor as leisure, food as style. Others considered the soup the placeholder for whatever was locally available, handy in the larder or left over from another meal. In its Indianised form, it remained a defiant staple at

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Sunday lunches all over British India and in its Anglicised version it continued to be consumed as an “Indian” dish in Britain (and in America). Formal dining became standardized over the course of the nineteenth century, and in no small measure through the proliferation and circulation of conduct literature, household manuals and above all cookery books that came accoutered with ready-made sample menus, diagrams for setting the table, and advice about servants and serviettes. Through these “iterative narratives” a “dining taxonomy” began to emerge—what Natalie Meir calls “a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified…and routinized.”97 The vast majority of cookery and household advice books were directly addressed to women. Planning meals, cooking and serving food properly were connected to a growing understanding of home-making which in turn was connected to ideas of modernity and progress. All the notable cookery writers of Victorian England viewed dining (as opposed to the merely functional “eating”) as a mark of civilization. Mrs. Beeton understood well the culture work of cookery in the construction of what has been called “banal nationalism.” “A nation,” she wrote, “which knows how to dine has learned the leading lessons of progress.”98 Food, always a marker of social difference and distinction, now took on an even greater role in distinguishing class and status. According to Stephen Mennel, it was in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that French cuisine “captured the social commanding heights in England more decisively…and national difference in cuisine became entangled with class difference.” 99 New recipes, mulligatawny among them, were invitations to cultural and class assimilation and were written, as Eliza Acton candidly maintained, with “such thoroughly explicit and minute instructions as may, we trust, be readily comprehended and carried out by any class of lerners.”100 If in Britain, a cosmopolitan, urban bourgeoisie was busily domesticating “exotic” commodities by buying, selling, exchanging Kashmiri shawls and curry recipes with equal aplomb, the opposite was true of the British in India who became increasingly more insular and conscious of themselves as separate and above those they ruled. The administrative class stressed, even relied on, hierarchy and protocol. For them, the art of dining and arranging dinner parties were extensions of the art of ruling and associated with the production of an imperial superiority amidst the inhospitable outposts of a tropical colony. The Anglo-Indian domestic sphere, as Steel astutely observed, was the mirror image of the British Raj. Just as the Indian Empire depended fundamentally on local intermediaries, so did the Anglo-Indian household where a number of servants were employed to oversee and attend to the quotidian details of

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“Though one of the movements drives forward, the other is circling on itself” (36). The richness of the truncated moment of the fall depends on just such a circular movement of meaning. The depth and weight of the fall exists in the shortened “eat”/ “et” because of the physiological understanding of ingestion which precedes and follows the fatal alimentary action.18 As Ricks points out, “the vigour of [Milton’s] words is a matter of his leading us back to the riches buried in them” rather than “to blaze new trails” (58). Ricks argues that Milton’s successful use of metaphor depends on exactly this strategy: “Milton re-establishes the power of the original metaphor, by setting the word in a context which stresses the physical roots of the emotional meaning” (59). I suggest here that we might read the metaphorical connotations of eating in the original genesis story and Milton’s subsequent use of digestive metaphors throughout the text of Paradise Lost to better understand how the text reinvests Eve’s “eat” with the weight it carries in the poem. Eating as sin functions as an original metaphor, but the text reminds us constantly of the depth of the physical roots of that metaphor. At that moment of breakdown of Milton’s Galenic model of health — when Eve is convinced to eat of the fruit—we see the convergence of metaphoric act of eating and the literal act of eating. And, it is in this moment of convergence—a transubstantiation of sorts—that action and metaphor are the same.

Works Cited Albala, Ken. 2002. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P. Burton, Robert. 2001. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Holbrook Jackson, Ed. New York: New York Review Books. Donne, John. 1990. John Donne: A Critical Edition of the Major Works. John Carey, Ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. Flannagan, Roy, Ed. 1998. The Riverside Milton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gigante, Denise. 2000. “Milton’s Aesthetics Of Eating.” diacritics 30.2: 88-112. Grant, Mark. 2000. Galen on Food and Diet. London: Routledge. Gulden, Ann Torday. 1998. “Milton’s Eve and Wisdom: The ‘DinnerParty’ Scene in Paradise Lost.” Milton Quarterly 32.4: 137-43. Jooma, Minaz. 1996. “The Alimentary Structures of Incest in Paradise Lost.” ELH 63.1: 25-43.

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following precise instructions without a concomitant change in income or power. The desired effect was the creation of a genteel, middle-class sociality that distanced itself from vulgarity or what Thackeray described as the “delightful exercise in gobbling.”106 A proper dinner consumed properly became an occasion for the display of race and class; after all, to dine properly (i.e., in prescribed ways) was not to be “junglee.” As in Britain, where “darling girls” prepared feasts fit for Emperors, in the colonies women were the lynchpin of this transformative process. It was the Englishwoman’s task “to guard against contamination from the outside.”107 Serving or shunning mulligatawny was but one instance of this struggle to set in place dining etiquette that indicated social distinction. Powerfully prescriptive, the dinner menus and recipes, through their repetitions, attempted to refine the palate but their end product surely was the construction of a “refined” self. Mulligatawny, according to Salman Rushdie, “tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra-parochially British, only with too much pepper.”108 Mark Stein, on the other hand, appreciates mulligatawny’s “quality of inbetweenness” that it can be “called upon as a sign of the inauthentic, the impure, the invented.”109 The burden of this essay has been neither to praise mulligatawny’s hybridity nor to testify to its authenticity. Instead, I have attempted to show that close contextual readings of the various recipes may yield a quite different set of conclusions; to wit, mulligatawny, its invention, reinvention, reincarnations, are connected to a larger more complex narrative about culture and society. Mulligatawny then, as now, exemplifies the unsteady oscillation between sophistication and simplicity, between the cosmopolitan and the common. Cookery books and recipes, after all, are as much about fantasy and desire as they are about the materiality of consumption. If the British recipes of mulligatawny held out a promise of adventure for the bland British palate, for Steel and Wyvern, mulligatawny was both a grudging acknowledgement of mongrel identities of the British and a vain desire for a “pure” European self. But for the majority of the British residents in India, whose aspirations were far in excess of their pocket books, the soup was their compromise between budget and belonging, an acceptance of being at one and the same time impoverished and British. From its very beginning, mulligatawny provided both possibilities: at once too ‘native’ and too exotic, the soup has entered our cultural lexicon and onto our tables in unexpected ways. There is a historical continuity, however uneven and submerged, between taking lumps of mulligatawny paste on an expedition to Africa and being a connoisseur of soup in Manhattan. The variations of mulligatawny, more than most recipes, are a culturally

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polysemic object, affording us a glimpse into the larger cultural and political narratives of empire, class and gender.

Works Cited Primary Sources Acton, Eliza. 1845. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches Reduced to A System of Easy Practices, For the Use of Private Families. In a Series o f Receipts which have been Strictly Tested and are Given with the Minute Exactness. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. —. 1846. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches 5th. Edition. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans —. 1860. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches: The Whole Carefully Revised by Mrs. S.J. Hale. Philadelphia: John E. Potter. —. 1900. The People’s Book of Modern Cookery: Revised and Enlarged with Many New and Original Recipes. London: The Monarch Book Company. Anon, [Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith]. 1832. The East India Sketch-Book: Comprising an Account of the Present State of Society in Calcutta, Bombay, &C. in Two Volumes. London: Richard Bentley. Beeton, Mrs. Isabella. 1861. The Book of Household Management. London: S. O. Beeton. —. 1968. The Book of Household Management. (Reproduced in Facsimile) London: Jonathan Cape. —. 2000. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (Abridged Edition) Oxford University Press. Eden, Emily, 1866. Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. London: Muston, 1983. Fay, Mrs. Eliza, 1866. The Original Letters from India. Calcutta. 1925 reprint. London: Hogarth Press. Franklin, E. A. M. [E.A.M.F]. 1906. The Wife’s Cookery Book Being Recipes and Hints on Indian Cookery. Madras: Wilson’s Artistic Press. Francatelli, Charles Elmé. 1863. The Cook’s Guide and the Housekeeper’s & Butler’s Assistant London: Richard Bentley. Fritzgerald, Olivia. 1900. The People’s Indian Cookery Book. New and Popular Culinary and Household Recipes Calcutta: Methodist Publishing House. Indian Cookery“Local” for Young Housekeepers. 1887. Second Edition revised and enlarged. Bombay: Bombay Imperial Press.

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Kenney-Herbert, Col. [Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings for Madras. Madras: Higginbotham & Co. —. 1885. Fifth Edition Facsimile Published in 1994. “Introduction” by Leslie Forbes. Devon: Prospect Books. Kitchiner, William. 1818. The Cook’s Oracle. 2nd. Edition. Containing Recipes for Plain Cookery on the Most Economical Plan for Private Families. London: John Hatchard. Livingstone, David. 2001. A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries and the discovery of Lake Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864 Santa Barbara: Narrative Press. Riddell, Dr. R. 1850. Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book. Sixth Edition Revised. London: G. P. Meaden. Roberts, Emma. 1835. Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society 3 vols. London: Wm. H. Allen. Soyer, Alexis. 1849. Modern Housewife or Managere. London: Simpkin Marshall & Co. Steel, Flora Annie and Grace Gardiner. 1898. The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (New Edition). London: Heinemann —. 1909. Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. London, Heinemenn. Thackeray, William Makepeace. 1963. Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Yule, Col. Henry and A.C. Burnell, 1886. Hobson-Jobson. A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Calcutta: The Bengal Chamber Edition, Rupa & Co., 1994.

Secondary Sources Beetham, Margaret. 2003. “Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteenth Century: Mrs.Beeton and her Cultural Consequences.” In The Recipe Reader: Narratives-Contexts-Readings edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster, London: Ashgate. Blunt, Wilfred. 1909. India Under Ripon, a Private Diary. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Bridenthal, Renate. 1987. Becoming Visible. Women in European History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Burnett, John. 2004. England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating out in England from 1830 to the Present. Harlow, U.K.: Pearson Education Limited. —. Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day. 1966. Reprint 1979. London: Scholars Press.

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13 Flannagan emphasizes the health-related overtones here when he remarks in his footnote on this line that “Eve’s unhealthy flush should give away her distempered or unbalanced temperament” (9.887 fn255). 14 This definition: “remedy” (n) 1.a. Oxford English Dictionary. 15 Sir Walter Ralegh uses a similar image of a mouthful of gravel in a description of someone facing death in his History of the World: It is therfore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himselfe. He tells the proud and insolent, that they are but Abiects, and humbles them at the instant; makes them crie, complaine, and repent, yea euen to hate their forepassed happinesse. He takes the account of the rich, and proues him a begger; a naked begger, which hath interest in nothing, but in the grauell that filles his mouth. (396) Here, the realization of death removes all other considerations except “the grauell” that ruins the oral sensations. 16 Flannagan remarks here that “confessing to her, Adam admits that in allowing her to go out he exposed her to danger. In alluding to her ‘frailtie and infirmer Sex,’ Adam is supposed to be speaking what the reader should perceive as the absolute truth about Eve’s nature, even given more recent opinions about sexual roles to the contrary” (10.957 fn 311). Flannagan does not remark on the medical implications of “infirmer.” 17 Schoenfeldt notes the appetite of Death in the poem but relates the description more closely to a reversal of the bounty of the banquet which Eve prepared for Adam and Raphael (153). 18 Ricks does not examine the syntax of this moment but he similarly analyzes Adam’s presumptuous thinking after the Fall. Ricks says, “The important thing about the syntax there is the way that the brusque simplicity of ‘who can please him long?’ and ‘whom will he next?’ is played against the grand inversions of ‘Fickle their State…’ and ‘Mee first he ruined.’ The laconic and the colloquial burst out all the more strongly” (37).

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Spielman, M. H. 1900. The Hitherto Unidentified Contributions of W. M. Thackerary to “Punch” with a Complete Authoritative Bibliography from 1843to 1848. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Stein, Mark. 2003. “Curry at Work: Nibbling at the Jewel in the Crown,” Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heinde, Susanne Mühleisen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag. Winter. Strobel, Margaret. 1987. “Gender and Race in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury British Empire.” In Becoming Visible. Women in European History Edited by Renate Bridenthal et.al., Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 375-394. Narayan, Uma. 1995. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food.” Social Identities 1:1:160-188. Zlotnick, Susan. 2003. “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England.” The Recipe Reader. London: Ashgate.

Notes 1

Livingstone, David. 2001. A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries and the discovery of Lake Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864 Santa Barbara: Narrative Press. 101. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Yule, Col. Henry and A.C. Burnell, 1886. Hobson-Jobson. A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Calcutta: The Bengal Chamber Edition, Rupa & Co., 1994. Hobson-Jobson. 1784: 595. 5 Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India. London: Faber and Faber. 96. 6 Yule, Col. Henry and A.C. Burnell, 1886. Hobson-Jobson,. 1784: 595. 7 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings for Madras. 320. 8 Chaudhuri, Nupur. 1992. “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian England.” In Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance edited by Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel, Bloomington: Indiana UP: 231-246: 238-240. 9 Burnett, John. 1830. Plenty and Want, 82. 10 Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India. London: Faber and Faber. 94. 11 Geddes, Olive M. 1996. The Laird’s Kitchen: Three Hundred Years of Food in Scotland Stationery Office Books.

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12 Fisher, Michael H. 1996. The First Indian Author in English. Dean Mahomed (1756-1851) in India, Ireland, and England. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Times 27/3/1811. Cited in Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author. 258. 13 Chaudhuri, Nupur. 1992. “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian England.” In Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance edited by Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel, Bloomington: Indiana UP: 231-246: 241. 14 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings for Madras. 320. 15 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings. 321. 16 Robbins, Bruce. 2005. “Commodity Histories.” In PMLA 120:2:454-463: 454. 17 Ibid., 456. 18 Ibid. 19 Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. 178-179. 20 David, Deirdre. 1999. “Imperial Chintz: Domesticity and Empire.” In Victorian Literature and Culture: 569-577: 569. 21 Procida, Mary. 2003. “Feeding the Imperial Appetite:Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Domesticity.” In Journal of Women’s History 15:2: 123-149: 123. 22 Barbara Ramusack, for example, in her recounting of British women activists and their contribution to the reform movements in India, writes, “Interaction across class categories will not be given the same consideration since both the British women and the Indian men and women with whom they interacted were of the middle class in their respective societies.” I would argue that without an analysis of class affiliation, middle-class values are naturalized both in the sphere of domesticity and the resistance to them. Barbara N. Ramusack, 1992. “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies” in Western Women and Imperialists. Complicity and Resistance Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds.) Indiana University Press, 120. In a similar vein, Uma Narayan, in analyzing the “relationships between food and cultural identity, in colonial and post-colonial contexts” makes clear that her focus will be on “the relationships between colonizers and colonized, about the different visions of the colonizing project…” “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food” 1995.Social Identities, Vol. 1, no.1: 64. 23 David, Deidre. 1995. Rule Britannia. Women, Empire, and Victorian Writing. New York: Cornell UP: 4. 24 Ibid. 25 Fowler, Marian. 1987. Below the Peacock Fan: First Ladies of the Raj. Viking. 37. 26 Strobel, Margaret. 1987. “Gender and Race in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury British Empire.” In Becoming Visible. Women in European History Edited by Renate Bridenthal et.al., Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 375-394: 377. 27 Blunt, Wilfred. India Under Ripon, 248. 28 Eden, Emily, 1866. Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. London: Muston, 1983: 70. 29 Ibid., 36. 30 Eden. 1866. Up the Country. 140.

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Ibid., 293. Roberts, Emma. 1835. Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society 3 vols. London: Wm. H. Allen. 2:1: 165. 33 Collingham, Lizzie.2005. Curry: A Biography London: Chatto & Windus. 112. 34 Burton. 1993. The Raj at Table. 5. 35 Roberts. 1835: I: 76. 36 Ibid., 19. 37 Ibid., 3. 38 Ibid., 17. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., 89. 41 Collingham, Lizzie. 2005. Curry. 112. 42 Ibid., 30. 43 Beeton, Mrs. Isabella. 1861. The Book of Household Management, 90. 44 Ibid. 45 Acton, Eliza. 1845. The People's Book of Modern Cookery (1900), 43. 46 Ibid., 53. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Acton, Eliza. 1900. The People’s Book of Modern Cookery: Revised and Enlarged with Many New and Original Recipes. London: The Monarch Book Company. 72. 50 Soyer. 1849. Modern Housewife, 100. 51 Francaltelli, Charles Elmé. 1863. The Cook’s Guide, 46. 52 Acton, Eliza. 1846. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches 5th. Edition. xii. 53 Burnett, John. England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating out in England from 1830 to the Present. 67. 54 Steel, Flora Annie and Grace Gardiner. 1898. Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. London: Heinemann. 55 Ibid., 252. 56 Ibid., 255. 57 Steel. 1898. Complete Indian Housekeeper. 255-6. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 238. 60 Acton. 1900. People’s Book, 43. 61 Steel. 1898. Complete Indian Housekeeper. ix. 62 Ibid., 356. 63 Steel. 1898. Complete Indian Housekeeper. 45. 64 Ibid., 47. 65 Ibid., 9. 66 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1885. Culinary Jottings for Madras. Forbes, “Introduction.” vii. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid., 321. 32

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“French Food Texts and National Identity: Consomme, Cheese Souffle, Francite?”

although Barthes relates the anecdote that after the armistice was reached in Indochina, General de Castries asked for fried potatoes as his first meal, making a link to patriotism. This elemental food does, however, share the universality at table that steak has, appearing on menus of all classes, albeit in different forms. The French fry is, of course, not French but of Belgian origin, limiting the nationalistic force of this alimentary symbol. But the French fry belongs to the French culinary identity because it begins with the potato, a humble food from the earth that is refined by means of a specific cooking process. Escoffier gives ten recipes for fried potatoes, many evocatively named (Chatouillard, Pont-Neuf), and each with a specific shape. Refinement is key to the conception of the French culinary identity here and in the following examples. The Danish film Babette’s Feast (1987), based on the Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) story of the same name, presents 19th-century French food as imagined by the Danish director Gabriel Axel. In the well-known film, Babette, the former head chef of the famed Café Anglais in Paris, now working as a housekeeper for two sisters who lead a religious sect founded by their father, wins ten thousand francs in the lottery and offers to serve her frugal and ascetic Danish hosts a “real French dinner” in gratitude for having employed her for fourteen years. The details of the feast do not appear in the original short story; in the film, Babette prepares and serves turtle soup, blini Demidoff with caviar and crème fraîche, caille en sarcophage (quail in a pastry “tomb”), a salad of endives, a cheese and fruit course, and baba au rhum with fresh figs. The meal is meant to replicate the finest of traditional French fine dining in the late 19th century, and its components are certainly typical of the period but curious as a marker of French identity. Ferguson underlines the foreign approbation of French cuisine evident in the film: “Gabriel Axel's film, quite unlike Dinesen's narrative, is a fable for the French, an iconic projection of and for French culinary culture. ...Its very foreignness allows Babette's Feast the greater testimony to the prestige that continues to accrue to French cuisine abroad as well as at home.”9 Jean-Pierre Poulain admires the film’s portrayal of French culture in general, calling it “une des plus éloquentes traductions de ce qu’est le goût dans la culture française” (one of the most eloquent translations of what taste means in French culture).10 Yet the specific dishes presented in the film, elegantly French in their bleak Danish setting, represent France as mild and feminine. The live turtle in the kitchen frightens the sisters, but the film does not show the preparation of the beast for eating (a process that involves butchering and bleeding the turtle), and the resulting dish is an unassuming clear broth, unremarkable to all but one diner, General Loewenhielm, a Swede who has spent time in

FOOD, HUNGER, AND IDENTITY IN JEWISH WOMEN IMMIGRANTS’ AUTOBIOGRAPHY DEBORAH ISRAEL

Contemporary Americans generally associate ethnicity with food. One has only to pick up the Yellow Pages and turn to “Restaurants” to find a special listing “grouped by cuisine,” which, for the most part, classifies restaurants by country of origin: Chinese, German, Italian, Mexican, Thai, and so forth. A major distinction between these ethnic foods and “Jewish” foods is that the latter originates in no specific country. Of course, Jews from different countries do have distinct recipes, but in America “Jewish” restaurants are classified as “kosher,” the foods’ characteristics adhering to Biblical mandates for suitability of consumption. Outsiders, and certainly many American Jews, might frequent a kosher deli to feast on thick corned beef sandwiches and potato knishes, but the observant Jew seeks out a restaurant labeled “kosher” because the food is “fit”; it has been prepared in the manner prescribed by the Torah, no forbidden foods are served, and the proprietors will not violate the dietary laws, or rules of kashrut, so that, among other requirements, all meat has been ritualistically slaughtered, and meat is never served with dairy products.1 Understanding the significance of kashrut in the lives of observant Jews while noting how Jewish immigrants from the Pale of Settlement responded to these dietary laws upon arriving in America provides insights into their acculturation process. In essence, such immigrants had to weigh the place of Judaism in their lives and balance their religion with their integration into a new culture. Adhering to the laws of kashrut could be viewed as a practice that might divide Jews from the dominant culture, while rejecting such laws would be a conscious rejection of their religion and traditions. Examining food references in Rachel Bella Calof’s My Story, Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow, and Anzia Yezierska’s Red Ribbon on a White Horse provides insights into how three Jewish women from the Pale of Settlement assessed their Jewish identities while adapting to their new country. Just as Jews examine their life during the previous year during the Days of Awe, the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom

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Kippur, in order to readjust their lives, so these women have examined their lives during their period of adjustment to America. Viewing their adaptation process as their personal days of awe, the time during which they reckon with their identities as Jews and as Americans to find a comfortable balance, perhaps even atoning for the “sins” associated with such adaptation, provides insights into the acculturation of each woman. Scholar Anne Goldman insists that “. . . to write about food is to write about the self as well,”2 thus stressing the potential significance of food in autobiography in general. Perhaps because food preparation is central to Jewish religious practice and a basic aspect of duties within the domestic sphere, food stands out as a recurring trope in Jewish women’s autobiography. Texts of immigrant women from the Pale of Settlement, in particular, contain numerous references to food, possibly because of marked differences these women observed between the food of the shtetl and of America. Some foods were simply foreign to these immigrants. For example, Eastern European Jews had apparently never eaten bananas, for several texts refer to the peculiarity of this fruit.3 But the major distinction with which these Orthodox Jews had to contend was the prevalence of traife, non-kosher food. In the Pale of Settlement, Jews, living in a religion dominated community, ate only kosher foods, but such was not the case in America. Here freedom extended to the foods one ate. And, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, “Food is a powerful resource for giving tangible expression to the choices that are being made.”4 When a Jew raised in Orthodoxy chooses to abandon dietary restrictions, that person elects to separate herself from one of the mainstays of her religion. The choice is generally conscious and willful, which indicates a reevaluation of her identity and place within the Jewish community. As contemporary Jewish scholar Doris Friedensohn puts it, food is “a yardstick of consciousness: a reflection of choices made among a multiplicity of options, choices which define communities of meaning and configurations of identities.”5 Interestingly, Friedensohn chooses to write about her own relationship to Judaism through her act of defiance on Yom Kippur by confessing that as an adolescent she purposely defied the mandated fast for the Day of Atonement by following morning religious services with a lunch of egg foo young, not only opting not to fast, but purposefully feasting on forbidden foods made with “bean sprouts, onions, and diced roast pork.”6 The significance of her confession becomes evident when she explains that later in life, when preparing food for a Passover seder, she considered a new recipe for charoset7 made with dates instead of the traditional apples, as well as duck pâté in place of old-fashioned Jewish chopped chicken liver as an appetizer, but in both cases opted for the

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traditional fare. Although Friedensohn could accept changes to the Haggadah8 reading at the family Passover service to include more English, the foods had to remain the same. Her initial act of defiance might be likened to the experimentation in which most teenagers engage. As an adult, this woman opted to observe traditions. Her revelation supports Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s contention that when religious Jews give up “rituals and ceremonies to which they had previously conformed . . . . usually the daily prayers go first, the ritual dietary laws last.”9 Food thus becomes the final ground upon which Jews from Orthodox backgrounds do battle with their self-identity in order to establish their place in their community. Examining references to food in immigrant Jewish women’s autobiography consequently yields more than simply an understanding of their physical sustenance; food metaphorically reveals these women’s self-concepts and world views as they live through their days of awe. An understanding of Talmudic debates over kashrut will provide a better appreciation for the significance of food in these autobiographies. Kashrut cuts to the very core of Judaic beliefs. A Jew’s most important charge is to maintain human life, both physically and spiritually, and fit food aids one in complying with this commandment. But why do the particular rules set forth in the Torah ensure certain foods’ fitness for consumption? Over the centuries, Jewish scholars have struggled to explain the reason for the detailed rules of kashrut. Plaut states that one of the earliest explanations came from Philo of Alexandria, who believed these laws were meant “to teach us to control our bodily appetites,” discouraging self-indulgence and encouraging kindness.10 Others associate the rules of kashrut with health. In the twelfth century, Maimonides, a physician as well as a philosopher who believed all of God’s commandments have reasons, asserted that the foods forbidden by the Torah are unwholesome. Ironically, he writes, “There is nothing among the forbidden kinds of food whose injurious character is doubted, except pork and fat,”11 stating that swine’s habits are dirty and loathsome, which account for its forbiddance, and fat makes us too full, interrupting our digestion. Today we know that pork, perhaps most associated with the forbidden foods, may transmit tapeworms and trichinosis, while fat contributes to weight and heart associated health problems; shellfish, also traife, contain iodine, to which many are allergic, and spoil easily, often causing serious illness. Thus, many contemporary Jews tend to reaffirm Maimonides’s contention when explaining the reasons for kashrut. But most Jewish scholars find Maimonides’s contention deplorable, for, they argue, the Bible is not simply a book of rules, since otherwise it would

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favor among French consumers.21 The introduction of pasteurized Camembert in the 1950s, fostered by the new interest in food science, meant factories with machine-cut and -poured curd. The industrial Camembert found in French supermarkets today bears little resemblance to the original cheese, a regional product of Normandy that retained its “barnyardy” odor (likened to body odor and even sexual odor) and rustic appearance. In this manifestation, it is an acquired taste, almost defiantly resisting appreciation. Camembert is among the few food products that are recognized as good when they smell bad, allowing a counter-intuitive and almost illicit pleasure. For Boisard, the change illustrates the gulf between the French desire to retain remnants of its culinary myth and current practice: “the nation cherishes a nostalgia for its rural past and its countryside unspoiled by industrialization, but it has irrevocably turned a page in its history.”22 As such, Camembert is a “messenger from the past to remind French of their peasant origins”23 Present-day Camembert can only weakly imitate those origins, but Camembert as metaphor begins to appear regularly in literature in the late 19th century, when the cheese finally attained national familiarity.24 Proust illustrates the cheese’s ultimate ubiquity in a passage from Sodome et Gomorrhe (1922): Marcel wishes to correct the doorman who has mistakenly announced Madame de Cambremer as “Madame de Camembert” and reasons that le nom de Camembert lui avait paru d'autant plus vraisemblable que, ce fromage étant universellement connu, il ne fallait point s'étonner qu'on eût tiré un marquisat d'une renommée aussi glorieuse, à moins que ce ne fût celle du marquisat qui eût donné sa célébrité au fromage.25 the name Camembert seemed to him very logical since, this cheese being universally well known, one wouldn’t be a bit surprised that a royal title had been derived from its glorious fame, unless it was the fame of the royal title that gave its celebrity to the cheese.

Camembert’s earlier presence in literature more closely approximates the importance of French cheese as French culture, and its literary representation celebrates its pungent aroma. The Goncourt brothers affirm Camembert’s odiferous fame when they report in one of their Journal entries (1896) that a certain Baron Imbert de Saint-amand earned the nickname “camembert de Saint-amand” for his dirtiness and his odor.26 In Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Zola gives an extensive word-portrait of a stunning array of cheeses in a cheese shop in Les Halles in Paris; Camembert stands out pointedly because of its odor. Zola enumerates the

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reading the Torah in synagogues throughout New York City, demanding that Jews refrain from purchasing meat. In one instance, meat actually became a weapon when a woman slapped a policeman in the face with a piece of liver!15 On a very basic level, a woman can exert her power by electing to feed her family or, conversely, by withholding food from them; when a woman provides meals as a part of her domestic responsibility, we must realize that to do so constitutes a choice. Thus, in striving to provide meals beyond the simplistic fare the Calofs accepted, Rachel exerts her power as an individual; in deciding to relinquish her domestic responsibilities, Yezierska seizes the personal power to select her own lifestyle; and in taking on the responsibility of food preparation upon arriving in America, Cohen becomes empowered beyond her years as a child. Cohen provides readers with several instances in which food suggests power struggles. As a domestic servant for the Corlove family, she employs food to demonstrate her power struggle with the mother of the family. Mrs. Corlove always found the worst of the available food for Cohen: “It was usually the tail of the fish, the feet and the gizzard of the chicken, the bun to which some mishap had occurred.”16 Later, although with much guilt, Cohen ate a coveted pan cake which she knew that Mrs. Corlove would miss, metaphorically asserting herself as a deserving human being. In two other instances, through reference to food she indicates the power of the dominant society and the immigrant family’s helplessness. Starving, Cohen’s father stood in line at the United Hebrew Charities for two days in order to bring home one chicken for his family to eat, a submission after which he “sat down at the table and wept like a child.”17 In this case, Cohen, a shtetl Jew from the second wave of immigration, had relinquished control of his own life to the German Jews who viewed the shtetl Jews as an embarrassment, providing charity out of a sense of duty. The second instance reveals the insidious destructiveness the dominant Christian society visited on the new immigrants. Although the family strove to maintain their independence, when faced with starvation, Cohen’s mother instructed her children to bow their heads in prayer at school, as the Christian missionaries had requested, so as to receive bread and honey. In this case, America had successfully dominated the Jewish immigrants, buying their souls, not outright through an inquisition, but by taking advantage of their physical starvation. While food has divisive powers, it also has the capacity to bring people together. Most conspicuously, people come together as a community and eat at each celebration, as was the case for each of the immigrant women under study: at the Calof’s marriage and at their son’s circumcision, which

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family and neighbors attended; at Cohen’s engagement party, to which her family invited everyone they knew; and at Yezierska’s welcoming dinner party in Hollywood, which the community of writers attended, as well as at the Fair Oaks dinner party celebrating Marian Foster’s publishing success. Less apparent are the interpersonal relationships which develop as a result of sharing food. Abraham met Rachel with an offering of two oranges as she left Ellis Island to ease the tension of their first meeting. When weak from hunger and illness aboard ship, Cohen accepted aid from a seaman who gave her water and oranges. From that point on, she and her Aunt Masha, with whom she traveled, felt a bond with this kind man. In another instance, Cohen shared food with the presser from her shop on a cold winter day, Cohen providing the bread and the presser supplying sliced smoked salmon; afterwards, they shared stories of Russia and developed a friendship. Yezierska also developed relationships over food: in the studio dining room in Hollywood where she congregated with her fellow script writers; at the Algonquin Hotel dining room where the literari of New York adopted her over martinis and lunch and promoted her writing career through positive book reviews; at Tony’s Bar where the WPA writers met on pay day, nibbling pretzels and drinking beer; and in Fair Oaks where Mrs. Cobb established their relationship with gifts of fresh baked bread and dandelion wine. Food’s power to create relationships stands out in each autobiography as a positive force which helped ease each woman into America. On another level, food provides readers with emotional insights into these women, for food not only sustains people physically but emotionally as well. After a difficult day, for example, we might go out for a relaxing meal, seeking specific foods as comfort. A mother often turns to food to soothe, heal, and reward her offspring; the stereotypical Jewish mother always has a bowl of chicken soup handy, an almost mythical tool for masterfully maintaining the health of her family which provides her with a sense of self-worth. Jewish celebrations are nearly always associated with special foods at the center of or complementary to the festivities, foods which promote the joy of the holidays: apples and honey on Rosh Hashanah, latkes on Hannukah, dairy on Shavuot, hamentashen on Purim. The primary Jewish holiday which we do not associate with food is Yom Kippur, a day of fasting so as to concentrate on the more spiritual matters of self-examination and atonement. At the break-fast dinner after sundown on this holy day, Jews traditionally eat a dairy meal, considered “light,” a healthier means of re-entering the daily routine. Thus, we associate Yom Kippur with lack of food, and usually hunger. As this study strives to analyze immigrant Jewish women’s writings as metaphors for their

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personal days of awe and atonement as they enter American life, not only the foods they choose to eat but also their responses to hunger and starvation, common after immigration because of the newcomers’ meager means of income, become significant to their spiritual and psychological adaptation to life in the New World. For immigrants, the physical hunger often began on the journey to America during which kosher food was rarely available18; Orthodox Jews from the Pale of Settlement would not consider eating traife. The strict religious observances generally revealed in autobiographical writing confirm these immigrants’ initial Old World identity. Once in America, often unable to acquire any food, no less kosher food, these women had to decide what they would and would not eat. These determinations became a part of their New World identity. Rachel Bella Calof states that she was hungry as she traveled, not because she feared nonkosher food, but because she was reluctant to spend the little money she had for food, not knowing what expenses she might have to incur later on her voyage. Thus, she began a self-imposed fast as she traveled across Europe, willing to forego physical nourishment for the reward of arriving in America and embarking on a new life; her days of awe had begun. Calof does not mention eating aboard ship, for she was sea-sick for twenty days of her twenty-two day voyage and food, apparently, was not an issue given her illness. After this fast, her first meal consisted of two oranges which Abraham gave her as a gift upon their first meeting. This light meal provided the transition from her journey to her new life in the New World. As Calof’s story progresses, readers learn of her commitment to follow Jewish dietary laws by her frequent references to them. Although Calof twice confesses to eating nonkosher food, she carefully justifies doing so. First, with the family freezing and at the brink of starvation, and with a newborn infant severely burned, Calof reports that her husband Abe braved a trip to the nearest town and returned with medicine, fuel, and food, including what he thought was pickled herring, a mainstay of the Jewish immigrants’ diet. Unfortunately, however, the “herring” was in fact pickled pigs’ feet. Rachel states, “Considering our condition, you may draw your own conclusions as to whether Abe or I disclosed the true contents of the container which held this particular food.”19 She does not explicitly admit in print that she actually ate the pigs’ feet, for such an admission would be horrific for an observant Jew, but the words “considering our condition” evoke the hierarchy of Talmudic law which places the preservation of human life before following dietary laws; in other words, Jews are commanded to maintain the health of their bodies, even if that means violating kashrut. The shochet present at Calof’s first

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medical use of bouillon as treatment for various illnesses, the main ingredient changing according to the malady. Bouillon de vipère (see “Vipère”), for example, is prescribed for diseases of the skin (notably leprosy), and a bouillon of mole meat (see “Taupe”) is a home remedy for children who wet the bed. Like bouillon, sauces, another base element of cooking, stand at the core of France’s culinary superiority and testify to the identification of French food with refinement. Jules Favre calls sauces “or liquide” (liquid gold) in his Dictionnaire universel de la cuisine (1883) and for his part declares that “c’est à elles que la France doit tenir le flambeau de la gastronomie. Les sauces forment la base de la bonne cuisine, et c’est à leur excellence que la cuisine française doit sa supériorité sur celles des autres nations” (It is to them that France should hold the gastronomic torch. Sauces form the basis of good cooking, and French cuisine owes its superiority over other nations’ cuisine to them).38 These sauces require minute attention to flavor, strict techniques, and a significant base of knowledge given the sheer number of them to learn. The French elite of the 17th century began to replace spices with chives, shallots, mushrooms, capers, and anchovies: “it was from this point that France took the lead in European cuisine and became generally fashionable.”39 Pitte names these items “aromates français” (French aromatics) indicating the extent to which they are associated with French cooking, and adds black truffles (“symbole du luxe et de la haute cuisine”) to the list of French innovations.40 The technique of naming sauces (codified by Carême, expanded by Escoffier) allows the French to own these preparations and at the same time recall French historical and cultural figures as they eat. In terms of cooking technique, sauces are arguably more favorable as a reflection of French talent, but they are less metaphorically desirable in literature. Sauces appear in literary works, but do not resonate as the other iconic dishes do, perhaps because they occupy a shorter historical span than the pot-au-feu and the bouillon. The butter-enriched, cream-thickened sauces we know as French arrived late to gastronomy: sauces made with butter first appeared in recipes in the second half of the 17th century,41 but fell out of favor in the first wave of “nouvelle cuisine” in the 1740s that eliminated excess and replaced sauces with jus,42 and again in the new nouvelle cuisine of the 1960s that endorsed simplicity and eschewed heavy sauces. Paul Bocuse claims that in his cuisine, “il n’est plus besoin de ces fonds de sauces” (there is no longer any need for these bases for sauce).43 In their representational form, sauces have rhetorical value because they carry a French name. The sauce hollandaise is, says Pitte, “bien française en réalité”.44 Evocation of named sauces assumes a gastronomic

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“welcoming meal” her new family prepared upon her arrival: “flat pieces of boiled dough and cheese, with water or milk to drink.”22 Most of her descriptions of available food reiterate its paucity, especially her annual inventory of winter provisions, which generally consisted of flour; barley; chickens, mainly kept for their eggs; and milk, if the family owned a cow at the time. Throughout her time on the homestead, Calof experienced extreme physical hunger as well as emotional hunger. Her most noteworthy response to her physical hunger occurred at the beginning of spring during her first pregnancy. The Calof community was still dependent on their winter stock of provisions, which had dwindled to a dangerously low level; they had burned all their fuel, most of the food was gone, and the shack contained no water. Determined to acquire water and fuel, Rachel ventured into the prairie to search for melted snow and dried grass, which she found. After carrying two pailsful of water back to the shack, she returned to the prairie for the dried grass. At this point, she states, “The prairie . . . held many provisions if one only knew where to look,”23 her comment implicitly revealing her adventurous spirit and selfconfidence. She decided to hunt for something to enhance her meager food supply and discovered some wild garlic and mushrooms. Knowing that mushrooms could be poisonous, she held a bite in her mouth and, since no apparent side effects arose, she gathered an apronful and carried all of her booty home. Calof details her food preparation: Arriving at the shack, I immediately began my preparations. First I sieved the water through the fabric of a flour sack. I kneaded the dough and put it in the oven. I cleaned the mushrooms and steeped them in hot water. I then chopped up the garlic, put butter (we had our cow back) in the pan, and fried everything together. This meal made in large measure with food gathered from the wild prairie was simply delicious. . . . My husband would soon be coming through the door. I was so happy, truly in seventh heaven, and very proud. I had used my brains and my nerve and as a result my husband would soon sit down to a fine dinner, just the two of us alone.24 (emphasis mine)

This passage deserves attention for several reasons. First, Calof elaborates more than one might expect from this narrator many years after the events in explaining her procedure. The vividness of her memory attests to the importance of this seemingly minor event in her life. Clearly proud of her accomplishments, she elects to dwell on them, emphasizing her own strengths, mental (“I had used my brains”), emotional (“and my nerve”), and physical (she was pregnant while hauling water, fuel, and food). As self-pride is sinful, her detailing of this event and her feelings

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may be seen, from a Jewish perspective, as a confession. But from an American perspective, her achievements are commendable, for she relied upon her own wits, analyzing her problem and arriving at a more than viable solution, one which brought her a sense of self-worth. This need to specify accomplishments develops as a hallmark of this autobiography. If we view this story both as a boastful declaration and as a chronicle of accomplishments, it takes on a dual identity, showing Calof’s need to both confess her prideful feelings, while at the same time adapting to the American conviction of self-reliance. Near the end of her narrative, she underscores the significance of food as a sign of accomplishment when she writes, “We had plenty of food now. Each late fall now, the shochet paid us a visit for the coming winter. The dressed animals were stored in the barn which served as our winter freezer. What a contrast to the slow starvation of the early winters.”25 Food becomes a benchmark throughout the text as a means of assessing the family’s condition and tracking their “rags to riches” rise in America, establishing Rachel’s Jewish-American identity. While food in Calof’s story demonstrates her advancement in material wealth and sense of self-worth, it takes a very different course in Cohen’s autobiography. Just as Calof struggles to feed her starving family, so Cohen and her family also continuously face hunger. But food for Cohen emphasizes her dilemmas rather than sustaining a sense of self-worth. Upon leaving Russia, foreseeing the lack of kosher food, she brought a small bag of zwieback with her for her shipboard journey. This scanty provision indicates her naivete about the hunger she would face on the trip to follow. In Hamburg, she encountered her first bout with hunger. The steamship company served its passengers meals while they waited for permission to embark. At the first of these meals, as soon as the bread and potatoes were placed on the long communal table, the emigrants around Cohen and her aunt grabbed the food so quickly that the two women were left with nothing to eat. They vowed to grab food at the next meal, knowing their meager funds would not be enough for provisions, but again they failed to procure any nourishment. As Cohen reports, ”Going hungry seemed easy in comparison with the shame we felt to put out our hands for the bread while there was such a struggle.”26 Her pride, in this case, endangered her well-being and therefore may be interpreted as sinful. This incident foreshadows the hunger and humiliation the two would face in America and Cohen’s future wrestling with her pride. Once in America, Cohen’s first meal consisted of coffee and buttered rolls, a paltry spread which seemed a feast, for it constituted the first substantial repast available since leaving Russia. This meal foreshadows

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future meals she would eat in her new home. Cohen and her father scrimped on everything they could, including food, because their goal was to save enough money to send for the rest of the family. She describes her daily diet during the time when she worked in the same sweatshop as her father: Father used to buy me an apple and a sweetened roll. I used to think two cents a good deal to spend for my breakfast. But often I was almost sick with hunger. At noon we had our big meal. Then father would send me out for half a pound of steak or a slice of beef liver and a pint of beer which he sometimes bought in partnership with two or three other men.27

This passage emphasizes the conflict between Cohen’s hunger and her desire to have her family with her. Later, when she worked in a shop separate from her father, she provides a glimpse of her diet there, which appears to have been even more meager, when she writes, “When the pedlar [sic] came into the shop everybody bought rolls. I felt hungry but I was ashamed and would not eat the plain, heavy rye bread while the others ate rolls.”28 Hunger and shame followed Cohen throughout her ghetto life, meals becoming more and more insufficient, eventually reaching a nadir when the family had literally no food because none of them could find work. Even with nothing to eat, Cohen maintained her pride, refusing handouts from a charity worker. This asserted pride stands as a confession of sin, for it endangered the lives of all in the family, something Cohen’s mother realized when she advised her young children to comply with the gentiles’ requests to pray in order to attain nourishment. In fact, Cohen herself became extremely ill as a result of her need for food, doctors constantly warning her to “feed up” because she suffered from debilitating anemia. Her sustained pride continued throughout her days of awe, making it difficult for her to adapt to her new life. The conflict between Cohen’s pride and illness engendered even more internal turmoil for her when she eventually became so ill that she had to convalesce in an uptown hospital. Here nourishing food abounded, but the meat, of course, was traife. Her mother, well-schooled in Biblical mandates, instructed her to eat everything to become well, which Cohen did. Yet while eating nonkosher meat, she remained cognizant of breaking the vow she had taken to follow the laws of kashrut after a Russian neighbor had predicted that she would eat swine in America. She realized that she had not actually violated the spirit of her religion in doing so, yet later in her text, whenever writing about American ways conflicting with Judaic practices, as when a domestic job required that she light a fire on Shabbat, she comments on having eaten traife, indicating just how much

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pot-au-feu comes to symbolize marriage, domestic life, and a comfortable standard of living. E. J. Delecluze speaks dismissively in his Journal (1828) of young Parisian women who think only of getting married and whose “imagination est continuellement fixée sur l'idée d'un pot-au-feu qui bout tous les jours” (thoughts are always fixed on the idea of a pot-aufeu simmering every day).58 Edmond and Jules Goncourt similarly equate pot-au-feu and domesticity in their Journal of 1878: “L' homme peut rester bohème toute sa vie. La femme, à quarante ans, cesse la vie de bohème. Elle aspire au pot-au-feu” (A man can be a bohemian all of his life. A woman, at forty, ends the bohemian life. She aspires to pot-aufeu).59 For Hippolyte Taine in Notes sur Paris (1867), pot-au-feu is home cooking and marriage is the end of eating out: [Aux yeux d’un homme] l' amour est agréable comme la cuisine; à côté d' un restaurant, il y a d' autres restaurants. Quand il y aura soupé jusqu' à trente ans, il songera au pot-au-feu, c' est-à-dire au mariage.60 [In a man’s eyes] love is pleasing like fine food; next to one restaurant, there are other restaurants. When he has eaten there until the age of thirty, he will dream of pot-au-feu, that is, of marriage.

The pot-au-feu is set up against suspicious Parisian haute cuisine (even though this cuisine is also French) in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857): the pharmacist Homais responds to news that Léon is moving to Paris by evoking the questionable safety of Parisian food as compared to “un bon pot-au-feu” and declaring that “la cuisine bourgeoise” is healthier.61 Principally associated with the bourgeoisie in these examples, pot-aufeu can belong to any class, depending on the ingredients and mode of preparation. In the 19th century, the dish was prepared with pork in the country (as in the potée lorraine), with beef by the bourgeois of the cities, and with fowl by the elite classes, who normally consumed only the bouillon.62 The pot-au-feu classique is not exclusive to the middle classes in its early representations in literature. Madame de Sévigné’s 17th-century correspondence reveals that she enjoyed pot-au-feu and recommended it to her daughter, although the term “pot-au-feu” seems still in transition. Sévigné expressed a distinct preference for pot-au-feu or oille63 over consommé, noting in a letter to her daughter of 1673, “Je vous souhaite une oille au lieu d'un consommé; un consommé est une chose étrange” (I hope you have an oille rather than a consommé; a consommé is a strange thing).64 In a letter of the same year she writes that she prefers eating oille to eating meat by itself, and later describes a pot-au-feu that consisted of

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Food, Hunger, and Identity in Jewish Women Immigrants’ Autobiography My dear Mr. Levitas, This is just to remind you not to forget ½ cup of orange juice before breakfast every single morning without fail. Any of the following vegetables for lunch or dinner (with your meat or eggs) celery, lettuce, spinach, cauliflower or any other greens. The food we eat is almost as important as the thoughts we think and if you will follow my suggestions for a week, you will see how your complexion will clear and all indigestion will disappear. H.M.31

This letter completely about food and its effects provides insights into Yezierska’s attitude toward the significance of food. Given her intellectual bend, that she could write that food is “almost as important as the thoughts we think” indeed raises it to a level of importance far beyond mere nourishment for her. Yezierska may have chosen not to reveal her domestic arts training in her autobiography, it having been a stop-gap measure to provide her with a means of making a living rather than an education which furthered her need to write, but its effect prevails as a significant element in her life and in her writing. Several scholars have noted Yezierska’s obsessions with food images and with hunger as a metaphor for her yearnings throughout her canon. Elizabeth Ammons links images of hunger and starvation in Yezierska’s fiction to her professional hunger to write. She associates “starvation” with “dumbness,” explaining that Yezierska hungered for artistic achievement in the Anglo Emersonian tradition which struck her dumb since her own legacy was that of the Jewish matriarchal oral and folk traditions which ultimately infuse her writing with “gritty realism.”32 This desire for Anglo achievement reaches its peak in Hollywood, where she waivers between the urge to fit in with the group of famous authors she meets there, scriptwriters such as Will Rogers, Elinor Glyn, and Rupert Hughes, and the revulsion she experiences when she views these same writers as charlatans and hucksters concerned only with acquiring as much money as possible from their literary efforts. Significantly, this revelation comes to Yezierska at a dinner party at which the host plied her with champagne and served roast squabs, rich cuisine which ironically served to sober her up to the reality of “business authors.” Struck dumb by her decided distaste for the empty values she comes to associate with these writers she views as sell-outs, she must return to her own people, immigrant Jews, and immerse herself in the realities of the ghetto in order to retrieve the traditions which enabled her to create the emotion-filled texts for which she had become famous. Herring and gefüllte fish, not roast squab, nourished her writing career.

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Another aspect of Yezierska’s use of food images which scholars have considered is her sharp contrasts between dearth and abundance. Rose Yalow Kamel notes in passing that “the cluster of food images surrounding depictions of Jewish women [in Yezierska’s writing] are both nourishing and sparse. Rich bread and chicken soup are contrasted with thin soup, herring bones, squashed yeast, plenty undermined by scarcity.”33 Yezierska depicts joy in scarcity when she describes her mother dividing one small cake into twenty pieces for their shtetl neighbors on Purim. She describes this event while visiting the Hollywood set for Hungry Hearts, the place where set designers have recreated Yezierska’s Russian-Polish reality in plaster, and where the abundance of real food she encounters proves uneatable. She is not “the personification of the happy ending that Hollywood has been turning out,”34 as Julius Josephson, the scenario writer, observed, but rather she cannot swallow the riches of Hollywood at the expense of her values, which include concern for others. Disgust engulfs her as she watches the tired actors rehearsing without so much as a pause for food. When she implores director Paul Bern to give them a break because they are hungry, his response—”To hell with them! They’re paid to work. And they got [sic] to come across even if we stay here all night”—causes her to realize, “My old sweatshop boss had nothing on Bern.”35 Whether in the sweatshops or on the movie set, workers slaved as drudges with minimal rewards and little to eat, while those in charge feasted on their successes and riches, achieved through the sweat of others. Such contrasts, emphasizing plenty undermined by dearth, not only emphasize Yezierska’s personal experiences as the “Sweatshop Cinderella” but signify a deep unrest which permeates her writing. In noting the prevalence of food images juxtaposed with hunger throughout Yezierska’s works, Ellen Golub states that the Russian Jewish woman in her writing “uses hunger to articulate her peculiar discontent.”36 The “peculiar discontent” surfaces as irony when women such as Hanneh Breineh, in the story “The Fat of the Land” from Hungry Hearts, view food as precious when they don’t have enough, but when glutted with success and living on “the fat of the land,” they are distressed, incapable of adjusting to American prosperity as represented by its food. In the fiction Golub examines, “with bellies full, [the Jewish American immigrants] hunger even more intensely.”37 Although Golub analyzes Yezierska’s fiction, an examination of her autobiography yields much the same message. Immediately upon learning that Goldwyn has offered five thousand dollars for the movie rights to Hungry Hearts, and that her agent is holding out for ten thousand, Yezierska’s mind turns to food: “Five, ten

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thousand dollars was a fortune in 1920. I was suddenly aware of my hunger. I saw myself biting into thick, juicy steaks, dipping fresh rolls into mounds of butter, swallowing whole platters of French fried potatoes in one gulp.”38 With a ten dollar advance on her fortune, she straightaway hurries to Child’s Restaurant and orders “the most expensive steak on the menu,” after which: A platter was set before me—porterhouse steak, onions, potatoes, rolls, butter. I couldn’t eat fast enough. Before I was half through, my throat tightened. My head bent over my plate, tears rolled down my cheeks onto the uneaten food. When I hadn’t had a penny for a roll I had had the appetite of a wolf that could devour the earth. Now that I could treat myself to a dollar dinner, I couldn’t take another bite.39

When the waitress attempts to clear the table, Yezierska panics: “‘I’m not through!’ I held onto the plate, still starved for the steak and potatoes I could not eat.”40 This early episode in the autobiography foreshadows later encounters with food, as when she is served “cream in big silver pitchers three times a day” on the train to Hollywood and feels “like the beggar who drowned in a barrel of cream,”41 losing her taste for this luxury, or when, as a speaker at Ohio State University, she is served an elaborate dinner but cannot eat it because, not only is she nervous about speaking, but more significantly, she associates this food with the “the lovely creatures floating on the surface of life . . . . [who] were born into the good things of life,”42 young girls with whom she could not identify; she could not eat their rich food, for she could never ingest their way of life. For Yezierska, food becomes one means of portraying the psychological conflict between her relationship with the American society of plenty and her European Jewish heritage. When in Europe, as she begged her parents to go to America, she shouted, “White bread and meat we’ll eat every day in America!”43, but such a diet can never satisfy her once she immerses herself in American society. Although drawn to the prosperity available in her adopted country, she cannot partake of the rich fare which becomes a symbol of Mammon, a gourmet extravagance on which she chokes. Although she details the food listed on the gilded menu at the Miramar Hotel, “Terrine de Pâté de Foie Gras, Green Turtle Soup au Sherry, Jumbo Pigeon on Toast, Canapé Royale Princesse—whatever that is!”44, she does not mention actually ordering or eating this exotic fare; in fact, she makes it clear that she does not even understand what it consists of, perhaps because this language of affluent America, in appearing as pretentious as the gilding on the menu itself, is empty. This menu stands as a symbol of the rich options her ten thousand dollars have provided,

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inhospitable being “le grand-Thibet” where visitors find “ni lit ni pot-aufeu; cela peut dégoûter de la politesse” (neither bed nor pot-au-feu; it can make their politeness distasteful).75 In a letter of 1870 from Flaubert to his niece living in England, Flaubert criticizes the climate in London and expresses fear for his niece’s health; he writes, C'est une ville qui me fait peur: et puis, je doute que la nourriture te soit bonne: pas de pot-au-feu! Ni mille petites choses auxquelles nous sommes habitués.76 It’s a city that frightens me: and what’s more, I doubt that the food will be good for you: no pot-au-feu! Nor a thousand other little things to which we are accustomed.

London is by no means a foreign or exotic place for the French, but it is nevertheless deemed inhospitable to them, principally because it lacks potau-feu. For practical purposes, pot-au-feu leaves haute cuisine definitively in the 20th century when the recipe is no longer included in Escoffier’s Guide culinaire of 1903.77 The higher standard of living experienced by most French people after the Second World War made roasted or grilled meat more accessible and more popular than cheaper cuts of boiled beef. Grignon and Grignon report that “the most frequently purchased foods in 1982 were beef to roast or broil (by and large the beef steak) and butter”; beef steak remains sixth of the ten most commonly purchased products in 1991.78 Consequently, “le ‘bifteck-frites’ s’est substitué au pot-au-feu comme image du plat bien français” (steak-frites’ has replaced pot-au-feu as the image of the typical French dish).79 This assessment coincides with Barthes’ pronouncement that steak is French and renders the pot-au-feu part of the mythological French past, relegated to an act of ceremony. But the pot-au-feu remains firmly in place in the imaginary in texts like Rouff’s. The pot-au-feu has a mythical resonance beyond the simple act of purchasing meat to eat. Its presence in literature and its importance stems from its continued association with the hearth as center of family life, even in texts as recent as the nineteenth century. In her autobiographical work of 1855, George Sand writes tenderly of her mother’s sparsely furnished apartment, small and dark but with a potau-feu simmering over the fire.80 After ruining her marriage with imprudent spending, Sand’s mother is here painted sympathetically for her return to simple ways, and the pot-au-feu signifies parsimony and frugality, and yet it provides substantial nourishment and is recognizable as a proper French meal. Sand later remarks that her mother cannot give

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return to a debasing occupation, but rather in Zalmon she sees a man with many interests who represents the ethnic soul of her people with whom she eventually envisions her release from the disease of her days of awe. In the end, as a sign of her inability to separate her personal identity from her ethnicity, Yezierska employs foods in her texts as metaphors for communities. Exotic cuisine characterizes Hollywood, the martini luncheon distinguishes the New York literari of the Algonquin set, bland but sustaining food defines the New England natives, and gefüllte fish and herring mark the Jewish ghetto. Ammons stresses Yezierksa’s use of food as communal ceremony and as a celebration of “the nourishment to be received from traditional patriarchal culture, and . . . the life-steeped words of a loud, physical, this-worldly Jewish mother.”49 One might argue that the religious traditions of the Jewish patriarchy did not truly nourish Yezierska, for her independent nature would not allow her to continue in the ways of her father. But the culture that the patriarchy produced provided her with the ethnicity which fed her self-identity and her ability to write. As Levin points out, the fare she encounters in Fair Oaks—boiled pork, grape jelly, cabbage, and turnips—metaphorically excludes her from the Anglo New England community she strives to enter,50 sending her back to the community in which she can partake of the flavorful environment which provides the cuisine, and thus the cultural environment, she finds sustaining. The manner in which the three women under discussion employ food in their autobiographies provides readers with a key to understanding the true nature of the acculturation of each at the end of her days of awe. Throughout their texts, Calof and Cohen stuck to the hierarchy of Judaic law, never questioning the laws of kashrut or the overriding mandate to sustain human life, indicating their faithfulness to their ancestry within an American setting. Calof did not find doing so problematic, but Cohen did. As natural as following the dietary laws was to her, she perceived their effect as separating her from the rest of American society, creating a wall between the world to which she aspired and the world within which she lived. Yezierska experimented with cuisine, but like Friedensohn returned to her heritage, recognizing the connection between the food that nourished her physically and her less tangible yet inherent spiritual and emotional disposition. The significance of food in these texts cannot be overemphasized, for once each has reckoned with this final aspect of acculturation, she completes her days of awe by ending her metaphorical Yom Kippur fast with a better understanding of her personal identity and her place in this New World.

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Works Cited Ammons, Elizabeth. 1991. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. Antin, Mary. 1997. The Promised Land. 1912. New York: Penguin. Calof, Rachel Bella. 1995. “My Story.” In Rachel Calof’s Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plain edited by Sandford J. Rikoon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, Rose. 1995. Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side. 1918. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dresner, Samuel H. and Seymour Siegel. 1966. The Jewish Dietary Laws: Their Meaning for Our Time and A Guide to Observance. New York: Burning Bush Press. Friedensohn, Doris. 1996. “Yom Kippur at Um Luk: Reflections on Eating, Ethnicity, and Identity.” In People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, edited by Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, 245-57. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda. 1995. “Jewish Food Rituals.” Translated by Christopher T. Bever. Journal of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis 23: 7-17. Goldman, Anne. 1992. “‘I Yam What I Yam’: Cooking, Culture, and Colonialism.” In De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, edited by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 169-95. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Golub, Ellen. 1983. “Eat Your Heart Out: The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska.” In Studies in American Jewish Literature, number 3, edited by Daniel Walden, 51-61. Albany: State University of New York Press. Henriksen, Louise Levitas. 1988. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hyman, 1980. “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest: The New York City Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902.” American Jewish History 70: 91105. Kafka, Franz. 2002. “A Hunger Artist.” Translated by Edwin and Willa Muir. In The Norton Introduction to Literature, eighth edition, edited by Jerome Beaty et.al, 207-213. New York: W.W. Norton. Kamel, Rose Yalow. 1988. Aggravating the Conscience: Jewish-American Literary Mothers in the Promised Land. New York: Peter Lang. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1986-7. “The Kosher Gourmet in the

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Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective.” The Journal of Gastronomy 2 (Winter 1986-7): 51-89. Levin, Tobe. 1989. “How to Eat without Eating: Anzia Yezierska’s Hunger.” In Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture, edited by Mary Anne Schofield, 32-46. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P. Maimonides, Moses. 1956. The Guide for the Perplexed, second edition. Translated by M. Friedlander. New York: Dover. Nathan, Joan. 1994. Jewish Cooking in America. New York: Knopf. Nicholson, Mervy. 1987. “Food and Power: Homer, Carroll, Atwood and Others.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 20 (Summer): 37-55. The Oxford Annotated Bible, 1962. edited by Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger. New York: Oxford University Press. Plaut, Gunther W., ed. 1981. The Torah: A Modern Commentary. New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981. Rubin, Harris. 1981. “Worker on the Land,” Translated by Benson N. Schambelan. American Jewish Archives 33: 7-34. Setton, Ruth Knafo. 1989. “Anzia Yezierska: A Hunger Artist.” Midstream: A Monthly Jewish Review 35 (February/March); 50-54. Trupin, Sophie. 1984. Dakota Diaspora: Memoirs of a Jewish Homesteader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Yezierska, Anzia. 1975. Bread Givers. 1925. New York: Persea. —. 1920. Hungry Hearts. Chicagp: Grosset and Dunlap. —. 1987. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 1950. New York: Persea.

Notes 1

For an extensive yet concise and highly readable explanation of the specifics of kashrut, see Nathan, Jewish Cooking in America. 4-7. 2 Goldman 1992. “‘I Yam What I Yam.’” 169. 3 Sophie Trupin reports, “[My uncle] brought us a basket filled with . . . . some strange, long yellow fruits which I had never seen before. My uncle said they were bananas, and good to eat” (Turpin. 1984. Dakota Diaspora, 28). Similarly, Mary Antin remembers, “My father . . . . attempted to introduce us to a queer, slippery kind of fruit, which he called ‘bananas’” (Antin. 1997. The Promised Land, 146). 4 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 1986-7. “The Kosher Gormet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen.” 84. 5 Friedensohn. 1996. “Yom Kippur at Um Luk.” 246. 6 Ibid., 247.

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Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. 1825. Physiologie du goût. Paris: Flammarion. 1982. Carantino, Georges. “Voyage en pot-au-feu” in Csergo, ed. pp. 35-66. Csergo, Julia, ed. 1999. Pot-au-feu: convivial, familial: histoires d’un mythe. Paris: Autrement. Delecluze, Etienne-Jean. 1828. Journal. Paris: Grasset. 1948. Diderot, Denis and Jean d’Alembert, eds. 1751-1772. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres. 17 vols. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/encyc/ (accessed September 15, 2007). Dumas, Alexandre. (Père). 1846. Le Comte de Monte Cristo. Ed. J.H. Bornecque. Paris: Garnier. 1956. —. 1882. Petit dictionnaire de la cuisine. Paris: A. Lemerre. Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. 2004. Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. U of Chicago P. —. 1999. “Le Pot-au-feu: un plat qui fait la France?” in Csergo, ed. 13-19. Flaubert, Gustave. Correspondance-1870. Paris: L. Conard. 1926-1954. —. 1857. Madame Bovary. Ed. R. Dumesnil. Paris: les Belles Lettres. 1945. Goncourt, Edmond et Jules. 1959. Journal T. 2 [1878], T. 4 [1896] Ed. A. Ricatte. Paris, Flammarion. Grignon, Claude and Christine Grignon. 1999. “Long-Term Trends in Food Consumption: A French Portrait.” Food and Foodways 8.3: 151174. Kauffman, Jean-Claude. 2005. Casseroles, amour et crises: Ce que cuisiner veut dire. Paris: Armand-Colin. Larousse gastronomique. 2000. Paris: Larousse. Mennell, Stephen. 1996. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: U of Illinois P. Montanari, Massimo. 1994. The Culture of Food. Trans. Carl Ipsen. Oxford: Blackwell. Ory, Pascal. 1998.Le Discours gastronomique français des origines à nos jours. Paris: Gallimard. Pitte, Jean-Robert. 1991. Gastronomie française: Histoire et géographie d’une passion. Paris: Fayard. Poulain, Jean-Pierre. 2002. Sociologies de l’alimentation. Paris: PUF. Proust, Marcel. 1920. Le Côté de Guermantes. Ed. P. Clarac, A. Ferre, T.2. Paris: Gallimard. 1961.

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Ibid., 51. Ibid., 40. 45 One must note that for Yezierska “Jewish” food is not kosher food. For her, Jewish food is more of a cultural concept, a compilation of Old World tastes and recipes, often derogatorily referred to as “kitchen Judaism.” Yezierska’s efforts to reject her father and his devotion to God cause her to disavow all of the basic commandments of the Torah, including kashrut, which would identify her as an observant Jew. 46 Setton. 1989. “Anzia Yezierska: A Hunger Artist.” 50. 47 Yezierska. 1950. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 180. 48 Kafka. 2002. “A Hunger Artist.” 213. 49 Ammons. 1991. Conflicting Stories. 165. 50 Levin. 1989. “How to Eat without Eating.” 35. 44

CHAPTER FOUR: CHILDHOOD EATABLES

FOOD SYMBOLISM IN THREE CHILDREN’S LITERATURE TEXTS: GRAHAME’S THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, DAHL’S CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY AND ROWLING’S HARRY POTTER NOVELS JACQUELINE CORINTH

In his introduction to Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, Phillip Pullman writes that Lindsay conceived of this classic because “children liked eating and fighting, so they needed a story that put those things at the center of the action.”1 Indeed, there is much food to be found in children’s literature, from Lindsay’s Magic Pudding to Alice’s Wonderland cakes to Sendak’s Max who, after journeying all the way to the Land of the Wild Things and back, finds that his mother did leave dinner for him and “It was still hot.”2 Food is just plain fun. It is fun to write about and it is fun to read about. Food evokes sensuous descriptions that allow authors to douse their readers in delicious descriptive adjectives that rivet their attentions to the text despite their growling stomachs. Food is primal. It is not only one of life’s exquisite pleasures but it also happens to be necessary for survival. All audiences can relate. Because of its important role in life, food in literature is often put to great symbolic use. This is especially true in children’s literature where food can be used to reflect the primary themes of the text, including more complex adult ideas that may be either inappropriate or confusing for their readers. This essay examines three children’s literature texts – Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, and the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling – and analyses the different uses of food imagery in each story. The Wind in the Willows is a lovely story that centers on the pleasures of the domestic. In his book From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England, Colin Manlove writes:

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Montanari. 1994. The Culture of Food, 118; Pitte, Gastronomie française. 130. Pitte reports that one percent of the recipes in Taillevent’s 14th-century cookbook contain butter, while 55 percent of all recipes and 80 percent of sauce recipes in L.S.R.’s L’Art de bien traiter (1674) call for butter (130). 42 Mennell. 1996. All Manners of Food. 78, 43 Cited in Ory. 1998. Le Discours gastronomique français. 155. 44 Pitte. 1991. Gastronomie française. 130. 45 Dumas. 1946. Le Comte de Monte Cristo. 739. 46 Ibid., 739. 47 Proust. 1920. Le Côté de Guermantes. 500. 48 Ibid., 598. Sauce mousseline is a hollandaise sauce (egg yolks, butter, and a few drops of lemon juice) enriched with whipped cream; following tradition, Escoffier suggests serving it with poached fish or asparagus. Béarnaise sauce contains white wine, tarragon vinegar, shallots, crushed tarragon, egg yolks, and butter. 49 Blanche. 1928. Mes modèles. 217. 50 Brillat-Savarin. 1825. Physiologie du gout. 82. 51 Diderot et d’Alembert. 1751-1772. Encyclopédie, “Consommé.” 4.49. 52 Brillat-Savarin. 1825. Physiologie du gout. 81-82. 53 Diderot et d’Alembert. 1751-1772. Encyclopédie, “Bouilli.” 2.357. 54 Montanari. 1994. The Culture of Food. 22. 55 Ferguson. 2004. “Le Pot-au-feu.” 14. 56 Dumas. 1846. Petit dictionnaire de la cuisine. 141. 57 Published in its first incarnation from 1893-1940 and again from 1949-1956 (Mennell. 1996. All Manners of Food, 205). The April 1893 edition contained Charles Driessens’ lecture on pot-au-feu (Csergo, 1999. Pot-au-feu, 206). 58 Delecluze. 1828. Journal. 437. 59 Goncourt and Goncourt. 1959. Journal T.2: 38. 60 Taine. Notes 1867. sur Paris. 116. 61 Flaubert. 1870. Madame Bovary: “Les mets des restaurateurs, toutes ces nourritures épicées finissent par vous échauffer le sang et ne valent pas, quoi qu'on en dise, un bon pot-au-feu. J'ai toujours, quant à moi, préféré la cuisine bourgeoise, c'est plus sain!” (These chefs’ dishes, all of these spicy foods end up warming the blood and are not as good, whatever anyone says, as a good pot-au-feu. If you ask me, I’ve always preferred home cooking; it’s healthier!) 139-140. 62 Carantino. “Voyage en pot-au-feu.” 45. 63 Soup composed of root vegetables, herbs, and various types of meat. Without meat, sometimes served on fast days. Derived from the Spanish term olla (“Oille”, Émile Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française. My translation.). 64 Sévigné. 1696. Correspondance. 606. 65 Ibid., 610. 66 Pitte. 1991. Gastronomie française. 133. 67 Weiss. 1997. “The Ideology of the Pot-au-feu.” 108. 68 Rouff. 2002. The Passionate Epicure. 74. 69 Ibid,, 72.

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Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts “Do you really think so?” inquired the Rat seriously. “It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it very fine.”5

The above passage is both comedic and sweet, but the sheer profusion of food here and throughout the text forces a deeper reading. Wendy Katz describes The Wind in the Willows as being “an exceedingly domestic tale, and food as a sign of cosiness, plenty and cheer is much in evidence.”6 She asserts that “Breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners abound here, good fellowship and good food being synonymous.”7 Peter Hunt echoes Katz’s assessment when he writes that The Wind in the Willows is a story about friendship, home and security and that food is a symbolic reflection of these themes.8 For the Riverbankers, food showcases both a creature’s need for companionship but also Grahame’s Arcadian dream of domestic contentment. Indeed, the recurring themes of the text involve an individual’s need for not only community but also the comfort and physical/emotional security of home and a sense of belonging/identity. The Riverbankers must possess all of the above in order to be truly happy in Grahame’s imagined rural paradise. The aforementioned picnic scene with Rat’s gastronomic litany is a wonderful above-ground transition for Mole. Mole has forsaken his lovely, but lonely, shelter underground and soon decides to live by the river with Rat, most likely one of the most hospitable characters in all of literature. The sheer abundance of food in Rat’s listing underscores the welcoming environment of the River Bank. This is Mole’s new home and he is content. Home and the community and comfort it brings are of paramount importance in this world, but sometimes the animals, specifically Toad, forget this and take to wandering. All of the treks beyond the river bank, including the traveling in Toad’s caravan on The Open Road, commence with a sense of fun and excitement: “Poor Mole! The Life Adventurous was so new a thing to him, and so thrilling.”9 These manic emotions quickly change as the animals face scary and uncomfortable situations, start rethinking their initial impulse to leave, and begin missing the comfort of their homes: “ ‘I don’t talk about my river,’ replied the patient Rat. ‘You know I don’t Toad. But I think about it.’ He added pathetically, in a lower tone: ‘I think about it - all the time.’ ”10 In the end, all of the animals bitten by the travel bug return to their homes and are content in their society: “Then they got out their boat from the boat-house, sculled down the river home, and at a very late hour sat down to supper in their own cosy riverside parlor, to the Rat’s great joy and contentment.”11

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Happiness will not be found over the horizon. It sits at the dinner table in one’s own dining room. The travel bugs that bite Grahame’s characters and act as plot catalysts deserve some attention because they are also related to food symbolism. Manlove comments on these “wild urges” that sometimes seize the Riverbankers and what these desires might signify. He states that while a number of the animals dream of leaving their cozy abodes and exploring the wider world, …the whole book demonstrates that their variously wild urges are at root not as natural as their more domestic pleasures. And of course none of them in this fantasy is able to translate these sparkles in the blood into that alternative natural current: love, sex and children. All of the animals are hearty bachelors and there is not a female in sight (though the Otter has produced a baby from somewhere). After all, having women around makes the idea of ‘home’ a very different thing. 12

Katz mentions this lack of the female gender when she describes the “atmosphere” of the story as being “very ‘clubby’ and very male.”13 Food imagery can also be viewed in this context. The idea of food in children’s literature acting as physical symbol of more mature themes in the text appears to be a generally accepted idea in the realm of children’s literary criticism. Hunt writes: Certain aspects of adult life are not particularly or immediately relevant to child readers or, it must be said, to the child-in-the-adult (sexual activity being the most obvious example); these aspects tend to be addressed in children’s literature by replacing them with things that are relevant to children. Food is the most obvious choice for such a substitution.14

So while romantic love, sex, and children are almost nowhere to be found on the River Bank, food items and what food means are in abundance. Like sex, scrumptious snacks are physically fulfilling sources of shared pleasure that child and child-in-the-adult readers are able to understand. Conversely, in this context the lack of food would stand in for feelings of alienation, isolation and neglect. There is an excellent example of this type of food imagery during one of Toad’s many adventures. After his theft of an automobile and conviction of the crime, Toad is thrown in jail. There, isolated from society and separated from his home, Toad breaks down:

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Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts When Toad found himself immured in a dank and noisome dungeon, and knew that all the grim darkness of a medieval fortress lay between him and the outer world of sunshine and well-metalled high roads where he had lately been so happy, disporting himself as if he had brought up every road in England, he flung himself at the full length on the floor, and shed bitter tears, and abandoned himself to dark despair.15

One might assume that this attitude should be expected by those recently imprisoned, but the one aspect of this “dark despair” that most worries the gaoler’s daughter is Toad’s refusal of food. This behavior is unnatural and cause for concern. By denying food Toad chooses to wallow in his depressed state and refuses to be comforted. It is self-inflicted punishment. Toad makes the food, or lack thereof, a symbolic reflection of his current situation. Food means home, friendship and comfort. These fine feelings do not exist for Toad in his present state and he does not want them to because he feels he does not deserve them. He did not listen to his friends and he abandoned his home all for the thrill of driving a fast motorcar. This disturbing fast may have very well continued to a bad end if it were not for the gaoler’s daughter’s intervention on Toad’s behalf. She, who has an affinity for small animals and keeps many as pets, feels sorry for Toad and cannot “bear to see the poor beast so unhappy, and getting so thin!”16 She asks her father that she be allowed to assume his care. Her request is granted and the gaoler’s daughter’s first “errand of mercy”17 is to bring Toad food because food is necessary to improve both Toad’s physical and mental health: It was bubble and squeak, between two plates, and its fragrance filled the narrow cell. The penetrating smell of cabbage reached the nose of toad as he lay prostrate in his misery on the floor, and gave him the idea for a moment that perhaps life was not such a blank and deserted thing as he had imagined. But still he wailed and kicked his legs, and refused to be comforted. So the wise girl retired for a time, but, of course, a good del of the smell of hot cabbage remained behind, as it will do, and Toad, between his sobs, sniffed and reflected, and gradually began to think new and inspiring thoughts: of chivalry, and poetry, and deeds still to be done; of broad meadows, and cattle browsing in them, raked by sun and wind; of lichen-gardens, and straight herb borders, and warm snapdragon beset by bees; and of that comforting clink of dishes set down on the table at Toad Hall, and the scrape of chair-legs on the floor as every one pulled himself close to his work. The air of the narrow cell took on a rosy tinge; he began to think of his friends, and how they would surely be able to do something; of lawyers, and how they would have enjoyed his case, and what an ass he had been not to get in a few; and lastly, he thought of his own cleverness

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fingers, in one bite. Whimsy and artifice is their main attraction. Even when these do not resemble miniature structures on their own, their presentation on triple-tiered silver platters resembles a savoury cityscape.2

Although resonant metaphorically with Morris’ concerns this chapter attempts to unravel the literal connections between architectural and gastronomic hors d’œuvres.3 And, in parallel, it seeks to recover and reestablish the dialogue between architecture and cuisine.4

“Hors d’œuvres”: From architectural to culinary usage Hors d’œuvres is a slippery concept.5 Before its culinary subsumption, the term first appeared in the French language in 1596. Vitally, this initial appearance was made within in an architectural context: drawings of small constructions and other works to be built outside a main palace were labelled hors d’œuvres. Translating into English as “outside the work,” hors d’œuvres thus describes buildings of a particular kind.6 Commonplace even today in French architectural vocabularies, hors d’œuvres were built objects, detached from the main structure and set within the broader estate. A garden pavilion, for instance, would be one example of such an “architectural hors d’œuvres.” As they sometimes served functional purpose, these hors d’œuvres are not necessarily synonymous with follies.7 Hors d’œuvres were novel in that they were “excessive,” or superfluous, and usually extravagantly-designed. As will be seen, however, such “architectural hors d’œuvres” could also be found contained within a house. That is, some could be considered buildings within buildings. Early linking cuisine to architecture, some hors d’œuvres made provision for food storage and accommodated the elites’ luxurious lifestyles. “Architectural hors d’œuvres” were often venues for extravagant consumption.8 Around 1690, nearly a century after its architectural genesis, hors d’œuvres appeared in an explicitly culinary context and its definition enlarged to include the familiar “appetizer” in its scope. Willi Bode attributes the invention of this new hors d’œuvres type to French chefs then working in Russia.9 It is important to distinguish, however, that purveyors of fine food have always had an insatiable appetite for things small, tasty, and decorative. Long before the French, for example, the ancient Sybarites consumed fishy delicacies, the Russians served caviar as their zakuski and the Florentines arranged their antipasti. Then, as now, these luxuries attracted as indicators of refinement.10

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Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts But a toothpaste cap-screwer is never paid very much money, and poor Mr. Bucket, however hard he worked, and however fast he screwed on the caps, was never able to make enough to buy one-half of the things that so large a family needed. There wasn’t even enough money to but proper food for them all. The only meals they could afford were bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper. Sundays were a bit better. They all looked forward to Sundays because then, although they had exactly the same, everyone was allowed a second helping. 22

Dahl goes on to explain that the Buckets have enough food to survive but that all family members “went about from morning till night with a horrible empty feeling in their tummies.”23 The Buckets are so caring and so self-sacrificing that often Mr. and Mrs. Bucket deny themselves needed sustenance so that Charlie, a growing boy who felt the hunger “worst of all,” could eat their shares. The situation worsens in Chapter 10, which is aptly titled “The Family Begins to Starve.” The toothpaste factory goes bust and Mr. Bucket is out of a job. He starts shoveling snow, a career that is much less lucrative than toothpaste cap screwing since “it wasn’t enough to buy even a quarter of the food that seven people needed. The situation became desperate. Breakfast was a single slice of bread for each person now, and lunch maybe half a boiled potato.”24 Something is very wrong here. The sweet characters that the readers have grown to love are suffering from a lack of sustenance. The emotional nature of the characters and the food imagery are disconnected, and the result is anxiety-producing for the readers. The typical use of food as symbol, as it is used in Wind in the Willows, does not appear to be applicable here. More food confusion erupts once all of the Golden Tickets have been located and the cast of children and guardians are assembled at the gates of Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Here Dahl’s perverse food fun really begins. Manlove succinctly sums up the plot of the two Dahl novels James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in one sentence when he writes, “Where James eats a peach and travels over the sea. Here Charlie eats chocolate and goes round Mr. Wonka’s factory.”25 Indeed Charlie does go “round the factory” and it is during this trip inside this fabulous world that food takes on a rather sinister quality not seen in The Wind in the Willows. The main conduit of Dahl’s food imagery is candy. Candy is one of a child’s most favorite foods. It’s a seemingly benign treat despite possible tooth decay. Its sole purpose is sensual enjoyment rather than

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nourishment. Candy is simply…fun. In Wonka’s factory, however, candy means so much more. Wonka’s candy is clever. Wonka’s candy is creative. Wonka’s candy is unarguably the best in the world. It is the reason for his worldwide fame and brilliant financial success. The readers understand all of this because it has been explained to them early on in the text. What is not quite explained is that Wonka’s candy is dangerous. While Charlie and the others go “round Mr. Wonka’s factory,” candy is bait. It becomes the subject of secret traps that Wonka sets for the children. One by one, each child succumbs to a candy-related temptation that, somehow, preys upon what Dahl perceives as the flaw in that child’s character. Augustus Gloop, a gluttonous boy, is the first to go after overeating in Wonka’s candy garden and falling into a chocolate river only to be sucked up a pipe. Violet Beauregard, an obnoxious gum chewer, becomes a victim of one of Wonka’s gum prototypes that was not yet finished. Veruca Salt, a spoiled brat, is dumped into the garbage after demanding that her father purchase her a nut-cracking squirrel. Finally, Mike Teevee, rabid television watcher, is shrunken in size after making himself the subject of one of Wonka’s new candy distribution techniques. All fail to heed Wonka’s explicit warnings, give in to their selfish and hedonistic desires, and suffer the consequences as a result. For Kenneth Grahame’s Riverbankers, food sometimes stands in for romantic love, sexual fulfillment and family. In contrast, Roald Dahl’s candy concoctions are not so innocent. Here in Wonka’s Factory, candy is a sensuous temptation calling out to the children’s baser natures of gluttony and wildeyed desire, similarly to how the automobile called out to Toad. To succumb to the temptation of candy is to place personal gratification over the greater good of the community. It is greed without charity. It is sex without love. It is instant but empty gratification. It is an unmannered, ungrateful and undeserving child. It is a punishable offense and Wonka does punish, rather sadistically but also very satisfactorily. Only Charlie, a sweet boy who shows remarkable restraint considering that he is starving, is left uninjured at the end of this ethical obstacle course. His denial of easily available food because of a developed moral compass is the key. Restraint in the face of incredible temptation, a temptation that is more physically real for Charlie than any of the other children, is how Charlie survives. He does not bow to his basic nature but remains courteous and respectful throughout. This is Charlie’s and his family’s salvation from hunger. One inconsistency in this analysis is that Charlie would not even have been invited to the factory if he did not give in to his basic desires at the

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onset. The day before the factory tour, Charlie finds a one dollar bill on the ground. First making sure nobody in the area dropped it, he goes to a store, buys two Wonka bars, and pledges that he will bring the remaining money back to his starving family. Amazingly, the second candy bar contains Wonka’s Golden Ticket, the catalyst for the rest of the story’s plot. Rationalization of this tiny selfish action is easy. The boy is starving, he finds money on the street, the money becomes his to do with as he pleases, and so he feeds himself. Charlie is easily forgiven for this moment of weakness. The perfectly unselfish person would have brought the entirety of the sum home to purchase food for everyone, but Charlie is not perfect. Charlie is just a “good sensible loving child.”26 He is exactly the person Wonka has been searching for. It is only at the conclusion of the book that the readers come to understand the real meanings of both Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket contest and the Bucket home’s disturbing food imagery that appeared earlier in the text. Wonka, the creator of some of the most enjoyable and interesting candy in literature, is in sole possession of large amounts of food but has no family to share it with. Food imagery is as disconnected for his situation as it is for the Buckets’. The secret motivation for the Golden Ticket contest and Wonka bringing the children to the factory was to find an heir to inherit the factory. In the end, Wonka takes Charlie under his wing and the Buckets then have enough food to truly reflect their loving family. The food symbolism that appeared to be lost in the beginning of the story is now invoked with force. One could even read the entire plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a way of righting the initial food symbolism wrongness. As if to cement the symbolic correction, Dahl ends his tale with one last exchange concerning food. As Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe usher the rest of the Bucket family into the glass elevator so that they can all travel to the factory to live, Grandma Josephine, not understanding the nature her grandson’s newly inherited institution, asks Charlie the burning question: “Will there be anything to eat when we get there?” asked Grandma Josephine. “I’m starving! The whole family is starving!” “Anything to eat?” cried Charlie, laughing. “Oh you just wait and see!”27

J.K. Rowling uses food imagery to great effect in the Harry Potter novels. On one level Rowling’s descriptions of the various Wonka-style novelty foods and candies found in the wizard world - such as chocolate frogs that can really jump and canary creams that transform the eater into the song bird for just a few moments - are simply delightful and clever and

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fun. On a symbolic level Rowling uses food imagery as a mirror of Harry’s own maturation process. Interestingly, the symbolic meaning of foodstuffs and food preparation in the Harry Potter novels transforms as the series continues. They become much more layered and complex as Harry moves from a child’s worldview to that of an adult’s. Coming of age is a messy process and the food imagery reflects this messiness. Food symbolism in the texts transitions from the relatively simplistic reading of food as a token of friendship, home and security to the darker themes of addiction, abuse and obesity that illustrate the various vices that Harry begins to realize exist even in his trusted allies. Firstly, the type of food symbolism that appears in Wind and the Willows and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where food represents the domestic, can also be seen in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. This is especially true of the first two Harry Potter novels that take place when the protagonists are children ages 11 and 12 years old respectively. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, food imagery is very apparent and easily understood. Food is a central issue in the novels from the very beginning when we learn that although little Harry Potter is not technically starving at the hands of his aunt and uncle he is incredibly underfed both literally and emotionally. Harry’s relatives cannot stand him and make no effort to hide their disgust of who he is and what he represents…the not normal. They try their best to marginalize him in the family by making him sleep in the cupboard under the stairs, speaking to him as little as possible, and providing him only enough food to survive. While this is happening, the Dursley’s continually fawn over their own son Dudley, upon whom they thrust an abundance of material objects including all the food he can eat, which is quite a bit. Not surprisingly then, the first true exchange that takes place between Harry and the magical world in 11 years involves food and what food often represents in children’s literature. On his 11th birthday Harry is greeted by Hagrid, a person who in unmistakably part of the magical world, and presented with a squashed but homemade birthday cake. The cake is, of course, a food item that can feed him but also acts as a symbol of a world and hidden community where he is not only accepted and wanted but revered and honored as the “boy who lived.”28 After Harry’s return from his exile to the world in which he truly belongs, food and the meaning of food is continually invoked through the

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text. On the Hogwart’s Express Harry is first exposed to food only available to wizards and witches like chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans. It also is here where Harry meets his first and soon to be best friend Ron Weasley. The two bond over pumpkin pasties and magical sweets that Harry buys for them while on the train. Food here, like in The Wind in the Willows, is a symbol of friendship. Once they reach Hogwart’s there is more food to be had at the beginning of school year banquet. Rowling describes the Hogwart’s feast in a similar fashion to how Kenneth Grahame describes Rat’s picnic basket in The Wind and the Willows. She provides the readers with a complete listing of all available foodstuffs: Harry’s mouth fell open. The dishes before him were now piled with food. He had never seen so many things he liked to eat on one table: roast beef, roast chicken, pork chops and lamb chops, sausages, bacon and steak, boiled potatoes, roast potatoes, fries, Yorkshire pudding, peas, carrots, gravy, ketchup, and, for some strange reason, peppermint humbugs.29

Again, like Rat’s picnic basket, the long listing underscores the sheer abundance of food available to Harry at Hogwart’s and is a symbol of the place Harry will most feel at home. It is a stark comparison to Privet Drive. Rowling explains to the reader in the very next passage that “the Dursleys never exactly starved Harry, but he had never been allowed to eat as much as he liked.”30 It is apparent now that Harry will be fulfilled both physically and emotionally here at Hogwart’s. Hogwart’s, like the river bank, is a (mostly) hospitable environment and Harry, like Mole, is welcomed home in this new world with the presentation of food. In addition to the numerous feasts at Hogwart’s there are also many meals to be had at the Weasley’s home, affectionately called “The Burrow.” At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Harry is accepted into the Weasley clan. The Weasleys are routinely juxtaposed with the Dursleys as their opposites. The Weasleys are not a wealthy family and often have to make do with secondhand books and hand-me-down clothes, something that the Dursleys would have never tolerated for their son but was just fine for Harry. Also unlike the Dursleys they overflow with a sense of love and family that they extend towards Harry. Not surprisingly then the one type of material item that the Weasleys do not need for is food. There is always more than enough at family dinners. No one ever leaves the table hungry.31

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Another wonderful example of the comforting nature of food in the Harry Potter novels concerns the Dementors. Guards of the Azkaban Prison, these hideous creatures thrive on human spirit by sucking happiness from their victims and leaving the poor people with only feelings of deep despair and memories of sadder times. Extended exposure to the Dementors drives most insane. Some are more susceptible to the Dementors’ effect than others. The unhappier of a past one has, the more one is vulnerable to the Dementors’ power. Harry, whose parents were murdered by Voldemort when he was a baby, is especially “delicate.” In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry “hears” his parent’s last screams of horror before they were killed whenever a Dementor turns towards him. Harry often faints as well. This outcome is mild compared to what can happen. If uncontrolled, a Dementor will perform the Dementors Kiss. Essentially, the Dementor sucks the soul from a victim, leaving him alive but having “no sense of self anymore, no memory, no…anything. There’s no chance of recovery. [He will] just – exist. As an empty shell. And [his] soul is gone forever…lost.”32 While there is no cure for those that have endured the Dementors Kiss, there is some treatment for general Dementor exposure. That treatment is the ingestion of chocolate. After Harry first meets a Dementor on the Hogwarts Express, Professor Lupin gives Harry the chocolate remedy. Harry “took a bite and to his great surprise felt warmth spreading suddenly to the tips of his fingers and toes.”33 Incidentally, the physical and emotional healing powers of chocolate are also featured in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “Suddenly, Mr. Wonka, who was sitting on Charlie’s other side, reached down into the bottom of the boat, picked up a large mug, dipped it into the river, filled it with chocolate, and handed it to Charlie. “Drink this,” he said. “It’ll do you good! You look starved to death! Then Mr. Wonka filled a second mug and gave it to Grandpa Joe. “You too,” he said. “You look like a skeleton! What’s the matter? Hasn’t there been anything to eat in your house lately?” “Not much,” said Grandpa Joe. Charlie put the mug to his lips, and as the rich warm creamy chocolate ran down his throat into his empty tummy, his whole body from head to toe began to tingle with pleasure, and a feeling of intense happiness spread over him.”34

In both Charlie’s and Harry’s worlds, chocolate makes the eater feel warm, comforted and happy. For Charlie, the warmth and happiness that eating chocolate brings may simply be the result of a finally full tummy. For Harry, chocolate’s magic is much deeper. Chocolate is the antidote for Dementor exposure. It breaks the victim’s depressive emotional cycle by

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comforting and reassuring the eater. Soon, all does not seem nearly as bad as it did just a few moments ago. Chocolate triggers other memories. The eaters remember that they are alive, that they have a distinct identity and that they belong to a larger community. The feelings of depression and isolation cease and the Dementor’s effect is nullified. Here we are reminded of food cures in the Wind in the Willows too. While the cure for toads despairing in prison is buttered toast, the cure for wizards despairing because of Dementors is chocolate. The Harry Potter text is a continuous story of a boy’s coming of age over the course of, what will be, seven individual novels, with each novel equaling a year’s worth of life experiences and an academic year. They begin with Harry’s 11th birthday, and Rowling has indicated that they will conclude around his 18th, thereby encompassing the growth of the child through adolescence and into adulthood. Many critics have already commented on this particular aspect of the text’s construction, including Donna C. Woodford, who refers to Harry’s maturation process as his disillusionment.35 As readers we see the magical world through Harry. As Harry matures, we notice that what at first seemed a paradise compared to the Dursley’s home continues to be a place of love and community but also of life-threatening danger, political corruption, prejudice and discrimination, as well as general pettiness and cruelty that is not much different from the Muggle world. In effect, the magical world become less stable and reassuring as the characters grow. The same can be said for food. The symbol of food grows in complexity as the protagonist comes of age. Food continues to serve as a symbol of love and acceptance but becomes tainted as Harry and Harry’s perception of the magical world matures. The first real example of this concerns food preparation. In the first three novels food at Hogwart’s just appears on empty plates in the large dining hall. Only in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire do we learn that house-elves are responsible for all meals in the castle as well as the cleaning. Hermione, who first encounters a house-elf earlier in the book, is horrified at hearing this from Nearly Headless Nick: Hermione had knocked over her golden goblet. Pumpkin juice spread steadily over the tablecloth staining, several feet of white linen orange, but Hermione paid no attention. “There are house-elves here?” she said, staring, horror-struck, at Nearly Headless Nick. “Here at Hogwart’s?”

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“Certainly,” said Nearly Headless Nick, looking surprised at her reaction. “The largest number in any dwelling in Britain, I believe. Over a hundred.” “I’ve never seen one!” said Hermione. “Well they hardly ever leave the kitchen by day, do they?” said Nearly Headless Nick. “They come out at night to do a bit of cleaning…see to the fires and so on…I mean, you‘re not supposed to see them are you? That’s the mark of a good house-elf isn’t it, that you don’t know it’s there?” Hermione stared at him. “But they get paid?” she said. “They get holidays don’t they? And – sick leave, and pensions, and everything?” Nearly Headless Nick chortled so much that his ruff slipped and his head flopped off, dangling on the inch of so of ghostly skin and muscle that still attached it to his neck. “Sick leave and pensions?” he said, pushing his head back onto his shoulders and securing it once more with his ruff. “House-elves don’t want sick leaves and pensions!” Hermione looked down at her hardly touched place of food, then put her knife and fork down upon it and pushed it away from her. “Oh c’mon ‘Er-my-knee,” said Ron, accidentally spraying Harry with bits of Yorkshire pudding. “Oops – sorry, ‘Arry – “He swallowed. “You won’t get them sick leave by starving yourself!” “Slave labor,” said Hermione, breathing hard through her nose. “That’s what made this dinner. Slave labor.” And she refused to eat another bite.36

This is the first time in the series where a character refuses food that is offered based on principle. (Harry and his friends often refuse to eat Hagrid’s food because of his lacking culinary skills – but try to hide this refusal from him so as not to cause offense.) The feast, formerly a familiar and comforting ritual, becomes suspect because the food production may be unethical. For Hermione at least, Hogwart’s is no longer a paradise but a corrupt institution that uses what she refers to as slave labor. She pits herself against the institution by first going on a mini hunger strike and then becoming an activist by founding S.P.E.W (Society for the Protection of Elfish Welfare.) Woodford describes Harry’s disillusionment as taking place in the following text, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Hermione is always a bit more advanced than Harry in both academics and emotional maturity. Her disillusionment begins here in Book 4 at the dinner table. Butterbeer is another example of how the nature of food changes as the story progresses. Harry drinks butterbeer for the first time in Harry Potter and the Prisoner is Azkaban after he, Hermione, and Ron take refuge from

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Above all, the Broken Column House exemplifies another type of excessive architectural hors d’œuvre: a garden folly, albeit one that functions. One visitor to Monville’s Desert de Retz left particularly impressed: celebrated French chef Antonin Careme (1783-1833).22 And, in his pastry cooking drawings and picturesque pastries, Careme would fuse architecture and cuisine.

Fusion of interior and exterior hors d’œuvres: Antonin Careme’s pastry cooking drawings The dialogue between architecture and edible hors d’œuvres is multifaceted. For Careme, pastry cooking was a culinary and picturesque, architectural art. Indeed, Careme had learnt drafting from the architect, Charles Percier.23 Under Percier’s tutledge, Careme developed a keen interest in picturesque gardens and ruins. This preoccupation led him to study the architectural embellishment of, for instance, Paris and St Petersburg. In Russia and France, architectural hors d’œuvres often took the form of garden follies, as exemplified by those excessively luxurious constructions at Peterhof, Versailles and the Desert de Retz. Although follies are often only decorative, they can be interpreted as functioning to educate the public about the culinary arts. Eventually, Careme would publish two volumes on architecture.24 The celebrity French cook soon adopted an architectural approach to the design of the pastry constructions, studying the history of foreign foods and architecture. Careme’s cooking drawings were no less elaborate than the pastries they represented. His depiction of food hors d’œuvres might easily be mistaken to represent exterior architectural hors d’œuvres or follies. Careme published his drawings of pastry creations or, as he called them, extraordinaires, in a book entitled Le patissier pittoresque (first published in 1815 and then in 1842).25 These visual templates or rustic “place mats” instruct a cook or architect in the decoration of food or architecture. Careme’s pastry constructions are at once food and architectural hors d’œuvres, imitating and transforming functional “follies” into miniature function-less palaces. The most direct example of Careme’s edible metamorphosis is his pastry drawing of an Athenian ruin (Ruine d’Athenes) (see figure 3.4).

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Twelve, Grimmauld Place in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Before this most adult wizards and witches, Snape being the notable exception, have all been very strong and stable characters whether they fall on the side of good or evil. It is during the 4th, 5th, and 6th novels that the adult characters become much more ambiguous. In these texts Harry encounters the likes of Ludo Bagman, who is willing to help Harry cheat in the Tri-wizard tournament, and Rita Skeeter, the sneaky journalist who is an unregistered animagus. Harry also learns about the darker side of his father’s humor, gets a glimpse of Professor Snape’s sad childhood and even feels a little pity for the young Voldemort. Sibyl Trelawney, Mundungus Fletcher and Sirius Black are also examples of this new type. None are evil, yet their characters are not unblemished. Sibyl is a fraudulent seer, except on two important occasions. Mundungus continues to be a petty thief and con-artist despite being a member of the Order of the Phoenix. Sirius quickly becomes discontented and bored with his role as housekeeper and takes unreasonable personal and ultimately selfdestructive risks to be a part of the action. All are not perfect people but rather good characters with notable flaws. Their respective abuses of alcohol in the novels illustrate this point. Their addictions highlight their own ambiguities. Now the Harry Potter world no longer easily separates into good and evil. Like the symbol of food’s presence, the symbol of food’s absence becomes more complicated as the series continues. As described before, Harry’s treatment at the hands of his aunt and uncle, including their refusal to truly feed Harry properly, simply emphasizes Harry’s exile from the Wizard world by employing evocative imagery. Later in the story, food deprivation gains more layered symbolic meanings as the protagonists mature. The relationship between ghosts and food is particularly problematic. Food is a thing of the living and ghosts, creatures that have died, do not require the ingestion of calories to maintain life. Yet, ghosts want to eat. They desire that earthly pleasure that no longer pertains to their existence. We are first introduced to this relationship in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Harry, Ron and Hermione attend Nearly Headless Nick’s Deathday Party. Here the three living humans are first exposed to ghosts’ favorite food choices, anything putrid and rotting: “Look, food!” said Ron On the other side of the dungeon was a long table, also covered in black velvet. They approached it eagerly but the next moment had stopped in their tracks, horrified. The smell was quite disgusting. Large rotten fish

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Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts were laid on handsome silver platters; cakes burned charcoal-black, were heaped on salvers; there was a great maggoty haggis, a slab of cheese covered in furry green mold and, in pride of place, an enormous grey cake in the shape of a tombstone, with tar-like icing forming the words, Sir Nicholas De Mimsy-Porpington Died 31st October, 1492 Harry watched, amazed, as a portly ghost approached the table, crouched low, and walked through it, his mouth held wide so that it passed through one of the stinking salmon. “Can you taste it if you walk through it?” Harry asked him. “Almost,” said the ghost sadly, and he drifted away.42

Food is there, but ghosts cannot have it. It is denied to them because of their nature. Food is a requirement and physical pleasure of the living only. Ghosts, as dead things, cannot literally eat despite their attempts at maintaining this ritual of a past existence. Instead of eating, they glide though the rotting food trying to catch an almost taste like trying to relive a memory. Jann Lacoss comments on this relationship between ghosts and their gastronomy in her essay titled “Of Magicals and Muggles: Reversals and Revulsions at Hogwarts:” Ghosts also have distinct foodways, and the cuisine at Nick’s deathday party depicts a reversal. Ghosts are the opposite of humans: noncorperal and nonliving. Their food appropriately reflects this opposition.43

The question of ghosts is then dropped until the conclusion of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Harry, hoping that perhaps the recently deceased Sirius will return as a spirit, confronts Nearly Headless Nick about what it means to be a ghost. Nick explains: “I was afraid of death,” said Nick. “I chose to remain behind. I sometimes wonder whether I oughtn’t to have…Well, that is neither here nor there…in fact, I am neither here nor there…” He gave a small sad chuckle. “I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead.44

Ghosts then are not simply dead, they are lost. They are caught between this world and the next and belong to neither because they were afraid to move on to the next stage of the human experience. Despite this, they try their best to include the conventions and pleasures of their former society in attempts to recapture a small part of their previous existence. Their use of food reflects their precarious state. Ghosts are separated from

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approach, however, eventually exceeded the limits of cuisine. Novelist and food writer Marion Halligan observes: Careme’s architecture turned creams and jellies into classical temples and country house follies…These great set pieces were so elaborate and costly that certain miserly rich men made their chefs present the same ones at dinner after dinnerņtheir servants were supposed to dissuade guests from eating them. This is food as unlike food as possible not meant to be eaten but only admired.28

Careme’s “set pieces” were either made for aristocratic Sybarites or meagre ascetics. As they convey architectural information, these “set pieces” or extraordinaires qualify as graphic representations of hors d’œuvre confections, as opposed to picturesque assemblages of food structures. Allen Weiss identified the pervasiveness of garden imagery within Careme’s work. Indeed, the chef himself revealed: “I would have ceased being a pastry chef if I blindly gave in to my natural taste for the picturesque genre, as I conceive of it for the embellishment of the parks of princes and for private gardens.”29 Revealing this passion, Careme carefully studied the architectural plates at the cabinet des estampes of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Weiss argues: [Careme was i]nspired by Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola’s five orders of architectureņTuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Compositeņhis spun-sugar creations in the form of pavilions, rotundas, temples, towers, fortresses, mills, hermitages, and ruins of all sorts were created in the greatest diversity of styles: Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Russian, Polish, Venetian, Chinese, Irish, Gaelic, and Egyptian. All this was finally combined in an imaginative melange whose results transgressed the historical limits of both architecture and cuisine.30

Careme’s “imaginative melange” of architecture and cuisine celebrated ancient Sybaritic myths concerning excessive luxury. These, in turn, underpinned his career as a both a cook and as an architect. With respect to the latter pursuit, Weiss assesses Careme’s various design proposals for Paris as being: as much in keeping with the great buildings and constructions for public festivals, both royal and revolutionaryņutopian architectural fantasies such as those of Etienne-Louis Boullée, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, and JeanJacques Lequeuņas it is with the art of pastry decoration.31

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picking up Harry at the Dursley’s knowing that Dudley would eat it. The prank is funny because like Crabbe and Goyle, Dudley is a disgusting character, but the rationalization of the twins is just a little malicious: “It isn’t funny!” Mr. Weasley shouted. “That sort of behavior seriously undermines wizard-Muggle relations! I spend half my life campaigning against the mistreatment of Muggles, and my own sons…” “We didn’t give it to him because he’s a Muggle!” said Fred indignantly. “No, we gave it to him because he’s a great bullying git,” said George.46

There is no noble motivation here. In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince a love potion hidden inside a box of chocolates intended for Harry but consumed by Ron leads to violence. Ron is overcome with obsessive love for Romilda Vane and actually punches Harry, whom he believes is making fun of her, as a result. The readers understand that this is a very serious situation because Rowling has already provided us with numerous warnings about love potions. The chocolate scene occurs after we learn about the disastrous consequences of the love potion Merope used on Tom Riddle, which includes the birth of Voldemort as well as her own death, and Professor Slughorn’s explicit warning in his advanced potions class: “Amortentia doesn’t really create love, of course. It is impossible to manufacture or imitate love. No, this will simply cause a powerful infatuation or obsession. It is probably the most dangerous and powerful potion in this room – oh yes,” he said, nodding gravely at Malfoy and Nott, both of whom were smirking skeptically. “When you have seen as much of life as I have, you will not underestimate the power or obsessive love.”47

Ron is cured of his obsessive love only to become the victim of a second and more dangerous hidden potion moments later when he drinks poisoned mead and almost dies. The reasoning behind this hidden potion is clear even if the intended victim is in question. Someone planted the potion hoping for the drinker’s death. The motivations and the results of hidden potions in food moves from noble to malicious to evil as the series continues, just as Harry’s perceptions of his world change from the childish view of good and evil to an understanding of how ethically messy the magical world really is. The increasing danger of eating mirrors the increasing danger in Harry’s world. The growing complexity of food is not limited to the magical world. Muggle-food relationships also change. In the beginning of the Harry Potter series, the Dursley’s give their son Dudley everything he asks for, including food. This is an expression of love and affection – however

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misguided it may be. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone Dudley is described as looking: “a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large pink face, not much neck, small, watery blue eyes and thick blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick fat head. Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel – Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.”48

There is no mistaking that Dudley is a fat child. Dudley is also a bully and spoiled brat consumed with the attainment of material items. (He is an amalgam of all of Dahl’s nasty Golden Ticket-finding children minus the gum chewing.) Nonetheless, the Dursley’s and their relationship to food in the first three novels are in keeping with the classic food-equals-love comparison. The Dursley’s ply their son with food because they love him. The Dursley’s relationship to Dudley does not alter – they continue to love and make excuses for their child throughout the series – but their relationship to food does change. At the beginning of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire we learn that: “no matter how much Aunt Petunia wailed that Dudley was big boned, and that his poundage was really puppy fat, and that he was a growing boy who needed plenty of food, the fact remained that the school outfitters didn’t stock knickerbockers big enough for him anymore,”49

and that Dudley, “had reached roughly the size of a young killer whale.” 50 Food at the Dursley household goes topsy-turvy. Now Aunt Petunia is forced to follow the school’s prescribed diet and restricts Dudley’s daily caloric intake to fruits and vegetables. He is only allowed a small grapefruit quarter for breakfast. Of course Aunt Petunia gives Harry an even smaller portion than Dudley’s in an effort to maintain some kind of consistency of favoritism, but Harry’s food experience at the Dursley’s has changed as well. After Harry dutifully eats his bit of fruit he runs upstairs for another helping of one of four birthday cakes that he received from his friends over the summer. After four years in the magical world Harry’s food supply increases by four and now his friends are feeding him more physically and emotionally than Aunt Petunia is feeding Dudley. The situation has completely changed. It is like some kind of food karma. Dudley may not be satisfied with this ironic turn of events, but the reader, most assuredly, is.

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Kenneth Grahame, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling have written three wildly popular texts for children where food and what food signifies play a large role in the understanding of the deeper themes of the novels. These stories utilize food imagery that spins off the popular motifs of food as a symbol for the domestic and food as a symbol of pleasure to different effects. The Wind in the Willows, with its packed picnic baskets and well stocked kitchens, is a lovely and nostalgic story about home and the various types of enjoyments that home brings into one’s life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory uses similar food imagery in a very different way. While the Riverbankers’ meals represent community and security, the Bucket Family’s meager and almost non-existent portions are downright disturbing. The story also includes a perverse re-imagining of food as a tasty temptation that leads to a sticky end for selfish children that is satisfying, if not a little sadistic. Food symbolism in the Harry Potter novels begins with food as a symbol of friendship, home and security but becomes more complex and ambiguous in nature as the series continues. In this case, the food imagery reflects the protagonist’s emotional growth from an innocent child to an experienced adult. In all three texts, food functions as an ideal physical symbol for many aspects of the human condition that young readers can read and easily digest with delight because, as Norman Lindsay said, children have always “liked eating.”

Works Cited Dahl, Roald. 1964.Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Reprint, New York: Puffin Books. 1988. Grahame, Kenneth. 1908. The Wind in the Willows. Reprint, New York; Simon & Schuster. 1989. Hunt, Peter. 1996. “‘Coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssan dwichespottedmeatgingebeer-lemonadesodawater….’ Fantastic food in the books of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K Jerome, H E Bates and other Bakers of the Fantasy England,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7 1: 5-22. —. 1994. The Wind in the Willows: A Fragmented Arcadia. New York: Twayne Publishers. Katz, Wendy. 1980. “Some uses of food in children’s literature,” Children’s Literature in Education 11: 192-199. Lacoss, Jann. 2002. “Of Magicals and Muggles: Reversals and Revulsions at Hogwarts.” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a

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Literary Phenomenon. Lana A. Whited, ed. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Manlove, Colin. 2003. From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions. Pullman, Phillip. 2004. Introduction to The Magic Pudding, by Norman Lindsay. 1918; Reprint, New York: The New York Review Children’s Collection. Sendak, Maurice. 1963. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: HarperCollins. Rowling, J.K. 1998. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic. —. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Scholastic. —. 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Scholastic. —. 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic. —. 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic. —. 1998. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic. Woodford, Donna C. 2004. "Disillusionment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review 54: 63-72.

Notes 1

Pullman, Phillip. 1918. Introduction to The Magic Pudding, by Norman Lindsay Reprint, New York: The New York Review Children’s Collection. 2004, xi. 2 Sendak, Maurice. 1963. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: HarperCollins. 3 Manlove, Colin. 2003. From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England. Christchurch, New Zealand: Cybereditions. 50. 4 Grahame. 1989: 10. 5 Grahame, Kenneth. 1908. The Wind in the Willows. Reprint, New York: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1989: 8. 6 Katz, Wendy. 1980. “Some Uses of Food in Children’s Literature.” Children’s Literature in Education 11: 193-194. 7 Ibid. 8 Hunt, Peter. 1996. “‘Coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichesspo ttedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater…’ Fantastic Food in the books of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K. Jerome, H.E. Bates and Other Bakers of the Fantasy England.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7: 11. 9 Ibid., 31.

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Ibid, 33. Ibid., 41-42. 12 Manlove. 2003: 51. 13 Katz. 1980: 194. 14 Hunt 1996: 93. 15 Grahame. 1989: 142. 16 Ibid., 143. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 145. 19 Ibid., 146. 20 Ibid., 147. 21 Ibid., 255. 22 Dahl, Roald. 1964. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Reprint, New York: Puffin Books, 1988: 7. 23 Ibid., 7. 24 Ibid., 44. 25 Manlove. 2003: 105. 26 Dahl. 1988: 157. 27 Ibid. 162. 28 Rowling, J.K. 1998. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. New York: Scholastic. 17. 29 Ibid., 123. 30 Ibid. 31 Rowling, J.K 1998. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. New York: Scholastic. 24-41. 32 Rowling, J.K 1999. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic. 247. 33 Ibid. 86. 34 Dahl .1988: 89. 35 Woodford, Donna C. “Disillusionment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” Topic: The Washington and Jefferson College Review 54 (2004): 63-72. 36 Rowling, J.K. 2000. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. New York: Scholastic. 181-182. 37 Rowling. 1999. Prisoner. 201. 38 Ibid., 246-248. 39 Rowling, J.K 2003. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York: Scholastic. 337-349. 40 Rowling. 2000. Goblet. 536. 41 Rowling. 2003. Phoenix. 475. 42 Rowling. 1998. Chamber. 133. 43 Jann Lacoss, “Of Magicals and Muggles: Reversals and Revulsions at Hogwarts,” in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives and a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lana A. Whited. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. 2002: 72. 44 Rowling. 2003. Phoenix. 861. 11

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Saki. 1904. “Reginald at the Carlton,” in Reginald. London: Methuen. Singley, Paulette. 2004. “Hard to Swallow: Mortified Geometry and Abject Form,” edited by Jamie Horwitz and Paulette Singley. Eating Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press. Tannahill, Reay. 1973. Food in History. London: Eyre Methuen, Viollet-le-Duc, Eugene Emmanuel. 1875. Description du Chateau de Coucy. Paris: Imprimeries Reunies. Young, Carolin. 2002. Apples of Gold in Setting of Silver: Stories of Dinner as a Work of Art. New York: Simon & Schuster. Young, Hilary. 2002. “Porcelain for the Dessert,” in Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style, Phillipa Glanville and Hilary Young, eds. London: V & A Publications. Weiss, Allen. 1998. Unnatural Horizons: Paradox and Contradictions in Landscape Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Notes 1

Saki, “Reginald at the Carlton,” in Reginald, 1904; and also quoted in Arnauld Malgorn’s Hors d’œuvre: Froids et chauds, potages, 1998. 2 Morris, Mark. 2001. “Architecture, Yum!,” in Room 5: 41. 3 I am grateful to my partner and colleague Christopher Vernon for his encouragement and support. John Dixon Hunt, Michel Baridon, Michael Levine, Darra Goldstein and Marco Frascari also provided helpful insights into my research. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Quantitative Gastronomy, First International Conference, Ecole Nationale d’Ingenieurs des Travaux Agricoles de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (May, 2006); Place, Taste and Sustenance: The Social Spaces of Food and Agriculture, Annual Meeting of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society, Boston University (June, 2006); and Panorama to Paradise, XXIVth International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, Adelaide (September 2007). 4 On the connections between architecture and cuisine see Marco Frascari, “Semiotica ab Edendo, Taste in Architecture,” in Eating Architecture, 2004; and The Architect, the Cook and Good Taste, eds. Petra Hagen Hodgson and Rolf Toyka, 2007. 5 Paulette Singley considers the term “hors’d’œuvres” but only metaphorically as a sub-theme in architecture. See “Hard to Swallow: Mortified Geometry and Abject Form,” in Eating Architecture, 2004, 353. On the connections between art and the hors’d’œuvre see Richard Artschwager, 2005. Hors d’œuvre: Ordre Et Desordres De La Nourriture Exposition Du 9 Octobre 2004 Au 13 Fevrie.

AT THE CORE OF THE GIVING TREE’S SIGNIFYING APPLES LISA ROWE FRAUSTINO

The image of the tree, firmly implanted in the earth that feeds it, but rising up into the air where it unfolds its crown, has stirred man’s imagination from time immemorial. It shades and shelters all living things, and feeds them with its fruit, which hang on it like stars. —Erich Neumann

Roland Barthes in “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” points out that food does more than nourish the body: “it signifies.”1 Mary Anne Schofield calls food “a metaphoric matrix” of “the most basic of human needs and desires.”2 In fact, “one could say that an entire ‘world’ (social environment) is present in and signified by food.”3 Of course, to a fetus the entire world is the mother’s womb that provides food through her lifeblood. Anna Freud has theorized: “The image of food and the mother-image remain merged into one until the child is weaned from the breast”4; hence, food is mother, a likely signification even for infants bottle-fed while cradled by her familiar body. This early association between food and mother continues to shape the child’s world view, and ultimately contributes to gendered social structures. “One of the most significant domains of meaning embodied in food centers on the relation between the sexes,” says anthropologist Carole M. Counihan.5 Female “rule over food”6 goes back to the Stone Age, when women’s gathering tasks “provided 80 percent of the nourishment,”7 and it is well known that women today continue to do the majority of meal

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preparations for their families. Marjorie DeVault has found that even in egalitarian families where men do the cooking and housekeeping, they mostly depend on their wives to tell them what to do, maintaining female “responsibility for feeding.”8 Multidisciplinary scholars have studied the formation of gender role patterns and published their findings to the point where it is now common knowledge that children are socialized from birth by parents, community, other children, and a barrage of messages from the media, entertainment, billboards—cues for gender performance are all around. One highly influential mode of inculturation is children’s literature, especially picture books for the very young, with images as well as words to convey messages both overt and implicit. In a landmark 1971 study, Alleen Pace Nilsen famously found a “cult of the apron”9 in picture books that depicted women, and more recent studies continue to show most picture book women in traditional gender roles.10 From the time parents read stories to the lapchild, through the school years of reading lessons, and until the grown-up child completes the circle of reading to her own children, picture books contribute to what sociologist Marjorie L. DeVault calls in Feeding the Family “a socially produced sense of appropriate gender relations, a sense that certain activities are associated with the very fundamental categories ‘man’/‘husband’/‘father; and ‘woman’/ ‘wife’/‘mother.’”11 Many popular picture books promote “a cultural definition of ‘woman’ that includes caring activity and the work of feeding.”12 To illustrate, this essay closely examines how Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree feeds children a “metaphoric matrix” of patriarchal gender ideology, beginning with the signifying apple on the cover. As of 2000, The Giving Tree had sold around 6 million hardcover copies since its publication in 1964,13 and has never been issued in less profitable paperback. Its widespread influence on children invites careful scrutiny.

No Ordinary Tree At first glance, the jacket image that introduces readers to The Giving Tree seems simple, as picture book images often do, but cultural complexities always lurk between the covers. If Wendy R. Katz is correct in saying, “Food may be, in fact, the sex of children’s literature,”14 then we are looking at an intimate relationship here. From a bright green tree, its trunk slightly arched like a back, its lowest branch drawn to resemble an arm, a red apple drops toward the outstretched arms of a small human

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child. The tree gives an apple, a child receives. Let us hold that thought for later and open the book. The only color appears on the cover. Silverstein’s story begins thus, with line breaks indicating a turn of page, each sparely illustrated by black pen-and-ink line drawings (italics are mine, and no page numbers are cited throughout this essay because picture book texts do not use page numbers): Once there was a tree… and she loved a little boy. And every day the boy would come and he would gather her leaves and make them into crowns and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples. 15

While many picture books are written and illustrated in such a way that any young reader may take the subject position of the child protagonist, The Giving Tree closes that option by using gender-specific nouns and pronouns. Obviously, he and she behave in traditionally sex-typed ways from the start, with the female tree engaged in loving and the male engaging in actions that, we can infer, provide evidence of her love: she allows him to gather her leaves, make them into a crown, play king of the forest, climb on her, swing from her, and—most poignantly, given our food metaphor—eat apples that we know from the cover must be hers, though Silverstein omits the possessive pronoun here. Perhaps her apples would make his cannibalistic consumption of her flesh too conspicuous, as we see two cores dropping from the tree, where the boy hides in the leaves, undrawn. Interestingly enough, in her study of preschool and kindergarten student storytelling, Counihan notes that “boys more often use food symbols for aggression and violence through images of devouring, while girls more often use them for parental identification through food tasks and feeding.”16 Silverstein reflects this. She loves, he eats. At any rate, she is no ordinary tree, given her emotive and nurturing abilities. The Giving Tree bears fruit, apples, symbols of fertility, of abundance. So, who is she? What is she about?

SOME LIKE IT HOT: CLASS, GENDER AND EMPIRE IN THE MAKING OF MULLIGATAWNY SOUP MODHUMITA ROY

Then jungles, fakers, dancing girls, prickly heat, Shawls, idols, durbars, brandy-pawny; Rupees, clever jugglers, dust-storms, slipper’d feet, Rainy season, and mulligatawny. —Curry and Rice on Forty Plates

“We discovered Lake Nyassa a little before noon of the 16th of September, 1859,” records Dr. Livingstone. After a gruelling forty-day trek, on October 6th, 1859, he arrived back on the ship “in a somewhat exhausted condition.”1 The exhaustion, it turns out, was caused not so much from the long march to the sea, but due to the food the cook had prepared. “We had taken a little mulligatawny paste, for making soup, in case of want of time to cook other food,” he tells us. The cook, instead of using “a couple of spoonful” had used it rather rashly, resulting in a “soup [that] tasted rather hot.”2 Although boiled rice was added to it to counter the excessive use of the paste, “in consequence of the overdose, we were delayed several days in severe suffering.”3 The irony of Livingstone’s condition is worth noting: the British in Madras often turned to mulligatawny before and after meals as a digestive and it was considered by some a trustworthy remedy for “sick headaches.” From its humble “origin” of “pepper water” (from the Tamil milagu tanni), mulligatawny seems to have traveled around the globe, and across time— from Dr. Livingstone’s meals on his African trip in the 1850’s to the “Soup Nazi” of the popular American television sitcom, Seinfeld. While aficionados of the show may recall Kramer’s craving for “a hot bowl of

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tree’s gender. (Most of the Judeo-Christian believers I know have firm opinions about the sex of their deities.) However, the text does support an exegetical reading of a different sort. The most primal image of motherhood is that of feeding a child, and Silverstein’s tree gives the boy none other than her apples, those round fruits reminiscent of breasts and, to those of us raised in the days of New Criticism, a signifier of the fall of man. Of course that fall was the fault of Eve, the first mother (because she bit the apple and gained sexual appetite—wow, maybe food is the sex of children’s literature!). God tells Eve in Genesis 3:16, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

Thus the tree represents not Christ’s sacrificial love of man—because Jesus (though nailed to a cross of wood) is no stump in the end, after all— but God’s curse on woman. With her leaves made into a crown for her little “king of the forest,” this female all-giving tree exists to serve the very patriarchy embodied in and perpetuated by Judeo-Christian faith. By the way, Shel Silverstein, or “Uncle Shelby” as he sometimes called himself in his children’s writings, got his big career break in Playboy magazine. (Knowing what I know about the significations of apples, I can’t help but see a horny cartoon granny’s withered breasts as a palimpsest of the pair of apple cores the boy throws down from the tree.) Before Playboy, Silverstein cartooned for Pacific Stars and Stripes during the Korean War. Many parents would be shocked to learn that he wrote “I Got Stoned and I Missed It” along with many other famous songs, including Johnny Cash’s classic “A Boy Named Sue.” A People magazine obituary upon Silverstein’s death in 1999 quotes Hugh Hefner as calling Silverstein a Renaissance Man. He was definitely a man’s man. In my view, then, The Giving Tree doesn’t represent God’s love or Mother Nature so much as she represents what many view as the nature of mothers, the culturally defined “good” mother found in child-rearing manuals such as the one its official web site claims is “second in sales only to the Bible”—Dr. Spock’s “‘good’ mother who is ever present, allproviding, inexhaustibly patient and tactful, and who anticipates the child’s every need.”18 What other female would show a lifetime of what The Giving Tree’s book jacket describes as “serene acceptance of another’s [lack of] capacity to love in return”? Not only does the tree give literally everything she has, but she is also ever present: rooted in one place, the quintessential stay-at-home mother recommended by Dr. Spock before he revised his view of working mothers in response to feminist

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attacks during the 1970s. As Carolyn Daniel has generalized about mothers in children’s books, “The powerlessness and subordinated status of her socially assigned domestic role is acknowledged and accepted as a natural aspect of her gender.”19 Some view The Giving Tree as a parody of the Jewish mother and son relationship often found in stereotypical jokes such as this one: A man calls his mother in Florida. “Mom, how are you." " Not too good," says the mother. "I've been very weak." The son says, "Why are you so weak?" She says, "Because, I haven't eaten in 38 days." " Mama," the man says, "that's terrible. Why haven't you eaten?" The mother answers, "Because I didn't want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call."

Read as a Jewish mother joke, The Giving Tree works the same way it works if read as tree-hugger snark: not for kids. They don’t get it. Nor do most of the adults who read it to them, for that matter, most likely because of its context as a children’s book. Perhaps it should have been published in Playboy?

The Great Mother, Archetype or Trap? The Giving Tree may be read as a good mother, but, according to Eric Neumann’s theory of feminine development in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype20—is she Great? Trained by Carl Jung, to whom his book is dedicated, Neumann believed in the concept of the collective unconscious and developed his archetypal analysis based on feminine images in art and literature from different cultures and times all around the world. His analysis traces the unconscious back to a matriarchal world that he claims predated patriarchy. He describes the ways that early experiences of the Great Mother continue to shape collective culture as well as individual psyches, both male and female. On the book’s back cover, we are told: [The] primordial image of The Great Mother…finds outward expression in the ritual mythology, (sic) and art of early man and in dreams, fantasies, and creative works of both the sound and the sick man of our day.

Of course, since the publication of The Great Mother in 1955, the second and third waves of feminism have had their day, making obvious the masculine intellectual and imaginary bias of Neumann’s theory as well

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as that of the flap copywriter. Mass media analyst Kate Kane points out, “Definition of the feminine as essentially maternal underpins an entire edifice of female stereotypes.”21 While we may righteously object to Neumann’s essentialism, his ideas are nevertheless telling about the psychology that may, consciously or unconsciously, sound or sick, not only have helped to create The Giving Tree, written and illustrated by a man and published nine years after The Great Mother, but may also continue to keep it on the bestseller list and in grade school lesson plans. With Ellen Handler Spitz, “I would argue that the ongoing popularity of The Giving Tree speaks volumes about the persistence of such [mothering] myths in our culture.”22 Neumann, after establishing that the central symbol of the Feminine is the vessel, most specifically “the nourishing vessel that provides the unborn as well as the born with food and drink,”23 devotes significant attention to feminine symbols in nature, including “all of vegetation.” In fact: The center of this vegetative symbolism is the tree. As fruit-bearing tree of life it is female: it bears, transforms, nourishes; its leaves, branches, twigs are ‘contained’ in it and dependent on it….24

The tree equates with “a Feminine that nourishes, generates, and transforms.”25 Shel Silverstein’s fruit-bearing tree nourishes the human boy with her apples and attentions, generates material comforts for him out of her own body, and enables his social transformation into a family man under patriarchy. “And the childbearing tree may be further differentiated into treetop and next, crib and cradle,” Neumann adds, further differentiating the Giving Tree’s symbolism, as her treetop branches provide the house that the boy needs for his wife and children, and her trunk provides the cradlelike boat that he desires to sail away; or, “the uterus ship, in which the sleeping embryo rides into life, rocking on the primeval ocean.”26 Though these words of Neumann’s precede publication of the The Giving Tree by nearly a decade, how neatly his description of the ship-as-mothervessel fits. As Carolyn Daniel has pointed out in Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature, “The desire to return to or to restore the rapport and fulfillment of the primal relationship is clearly present in representations of food linked to the maternal aesthetic in many stories for children.”27 The boy, it seems, has a subconscious wish to return to the Good Mother, which he acts out by consuming her body to make a boat. How she feeds him!

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proliferation of commodity histories, all purporting to have changed the world: Tobacco: A cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization or Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World or Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World.16 Robbins perspicuously observes the underlying narrative formula of these commodity histories, both popular and academic: they are at times, the rags to riches story of a humble plant or fish or mineral that struggles mightily against aristocratic prejudices to finally find favor among one and all. “In effect,” writes, Robbins, “each commodity takes its turn as the star of capitalism’s story.”17 Commodity histories, thus, in many ways, are effective capitalist propaganda (as Robbins notes): “What a wondrous system this is, you are told, that has brought to your doorstep or breakfast table all these things you never would have known existed, yet things without which you would not, you suddenly realize, be yourself.”18 But there is another, less sensational, tradition of writing about commodities. Sidney Mintz, for example, in his classic Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in Modern History looked not so much at the expansionist triumph of sugar from an expensive and exotic item to the most commonplace of ingredients in our diet, as he laid bare the horrific history of slavery via which sugar made fortunes for the upper-classes. Mintz, in his account of the ubiquitous presence of sugar in modern life, carefully linked the institution of slavery to the British working-class and their acquired habit of sweetening tea. In unveiling the concealed social relations between the production of the commodity and its circulation, he reminds us that the “creation of a radically new diet cannot possibly be explained by reference to some single narrowly confined cause.”19 By his example, Mintz teaches us to be attentive to shifts in diet which are connected to and often signal much larger social and economic processes at work. The story of mulligatawny I wish to trace follows this latter example on a muted note. My ambition in this essay is modest: I wish to look at the creation of this soup—mulligatawney—in the British-Indian Empire. I do so not to confect a story of triumph, nor to produce an insidious tale of the exotic invading, occupying and overwhelming the delicate cuisines of the west, but to try and explain the “origin” creation, and popularity, and its current ubiquitous presence on menus in “Indian” restaurants. The history of this soup is a history, not so much of the clash of civilizations as an internecine skirmish within and among AngloIndians to define themselves. It is, I hope to show, a story of class struggle at the level of the dinner-table and it is a story, inevitably, about gender.

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As Jessica Benjamin summarizes, psychoanalytic thinkers describe “the transfer of power to the father as the only means by which the child can free himself or herself from the helpless subjection to the omnipotent mother and enter the reality of the wider world.”36 “Yet, even as mother is all-powerful,” social scientist Shari Thurer notes, “she ceases to exist. She exists bodily, of course, but her needs as a person become null and void. On delivering a child, a woman becomes a factotum, a life-support system”37—words that could easily have been written about Silverstein’s Giving Tree as mother. The rooted tree and the worldly boy are intertwined in perhaps a warped version of what Neumann calls the “participation mystique,” that is, “an indissoluble bond between mother and child” that derives from the “original situation of container and contained.”38 At its most primal level, the Great Mother as earth—as the symbol unifying the change of seasons, of life and death—the archetypal Feminine in the participation mystique “takes everything that is born of it back into its womb of origination and death.”39 Ironically, though, when the boy returns to her “womb,” the tree’s uterus ship, it is her death, not his, at least not yet. The Giving Tree also illustrates another of Benjamin’s key points: “The adult relation between men and women becomes the locus of a great reversal, turning the tables on the omnipotent mother of infancy.”40 This is why psychoanalytic critic Nancy Chodorow, similarly to her contemporary Dinnerstein, argues: Any strategy for change whose goal includes liberation from the constraints of an unequal social organization of gender must take account of the need for a fundamental reorganization of parenting, so that primary parenting is shared between men and women.41

Once the nascent psyche experiences the Masculine and the Feminine equally, then perhaps we can get the Good and the Terrible into gender balance—and ultimately balance the Supreme Court. In my work-in-progress on the reproduction of mothering in children’s and young adult literature, I have noted some recurring patterns in relationships between picture book mothers and sons, especially in stories that are about mother-child relationships. Interestingly enough, the most popular texts seldom focus on daughters. The Giving Tree, The Runaway Bunny (1942) by Margaret Wise Brown, and Love You Forever (1986) by Robert Munsch are the bestselling mothering books,42 and all are about how incredibly much she loves her child, as if that is her only role in life. The mother-child relationship is intense, one-on-one, all-consuming. There’s no career for the woman, no interest in non-domestic activities.

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We see no fathers or siblings around to share the mother’s love—nor share in the labor of child rearing, for that matter. Her son is her primary love interest. The same goes for another top bestseller, P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother? (1960), with the exception that the mommy bird does have a job outside the nest; she leaves her baby bird home alone so she can go find him some food. The fact that all four of the bestselling picture books about mothers feature boys reflects the stereotype in the dominant ideology that mothers prefer sons, a latent echo of power relations before women’s suffrage. Again we can trace our Giving Tree’s roots back to the archetypal patterns of The Great Mother. The “Great Round,” another name for the earth mother vessel that produces man, also produces “The mystery of transformation, in which the ‘spirit’ comes into being; it is its luminous essence, its fruit, and its son.”43 Matriarchal artifacts often show “the figures of the Great Mother Goddess and of her son merge with one another,”44 no surprise in emerging patriarchy where male children were valued over females. Shari Thurer notes, “There has never been a true matriarchy—equality, perhaps, as we have seen in prehistory—never female dominance over men, the inversion of patriarchy.”45 Rather than to account for the prevalence of mother-son love in art and literature as a side-effect of patriarchal power relations, Neumann idealizes the relationship as spiritual: With the birth of her son, the woman accomplishes the miracle of nature, which gives birth to something different from itself and antithetical to itself. Moreover, the divine son is totally new; not only as to sex but also in quality. Not only does he engender, while she conceives and bears; he is also light in contrast to her natural darkness, motion in contrast to her static character. Thus the woman experiences her power to bring forth light and spirit, to generate a luminous spirit that despite all changes and catastrophes is enduring and immortal.46

No wonder the son is the apple of his mother’s eye in so many picture books. Historically, a woman has had no power but her mothering; if she mothers a divine son, she can get somewhere. When influence over a man was the only way for a woman to have any access to the political sphere, it behooved a mother to maintain a close relationship to her son. She did so by controlling, as the Giving Tree perhaps does through passive aggression, giving him everything he wants to keep him coming back. Still, despite Strandburg and Livo’s view—“The tree can be compared to the exploitive mother” because “she encourages total dependence on her” 47 —the Giving Tree is no monster. To the boy, as to the uncritical reader,

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she exhibits only the “Good” elements of the Great Mother, at least from the perspective of the male child, for “the Feminine—in so far as it is ‘good’—is not a devourer but a giver of riches.”48 Boys raised to be “taking” boys, as well as boys whose controlling mothers train them to maintain the mother-son bond as primary, continue the cycle of being narcissistic in relationships and emotionally unavailable to their wives, who in turn continue to look to their children for love and a sense of importance. “That women turn to children to fulfill emotional and even erotic desires unmet by men or other women means that a mother expects from infants what only another adult should be expected to give,” says Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering.49 It’s a selfperpetuating cycle. Women who repeatedly read picture books that depict these gender patterns, to borrow Chodorow’s words, “contribute to the perpetuation of their own social roles and position in the hierarchy of gender.”50

Dismemberment and the Problem of the Feminine And now let us revisit the epigraph that sets the tone for this study. “The image of the tree, firmly implanted in the earth that feeds it, but rising up into the air where it unfolds its crown, has stirred man’s imagination from time immemorial,” Neumann tells us. “It shades and shelters all living things, and feeds them with its fruit, which hang on it like stars.”51 Silverstein’s line drawings keep our attention on the boy, not on the tree as a whole; we see only her trunk and her lowest branches, usually held in positions like arms to embrace him, play with him, give him shade, or hug her trunk to self-soothe when he leaves her alone. We never see her crown. As so often happens, we never see the woman as a whole, only the signs of her mothering. We never even see the fruit on her branches, only the cores of eaten apples midair as the boy drops them in his youth, then later the apples falling to the ground as he gathers them to sell so he can “buy things and have fun.” The boy is a consumer, and even as the tree nurtures him, he consumes her severed limbs. Mary Daly goes so far as to say that the story “is one of female rape and dismemberment.”52 Rape may seem a harsh word for the tree’s giving, which results in her multiple (…dare we say orgasmic?) refrain: And the tree was happy.

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whether guests should be exempted from wearing white gloves in hot weather, where the Director of Smoke Nuisance should be seated at dinner or whether mulligatawny ought to be served at parties or best left for “cosy dinners.” The upper echelons of the British administrative class led unimaginably pampered lives, traveling the country with huge entourages, hunting, shooting and golfing, “eating salmon from Scotland and sardines from the Mediterranean, and observing that St. Cloup’s potage a la Julienne was perhaps better than his other soups...”31 It was, as Emma Roberts observed as early as 1835, in her famous Scenes and Characteristics of Hindostan, “the best display of the grandeur and magnificence of India which the Asiatic style of living could produce.”32 Socializing centered on the “burra khana” [“big meal”] and it was there “on their dinner tables that the British in India most extravagantly displayed wealth and status.”33 In the early days of British presence in India, everyday meals were an unmanageable hodge-podge of European and Indian dishes. Meals were displays of abundance which, as Padre Ovington observed, attempted “to please the Curiosity of every Palate.”34 The fabulously wealthy merchants of John Company, “the Nabobs,” who were “envied yet despised” in England reveled in their ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption, freely adopting the extravagant lifestyles of the Indian ruling classes. “The receipt of an Indian dinner appears to be,” commented the ever-acerbic Emma Roberts, “to slaughter a bullock, and a sheep and place all joints before the guest at once, with poultry &c to match.”35 But lurking behind these scenes of fantastic grandeur, were the mundane lives of mid-to-low level workers in the service of Empire. The quotidian problems of life in alien, inhospitable places often do not feature in the many travel narratives of the nineteenth century. What we do find in Eden and Roberts and others—as well as post-colonial critical writing—is the chasm between the governor and the governed. The India of these narratives has an “Arabian nights” feel of exoticism, abundance and splendor contrasted, every now and then, with the India of squalor and chaos. It is through close readings of recipe books that dispensed advice to the young housewife with an inelastic household budget but who, nonetheless, was enjoined to keep up appearances that we catch glimpses of the lives of lowly Company servants and begin to understand the distinctions of class within the British community in India. While senior merchants feasted on opulent meals, junior officers and subalterns often had to make do with frugal fare, punctuated by compulsory fasts on high holy days. The diet of the common soldier in

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the whole man.”59 Like other psychoanalytic forefathers, Neumann conceives consciousness as ever Masculine, the subconscious as Feminine. In laying out his theory, he claims: But the problem of the Feminine has equal importance for the psychologist of culture, who recognizes that the peril of present-day mankind springs in large part from the one-sidedly patriarchal development of the male intellectual consciousness, which is no longer kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche.60

Perhaps what Neumann means here is that “removal of the body from the mind mirrors the way in which the body of the mother has been withheld in Western culture, noted by Kristeva and other French feminist psychoanalysts,” in the words of Roni Natov regarding thought and metaphor.61 From his perspective, writing on the Great Mother in 1955, shortly after the two World Wars, born in Berlin in 1905 and an immigrant to Tel Aviv in 1934, Neumann worries about the whole man—and I share his concern—but he was unable to get outside of his masculine perspective on patriarchy to see the damage that clinging to these supposedly archetypal symbols does to women and men both. We need a synthesis of the two one-sided psyches to save Western man, Neumann believes, but in his analysis the Feminine and Masculine traits are still essential, universal, and unchanging. He does not call for a revision of the symbolic patterns that define women by their matriarchal power as The Great Mother. Culture no longer needs to define women by fruitful metaphors. Yes, we have the anatomy. We also have birth control, which means that we can choose whether to become mothers at all, and what’s more we can be many things besides vessels just as well as the men can. We can also be lesbians, perfectly naturally. Yet the Good and the Terrible and the Great Mother images perpetuate themselves in popular culture, and persist in children’s books, whether through the collective unconscious as Neumann would argue; or, more likely (through my twenty-first century feminist lens), the social construction of gender role expectations. “Since the ideal ‘family’ that most people try to construct is built on women’s service for men,” DeVault has pointed out, “caring is typically done in ways that reinforce men’s entitlement and women’s subservience. These patterns are not ‘natural’; they are produced by characteristic ways of understanding the family.”62 Children learn essential gender roles early on, and even parents who have achieved a more egalitarian state inadvertently participate in the reproduction of outgrown archetypes by sharing “classic” children’s books that they associate with pleasant

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childhood memories. And a schoolteacher with a mission to meet acrossthe-curriculum objectives for The Giving Tree may overlook gender issues entirely in an “A is for Apple” unit that brings in a wide array of science and math lessons. Adults feed children the same lessons they were fed, often without critical awareness, and often out of a misguided sense that “it’s just for kids” and “those books didn’t affect me,” as my college students often claim. “You’re reading too much into it,” they say. Even college professors to whom I have presented my research findings sometimes require lengthy proofs to see the problem of the Feminine in The Giving Tree. Tellingly, the most ardent defenders of the book in academic settings have been male; in fact, to them I owe the inspiration to write this essay because they have led me to think about the text in multiple ways and expand my arguments. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to one education professor who immediately after my presentation emailed me a web page about The Giving Tree that linked to other web pages describing the book’s many uses. He continues to defend the story as flexible, all interpretations as equally valid. As I recall the discussion, he was one of several male professors at my talk who expressed admiration for the tree as the kind of mother they have and that their wives are—the tree women ought to be. And these are smart men. It is that difficult to slough off entitlement to mommy’s apples.

What Does The Giving Tree Feed Us? A reader response survey of 246 readers by Maj Asplund Carlsson suggests that readers between ages eight and twenty view The Giving Tree in one of three ways: 1. An example of a) the tree as a good example; b) the boy as a bad example; and c) the boy as representing change when growing up; 2. As an example of the principle of a) giving without taking—love; b) taking without giving—materialism; and c) development and change; 3. The relation between principles a) giving and taking; b) the conflict of love and materialism in the development of a person.63

Carlsson does note in discussion that some young readers understood the tree as an unselfish mother, just as some read it as “the unselfish love of Jesus Christ,” and others thought “the two figures could be characterized as two friends or as two lovers.”64 Yet the study’s overall

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conclusions focus on good and bad examples of giving and taking, development and change, love and materialism, with no basis in gender. Perhaps Carlsson has oversimplified the students’ understandings; or, more likely, this list suggests that young readers accept ubiquitous gender role stereotypes to the point that they are rendered invisible, mere vessels to contain higher abstract morals. With all of this, it’s no wonder that Ellen Handler Spitz has ranked The Giving Tree as “The Most Overrated Children’s Book,” saying: Totally self-effacing, the “mother” treats her “son” as if he were a perpetual infant, while he behaves toward her as if he were frozen in time as an importunate baby. This overrated picture book thus presents as a paradigm for young children a callously exploitative human relationship— both across genders and across generations. It perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists only to be used and the image of a male child who can offer no reciprocity, express no gratitude, feel no empathy—an insatiable creature who encounters no limits for his demands.65

Arguments against the book’s place as a “classic” go back decades. In 1979, Jacqueline Jackson and Carol Dell began their Language Arts essay, “The Other Giving Tree”: It is hard to believe that anyone would take Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (Harper and Row, 1964) seriously, as an admirable story of selfless giving. Yet after hearing a number of sermons using the book as an example of Christian love worthy of emulation; watching the Little Theater of the Deaf act it out nonsatirically; seeing college students handle it with reverence, and reading articles in teachers’ magazines (one as recent as 1978) on how to build value units upon it, we realize that there are large numbers of persons of all ages who do consider the book a profound expression of love.66

Jackson and Dell counter the profundity with a parody of the story that they use in classrooms to trigger critical discussion. Their version introduces the character of a second tree next to the Giving Tree. The second tree does give apples for the boy to sell when he asks but refuses all of the boy’s other requests until finally, in the end, the old boy gets hot sitting on the stump and asks to sit in the shade. The second tree agrees, And the stump wept.67

A fittingly ironic end for those who use the Giving Tree to stump for Christ.

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Based on the continued misreadings and misuses of the story as recently as 2007, it’s clear that Jackson and Dell’s clever teaching tip didn’t change much. After another seven years of bad luck during which teachers continued to proselytize The Giving Tree, Walter L. Strandburg and Norma J. Livo gave talking sanity another try in their 1986 Children’s Literature in Education article, “The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute.” They argue that the book is “a satirical piece that has taken an incredible twist. Its distortion by adults has made it a mockery that sanctifies a rip-off. It is incredible that for years it has passed as children’s literature.”68 And all the more incredible that it continues to pass over twenty years later. Perhaps the root of the problem traces back to archetypal essentialism such as Neumann’s, in modern Feminine dress. Many cultural feminists, particularly those who focus on care ethics, claim a space for feminine virtues, as for instance Kay A. Chick in her 2002 article, “Challenging Gender Stereotypes Through Literature: Picture Books With Strong Female Characters.” Chick outlines a series of eight selection guidelines, mostly sound, but I plead she reconsider the fifth: Fifth, book selections must retain the essence of masculinity and femininity without resorting to stereotypes. The authors of children’s books must be careful in stories to present images of girls and women that are not simply substitutes for male characters. Children are less likely to identify with such unisex characters.69

And the example Chick provides? “While obviously an adventurer, Stella [from Stella, Queen of the Snow] is also a nurturer and a very patient teacher.” And what does our patient feminine nurturer teach about in the example given by Chick? What polar bears eat for breakfast. Food! If Anna Freud is right that the human unconscious merges food and mother, this may explain the continued signification in the postmodern world of food preparation as women’s work despite any logical imperative that it be so. As a society are we subconsciously clinging to mother’s breast?

Restoring Her Branches Many of my students at a four-year liberal arts university claim they loved The Giving Tree as children and never noticed that the title character represents a mother. Upon close reading through an adult lens of feminist and cultural criticism, they agree that she does play that role, but they often retain ambivalent feelings toward the text, idealizing the tree’s

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hallmark “curry paste,” created a recipe which is European in its basic idiom. Acton’s recipes and advice were directed at creating a “refined modern table” by deliberately “intermingl[ing] many foreign recipes and elements.”52 Since rice, which was usually served at table with the soup, was not a usual item of consumption in England, her recipes for the Mulligatawny included a separate section on how to boil rice for the soup. Here, she advises her reader that the “The Patna, or small-grained rice, which is not so good as the Carolina” nonetheless, goes well with the soup. While her various versions of the mulligatawny called for marrow, cucumber, apple and cocoanut, Mrs. Beeton substituted cocoanut with ground almond. Some “clear” versions of the soup listed coriander, cumin, fenugreek and cinnamon as required ingredients. Alexis Soyer, added ham, thyme and apple to his recipe, thereby producing a soup that’s a far cry from the “original” mulligatawny. A combination of commodities—Carolina or Patna rice, cocoa-nut and curry powder, cardamom and ground almond—make the nineteenth century English larder a reflection of the globalized economy of England. These recipes which called for a mixing of the familiar with the unfamiliar, were exercises in creating a cosmopolitan sensibility commensurate with the ambitions and disposable incomes of the rapidly increasing middle-class which, throughout the nineteenth century, grew corpulent and rich on the surplus of Empire. Mulligatawny recipes reflected the circulation and availability of exotic items for consumption in the metropolis and the hegemony of the middle-class in dictating the terms of sophistication and taste. As Burnett points out, “England had become very largely their England.”53 In the colony, however, cookery and household management books were always conscious of the rigid class/caste differentiations that had to be maintained between Britain and India in the first instance, and also between the upper and lower classes of Britons. For the British in India, especially after the Mutiny of 1857, the maintenance of an aloof, imperial persona was much recommended. There was the dual anxiety of either appearing to have gone native (“junglee”), or to reveal oneself to be common. In Britain, curries in general began to be assimilated into the diet, but in India, its proximity to the “natives” resulted in its downward spiral in popularity. While Acton’s and Beeton’s manuals laid the foundation for middle-class living in Britain, for the Indian Empire the classic work was, of course, Flora Annie Steel’s Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook. First published in 1888, it went through ten editions and remained in-print till Indian independence. Steel arrived in

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I agree with her. But how do we accomplish this restoration? How do we give our stump mother back a real body—whole, fully crowned, and laden with apples—when in their study of gender equality in nonsexist literature, Amanda B. Diekman and Sarah K. Murnen find that even nonsexist stories may “perpetuate gender inequity through the reinforcement of the traditional feminine ideal,” or “benevolent sexism”?75 Benevolent sexism says there’s nothing wrong with the Giving Tree because She’s a Good Mother. The benevolent book buyers who continue to keep the book in print as a bestselling hardcover title are unconsciously contributing to a malevolent ideology of the self-sacrificing mother and the narcissistic taking boy. Notice: he does not fare well in the deal, either, as he winds up alone at the end of his life. Where are the wife and kids for whom he needed the house? Why did he have to sail away in a boat? “The result of this ‘giving mother’ is kids who themselves will make poor husbands, wives, and parents,” Strandburg and Livo point out.76 Only the primary bond remains to a boy who expects a Giving Tree wife. Had the all-giving Feminine ever given him some tough love instead of all her apples, perhaps he would have learned to make some real connections rather than having to revert to the symbolic primal womb. Authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, critics, librarians, teachers, parents, and everyone else involved with disseminating children’s books must stop idealizing traditional Good Mother traits and restore the mythic Great Mother her full range of terrible power and ambivalence—no more splitting her apart into monsters and madonnas. At the same time we need to develop nurturing power in men and give women a powerful symbolic space beyond the sex roles of virgin, vixen, mother. Let’s dig up that poor old dead stump and plant some new apple seeds.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1961. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Reprint 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. NY: Routledge. 20-27. Benjamin, Jessica. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality. Representations of Motherhood. Ed Dona Bassin et al. CT: Yale UP. 129-146. Brown, Margaret Wise. 1942. The Runaway Bunny. Reprint 1972. New York: HarperCollins.

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Carlsson, Maj Asplund. 1996. Readers’ Experience of Textual Meaning: An Empirical Approach. Reader. 35/36: 67-79. Chick, Kay A. 2002. Challenging Gender Stereotypes Through Literature: Picture Books With Strong Female Characters. Journal of Children’s Literature. 28(2):19-31. Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender With a New Preface. Reprint 1999. Los Angeles: U California P. Counihan, Carole M. 1999. The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. NY: Routledge. Daly, Mary. 1987. Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P. Daniel, Carolyn. 2006. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. NY: Routledge. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. IL: U Chicago P. Diekman, Amanda R.and Sarah K. Murnen. 2004. Learning to Be Little Women and Little Men: The Inequitable Gender Equality of Nonsexist Children’s Literature. Sex Roles 50 (5/6): 373-385. Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harpercollins. Disney’s The Little Mermaid. 1989. Dir. Ron Clements and John Musker. DVD 1999. Eastman, P.D. 1960. Are You My Mother? NY: Random House. Fraustino, Lisa Rowe. 2007. The Reproduction of Mothering in Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Work-in-progress. Freud, Anna. 1946. The Psychoanalytic Study of Infantile Feeding Disturbances. Reprint 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. NY: Routledge. 107-116. Gooden, Angela M. and Mark A. Gooden. 2001.Gender Representation in Notable Children’s Picture Books: 1995-1999. Sex Roles 45(1/2): 89101. Jackson, Jacqueline and Carol Dell. 1979. The Other Giving Tree. Language Arts 56(4): 427-429. Juchartz, Larry R. 2004. Team Teaching with Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein in the College Basic Reading Classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 47(4): 336-340. Kane, Kate. 1989. Who Deserves a Break Today: Fast Food, Cultural Rituals, and Woman’s Place. Cooking By the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. Ed. Mary Anne Schofield. OH: Bowling Green State UP. 138-146.

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Katz, Wendy R. 1980. Some Uses of Food in Children’s Literature. Children’s Literature in Education 11(4): 192-199. Munsch, Robert. 1986. Love You Forever. Toronto/Buffalo: Firefly. Natov, Roni. 2002. The Poetics of Childhood. NY: Routledge. Neumann, Erich. 1955. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Second Edition. Reprint 1974. NJ: Princeton UP. Nilsen, Alleen Pace. 1971. Women in Children’s Literature. College English 332(8): 918-926. Remler, Nancy Lawson. 2000. Using The Giving Tree to Teach Literary Criticism. TETYC: 28 (1). September. Roback, Diane, et al. 2001. All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books. Publishers Weekly Dec 17, 2001: 24-32. EBSCO. Eastern CT State U Lib. (accessed Jan 21, 2004). Schofield, Mary Anne, Ed. 1989. Cooking By the Book: Food in Literature and Culture. OH: Bowling Green State UP. Silverstein, Shel. 1964 The Giving Tree. Reprint 1992. New York: HarperCollins. Smolowe, Jill et. Al. 1999. Bard Brain: Shel Silverstein’s Whimsical Poems and Drawings Enchanted Readers of All Ages. People 51(19): 64. Spitz, Ellen Handler. 1999. Most Overrated Class Children’s Book. American Heritage 50.3: 46. Spitz, Ellen Handler. 1999. Inside Picture Books. New Haven: Yale UP. Spock, Dr. Benjamin. 1903-1998. 2004. The Dr. Spock Company. (accessed June 1, 2004). Strandburg, Walter L. and Norma J. Livo. 1986. The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute. Children’s Literature in Education 17(1): 17-24. Thurer, Shari L. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. New York: Penguin. Tognoli, Jerome, Jane Pullen, and Judith Lieber. 1994. The Privilege of Place: Domestic and Work Locations of Characters in Children’s Books. Children’s Environments 11(4): 272-280.

Notes 1

Barthes, Roland. 1961. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Reprint 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. NY: Routledge. 20-27: 21.

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curries and mulligatawny were still being relished at Anglo-Indian meals. Read within the context of her milieu, Steel’s recipes for mulligatawny are an instance of the delicate calibration of class and culture that was at the very centre of British Indian identity in the second half of the nineteenth century: on the one hand, the reality of food habits of the British residents and on the other the hauteur of a British imperial persona that wished to distance itself from anything with the slightest Indian flavor. For the most part, Steel’s recipes are European with liberal use of French names and techniques, even if simplified for “primitive” Indian kitchens; her recipes recommend carlton soup, macaroni, and chiffonades. By the time of her writing, it should be remembered, menus in Britain were being written entirely in French. This new fashion, transported to India made for some curious translations: Indian curd was transformed into gros lait and Indian gourd in brown gravy became the exoticsounding podolongcai au jus. Steel’s attempt is not a synthesis of East and West (as in some of the earlier cookbooks) but like Wyvern, about whom I will have more to say later, her desire is to reproduce European (especially French) cuisine in primitive Indian kitchens. If “Indian” recipes are selectively, indeed, reluctantly included, her opprobrium is equally directed at Anglo-Indian habits of food and entertaining. Breakfast in India, she found to be “for the most part horrible meals.”63 She was not better impressed by that peculiar mid-day meal, so beloved of the British in India, the tiffin: “Heavy luncheons and tiffins have much to answer for in India…It is no unusual thing to see a meal of four or five distinct courses placed on the table when one light entree and a dressed vegetable would be ample,” is her unamused opinion.64 But she was uncompromising on her stance that even under the most difficult conditions, Englishness must never be abandoned. Her manual is a reassurance to the young, inexperienced housewives that with advice from “an old India hand” such as herself, any Englishwoman, even in the remotest corner of the Indian empire could run a household worthy of the ruling race. “We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness, “ she avers, “but an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.”65 Antonin Carême had inaugurated the turn towards French cuisine as a mark of a sophisticated palate in Britain. In India, the figure undoubtedly was Wyvern who Nancy Forbes in her introduction to a new edition of his famous cookery book, credits with having “supplied the grammar of classical French cuisine” in British India. 66 One of the most distinctive, and certainly the most amusing, cookery writer of Anglo-India was Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert or Wyvern whose Culinary

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Ibid., 148. Ibid., 15. 31 Ibid., 43. 32 Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harpercollins. 161. 33 Ibid., 163. 34 Ibid., 166. 35 Ibid., 167. 36 Benjamin, Jessica. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality. Representations of Motherhood. Ed Dona Bassin et al. CT: Yale UP. 129-146: 130. 37 Thurer. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood. xvii. 38 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 29. 39 Ibid., 30. 40 Benjamin. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother. 141. 41 Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender With a New Preface. Reprint 1999. Los Angeles: U California P. 215. 42 Roback. All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books. 43 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 55. 44 Ibid., 242-43. 45 Thurer. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood. 23. 46 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 326. 47 Strandburg, Walter L. and Norma J. Livo. 1986. The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute. Children’s Literature in Education 17(1): 17-24: 21. 48 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 123. 49 Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender With a New Preface. Reprint 1999. Los Angeles: U California P. 212. 50 Ibid., 209. 51 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 245. 52 Daly, Mary. 1987. Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P. 90. 53 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 79. 54 Ibid., 331. 55 Ibid., 49. 56 Ibid., 331. 57 Ibid., 98. 58 Ibid., 332. 59 Ibid., 57. 60 Ibid., xlii. 61 Natov, Roni. 2002. The Poetics of Childhood. NY: Routledge. 64. 62 DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. IL: U Chicago P. 18. 30

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63 Carlsson, Maj Asplund. 1996. Readers’ Experience of Textual Meaning: An Empirical Approach. Reader. 35/36: 67-79: 76. 64 Ibid., 74. 65 Spitz. 1999. Inside Picture Books. 46. 66 Jackson, Jacqueline and Carol Dell. 1979. The Other Giving Tree. Language Arts 56(4): 427-429: 427. 67 Ibid., 429. 68 Strandburg, Walter L. and Norma J. Livo. 1986. The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute. Children’s Literature in Education 17(1): 17-24: 23. 69 Chick, Kay A. 2002. Challenging Gender Stereotypes Through Literature: Picture Books With Strong Female Characters. Journal of Children’s Literature. 28(2):19-31: 21. 70 Remler, Nancy Lawson. 2000. Using The Giving Tree to Teach Literary Criticism. TETYC: 28: 1. September. 62. 71 Ibid. 72 Juchartz, Larry R. 2004. Team Teaching with Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein in the College Basic Reading Classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 47(4): 336-340: 339. 73 Thurer. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood. xii. 74 Natov. 2002. The Poetics of Childhood. 64. 75 Diekman, Amanda R.and Sarah K. Murnen. 2004. Learning to Be Little Women and Little Men: The Inequitable Gender Equality of Nonsexist Children’s Literature. Sex Roles 50 (5/6): 373-385: 375. 76 Strandburg, Walter L. and Norma J. Livo. 1986. The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute. Children’s Literature in Education 17(1): 17-24: 22.

PERCEPTIVE APPETITES: FOOD ISSUES IN MOTHER GOOSE AND NURSERY LITERATURE ANNETTE M. MAGID

Traditionally, Mother Goose rhymes enable adults to cope with expanding families while preparing their children for the tasks of the day. If Iona and Peter Opie, compilers of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, are to be taken as the accurate authorities that they are, most of the rhymes existed, as oral tradition or written, before 1750.1 The rhymes I discuss are those either originating in English or those that have been translated into English.2 The imaginative freshness of the rhymes help to reflect the concerns, both behavioral and attitudinal, parents might have in the difficult task of raising children in a proper fashion, according to their specific mores. Since food is one of the basic requirements for existence, it is not surprising that food is often referenced in Mother Goose nursery songs. The focus of my paper is to examine the inclusion of various foods in some of the enormous collection of Mother Goose rhymes and related nursery songs in order to illustrate the use of language as a means of promoting sustenance and to reflect the societal values of the day. In conjunction with establishing eating routines and behavioral patterns, many Mother Goose rhymes “are supposed to help young children learn numbers, letters and designations.”3 Nursery songs have proven to be an effective learning tool if not for any other purpose than for the stimulation of memory. It is my contention that in addition to a memory tool, nursery rhymes serve as a means to forewarn children that certain behavior may result in adult responses that range from disappointment to punishment. From sun up to sun down, Mother Goose rhymes enabled adults to cope with the expanding families while preparing their children for the tasks and at times, tragedies, of the day. Mother Goose songs served to provide a lyrical means to advise children and guide adults toward appropriate behavior, acceptable through generations of societal norms.

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prepared by the incompetent “mootooswami.” Haute cuisine identified with refinement and class, by contrast, is produced and presented within the private space of the household where the Englishwoman’s task was to “make the bungalow an island of Englishness, secure from a noxious India.” If Steel is concerned about contingencies of British Indian life, for Wyvern, there is only the leisurely, lavish meal that must be produced as the fundamental unit of a civilized living. As Margaret Beetham notes, “The location of women in domestic rather than in the public sphere of men’s work meant that management was differently inflected for women. Whereas men’s place was in the public world of work and their economic role was production, women were located in the domestic and their role in the economy was to manage consumption.”77 The call for new taste in dining signaled a sea change in the “habitus” of middle class life. The recipes necessitated the use of modern gadgets and utensils and a new geography of the kitchen itself. The very architecture and design of the household needed to be rearranged to accommodate the emergent sense of sophisticated modern “self.” The making of the recommended pastries, in all their delicate intricacies, the mixing of sauces, the controlled heating and cooling of puddings and soups required a different kind of kitchen, different tools, equipment and of course, training. The expertise required to make delicate patisseries was beyond the ken of the much-reviled Indian cook. The best tool for any household to acquire, Wyvern confidently urged, was the “small yet very excellent Anglo-American cooking range.”78 Not one to mince words, Wyvern advises his readership that “The delicate cookery which day by day gains popularity in India demands a clean airy room, properly furnished, with plenty of light, and many accessories borrowed from civilized Europe.”79 When we look back to William Kitchiner’s aim, “to render Food acceptable to the Palate, without being expensive to the Purse, or offensive to the Stomach…constantly endeavoring to hold the balance even between…Epicure and Economist” we begin to see the distance recipe and advice books about cooking and entertaining have traveled.80 It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Anglo-Indian households converted to French cuisine at the exhortation of Wyvern and Steel. The emphasis on “common fare” and on the importance of frugality continues through the century in recipe books that stand in marked contrast to Wyvern’s. Take for example Indian Cookery “Local” for Young Housekeepers, (1887), the anonymous “authoress” an exact contemporary of both Wyvern and Steel, who assures her readership that “should any lady have, on an emergency, to do for herself, she will find that, with an Oil stove and this book for a

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What! Washed your mittens, you darling kittens, But I smell a rat close by, Hush! Hush! Miew, miew, We smell a rat close by, Miew, miew, miew.7

Customarily nursery or folk melodies or rhymes have been identified as “Mother Goose” rhymes. Many scholars, including William and Ceil S. Baring-Gould and Gloria T. Delamar, derived the same conclusion: “Nobody really knows how many countries or how many centuries”8 the tales of Mother Goose encompass. While many rhymes employ repetition and seem appropriate for games, other Mother Goose stories are rhymes that may have been created to encourage children to sit quietly and consume their daily food portions. Even though the rhymes “originated in specifically national terms,”9 they are universal in theme and type. The world of Mother Goose is a simple, rural place and even though some nursery songs mention royalty, even the king and queen as in “Good King Arthur” are often relegated to menial tasks such as shopping or baking: King Arthur was a worthy kind, As ancient bards to sing; He bought three pecks of barley meal, To make a bag pudding. A bag pudding the queen she made, And stuffed it full of plums, And in it put great lumps of fat As big as my two thumbs. The king and queen sat down to dine, And all the court beside, And what they could not eat that night The queen next morning fried.10

Since specific tasks and hierarchy are, for the most part, not an issue in children’s literature, it is not unusual to have rhymes such as “Good King Arthur” in which Arthur himself shops for and purchases barley meal and upon bringing it home requests that the Queen “make a bag pudding.” No servants are mentioned for either the King’s shopping or for the Queen’s cooking. In fact the last line of the stanza has the Queen in the kitchen in the morning frying the remainder of the barley that the king and queen “And all the court beside” could not consume at one sitting. A more familiar “King and Queen” Mother Goose rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence”11 is remembered more frequently as a Nursery Song.

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The lyrics indicate more traditional roles for the monarchy. The “king was in his counting-house” when a pie with two dozen live blackbirds was served to him. Like those singing the Nursery Song about the king, the birds “began to sing” once the “dainty dish” was “set before” him. Since the king could not actually eat the pie, he was consumed with his task of counting and apparently also counted the birds which he freed once he opened the pie. Even though the king wasn’t able to eat that which was prepared for him, the queen faired better. While she “was in the parlour [sic]” she ate “bread and honey”; however, had she been in the garden along with the maid, she too may have suffered a loss of her nose as the maid did. The implication of eat or be eaten is inherent in this rhyme. Since the king didn’t eat the live birds, one of the blackbirds flew off and ate the maid’s nose. One version offers a “Happy ending”: They sent for the king’s doctor, Who sewed it on again, And he sewed it on so neatly, The seam was never seen.”12

The sibilants herald a warning sound to beware of what might be consumed and the possible consequences of that consumption. Several jingles include references to a King such as: Hokey, pokey, whisky, thum, How d’you like potatoes done? Boiled in whiskey, boiled in rum, Says the King of the Cannibal Islands.”13

I’m sure that John Bellenden Ker would have analyzed this Mother Goose rhyme as being a direct attack on Ireland, referencing whisky and potatoes as obvious clues. I see it as a playful rhyme aimed at entertaining children using assonance and end rhyme to emphasize the rhythm. I also see it as a means of lightening the monotony of a poor person’s diet through silly lyrics to refocus attention to playful language rather than the tedious menu. In another monarchical Mother Goose reference, “Humpty Dumpty” who is often depicted as a cracked egg, discusses the ineptitude of “all the King’s horses and all the King’s men” who failed to restore him to his uncracked state. Perhaps the message is for children [and some overzealous adults] to be careful when eating delicate items so that nothing is wasted, rather than a diatribe against the monarchy of England. Even though my

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spin seems relatively simplistic, it is no less plausible than some of the contrived references Katherine Elwes Thomas included in her book, The Real Personages of Mother Goose14 Thomas discusses the assertion that Humpty Dumpty was identified as the tragic figure from the year 1483, Richard III, who was slain on Bosworth Field; however, the actual nursery song may have been part of an oral tradition prior to this. A preface to a nursery chap-book of the Douce Additions in the Bodleian, written “By a very Great Writer of very Little Books,” there is a reference to Humpty Dumpty: This kind of composition has been employed in a satirical manner of which we have a remarkable instance so far back as the reign of Henry the fifth…well knowing that music had often the power of inspiring courage, especially in the minds of good men.15

It is not difficult to see why more in-depth analysis might be suggested for Mother Goose rhymes that reference Kings and Queens; however, just as the nursery rhymes could refer to politically focused issues, so too could the rhymes serve as instructive devices to curb inappropriate behavior. One example of a nursery rhyme with monarchical subject matter is “The Queen of Hearts”: The Queen of Hearts She made some tarts, All on a summer’s day; The Knave of Hearts He stole those tarts, And took them clean away. The King of Hearts Called for the tarts, And beat the knave full sore; The Knave of Hearts Brought back the tarts, And vowed he’d steal no more.16

Here a Knave stole tarts which had been made by the Queen for the King. Again the nursery rhyme takes the monarch off her throne and places her in her kitchen. Once the errant behavior of the perpetrator was discovered, the King meted out his punishment by “beating the knave full sore” which resulted in the Knave returning the tarts after which the Knave “vowed he’d steal no more.” It should be noted that the king too was taken off his throne to become the enforcer of his own decree.

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sample menus and suggestions for parties, formal and informal, were a veritable theatre of class and culture wars. In Dainty Dishes for Indian Tables (1879) the exemplary dinner menu included such dishes as: Golden Quennelle Soup, Turbot with Cream Sauce, Stewed Partridges with Soubise Sauce, Leg of Mutton with Anchovy Sauce. It was not at all uncommon for such menus to include—even for breakfast—fish as well as three different meats. But for Fritzgerald, and others, by contrast, the aim is to provide advice and guidance to families with small budgets, whose daily lives resembled neither that of Indians nor that of the wealthy British. For this middle group, the Anglo-Indians, stationed in remote towns and cantonments, the plebian flavors of curried chicken fry, Sheep’s head baked, Salt Fish Tamarind Fry, and the curiously named but everpopular “Beef Ding Ding” were the familiar and commonly recommended fare. E. A. M. F. in The Wife’s Cookery Book joined the fray on the side of young wives with fixed budgets. In sharp contrast to Steel and Wyvern who assume that the labor of producing food has been relegated to servants, and who, like the rest of India, will have to be administered with firm discipline, Franklin and others assume no such thing. She assures her readers that “no loss of dignity attends the knowledge and practice of cooking.”87 Supporting her assertion by Biblical references to Sarah who “entertained angels unawares” and to Rebekah whose fine cooking deceived her husband (though she is quick to note parenthetically that this was “an example not to be recommended”), Franklin provides a new recipe for being a memsahib in the tropics. The book, as even a casual reader can see is a practical guide intended to be of use in India, under Indian conditions. She insists “only those English recipes are included that can be prepared in India and only after it has been carefully ascertained that all necessary ingredients are available in the local market.” This, she points out, “is of great importance since cookery books though easily got are seldom Indian ones.”88 These recipe books are written with less affluent memsahibs in mind. Her book, she claims, “is a really practical Indian cookery book…instead of the books that are published full of recipes of dishes that invariably require an income two hundred rupees at least.” 89Chapters titled “Cheap Breakfast” and “Cheap Tiffins” are unabashed acknowledgements of budgetary constraints. While a possible breakfast might consist of “cow heel moolee” and “fried fish roe,” the cheap tiffin section invariably recommended a mulligatawny soup, the recipe for which was a reflection of the Indian bazaar rather than the English herb garden: “8 bendikai, 4 heaped tablespoonsfull of Dhall, 12 peppercorns, 3 tablespoonsful of ghee.” Her preferred meat is mutton

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And gave him a clout, Which made poor Charley hop.21

As a poet, I am aware of the ease with which I can slip into rhyming doggerel, selecting words for their syllabication rather than logical meaning. Because the language of many rhymes may depend more on alliteration, assonance and consonance, rather than in-depth meaning from the poet’s point of view, nursery rhymes are perfect fodder for the interpretive grist mill. John Bellenden Ker’s “An Essay on the Archaeology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes” (1834) was highly criticized for being “probably the most extraordinary example of misdirected labour [sic] in the history of English letters.”22 In Ker’s 1837 two volume book, even though he begins from the point that Nursery Rhymes are usually nonsense, he convinced himself, and hoped to convince others, that in-depth meaning after rearranging some wording “lurked behind this nonsense.”23 Since he perceived English nursemaids as “incapable of composing and singing nonsense,”24 he posited them as “true heralds and apostles of Protestant principles”25 which were defamatory abuses of the basic precepts held sacred and respected by the Roman Catholic Church.26 In addition to the themes of monarchical interest, the name “Jack” seems to be a popular choice of some Mother Goose nursery rhymes. The interpretation of a “Jack” poem For Ker, a nursery jingle: Little Jack-a-dandy Wanted sugar-candy ”27

might be interpreted as a diatribe against monarchism, sacerdotalism, or Catholicism when the rhyme may have been initiated, as Baring-Gould states, “for no other earthly reason than that ‘candy’ rhymes with ‘dandy.’”28 It should be noted that there are some nursery rhymes which reflect religious beliefs. In “One Kid,” a song sung at the end of a Passover Seder and first printed in 1590 in a Prague edition of the Haggadah,29 the lyrics imply that bad behavior and all violence are avenged by God. The song lists a sequence of powers, each superseded, and ends with something prized, a kid. Furthermore, the song’s form is that of popular aids toward memorizing, devised for use with creeds and other sacred writings.30 The first stanza of the nursery song is recited at the end of the annual reading of the Passover Hagaddah. The Hagaddah is used as a guide to instruct and remind participants of past historical and spiritual events. The song, “One Kid,” lightens the mood of the Seder participants, especially the children, and instructs the children about God’s

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omnipotence: “One Kid” speaks of “a cat” that “came and devoured the kid.”31 The opening act of consumption in “One Kid” is followed by a series of increasingly larger aggressors: one kid that father bought a cat then came and devoured the kid a dog then came and bit the cat , a stick then came and beat the dog, a fire then came and burnt the stick, water then came and quenched the fire, an ox then came and drank the water, a butcher then came and slaughtered the ox, the Angel of Death then came and killed the butcher, the Holy One, blessed is He, then came and slew the angel of death.32

In the final line of the song, the Holy One [God] avenges the original violence against the kid perpetrated by the cat and reduces all subsequent violent acts to one final act which supersedes all others. The kid was originally purchased by the father to feed the family; however, outside forces prevented the family from partaking of the kid as a food source. Because the cat deprived the father and his family of the kid for sustenance, revenge was meted out through a series of increasingly aggressive forces until finally the ultimate outside force, God, punished the Angel of Death. This model of building details upon a single act of consumption is reflected in the “Jack” focused Mother Goose nursery rhymes, “The House that Jack Built”.33 This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt that lay in the house… This is the rat that ate the malt…, This is the cat, This is the dog, This is the cow with the crumpled horn, This is the maiden all forlorn This is the man all tattered and torn, This is the priest all shaven and shorn, This is the cock that crowed in the in the morn, This is the farmer sowing his corn34

This poem, translated as an English nursery rhyme, has probably been carried into every country in the world.35 As an act of accumulating behaviors, the final stanza, as in “One Kid” summarized all the behavior which include eating and consumption as instigating activities that initialized the ripple effect witnessed in this Mother Goose Song:

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This is the horse and the hound and the horn, That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn, That kept the cock that crowed in the in the morn, That waked the priest all shaven and shorn, That married the man all tattered and torn, That kissed the maiden all forlorn That milked the cow with the crumpled horn, That tossed the dog That worried the cat, That killed the rat, That ate the malt That lay in the house that Jack built.36

Here as in other nursery rhymes, the parallel concept of consumption and eating accomplish the same task. That which once existed as a separate entity becomes an integral part of an Other. As in “One Kid,” the concept of repetition in the nursery song served two purposes: initially, the child, upon hearing the words repeated, would have a better chance of remembering the lyrics and secondly, the adult teaching the song would be able to repeat the meter and lyrics for easier instruction. Both purposes serve to enhance the annual lesson both taught and remembered by the participants at the Passover Seder. In the case of “One Kid,” the spiritual message of the power of God is imparted in the song sustains effectiveness and is easily memorized; however, the question of the lesson taught in “The House That Jack Built” may be more illusive. First, the inclusion of rhyme may enhance the memory; however, it could also alter the logical lesson imparted. Since the sequence of events initializes from the vermin eating malt in Jack’s house, it makes sense that increasingly imposing predators prevail in Jack’s house. The cow, the maiden, the man and the priest seem to be added strictly for the form of the rhyme rather than for the hierarchy of predatory behavior. The cock, the farmer, the horse, the hound and the horn, while related to country living and obliquely to Jack’s House in the country, sustain no aggressive activity between any part of these final lines. The teller becomes consumed with the rhyme and loses the focus of consumption which initiated the lyric. While the accumulation song “One Kid” is sung at the end of the Passover reading of the Hagaddah, other songs involving accumulation principles, in addition to “The House That Jack Built,” were part of the Mother Goose experience. In fact, the literary device of repetition adds to the lyrical round. “Green and Airy Around” is one example: There was an old woman lived under a hill, Green and airy around.

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Sunday lunches all over British India and in its Anglicised version it continued to be consumed as an “Indian” dish in Britain (and in America). Formal dining became standardized over the course of the nineteenth century, and in no small measure through the proliferation and circulation of conduct literature, household manuals and above all cookery books that came accoutered with ready-made sample menus, diagrams for setting the table, and advice about servants and serviettes. Through these “iterative narratives” a “dining taxonomy” began to emerge—what Natalie Meir calls “a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified…and routinized.”97 The vast majority of cookery and household advice books were directly addressed to women. Planning meals, cooking and serving food properly were connected to a growing understanding of home-making which in turn was connected to ideas of modernity and progress. All the notable cookery writers of Victorian England viewed dining (as opposed to the merely functional “eating”) as a mark of civilization. Mrs. Beeton understood well the culture work of cookery in the construction of what has been called “banal nationalism.” “A nation,” she wrote, “which knows how to dine has learned the leading lessons of progress.”98 Food, always a marker of social difference and distinction, now took on an even greater role in distinguishing class and status. According to Stephen Mennel, it was in the mid-to-late nineteenth century that French cuisine “captured the social commanding heights in England more decisively…and national difference in cuisine became entangled with class difference.” 99 New recipes, mulligatawny among them, were invitations to cultural and class assimilation and were written, as Eliza Acton candidly maintained, with “such thoroughly explicit and minute instructions as may, we trust, be readily comprehended and carried out by any class of lerners.”100 If in Britain, a cosmopolitan, urban bourgeoisie was busily domesticating “exotic” commodities by buying, selling, exchanging Kashmiri shawls and curry recipes with equal aplomb, the opposite was true of the British in India who became increasingly more insular and conscious of themselves as separate and above those they ruled. The administrative class stressed, even relied on, hierarchy and protocol. For them, the art of dining and arranging dinner parties were extensions of the art of ruling and associated with the production of an imperial superiority amidst the inhospitable outposts of a tropical colony. The Anglo-Indian domestic sphere, as Steel astutely observed, was the mirror image of the British Raj. Just as the Indian Empire depended fundamentally on local intermediaries, so did the Anglo-Indian household where a number of servants were employed to oversee and attend to the quotidian details of

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Come, says Jack, let’s knock him on the head. No, says Gye, let’s buy him some bread; You buy one loaf and I’ll buy two, And we’ll bring him up as other folk do.40

There is a question as to how one should behave toward someone already appearing to be beaten or abused “little boy with one black eye” and Jack’s response is to “knock him on the head.” Rather than perpetuate the bodily beating, Gye offers the suggestion to feed the little boy some bread. In fact, Gye generously offers to buy the child two loaves of bread and volunteers Jack to purchase one. If Jack and Gye are two men, there might be a question as to the sexual orientation of the two men since they plan to “bring [the little boy} up as other folk do.” Bringing up children was traditionally posited on woman, but again, the nature of the rhyme lends itself well to the phrase “we’ll bring him up” without concern as to the detail that Jack and Gye are males. Another “Jack” Mother Goose song which may have originated as “Jack and Bill” in a Nortic version but was changed to include a female in the story is “Jack and Jill.” “Jack and Jill” has been translated frequently into many languages, but according to an origin theory presented by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866), “Jack and Jill” referes to the Nortic rhyme related to Eddaic Hjuki and Bil. For the sake of euphony, Bil has been changed to Jill “in order to give a female name to one of the children.”41 It should be noted that a 1765 woodcut depicts two boys: “Jack and Gill.”42 “Hjuki” is pronounced Juki, “which would readily become Jack.”43 Lewis Spence in 1947 claims that some ancient myth can be traced in the rhyme, if only in that “no one in folk-lore sense climbs to the top of a hill for water unless that water has special significance”—dew water, for instance.44 A basic need for consumption is water and a traditional “Jack and Jill” Mother Goose rhyme is intrinsically focused on water gathering. Whether the water is for spiritual purposes or basic existence, the story of Jack and Jill is claimed to have been a long ballad; however, of that “nothing has remained in the nursery save the four lines”45 below: Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down, and broke his crown, And Jull cam tumbling after.46

A miniature chapbook [2.5 inches by 3 inches] printed by James Kendrew of York in 1820 included four pages with a longer version of

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Jack and Jill with a longer title, “Jack and Jill and Old Dame Gill” and an opening couplet “Read it who will,/ They’ll laugh their fill” sets the tone: Jack and Jill Went up the hill, To fetch a pail of water Jack fell down, And broke his crown, And Jill came tumbling after. Then up Jack got, And home did trot, As fast as he could caper; Dame Gill did the jog, To plaster his nob With vinegar and brown paper. The Jill came in, And she did grin, To see Jack’s paper plaster; Her mother whipt her, Across her knee, For laughing at Jack’s disaster.47

Not only did Jill suffer from falling down the hill after Jack fell, she also suffered from her mother’s whipping for laughing at Jack’s strangelooking poultice prepared by her mother to help Jack heal. Jack was not punished for dropping the water, a commodity necessary for the existence of the family. The entire Mother Goose rhyme is treated as an instructive device with each panel of the chapbook offering images, first of Jack and Jill cooperating and carrying the pail between them. Next a panel shows Jack and Jill spilling the bucket and tumbling down to the ground. The third panel depicts Dame Gill applying the plaster to Jack’s head while Jill points at Jack receiving all the attention. The final chapbook image shows a bare-bottomed Jill over her mother, Dame Gill’s knee while Jack stands with his arms folded across his chest watching the whipping of Jill. In addition to the behavioral instruction, in the Kendrew chapbook (1820), letters of the alphabet, A – D printed with capitals and small case, were included.48 The result of their disastrous uphill journey ends in unquenched frustration as well as severe injury. Questions related to possibilities of error on the part of Jack and Jill’s method of water retrieval come to mind. If neither Jack nor Jill were paying particularly close attention to the task

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at hand, then perhaps their unfortunate mishap is the result of disobedience. Had they been paying more close attention to the important task of gathering water, then perhaps they would have been more careful on the way down the hill. Another implication is that while ascending a hill can be very difficult, caution must be applied even on the seemingly innocuous activity of descending a hill. The cautionary warning is that even those activities which one takes for granted can hold peril. Another “Jack” Mother Goose nursery rhyme that is part of a larger rhyme is “Little Jack Horner.” The portion of “Little Jack Horner,” which is a commonly recited song, is thought to be part of The History of Jack Horner, Containing The Witty Pranks he play’d from his Youth to his Riper Years, Being pleasant for Winter Evenings, a six chapter chapbook printed in 1770; however, . The few lines preceding the familiar traditional lines indicate that the rhyme is awkward, having no bearing on the story and, in fact, “they impede the narrative.”49 The chapbook begins with a brief description of his highly functional family with father and mother both mentioned: Jack Horner was a pretty lad, near London he did dwell, His father’s heart he made full glad, his mother lov’d him well.

Beginning with line 21 which is part of the first chapter continues: When friends they did together meet, To pass away the time, Why little Jack be sure would eat His Christmas pye in rhyme. And said, Jack-Horner, in the corner, Eats good Christmas–pye: And with his thumbs pulls out the plumbs And said Good boy am I.50

The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1997) suggests that the traditional lines regarding the plums “have been dragged in, probably as a peg on which to hand the tale”51 which is “in the tradition of chapbook literature.”52 The traditional rhyme is found quoted in 1725 by Henry Carey in his Namby Pamby53 ballad several decades earlier than the chapbook history: Now he sings of Hacky Horner Sitting in the Chimney-corner

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polysemic object, affording us a glimpse into the larger cultural and political narratives of empire, class and gender.

Works Cited Primary Sources Acton, Eliza. 1845. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches Reduced to A System of Easy Practices, For the Use of Private Families. In a Series o f Receipts which have been Strictly Tested and are Given with the Minute Exactness. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. —. 1846. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches 5th. Edition. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans —. 1860. Modern Cookery in All Its Branches: The Whole Carefully Revised by Mrs. S.J. Hale. Philadelphia: John E. Potter. —. 1900. The People’s Book of Modern Cookery: Revised and Enlarged with Many New and Original Recipes. London: The Monarch Book Company. Anon, [Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith]. 1832. The East India Sketch-Book: Comprising an Account of the Present State of Society in Calcutta, Bombay, &C. in Two Volumes. London: Richard Bentley. Beeton, Mrs. Isabella. 1861. The Book of Household Management. London: S. O. Beeton. —. 1968. The Book of Household Management. (Reproduced in Facsimile) London: Jonathan Cape. —. 2000. Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (Abridged Edition) Oxford University Press. Eden, Emily, 1866. Up the Country: Letters Written to Her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India. London: Muston, 1983. Fay, Mrs. Eliza, 1866. The Original Letters from India. Calcutta. 1925 reprint. London: Hogarth Press. Franklin, E. A. M. [E.A.M.F]. 1906. The Wife’s Cookery Book Being Recipes and Hints on Indian Cookery. Madras: Wilson’s Artistic Press. Francatelli, Charles Elmé. 1863. The Cook’s Guide and the Housekeeper’s & Butler’s Assistant London: Richard Bentley. Fritzgerald, Olivia. 1900. The People’s Indian Cookery Book. New and Popular Culinary and Household Recipes Calcutta: Methodist Publishing House. Indian Cookery“Local” for Young Housekeepers. 1887. Second Edition revised and enlarged. Bombay: Bombay Imperial Press.

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When Jacky’s a good boy, He shall have cakes and custard; But when he does nothing but cry, He shall have nothing bur mustard.62

Apparently “cakes and custard” are considered standard fare for a male child who behaves; however if the little boy constantly cries, he is rewarded with a bitter condiment of mustard which seems unusually harsh for just being too sensitive. Along with Nursery Rhymes related to food already prepared and subsequently consumed, many Mother Goose rhymes include songs about preparing food. The intent may be to illustrate to children that in order to sustain oneself, food does not spontaneously appear at the table. Someone must go through the effort of cooking some foods that are consumed at the table.63 In “There was a poor man of Jamaica,”64 the main character in the rhyme starts out “poor” but finds a vocation that enables him to succeed: There was a poor man of Jamaica, He opened a shop as a baker: The nice biscuits he made Procured him much trade 65 With the little black boys of Jamaica.

This poem from Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen was a toy book attributed to R.S. Sharpe, published by John Marshall about 1821 with hand-colored illustrations probably by Robert Cruikshank.66 The transition from being “a poor man” to one who “procured… much trade” due to his still at making “nice biscuits” perhaps offers children an incentive to seek a profession that will put them in the realm of “Gentlemen” and provide them with a worthy means of supporting themselves. In “there was a little man,”67 the character in the rhyme is a hunter who shoots a duck and brings it home to his wife to prepare it as a roast. In The Real Personages of Mother Goose, Kathleen Thomas views the following rhyme as an allegory depicting Philip of Spain, Mary Tudor, and Sir Francis Drake. I am inclined to agree with Iona Opie who identifies Thomas’ analysis as “a fanciful explanation.”68 There was a little man, and he had a little gun, And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead; He went to the brook, and shot a little duck, Right through the middle of the head, head, head.

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Perceptive Appetites: Food Issues in Mother Goose and Nursery Literature He carried it home to his old wife Joan, And bade her a fire for to make, make, make, To roast the little duck he had shot in the brook, And he’d go and fetch her the drake, drake, drake.69

An eighteenth century version of this same song does not triplicate the last words in the second and forth lines of each stanza; however, the repetition is appropriate for a knee bouncing song popular for children’s nursery rhymes. Other instructive jingles include a “dog has eaten the mop.” Not only does this jingle have an animal eating something totally inappropriate, it includes a “pig’s in a hurry”; therefore, it implies that dinner may have gotten away. Another Mother Goose jingle, “Little fishes in a brook,/ Father caught them on a hook,/ Mother fried them in a pan,/ Johnnie eats them like a man,”70 identifies each household member in his/her traditional role. The father provides food for the family, the mother cooks it and the child consumes it. Unlike the focus of traditional behavior in “Little fishes in a brook,” “Tommy Tittlemouse” did his own fishing: “Little Tommy Tittlemouse/ Lived in a little house;/ He caught fishes/ In other men’s ditches.”71 Here, as in other consumption related nursery songs, food is not always easy to obtain. Tommy Tittlemouse had to seek sustenance in “other men’s ditches” rather than having his own homestead where food was more accessible. The subtle inference reveals to the childlistener as well as the adult-singer that providing nourishment, at times, requires some ingenuity. While fish are fairly popular food items in Mother Goose, it appears that the first favorites, pies, seem to be of even greater interest in Mother Goose song rhymes. One pie rhyme, “Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren” refers to feeding Jenny Wren “cherry-pie” and offering her a drink of “red currant wine.”72 The literal intention of Robin Redbreast is to alter the appearance of Jenny who danced “daintily” and sang “prettily.” Robin intention was to transform Jenny’s appearance to something she was not: beautifully feathered like a goldfinch or as a peacock. Jenny remained modest and while accepting the food offerings of cherry-pie and currant wine as being “nice,” she told “Bob” that she loved him but that she “must wear” her “plain brown gown, and never go too fine.”73 Thus even the act of consuming pie and wine would not subsume her identity as a wren. The lesson for the listener as well as the speaker reinforces the notion that food, no matter how elaborate, is a means of sustaining oneself, not a means of raising one’s social status or appearance. Many folk tales begin with “Once upon a time…” or “Once I saw...” or “There was a little man…,’ or “an old woman…,” or “a little girl…” to

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help suspend disbelief and transport the listener/ reader to a time created by the story teller. “Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren” begins in such a manner and transports the listener/ reader to a place where biological classification of species is inconsequential and wrens and robins can do more than sing; they can offer prepared food such as cherry-pie and currant wine as a means of wooing one another and as a means of offering incentive to change intrinsic appearance. The use of food for altering one’s appearance is apparently not something to which the song subscribed. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book sorts nursery rhymes into various categories, One category within the framework of “Baby Games and Lullabies” is identified as “Knee Rides,” Two interesting subject matter consistencies are part of these knee bouncing rhythmic lyric poems: One, the poems relate to riding a horse and two, the poems seem to be related to some type of food ingredient.74 Rhymes relate stories of little girls such as Jenny who while trotting “spilt all her butter milk” or named horses such as “Neddy” who is spoken to while transporting a child to the fair to buy “A penny apple and a penny pear.”75 Even the popular “To market, to market, / To buy a fat pig.” is identified as a rhyme which is part of the knee bouncing tradition. Personification of birds, especially robins, is another in the series of rhythmic knee bouncing verses. “A robin and a robin’s son/ Once went to town to buy a bun./ They couldn’t decide on plum or plain,/ And so they went back home again.”76 Like the others in this category, this poem focuses on a rhythmic ride likened to the cantering of a horse, even though the subjects are birds and food items such as plum or plain buns. While some Mother Goose rhymes serve as a means of playing with a child on a bouncing knee which is an inexpensive, readily available physical playing game, other Mother Goose rhymes serve as a means to play verbal games with children. One example of many is the “Teasing” lyrics which jumbled familiar Mother Goose rhymes into a mélange of various verses is: Little Jack Horner/Sat in the corner,/ Eating his curds and whey;/ There came a big spider,/ Who sat down beside her,/ And the dish ran away with the spoon.” This is followed in Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book with ‘Daddy, you haven’t got it right!’77 The mention of food from various nursery songs creates a jumble of information that becomes a game which teaches children appropriateness and inappropriateness of certain relationships of consumer and consumable. In conclusion, while many Mother Goose rhymes have errant behavior and assorted punishments for that inappropriate behavior, it should be kept in mind that these are rhymes and songs that were told or sung to children in the presence of an adult or an older sibling. While many Mother Goose

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Spielman, M. H. 1900. The Hitherto Unidentified Contributions of W. M. Thackerary to “Punch” with a Complete Authoritative Bibliography from 1843to 1848. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Stein, Mark. 2003. “Curry at Work: Nibbling at the Jewel in the Crown,” Eating Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Food. Ed. Tobias Döring, Markus Heinde, Susanne Mühleisen. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag. Winter. Strobel, Margaret. 1987. “Gender and Race in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury British Empire.” In Becoming Visible. Women in European History Edited by Renate Bridenthal et.al., Boston: Houghton Mifflin: 375-394. Narayan, Uma. 1995. “Eating Cultures: Incorporation, Identity and Indian Food.” Social Identities 1:1:160-188. Zlotnick, Susan. 2003. “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England.” The Recipe Reader. London: Ashgate.

Notes 1

Livingstone, David. 2001. A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone’s Expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries and the discovery of Lake Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864 Santa Barbara: Narrative Press. 101. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Yule, Col. Henry and A.C. Burnell, 1886. Hobson-Jobson. A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Calcutta: The Bengal Chamber Edition, Rupa & Co., 1994. Hobson-Jobson. 1784: 595. 5 Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India. London: Faber and Faber. 96. 6 Yule, Col. Henry and A.C. Burnell, 1886. Hobson-Jobson,. 1784: 595. 7 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings for Madras. 320. 8 Chaudhuri, Nupur. 1992. “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian England.” In Western Women and Imperialism. Complicity and Resistance edited by Nupur Chaudhuri & Margaret Strobel, Bloomington: Indiana UP: 231-246: 238-240. 9 Burnett, John. 1830. Plenty and Want, 82. 10 Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table. A Culinary History of the British in India. London: Faber and Faber. 94. 11 Geddes, Olive M. 1996. The Laird’s Kitchen: Three Hundred Years of Food in Scotland Stationery Office Books.

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Opie, Iona and Peter. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. London: Oxford University Press. 11. 3 Baring-Gould, William S. & Ceil Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Publisher. 12. 4 Rackham, Arthur. 1975. Illust. Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. New York: The Viking Press. 15. 5 Mitchell, Diana.2003. Children’s Literature: An Invitation to the World. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. 85. 6 Rackham. 1975. Illust. Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes. 15. 7 Ibid., 16. 8 Delamar, Gloria T. 1987. Mother Goose: From Nursery to Literature. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers. 1. 9 Baker, William J. 1975. “Historical Meaning in Mother Goose: Nursery Rhymes Illustrative of English Society Before the Industrial Revolution.” Journal of Popular Culture. 9: 645. 10 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. 36. 11 Ibid., 52. 12 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 57. 13 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 24. 14 Thomas, Katherine Elwes. 1930. The Real Personages of Mother Goose. London: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co. 38-39. 15 Ibid., 40-43. 16 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 32. 17 Ibid., 33. 18 Thomas. 1930. The Real Personages of Mother Goose. 17. 19 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 25. Opie also mentions that “the theories are so numerous they tend to cancel each other out.” Ibid. 20 Baker. 1975. “Historical Meaning in Mother Goose.” 646. 21 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 32. 22 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. ix. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Eckenstein, Lina. 1911.Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. London: Duckworth & Co. 2. 26 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. ix-x. 27 Ibid., xiii. 28 Ibid., xiii. 29 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 272. 30 White, Alison. “Mother Goose Reread.” Southern Folklore Quarterly. Vol 19: 156-163, 1955. 161. 31 Scherman, Rabbis Nosson and Meir Zlotowitz, General Editors. 1994. The Family Haggadah. Brookllyn, NY: Noble Book Press. 91-92. 32 Ibid.

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In England, too, the legend was known and discussed in the "London Congregational Magazine" for 1834, whence it was reprinted in New York, 1835, under the title, "A Kid, a Kid, or the Jewish Origin of the Celebrated Legend, 'The House That Jack Built'" (see an article describing this little book in "The New York Times Saturday Review," Feb. 9, 1901). In the preface it is called a "parabolical hymn." Henry George published in London in 1862 an essay on the same subject: "An Attempt to Show that Our Nursery Rime 'The House That Jack Built' Is an Historical Allegory, . . . To Which Is Appended a Translation and Interpretation of an Ancient Jewish Hymn" (comp. Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." v. 63). 34 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 47-49, 35 Ibid., 44. 36 Ibid., 47-49. 37 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. 21-22. 38 Ibid., 21-22. 39 “H” is an aspirant. 40 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 265. Maurice Sendak in 1993 used this rhyme for the ending of “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” (Harper Collins). 41 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 267. 42 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. n.267. 43 Ibid., 267. 44 Spence, Lewis. 1947. Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game, and Rhyme. London: Watts. 25. 45 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. xii. 46 Ibid. 47 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 266. 48 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. n. 267. 49 Ibid., 277. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 277-8. 52 Ibid., 278. 53 Defined as meaning “one who is insipid, sentimental or weak” or “Lacking vigor or decisiveness; spineless” (www.answers.com/topic/namby-pamby). Namby-pamby, a word derived from the name of Ambrose Philips, a little-known 18th-century poet whose verse incurred the sharp ridicule of his contemporaries Alexander Pope and Henry Carey. Their ridicule, inspired by political differences and literary rivalry, had little to do with the quality of Philips's poetry. In poking fun at some children's verse written by Philips, Carey used the nickname Namby Pamby: “So the Nurses get by Heart Namby Pamby's Little Rhimes” (www.answers.com/topic/namby-pamby). Pope then used the name in the 1733 edition of his satirical epic The Dunciad. The first part of Carey's coinage came from Amby, or Ambrose. Pamby repeated the sound and form but added the initial of Philips's name. Such a process of repetition is called reduplication. After being

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popularized by Pope, namby-pamby went on to be used generally for people or things that are insipid, sentimental, or weak. (www.answers.com/topic/nambypamby). [After Namby-Pamby, a satire on the poetry of Ambrose Philips (1674– 1749) by Henry Carey (1687?–1743).] 54 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 267. 55 Ibid., 278. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 280. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid., 283. 63 Ibid., 277. 64 Ibid., 283. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 1955: 340. 68 Ibid. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 25. 71 Ibid., 27. 72 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. 60. 73 Ibid., 61. 74 Opie, 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 12-14. 75 Ibid., 12. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 54.

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Ibid. Ibid., 286-7. 72 Ibid., 497. 73 Ibid., 496. 74 Ibid. 500. 75 Ibid. 287. 76 Ibid. 287. 77 Beetham, Margaret. 2003. “Of Recipe Books and Reading in the Nineteeth Century: Mrs.Beeton and her Cultural Consequences.” In The Recipe Reader: Narratives-Contexts-Readings edited by Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster, London: Ashgate. 22 78 Kenney-Herbert, Col.[Wyvern], 1878. Culinary Jottings. 503. 79 Ibid., 500. 80 Riddel, Dr. R. Cook’s Oracle. xiii. 81 Indian Cookery “Local” Preface to the Second Edition 82 Ibid. 83 Wyvern, Author’s Preface to the First Edition 84 Indian Cookery “Local” Preface to the Second Edition 85 Indian Cookery “Local” v 86 Olivia Fritzgerald, The People’s Indian Cookery Book. Preface 87 E. A. M. F. 5 88 E. A. M. F The Wife’s Cookery Book, 181 89 Ibid. 90 “Kitchen Melodies,” Punch 28 November 1846. In The Hitherto Unindentified, 202 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Susan Zlotnick, “Domesticating Imperialism,” 84 94 Kathryn Hughes, The Short Life, 211 95 Pullar, Consuming Passions, 1 96 Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (Abridged Edition), 2000. xvi 97 Ibid. 133 98 Ibid. 905 99 Mennell, 200 100 Acton, Modern Cookery (1845). xxi. 101 Steel, Complete Indian Housekeeper. 7. 102 Wyvern, Jottings. 1. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., 5-6. 105 Meir. 134. 106 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Far. 30. 107 Jenny Sharpe. 108 Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. 90. 109 Stein, “Curry at Work.” 134-5. 71

CHAPTER FIVE: CONTEMPORARY CUISINE

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Kippur, in order to readjust their lives, so these women have examined their lives during their period of adjustment to America. Viewing their adaptation process as their personal days of awe, the time during which they reckon with their identities as Jews and as Americans to find a comfortable balance, perhaps even atoning for the “sins” associated with such adaptation, provides insights into the acculturation of each woman. Scholar Anne Goldman insists that “. . . to write about food is to write about the self as well,”2 thus stressing the potential significance of food in autobiography in general. Perhaps because food preparation is central to Jewish religious practice and a basic aspect of duties within the domestic sphere, food stands out as a recurring trope in Jewish women’s autobiography. Texts of immigrant women from the Pale of Settlement, in particular, contain numerous references to food, possibly because of marked differences these women observed between the food of the shtetl and of America. Some foods were simply foreign to these immigrants. For example, Eastern European Jews had apparently never eaten bananas, for several texts refer to the peculiarity of this fruit.3 But the major distinction with which these Orthodox Jews had to contend was the prevalence of traife, non-kosher food. In the Pale of Settlement, Jews, living in a religion dominated community, ate only kosher foods, but such was not the case in America. Here freedom extended to the foods one ate. And, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett points out, “Food is a powerful resource for giving tangible expression to the choices that are being made.”4 When a Jew raised in Orthodoxy chooses to abandon dietary restrictions, that person elects to separate herself from one of the mainstays of her religion. The choice is generally conscious and willful, which indicates a reevaluation of her identity and place within the Jewish community. As contemporary Jewish scholar Doris Friedensohn puts it, food is “a yardstick of consciousness: a reflection of choices made among a multiplicity of options, choices which define communities of meaning and configurations of identities.”5 Interestingly, Friedensohn chooses to write about her own relationship to Judaism through her act of defiance on Yom Kippur by confessing that as an adolescent she purposely defied the mandated fast for the Day of Atonement by following morning religious services with a lunch of egg foo young, not only opting not to fast, but purposefully feasting on forbidden foods made with “bean sprouts, onions, and diced roast pork.”6 The significance of her confession becomes evident when she explains that later in life, when preparing food for a Passover seder, she considered a new recipe for charoset7 made with dates instead of the traditional apples, as well as duck pâté in place of old-fashioned Jewish chopped chicken liver as an appetizer, but in both cases opted for the

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plays the role and “led the / parade / the year / the boys came back / from war,” and where excess is associated with an onlooker who may be drunk rather than with Uncle Sam, himself, the ironies are deeper still.2 As the work of a writer often associated with celebration of both positive sensual experience and celebratory joy, the Rabbit series’ consistent pattern of treating eating with irony of one sort or another provides much food for thought. Why is the food never right? Why so seldom do we find simple satisfaction that is sanctioned by the narrative context? Before immersion in the saga’s vast design, we might note some tendencies of Updike’s irony with regard to food in “A & P,” perhaps his most widely anthologized short story. In “A & P,” the characters that Updike gathers in a supermarket are surrounded by food, but there is no eating—a scene that is literally “tantalizing,” if one considers the myth of Tantalus. The lovely “Queenie,” so dubbed by protagonist narrator Sammy, purchases “Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream” in a jar that is never opened.3 The herring snacks function as an image through what they stimulate in the Sammy’s imagination, the vision of an elegant cocktail party the likes of which he has never seen, rather than through being eaten or even tasted. The less-socially-privileged Sammy, a cashier at the market, imagines the men in Queenie’s world as wearing “ice cream coats” (with which her breasts are later associated when compared to “two scoops of the smoothest vanilla”) and as serving the herring snacks accompanied by “drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them [italics mine].” Thus, Updike pairs uneaten food with undrinkable drink, evidently Sammy’s conflation of the bitter martini with a sweet julep, a complex, ironic metaphor for his mixture of innocence, imagination and exclusion.4 It is also ironic that “sour cream” remains sealed in the jar while sweet “ice cream” and “smoothest vanilla” fill Sammy’s mind’s eye, but he is destined never to taste the treat, sweet or sour, and Queenie is gone before Sammy can get outside the market. Here we have many of the hallmarks of Updike’s treatment of food: a tantalizing but ironic mixture of absence and presence—in this case the food is uneaten; food imagery stimulates richer imaginative treats; the food may be plain but the description is delectable; food is not offered as an end in itself; food is associated with love; and a dissonant note is struck. The treatment of food in “A & P” also can serve as a metaphor for much of Updike’s art: ordinary life subjected to an extraordinary depth and eloquence of analysis and representation.

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II In keeping with the pattern of absence and presence, Updike introduces food substitutes before food at the beginning of Rabbit, Run. The novel opens with 26-year-old Rabbit smoking as he returns from work on March 20, 1959. After an impromptu game of basketball with a group of boys, he “plucks the pack of cigarettes from his bobbling shirt pocket, and without breaking stride cans it in somebody’s open barrel.”5 Updike associates Rabbit’s impulse to quit smoking with larger dissatisfactions and the vague desire to change his life, which had reached its zenith eight years ago when he was a high school basketball star. He received no further formal education or training, and he derives his small income from demonstration of a workable but trivial and unnecessary kitchen device, “the MagiPeel Peeler,” the inflated name and advertising of which connect both Rabbit and the American diet with commercial “fraud.”6 When he reaches his untidy walkup apartment in a row house, Rabbit finds his pregnant wife Janice deep into cocktails and television, on the screen of which dismembered segments of a Tootsie Roll disport themselves.7 It is suppertime, but food preparation has not commenced. After a quarrel, a symbol of Rabbit’s complex but unarticulated impetus for his first “run” from home is that his wife asks him to pick up more cigarettes. He leaves his home for several months, but Rabbit resumes smoking upon returning to Janice in the hospital after delivery of their second child. Rabbit’s joining them contains positive elements, but this is less true of his abandonment of Ruth, another woman to whom Rabbit had professed love, and acceptance of a cigarette signals both restoration and decline: “The effect is somehow of a wafer of repentance and Rabbit accepts. His first drag, after so many clean months, unhinges his muscles and he has to sit down.”8 Initially, the cigarettes and MagiPeel Peeler both stand for Rabbit’s diversion from healthful nourishment on both literal and metaphorical levels, and Janice’s drinking and poor cooking stand for her parallel alienation. She drinks heavily throughout the Rabbit novels. Her sugary old-fashioneds at the beginning of Rabbit, Run lead a long procession of other alcoholic drinks, and the last text, “Rabbit Remembered,” opens with Janice slipping Taylor’s sherry into her tea as she absorbs the shock of hearing that the middle aged woman who has just entered her living room is the late Rabbit and Ruth’s illegitimate daughter, Annabelle.9 The botched—and ultimately uneatendinner she is about to prepare at the beginning of Rabbit, Run also stands at the head of a succession of poor meals. When Rabbit returns to the apartment in her absence to get his

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clothes, he finds “the pork chops never taken from the pan, cold as death, riding congealed grease,”10 and meals throughout the series are a succession of flops, leftovers, picked up affairs, and frozen dinners. It is appropriate that Janice’s final feast, a Thanksgiving dinner in “Rabbit Remembered,” is a qualified success until dessert: “The turkey was dry and the gravy a little thick and cold but the stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce all came out of a box and were excellent, save for that last fillip of taste, tart or peppery, that only a fond and confident cook can impart. Janice’s bearing breathes relief that she will not have to do this for another year.”11 Four bottles of California sauterne have loosened the diners’ tongues, however, and out in the kitchen as the dishes are done and the pies are warmed, Janice’s new husband, Ronnie Harrison, speaks cruel words to Annabelle, dining for the first time with the family, out of his depths of old jealousy and hostility towards her father, Rabbit. The scene ends with Rabbit’s son, Nelson, taking his half sister by the hand and leaving his mother’s house “for good.” Yet we sense that it is high time that he break the tie, so “good” is a pun, and the dinner is not entirely a failure. Close to the beginning of Rabbit, Run, Updike moves from food substitutes to real food, but it is in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Rabbit begins to advance toward his first run, an automobile journey, he sees his son, Nelson, through the kitchen window of his parents’ house. The child is sitting in a high chair at the center table surrounded by Rabbit’s father, mother, and sister. A momentary feeling of “quick odd jealousy comes and passes” through him as he mistakes Nelson for himself. His mother is trying to coax Nelson into eating “a spoon of smoking beans.”12 The scene is an exquisite one, and the appeal of this plain food is enhanced by the single adjective, “smoking.” Food is also surrounded by a gentle but complex irony. Harry left Janice at dinnertime, but it is Nelson who is being fed in his old place at table. Harry is outside, detached, looking in. He came to fetch Nelson but realizes that the boy is better off, for the time being, where he is. The framed picture of his family eating contains much of what he loves, but he is about to run away from it. Harry gets something good to eat in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, just south of his native region, what Updike later calls “Diamond County,” based on the actual lozenge-shaped Berks County. Again, the plain American food is described in the most appealing fashion: “a glass of milk and to go with it a piece of apple pie; the crust is crisp and bubbled and they’ve had the sense to use cinnamon. His mother’s pies always had cinnamon . . . . The hamburgers had been warmer and fatter than the ones

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reading the Torah in synagogues throughout New York City, demanding that Jews refrain from purchasing meat. In one instance, meat actually became a weapon when a woman slapped a policeman in the face with a piece of liver!15 On a very basic level, a woman can exert her power by electing to feed her family or, conversely, by withholding food from them; when a woman provides meals as a part of her domestic responsibility, we must realize that to do so constitutes a choice. Thus, in striving to provide meals beyond the simplistic fare the Calofs accepted, Rachel exerts her power as an individual; in deciding to relinquish her domestic responsibilities, Yezierska seizes the personal power to select her own lifestyle; and in taking on the responsibility of food preparation upon arriving in America, Cohen becomes empowered beyond her years as a child. Cohen provides readers with several instances in which food suggests power struggles. As a domestic servant for the Corlove family, she employs food to demonstrate her power struggle with the mother of the family. Mrs. Corlove always found the worst of the available food for Cohen: “It was usually the tail of the fish, the feet and the gizzard of the chicken, the bun to which some mishap had occurred.”16 Later, although with much guilt, Cohen ate a coveted pan cake which she knew that Mrs. Corlove would miss, metaphorically asserting herself as a deserving human being. In two other instances, through reference to food she indicates the power of the dominant society and the immigrant family’s helplessness. Starving, Cohen’s father stood in line at the United Hebrew Charities for two days in order to bring home one chicken for his family to eat, a submission after which he “sat down at the table and wept like a child.”17 In this case, Cohen, a shtetl Jew from the second wave of immigration, had relinquished control of his own life to the German Jews who viewed the shtetl Jews as an embarrassment, providing charity out of a sense of duty. The second instance reveals the insidious destructiveness the dominant Christian society visited on the new immigrants. Although the family strove to maintain their independence, when faced with starvation, Cohen’s mother instructed her children to bow their heads in prayer at school, as the Christian missionaries had requested, so as to receive bread and honey. In this case, America had successfully dominated the Jewish immigrants, buying their souls, not outright through an inquisition, but by taking advantage of their physical starvation. While food has divisive powers, it also has the capacity to bring people together. Most conspicuously, people come together as a community and eat at each celebration, as was the case for each of the immigrant women under study: at the Calof’s marriage and at their son’s circumcision, which

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confess all to the newly sober Nelson, and the sensuous interlude eventually precipitates Rabbit’s final flight.

III In an interview conducted by Mimi Sheraton and published in The New York Times during the period of success following the appearance of the third novel in the Rabbit saga, Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike describes similarities between Harry Angstrom’s diet and Updike’s own during his early years. Several are of special interest. First, Updike explained, “When I was growing up in the Dutch-German area of Pennsylvania, we always had a vegetable garden and grew kohlrabi . . . . Just standing there in the garden gnawing away at the woody outercovering was a satisfying sort of rabbit thing to do.”21 He also noted, “Harry and I were raised on the same doughy Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. We had all sorts of bologna, which we ate instead of other sliced things like ham and cheese,” and, perhaps related, Updike confesses, “I don’t like meat to look like animals. I prefer it in the form of sausages, hamburgers and meat loaf, far removed from the living thing.” Along with Harry, Updike was a child of the Depression, and he observes, “Even though I think about my weight, I eat all of that food [away from home] because I was raised poor and can’t resist free food. You can’t tell when you’re going to get more.” Updike notes special weaknesses for pickles, “caramel and nougat” candy, and “salty things—potato chips, pretzels and corn curls.” Finally, despite an occasional indulgence in French food, of which he is also fond, Updike describes many middle-American eating preferences: “mild flavors,” “peanut butter,” milk with meals, and stops when traveling at McDonalds or “Howard Johnson’s or maybe a cut below that. I like that quick and efficient American way of eating.” All of these food motifs are important in the Rabbit texts, and most are specifically associated with Harry Angstrom. We would do well to remember, however, that Harry is much different from John Updike in many ways. Joyce Carol Oates describes the relationship of creator and character with both clarity and brevity as a “combination of cousinly propinquity and temperamental diamagnetism.”22 Hence, in Sheraton’s interview, most of Updike’s “ruminations on matters gustatory” emerge as tinged with nostalgia and other fond emotions, but in the novels similar tastes are enriched with multiple ironies, often sharp and even tragic, although Updike’s “cousinly propinquity” with Rabbit’s much narrower life gives to many descriptions the poetic intensity that is rooted in

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childhood experience. Regarding the genesis of Harry Angstrom, Updike has noted: “Rabbit, Run at first was modestly conceived as a novella, to form with another, The Centaur, a biune study of complementary moral types: the rabbit and the horse, the zigzagging creature of impulse and the plodding beast of stoic duty.”23 There are traces of this opposition in Rabbit, Run. The river that runs steadily through Brewer is the “Running Horse,” and Rabbit praises the more solid Ruth as “my good horse.”24 As might be expected, then, Updike provides a number of appropriate illustrations for Harry’s rabbit-like qualities. In Rabbit, Run, the priest Eccles who pursues Rabbit on behalf of Janice and her family is once compared to a “hunter,”25 and there are passing references to traps, nets, and a “hollow hutch,”26 but in subsequent novels, Updike begins to elaborate patterns of vegetable imagery. In Rabbit Redux, Harry encounters his former mistress Ruth, but she tells him dismissively, “`Run along Rabbit. You’ve had your day in the cabbage patch.’”27 In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry has an overgrown vegetable garden, or rather takes over one that Janice had started, but Nature’s smothering fecundity produces more thoughts of death than of life, and he absent-mindedly picks twice as much lettuce as the family needs for dinner.28 Later in the novel, he returns from Janice’s family’s summer house in the Pocono Mountains to find that Nelson and friend Melanie have weeded the garden, but the kohlrabi is “enormous,” and Rabbit partly rejects the next generation’s efforts by observing, “`You should have eaten some, the kohlrabi gets pulpy if you let it grow too big.’”29 It is decided that nobody likes it except Harry, but eating it is part of his tendency to “nibble,” “one reason he’s fat.” Melanie, a New Age Californian, did not recognize what the vegetable was, but pulls out of the depths of her encyclopedic knowledge of health that kohlrabi “is rich in vitamin C,” yet she says this “dreamily,” vitiating the positive message. Thus, the backyard garden and the kohlrabi, grounded in Updike’s experience and fond recollection, in the complex cross references of the Rabbit series become vehicles for multiple ironic reflections on family misunderstandings, the passage of time, attrition, and mutability. In Rabbit at Rest, when Janice and Harry have long moved out of the old Springer house on Joseph Street in the suburb of Mount Judge, the new householder, Nelson, has put up a swing set for his children on the site of Harry’s old garden. Janice, wandering in the backyard, “thinks she recognizes the ferny tops of carrots and kohlrabi among the plantain and dandelions’ yellow flowers and white pompons that flourish beneath” the swing’s metal feet30: the son cannot quite obliterate all traces of the father.

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Harry has a new vegetable garden, furthermore, just “lettuce and carrots and kohlrabi,” behind the handsome stone house in fashionable Penn Park that Janice and he had bought at the height of his success. Yet this garden, like the other at the Springer house, is an imitation of his’ parents’ vegetable garden long ago,31 and the description of all of these fictional gardens was enriched by Updike’s childhood memories of his own family garden. The Rabbit series abounds in references to Pennsylvania Dutch food, and they grow increasingly ironic, as the overall action advances. In Rabbit, Run, after his first night of love with Ruth, Harry goes out for groceries and brings back, among other things, “a Ma Sweitzer’s shoo-fly pie,”32 suggesting his transference of hearth and home to Ruth’s abode. Surveying his purchases, she notes ironically but mildly, “`You’re kind of a bland eater.’” When Janice’s family clergyman, Jack Eccles, goes to talk to the Angstrom family’s Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach about Rabbit’s infidelity, he encounters a house filled with the heavy smell of roast beef, suggesting serious German eating to accompany Kruppenbach’s rigorous brand of Christianity. The Episcopal Eccleses, by way of contrast, drink tea in the library, and Mrs. Eccles feeds Rabbit Cheerios with his choice of milk or cream,33 ironically commenting on Eccles’ support of Rabbit’s “feel good” brand of religion. In Rabbit Redux, we begin to encounter even more ironic treatment of Rabbit’s ancestral diet: “[I]n these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs.”34 Updike’s narrator notes with sharp satire that citizens of Rabbit’s home region are trying “to sell what couldn’t be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples.”35 While Janice is away having an affair with Charlie Stavros, one of her father’s automobile salesmen, Rabbit is caught up in the social turbulence at the end of the 1960s and plays host to a young, privileged Connecticut dropout, Jill, and a Black Power advocate, Skeeter. Charlie draws Janice temporarily toward Greek food, and Jill brings the dietary ways of the Stonington upper middle class to Harry’s modest home: Her cooking has renewed his taste for life. They have wine now with supper, a California white in a half-gallon jug. And always a salad: salad in Diamond County cuisine tends to be a brother of sauerkraut, fat with creamy dressing, but Jill’s hands serve lettuce in an oily film invisible as health. Where Janice would for dessert offer some doughy goodie from

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son’s circumcision affirms this interpretation of the law when he commands Rachel to eat meat he has deemed nonkosher because of her poor health at the time.20 Eating this meat is the second time in the narrative Rachel consumes traife; again she justifies her breach of dietary laws, this time through the words of the shochet. No where else in the narrative does Calof indicate that she abandoned the rules of kashrut. Given that her story is a retrospective text, and she maintains constant respect for the commandments of Orthodox Judaism throughout, readers must suspect that she otherwise followed dietary laws throughout her life. That she chooses to mention these two incidents attests to her use of text for confession and atonement for possible sins. Calof also demonstrates her religious devotion with reference to food when she describes the feasts in which the family indulged at times of simchas, events which evoke great joy in the Jewish religion. The first such event was Rachel’s marriage. After ensuring readers that food was scarce, describing meals of groats and milk as well as other scanty provisions, Rachel recounts a veritable feast for the wedding dinner, which served not only the entire Calof clan but two neighboring families as well: “We sat down to a truly magnificent banquet which consisted of beans, rice with raisins, chicken soup, and roast chicken” (38). Of course, most celebrate their wedding with a special meal, but given the circumstances under which the Calofs were living at this time, and with winter coming on after this November wedding, a time when the family often approached starvation, such a meal appears to be irresponsible. But a marriage in Judaism is a sacred event, one which must be solemnized through rituals which heighten the significance of the occasion. Perhaps a more distinctly Jewish celebration, one which would make the point clearer for a gentile audience, is the bris, the ceremonial circumcision of a Jewish male in keeping with God’s covenant with Abraham. Not only were the Calofs willing to go into debt to bring in a mohal21 so that this ceremony could be properly performed when their first son arrived, but they planned an elaborate menu, given their circumstances, including cheese, butter, and two roast chickens. Rachel reports that the family became reckless as their excitement over the bris grew, a recklessness which led to the decision to slaughter one of their oxen to mark the event. To butcher one of their farm animals indeed appears foolhardy, but such a sacrifice underscores the significance of the bris. Food, then, stands as a clear means of revealing religious devotion in this text. More interesting than Calof’s references to food in her autobiography as an indication of her religiosity is her response to starvation. Readers first glimpse the starvation Calof was to face in her description of the

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stimulated idealism of Jill’s statement, “Usually I try to rise above eating.”41 Updike recognizes that a consistent love of unhealthily salty, sweet, starchy, and fatty foods runs deep in the middle American diet, and especially, perhaps, in his native region. He sometimes writes almost fondly of it in associating the Janice whom Rabbit first dated with her job selling candy and cashews at “Kroll’s,” a fictional version of the grand, locally owned, small city department store.42 There is a touch of irony even here, perhaps, in the young Janice being associated with toothsome edibles. There is more than a touch of irony in Margaret (“Peggy”) Gring Fosnacht’s name, which recalls both the German Shrove Tuesday, “Fastnacht,” and heavy doughy pastry called a “fasnacht” (variant spellings), which is often sold at church and fire hall fundraisers and served with syrup in the Pennsylvania Dutch country just before Lent. In Rabbit Redux, Peggy Fosnacht repeatedly offers Rabbit food and her abundant body, and he sometimes associates her with “gumdrops.”43 Ironically, the night he accepts her offers, he is awakened by a phone call summoning him to the last stages of the destruction by fire of his house with Jill inside. A symbol of the continuity of a heavy diet in Brewer is Johnny Frye’s Chophouse. In Rabbit Is Rich, Updike notes that it had once served “good solid food day and night for the big old-fashioned German eaters, who have eaten themselves pretty well into the grave by now, taking with them tons of pork chops and sauerkraut and a river of Sunflower Beer.”44 It appears under new guises in four of the novels in the Rabbit series, each time rebuilt around a new concept that suggests lighter food, but the old calories keep creeping back in the forms of such things as meat salads with macadamia nuts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Johnny Frye’s has been resurrected as “The Crepe House,” but Harry notes that the fare is suspiciously akin to the fattening pancake. The last meal in the lengthy Rabbit series is a lunch meeting between Nelson and his childhood friend, and Peggy’s son, Billy Fosnacht, who is destined for Annabelle: “the restaurant . . . was Johnny Frye’s Chophouse many years ago and then became the Café Barcelona and then the Crepe House and then the Salad Binge and now under new management has been revived as Casa di Pasta, pasta supposed to be good for your arteries while having a little more substance than salads or crepes.” 45(322). Ironically, subverting even this last highly compromised diet concept, “Billy orders bowties with diced shrimp.”46

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IV Inscribed deeply in the openings of the Rabbit novels is the movement of work, return home, a drink, and a family “supper,” as the evening meal is usually called. Before eating, Updike sometimes cuts off the action, but supper is understood to be the next step. Every one of the texts begins this way. During the day, something unusual has happened, and upon returning home, the comforts of food and drink are interrupted by some kind of conflict. In two of the texts, the action reaches bedtime. The early story “Ace in the Hole” is John Updike’s prototypical story for the Rabbit texts. Here, the ex basketball player Ace has had an accident at the used car lot where he works and has been fired. He drives home, opens a beer, and argues with his wife. The narrative does not quite reach the evening meal, but Ace eventually resists dealing with his family’s multiple problems by saying, “`Baby. It’s the cocktail hour.’”47 Rabbit, Run, as we have noted, begins with Rabbit’s return from work, his chronic dissatisfactions temporarily sidetracked by mild March weather and exercise. In this case, Janice has the drinks, and they argue. She begins to prepare dinner as Rabbit ostensibly steps out for a few minutes to pick up his son, the car, and some cigarettes. Rabbit Redux opens with a chastened Rabbit leaving his day’s work at a printing job in Brewer. He has a drink with his father, who begins to plant the idea in Rabbit’s head that Janice is having an affair. He returns home to his son, has more drinks, heats up two Salisbury steak TV dinners, and goes to bed. The dissonance in this case is provided by the absence of Janice, who does not return home until 10:55 p.m. Something is amiss. In Rabbit Is Rich, toward the end of the day, a young couple enters Springer Motors, now a Toyota dealership as well as the family’s old used car business. Rabbit believes the woman to be his daughter by Ruth, who would never give him any information on the subject. He drives home. He and Janice have drinks and dinner while pondering a cryptic postcard from Nelson, who asks to bring home someone called “Melanie.” Janice and her mother, in whose house they all live, fight over Nelson’s sharing a room with a woman before marriage. Rabbit and Janice are semi-retired in Florida at the beginning of Rabbit at Rest, but their job for the day is picking up Nelson and his family at the airport and driving home. Tension is provided by Nelson’s unusual behavior, which turns out to be due to cocaine. The action ends with beers before dinner. In this case, dinner the next day is an elaborate set piece—where Harry eats far too richly and far too muchin the “Mead Hall” of the ironically named “Valhalla Village,” their retirement community. With his Swedish surname and having often

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been compared to a “Viking,” Rabbit has finally entered an ironic middleAmerican version of Nordic paradise where the emphasis is on endless supplies of food rather than on heroic drinking and fighting. “Rabbit Remembered” opens in late morning with Annabelle’s call upon Janice, but after engaging in various activities, the three denizens of the old Springer house converge—Janice, Ronnie, and Nelson—on the kitchen to contemplate, discuss, and argue at suppertime about the newest member of the family. The Rabbit Saga is not a breakfast club kind of affair. The opening movement from work to home, drink, conflict, a communal meal, and sleep at the end of a day of mixed satisfaction and compromise is so profound, so central to these texts that we must conclude that it is basic to Updike’s conception of middle class American family life. Perhaps it also was influenced by the fact that he wrote the Rabbit texts away from Pennsylvania, and with the commencement of each he returned home in spirit. The fact that in these texts, each opening day includes an unexpected problem, each cocktail hour and/or meal includes tension, and the day ends in a highly provisional fashion is appropriate also, of course, to the opening act of a work of fiction, which follows in all but the short story “Ace in the Hole.” This action sets the stage and asks the dramatic questions. Updike’s association of irony with homecoming, drink, and food, furthermore, allows us to see and appreciate the literary tradition within which, and against which, he has worked in one aspect of these complex books. Among the most powerful archetypes governing the treatment of food in the Western traditionincluding forbidden fruit, bloodletting and burnt sacrifice, miraculous feeding, ritual eating of divine flesh, the niggardly or absent meal due to famine, and so forth—perhaps the most important is the paradigm of the feast. We never “keep the feast” in the fullest sense in Updike’s realist and antiheroic world, but the culmination of the novels’ pattern of early scenes in Rabbit at Rest’s “Mead Hall” betrays the archetype. So deep is this paradigm in Updike’s imagination that the feast even appears in fragmentary fashion, and with multiple ironic qualifications, in Updike’s first mature story, “Friends from Philadelphia,” where the underage “John Nordholm” must engage help at 5:30 p.m. to buy a bottle of wine so that his parents can entertain friends at dinner.48 At the beginning of the Western literary tradition, The Iliad sets the pattern at the conclusion of the conflict-filled first book with the feasting of the gods. Homer describes mirth, music, poetry, conversation, perfect

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future meals she would eat in her new home. Cohen and her father scrimped on everything they could, including food, because their goal was to save enough money to send for the rest of the family. She describes her daily diet during the time when she worked in the same sweatshop as her father: Father used to buy me an apple and a sweetened roll. I used to think two cents a good deal to spend for my breakfast. But often I was almost sick with hunger. At noon we had our big meal. Then father would send me out for half a pound of steak or a slice of beef liver and a pint of beer which he sometimes bought in partnership with two or three other men.27

This passage emphasizes the conflict between Cohen’s hunger and her desire to have her family with her. Later, when she worked in a shop separate from her father, she provides a glimpse of her diet there, which appears to have been even more meager, when she writes, “When the pedlar [sic] came into the shop everybody bought rolls. I felt hungry but I was ashamed and would not eat the plain, heavy rye bread while the others ate rolls.”28 Hunger and shame followed Cohen throughout her ghetto life, meals becoming more and more insufficient, eventually reaching a nadir when the family had literally no food because none of them could find work. Even with nothing to eat, Cohen maintained her pride, refusing handouts from a charity worker. This asserted pride stands as a confession of sin, for it endangered the lives of all in the family, something Cohen’s mother realized when she advised her young children to comply with the gentiles’ requests to pray in order to attain nourishment. In fact, Cohen herself became extremely ill as a result of her need for food, doctors constantly warning her to “feed up” because she suffered from debilitating anemia. Her sustained pride continued throughout her days of awe, making it difficult for her to adapt to her new life. The conflict between Cohen’s pride and illness engendered even more internal turmoil for her when she eventually became so ill that she had to convalesce in an uptown hospital. Here nourishing food abounded, but the meat, of course, was traife. Her mother, well-schooled in Biblical mandates, instructed her to eat everything to become well, which Cohen did. Yet while eating nonkosher meat, she remained cognizant of breaking the vow she had taken to follow the laws of kashrut after a Russian neighbor had predicted that she would eat swine in America. She realized that she had not actually violated the spirit of her religion in doing so, yet later in her text, whenever writing about American ways conflicting with Judaic practices, as when a domestic job required that she light a fire on Shabbat, she comments on having eaten traife, indicating just how much

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Updike, John. 1965. Verse: The Carpentered Hen and other tame creatures, Telephone Poles and other poems. New York: Fawcett Crest. 151. 3 Updike, John. 2003. John Updike The Early Stories 1953-1975. New York: Knopf. 597, 599. 4 Ibid. 599-600. 5 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run. 7. 6 Ibid., 15. 7 Ibid., 9. 8 Ibid., 168. 9 Updike, John. 2001. Licks of Love. New York: Knopf, 2000. Rpt. Ballantine. “Rabbit Remembered.” 177-359: 186-7. 10 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run. 86. 11 Updike. 2001. Licks of Love. 291-2. 12 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run.20. 13 Ibid., 28. 14 Ibid., 38. 15 Ibid., 51. 16 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Redux. 364.. 17 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rich. 695. 18 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rest. 1151. 19 Ibid., 1352. 20 Ibid., 1364. 21 Sheraton, Mimi. 1982. “John Updike Ruminates on Matters Gustatory.” New York Times, Health. December 15, 1982. 22 Oates, Joyce Carol. “John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest.” New York Times Book Review, September 30, 1990. 23 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. “Introduction.” vii. 24 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run. 97. 25 Ibid., 94. 26 Ibid., 37. 27 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Redux. 325. 28 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rich. 662-3. 29 Ibid. , 762-3. 30 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rest. 1338. 31 Ibid., 1331. 32 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run. 81. 33 Ibid., 178. 34 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Redux. 334. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 413. 37 Ibid., 510. 38 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rest. 1500. 39 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Redux. 593. 40 Ibid., 363. 41 Ibid., 386.

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Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Run. 13. Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Redux. 538. 44 Updike. 1995. Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy. Rich. 699. 45 Ibid., 322. 46 Ibid., 324. 47 Updike. 2003. John Updike The Early Stories. 151. 48 Ibid., 34. 49 Homer. 1990. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking Penguin. 1724-5. 43

FOOD CONSUMPTION AND THE TROUBLED SELF IN KINGSTON’S THE WOMAN WARRIOR, WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE, TAN’S THE JOY LUCK CLUB, AND ERDRICH’S LOVE MEDICINE YA-HUI IRENNA CHANG

Anthropologists, social psychologists, and scholars of cultural studies believe that food is more than sustenance because food itself and food consumption are coded with messages. Anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz explains, “[E]ating is never a ‘purely biological’ activity. . . . Nor is the food ever simply eaten; its consumption is always conditioned by meaning”1 because each food items has a history behind it. Roland Barthes also observes: For what is food? It is not only a collection of products that can be used for statistical or nutritional studies. It is also, and at the same time, a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.2

Barthes’ definition of food shows us how food can communicate meanings symbolically as various media do. However, since food is saturated with culture and history, Mary Douglas believes that meanings or messages carried by food can only be found in the social and economic contexts in which it is consumed. Douglas explains: If food is treated as a code, the message it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries.3

Though these scholars may differ in their views on how food communicates or produces meanings, they agree that food possesses a

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Another aspect of Yezierska’s use of food images which scholars have considered is her sharp contrasts between dearth and abundance. Rose Yalow Kamel notes in passing that “the cluster of food images surrounding depictions of Jewish women [in Yezierska’s writing] are both nourishing and sparse. Rich bread and chicken soup are contrasted with thin soup, herring bones, squashed yeast, plenty undermined by scarcity.”33 Yezierska depicts joy in scarcity when she describes her mother dividing one small cake into twenty pieces for their shtetl neighbors on Purim. She describes this event while visiting the Hollywood set for Hungry Hearts, the place where set designers have recreated Yezierska’s Russian-Polish reality in plaster, and where the abundance of real food she encounters proves uneatable. She is not “the personification of the happy ending that Hollywood has been turning out,”34 as Julius Josephson, the scenario writer, observed, but rather she cannot swallow the riches of Hollywood at the expense of her values, which include concern for others. Disgust engulfs her as she watches the tired actors rehearsing without so much as a pause for food. When she implores director Paul Bern to give them a break because they are hungry, his response—”To hell with them! They’re paid to work. And they got [sic] to come across even if we stay here all night”—causes her to realize, “My old sweatshop boss had nothing on Bern.”35 Whether in the sweatshops or on the movie set, workers slaved as drudges with minimal rewards and little to eat, while those in charge feasted on their successes and riches, achieved through the sweat of others. Such contrasts, emphasizing plenty undermined by dearth, not only emphasize Yezierska’s personal experiences as the “Sweatshop Cinderella” but signify a deep unrest which permeates her writing. In noting the prevalence of food images juxtaposed with hunger throughout Yezierska’s works, Ellen Golub states that the Russian Jewish woman in her writing “uses hunger to articulate her peculiar discontent.”36 The “peculiar discontent” surfaces as irony when women such as Hanneh Breineh, in the story “The Fat of the Land” from Hungry Hearts, view food as precious when they don’t have enough, but when glutted with success and living on “the fat of the land,” they are distressed, incapable of adjusting to American prosperity as represented by its food. In the fiction Golub examines, “with bellies full, [the Jewish American immigrants] hunger even more intensely.”37 Although Golub analyzes Yezierska’s fiction, an examination of her autobiography yields much the same message. Immediately upon learning that Goldwyn has offered five thousand dollars for the movie rights to Hungry Hearts, and that her agent is holding out for ten thousand, Yezierska’s mind turns to food: “Five, ten

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somehow take on characteristics associated with the foods they eat.”8 Another scholar, Jean Solar also points out: Cooking is a language through which a society expresses itself. For [a person] knows that he [or she] ingests in order to live will become assimilated into his [or her] being. There must be, therefore, a relationship between the idea he [or she] has formed of specific items of food and the image he [or she] has of him [or her]self and his [or her] place in the universe.9

For this reason, members of a society not only share a common language (linguistic), but they also speak the same cultural language (food way). Therefore, they should be able to receive and interpret one another’s message correctly, regardless if it is expressed through a linguistic sign or a food code. Governed by this principle when it comes to food choice and food consumption, people know that they are not only being judged by the food they eat, but they themselves also make judgments of others based on the food they think others eat. Consequently, it is not an exaggeration to state that food consumption is closely related to a person’s self-identity or perception of self. However, what is identity? Sociologists Andrew Weigert, J. Teitge, and Dennis Teitge state: Identities are answers to questions such as there: What am I? Who are you? Who are me? Who are I? The grammatical barbarities are necessary to hint at the range of meanings that self, others, and society construct and impose on persons.10

According to their definition of identity, a person’s identity is both selfconstructed and social-constructed because it “needs to reflect the dialectical pluralism and tension of modern life while holding on to the unique personal dimensions of biography.”11 Their definition of the term sheds light on the nature of struggle that minority people face when they try to juggle their multiple identities as autonomous individuals, loyal subjects to their ethnic groups, and integrated members of the dominant society in their lives. The issue of self-identity or identity crisis is one of the hot topics much studied in the field of minority literature because minority people tend to suffer a lot from the crisis. This suffering is especially true for minority women since they are not only faced with racism, but they also have to overcome sexism (from men of other races as well as those from their own ethnic groups). Because of their double oppressions, minority women

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writers are keen at portraying a troubled self—the self that struggles to balance two seemingly opposing identities (individual and collective). Moreover, because most women, regardless of their ethic backgrounds, usually occupy the same space—kitchen—at home, they tend to be good at speaking the language of food. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that four minority women writers of different ethnic backgrounds use food images to explore and examine issues related to self-identity in their works. Food choice and food consumption in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1993) reveal that food is not only closely related to an individual’s physical need, but a person’s food choice also reflects his or her mental state and perception of self. That is, an individual’s food intake is sometimes triggered or suppressed by his or her psychological state, which serves as a mirror to his or her sense of self. Daniel Cappon, a psychiatrist and an analytical psychotherapist, explains the relationship between food intake and psychology as follows: Appestat is the psychological control mechanism which regulates the amount of food one eats…Like the thermostat, your appestat may have a high, medium, or low setting. . . . Kinetic drive is an emotional state of mind which controls the amount of energy one expends. In the thermostatfurnace analogy, kinetic drive is the motor in the furnace which pumps fuel into the burner in response to the thermostat’s demands…Disturbances in the world around us and disturbances within our own minds can throw the whole system out of whack.12

As Cappon’s explanation indicates, people’s eating habits and food intake are closely related to their ever-changing environment and psychological states. Thus, food images in these works can be seen as a blue print to their characters’ inner worlds and their sense of self. There are several descriptions of food and food consumption in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976), but the “White Tiger” chapter is particularly rich in portraying food as an agent that transforms identity, as well as food choice as a mirror of mental state. When Mulan—a heroine constructed by Kingston’s imagination and based partly on Chinese folktales—starts her journey as a woman warrior at the age of seven, she is led by a bird to a hut in the mountains. As soon as Mulan arrives, an old couple greets her with “bowls of rice and soup and a leafy branch of peaches” in their hands and an invitation to partake the meal with them.13 The old couple’s gesture reveals that they have no ill intention toward Mulan because “providing food typically suggests the giver is warm, nurturant, helpful, or kind.”14 The food items that they carry in their hands

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symbolize kinship and immortality. In southeast region of China, especially Guong-dong province, Rice porridge is a common dish for breakfast (Kingston’s parents were from Guong-Dong Province in China), and peaches in Chinese culture stand for “longevity and immortality.”15 In addition to these food items, Mulan is also offered an egg and tea. She comments, “They gave me an egg, as if it were my birthday, and tea, though they were older than I.”16 The food offered to Mulan indicates that the old couple sees Mulan as an honor guest because “[m]eals are for family, close friends, honored guests”17 and that their encounter might be a new beginning for Mulan who will acquire a new identity if she decides to stay with the old couple and become their pupil. Accompanying the food offered, Mulan is given the opportunity to become a woman warrior, as well as the chance to choose whether she wants to become immortal like the old couple or not. Prompted by her sense of filial piety and patriotic duty, Mulan decides to stay with the two old people,18 so they literally become her foster parents, martial art teachers, and her spiritual guides. During the seventh year of her stay with the old couple, Mulan experiences a physical and spiritual test in relation to eating. Her test is similar to that of Christ, which requires her to exercise her will power over her appetite and control of her emotions under extreme conditions. As “Jesus [is] led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil,”19 so is Mulan blindfolded and led by the old couple to the mountains “to survive bare-handed” and to find her way back to the hut. However, the difference between the two tests is that Jesus fasts or goes without food for forty days and nights during the temptation, but Mulan is allowed to eat, though food is scarce. To conserve food, she fasts and “only [drinks] the snow [her] fires [make] run”20 on the first two days. Because Mulan is allowed to have food during her survival test, she is tempted by her appetite for meat, not hunger. Mennell explains the difference between hunger and appetite: Appetite, it must be remembered, is not the same thing as hunger. Hunger is a body drive which recurs in all human beings in a reasonably regular cycle. Appetite for food, on the other hand, in the words of Daniel Cappon. . . . is basically a state of mind, an inner mental awareness of desire that is the setting for hunger.21

This statement sheds light on the inner struggle that Mulan is facing. She reflects: [T]he third day, the hardest, I caught myself sitting on the ground, opening the scarf and staring at the nuts and dry roots. Instead of walking steadily on or even eating, I faded into dreams about the meat meals my mother

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return to a debasing occupation, but rather in Zalmon she sees a man with many interests who represents the ethnic soul of her people with whom she eventually envisions her release from the disease of her days of awe. In the end, as a sign of her inability to separate her personal identity from her ethnicity, Yezierska employs foods in her texts as metaphors for communities. Exotic cuisine characterizes Hollywood, the martini luncheon distinguishes the New York literari of the Algonquin set, bland but sustaining food defines the New England natives, and gefüllte fish and herring mark the Jewish ghetto. Ammons stresses Yezierksa’s use of food as communal ceremony and as a celebration of “the nourishment to be received from traditional patriarchal culture, and . . . the life-steeped words of a loud, physical, this-worldly Jewish mother.”49 One might argue that the religious traditions of the Jewish patriarchy did not truly nourish Yezierska, for her independent nature would not allow her to continue in the ways of her father. But the culture that the patriarchy produced provided her with the ethnicity which fed her self-identity and her ability to write. As Levin points out, the fare she encounters in Fair Oaks—boiled pork, grape jelly, cabbage, and turnips—metaphorically excludes her from the Anglo New England community she strives to enter,50 sending her back to the community in which she can partake of the flavorful environment which provides the cuisine, and thus the cultural environment, she finds sustaining. The manner in which the three women under discussion employ food in their autobiographies provides readers with a key to understanding the true nature of the acculturation of each at the end of her days of awe. Throughout their texts, Calof and Cohen stuck to the hierarchy of Judaic law, never questioning the laws of kashrut or the overriding mandate to sustain human life, indicating their faithfulness to their ancestry within an American setting. Calof did not find doing so problematic, but Cohen did. As natural as following the dietary laws was to her, she perceived their effect as separating her from the rest of American society, creating a wall between the world to which she aspired and the world within which she lived. Yezierska experimented with cuisine, but like Friedensohn returned to her heritage, recognizing the connection between the food that nourished her physically and her less tangible yet inherent spiritual and emotional disposition. The significance of food in these texts cannot be overemphasized, for once each has reckoned with this final aspect of acculturation, she completes her days of awe by ending her metaphorical Yom Kippur fast with a better understanding of her personal identity and her place in this New World.

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immolation shows that Mulan has not only learned how to live harmoniously with nature, but that she has passed the survival test. Mulan’s experience after the test also parallels what happens to Christ after his temptation: in both cases, angels appear to them when they have conquered the wants and desires of their bodies, especially those associated with hunger. In Christ’s case, “the devil left Him, and behold, angels came and ministered to Him.”33 For Mulan, she witnesses a scene that is similar to a religious vision: I saw two people made of gold dancing the earth’s dances. They turned so perfectly that together they were the axis of the earth’s turning. They were light; they were molten, changing gold. . . . The man and the woman grow bigger and bigger, so bright. All light. They are tall angels in two rows. . . . I cannot bear their brightness and cover my eyes. . . . When I put my hands down to look again, I recognize the old brown man and the old gray woman walking toward me out of the pine forest.34

It seems that the door of the heaven is opened and the secret of the universe is unlocked for them because they have demonstrated their ability to conquer hunger and subject emotions and desires springing from it to their wills. Mulan concludes, “It would seem that this small crack in the mystery was opened, not so much by the old people’s magic, as by hunger.”35 At this point, we might wonder why “hunger” plays such a big role in Christ’s temptation and Mulan’s test. Pumpian-Mindline points out that “food feeds the ego, not merely the body.”36 So, in both cases, it can be said that hunger works as a mechanism that not only alerts them to the fact that their bodies are in deprivation, but that their egos are also in danger. However, what constitutes the ego and how does it work? Calvin Hall explains the concept in Jung’s terms: The ego is the name Jung uses for the organization of the conscious mind; it is composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings. . . . Unless the ego acknowledges the presence of an idea, a feeling, a memory, or a perception, it cannot be brought into awareness. . . . The ego provides identity and continuity for a personality.37

Seeing Mulan’s and Christ’s test in this light, it becomes clear why Mulan becomes extremely homesick when she runs out of all her food in the dead land and why the devil keeps asking Christ to prove his identity as the Son of God when his body is in the state of starvation. It is not a coincident that when food is withheld from their bodies, egos (identities and personalities) are threatened at the same time: old identities are forced to go, and new identities are formed. Mulan’s similarities to Christ show that

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she is a type of savior: a savior who turns adversity into victory through control of her appetite, emotions, and body. By practicing eating or not eating a certain kind of food, Mulan transforms her identity from a helpless fourteen year-old peasant girl to a novice woman warrior who has a total control over her body that will not be swayed by her appetite, emotions, and hunger. In addition to her sense of mission, Mulan’s motivation behind the self-inflicted discipline on her food intake is her desire for acceptance. After staying with the old couple for another eight years to perfect her fighting skills, Mulan returns home to take her father’s place in the army to avenge the wrongs done to her people. Because she assumes the responsibility of a son, her “parents killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if they were welcoming home a son.”38 The welcoming food that her parents prepare for her—food cooked especially for sons—indicates that Mulan has become as valuable as a son to them and that she has gained her parents’ acceptance. Like Mulan, Harpo in The Color Purple (1982) also wants to gain parental acceptance, and he tries to achieve this goal by acting like his father, especially acting like his father with regard to his father’s treatment of Celie, his wife. However, Harpo’s dream is shattered because he is married to Sofia, a woman who is in every way, mentally and physically, different from the obedient, silent, and low self-esteem Celie, his stepmother. Celie describes her first impression of Sofia as follows: Clear medium brown skin, gleam on it like on good furniture. Hair notty but a lot of it, tied up on her head in a mass of plaits. She not quite as tall as Harpo but much bigger, and strong and ruddy looking, like her mama brought her up on pork.39

Celie compares Sofia’s healthy clear skin tone on her big strong body frame to the bright translucent paint on a piece of nice furniture, which gives the impression that Sofia is a piece of good artwork—heavy and sturdy—carved out of solid wood. Her other comments on Sofia’s body also focus on Sofia’s body strength and shape: she sees Sofia’s pregnant body as large and as powerful as a pig. Celie’s use of the animal image “pig” to describe Sofia’s body seems to stem from the belief that “by eating strong, active, powerful creatures, the eater partakes of that strength and power.”40 Even after Sofia has given birth to a baby boy, Celie does not change her perception of Sofia’s body. She says: Sofia look half her size. But she still a big strong girl. Arms got muscle. Legs, too. She swing that baby about like it nothing. She got a little pot on her now and give you the feeling she all there. Solid. Like if she sit down on something, it be mash.41

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Celie’s portrait of Sofia may not have much aesthetic appeal according to the dominant society’s standards for feminine beauty, but the two metaphors—a piece of good furniture made of solid wood and a big strong pig—that Celie uses to describe Sofia’s body construct a different kind of beauty image that is uniquely rooted in their ancestral land: Africa. In “Soul, Black Women, and Food,” Marvalene H. Huges points out, “A big body to the Black woman represents health and prosperity. The interrelatedness of the concepts ‘big’ and ‘beautiful’ is African.”42 Apparently, Sofia’s body exemplifies an alternative view of what feminine beauty should be like. It is the kind of beauty that upholds the strength of the feminine body rather than glorifies its delicacy. Moreover, Sofia’s mind and will is as strong as her body: she is not afraid to speak up for what she wants or stand up for what she believes. It seems that Harpo is lucky to have a woman like Sofia as his wife. However, it is precisely Sofia’s physical and mental strength that prevents Harpo from realizing his dream—making Sofia obeys him as Celie obeys his father, Mister. When Harpo takes his father’s advice, as well as Celie’s, to beat Sofia for not obeying him, he becomes the victim of his own violence. Celie reports Harpo’s miserable state: “Next time us see Harpo his face a mess of bruises. His lip cut. One of his eyes shut like a fist. He walk stiff and say his teef ache.”43 After that, Harpo still tries, but without success, to subdue Sofia. Then, Harpo changes his strategies. He keeps eating, especially sugary and fatty food, throughout the day because he wants to have a big strong body like Sofia’s so that he can beat her into obedience. Sofia reports Harpo’s strange eating habit to Celie: Last night for supper he ate a whole pan of biscuits by himself. . . . And had two big glasses of butter milk along with it. This was after supper was over, too. . . . And this morning, for breakfast, darn if he didn’t have six eggs. After all that food he look too sick to walk.44

Instead of getting stronger and gaining more energy as he desires, Harpo becomes so sick that he cannot even walk. Apparently, Harpo’s body has a hard time of absorbing all the food that he forces down his own throat. Nevertheless, Harpo keeps gorging himself, ignoring the protest from his body. Celie describes his strange behavior when he comes to her house as follows: What you got to eat, Miss Celie? he say, going straight to the warmer and a piece of fried chicken, then on to the safe for a slice of blackberry pie. He stand by the table and munch, munch. You got any sweet milk? he ast. Got clabber, I say. He say, Well, I love clabber. And dip him out some.45

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Charoset, generally a combination of wine, nuts, apples, and honey, is a component of the Passover seder ceremony. 8 The Haggadah is the designated text for the Passover seder ceremony. 9 Fromm-Reichmann. 1995. “Jewish Food Rituals.” 7. 10 Plaut. 1981. The Torah. 810. 11 Maimonides. 1956. The Guide for the Perplexed. 370. 12 Dresner and Siegel. 1966. The Jewish Dietary Laws. 13-17. 13 Nicholson. 1987. “Food and Power.” 38. 14 Goldman. 1992. “I Yam What I Yam.” 191. 15 Hyman. 1980. “Immigrant Women and Consumer Protest.” 93. 16 Cohen. 1995. Out of the Shadow. 176. 17 Ibid., 169. 18 Several immigrant autobiographies attest to the kosher problem aboard ship on the journey to America. See Trupin. 1984. Dakota Diaspora, 26, and Harris Rubin,. 1981.“Worker on the Land.” 13. 19 Calof. 1995. “My Story.” 38. 20 A shochet is trained as a ritual slaughterer, such training providing authority which enables him to determine what may and may not be eaten. 21 A mohal receives training in circumcision, after which he is certified to perform a bris, sometimes called a brit milah. Even though most physicians can perform this medical procedure, religious Jews will hire only a certified mohal to circumcise their sons. 22 Calof. 1995. “My Story.” 24. 23 Ibid., 41. 24 Ibid., 42-43. 25 Ibid., 86-87. 26 Cohen. 1995. Out of the Shadow. 60. 27 Ibid., 83. 28 Ibid., 110. 29 Ibid., 94. 30 Ibid., 273. 31 “H.M.” stands for “Hatty Mayer,” Yezierska’s American name before she changed it back to her original Russian name. This letter was quoted in Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska. 30. 32 Ammons. 1991. Conflicting Stories. 164-7. 33 Kamel. 1988. Aggravating the Conscience. 71 34 Yezierska. 1950. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 54. 35 Ibid., 54. 36 Golub. 1983. “Eat Your Heart Out.” 53. 37 Ibid., 54. 38 Yezierska. 1950. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. 27-28. 39 Ibid., 28. 40 Ibid., 29. 41 Ibid., 41. 42 Ibid., 129.

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Sofia, he say. You still bothering Sofia? I ast. She my wife, he say. That don’t mean you got to keep on bothering her, I say. Sofia love you, she a good wife. Good to the children and good looking. Hardworking. Godfearing and clean [italics original]. I don’t know what more you want. Harpo sniffle. I want her to do what I say, like you do for pa. Oh, Lord, I say. When Pa tell you to do something, you do it, you do it, he say. When he say not to, you don’t. You don’t do what he say, he beat you. Sometimes beat me anyhow, I say, whether I do what he say or not. That’s right, say Harpo. But not Sofia. She do what she want, don’t pay me no mind at all. I try to beat her, she blacken my eyes. Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo. . . . He sit there hanging his head, looking retard…. Do Shug Avery mind Mr._____? I ast. She the woman he wanted to marry. She call him Albert, tell him his drawers stink in a minute. Little as he is,when she git her weight back she can sit on him if he try to bother her.48

Harpo’s desire to control Sofia has made him lose sight of what is truly important in his relationship with her: their love for each other. He dismisses all of her good qualities because she does not act like Celie. He does not realize that he is trying to force Sofia to take up the role of a servant and be his plaything, rather than his wife, in their relationship. Moreover, his zeal of pursuing that goal has blinded him to the fact that he is destroying his marriage with his own hands. Then, Celie describes Harpo’s behaviors following her conversation with him: Why I mention weight. Harpo start to cry again. Then he start to be sick. He lean over the edge of the step and vomit and vomit. Look like every piece of pie for the last year come up.49

Celie’s words draw out the insecure feelings and self-pity in Harpo. There is no doubt that Harpo overeats because he is suffering from an identity crisis—Sofia’s behaviors toward him endangers his image of self (his ideal of manhood), which is constructed by his observation of a false role model his father—Mister—a man who beats Celie with or without a cause. Though Harpo is married to Sofia, the woman he loves, he is not happy in his marriage because he wants to follow his father’s footsteps: to exert the kind of absolute control and power over Sofia as his father Mister does to Celie. Carl Dix observes, “[Harpo] loves Sofia. . . . But all around him the weight of tradition pulls on him—telling him that his [italics original] wife should serve him and be kept firmly under his thumb.”50 Eager to fit

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in and protect his sense of manhood, he believes that the shortcut to tame Sofia and have her totally under his control is by continuously eating large quantity of fatty food to increase his body size in a short period of time so that he can beat her into obedience quickly. Harpo is not alone in using food to solve a relationship problem and construct an identity. Lena in The Joy Luck Club (1989) is also troubled by a relationship and tries to solve her relationship problem through eating, though the relationship is an imagined one. The ordeal starts with Lena’s poor eating habits. Seeing that Lena, who is eight years old, does not eat every grain of rice in her bowl, Ying-ying tells Lena, “your future husband have one pock mark for every rice you not finish. . . . I once know a pockmark man. Mean man, bad man.”51 When Ying-ying says these words to Lena, she has no intention of putting a curse on Lena’s future. She is just voicing her concern for Lena (maybe Ying-ying herself has the same bad eating habits when she is young and ends up marrying a bad man in China). So, when she says these words to Lena, she is unconsciously lamenting her fate rather than intentionally cursing Lena’s future. However, Ying-ying does not realize that as Lena’s growing body gets nutrients from the food Ying-ying cooks for her, Lena’s mind feeds on words coming from Ying-ying’s mouth because Ying-ying is her mother. What Ying-ying says fills Lena’s heart with fear. Whether coincidentally or not, Ying-ying’s words reminds Lena “of a mean neighbor boy who had tiny pits in his cheeks, and . . . those marks were the size of rice grains. This boy was about twelve and his name was Arnold.”52 Lena explains that “Arnold would shoot rubber bands at [her] legs whenever [she] walked past his building on [her] way home from school.”53 Fearing that she would marry Arnold when she grows up, young Lena takes Yingying’s words literally. To solve the problem (preventing herself from marrying the mean Arnold), Lena picks up her rice bowl and eats up everything in her bowl, feeling “confident [that her] future husband would be not Arnold but someone whose face was as smooth as the porcelain in [her] clean bowl.”54 Nevertheless, instead of getting an assurance from her mother that she will not marry a bad man since she has eaten every grain in her rice bowl, Lena’s efforts are dismissed and discouraged by Ying-ying’s negative attitude and comments. Lena states, “my mother sigh[s]” and says, “Yesterday, you not finish rice either.”55 Ying-ying’s words continue to feed fear to young Lena’s already terrified heart. Lena recalls this incident in a tone of desperation: I thought of those unfinished mouthfuls of rice, and then the grains that lined my bowl the day before, and the day before that. By the minute, my

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eight-year-old heart grew more and more terror-stricken over the growing possibility that my future husband was fated to be this mean boy Arnold.56

Later that week at Sunday school, Lena sees a film that features “men and women with leprosy [. . . whose] faces [are] covered with . . . pits and pustules, cracks and bumps, and fissures” and thinks that “these poor people [are] victims of future husbands and wives who [have] failed to eat platefuls of food.”57 After watching the film, Lena believes that she has found a way to get herself out of a doomed relationship with Arnold: through the manipulation of her food intake. This time, instead of eating every grain of rice in her bowl, Lena decides to leave more rice and other food items in her bowl. She believes that doing so will prevent her from marrying the neighboring boy when she grows up because like the victims shown in the film Arnold might get leprosy, move to Africa, and die. Five years later, Lena hears her father say that the neighboring boy Arnold Reisman, who is mean to her when she is eight, has died of complications from measles. Lena becomes speechless when her father asks her, “Didn’t you know that boy?”58 Then, Ying-ying looks at Lena and says, “This is shame”; “This is terrible shame.”59 Partly because of Ying-ying’s words and partly because of the way she says it, Lena believes that her mother “[can] see through her and [knows that she is] the one who [has] caused Arnold to die.”60 Ying-ying’s response to the news of Arnold’s death convicts Lena of an imagined crime that she believes she indirectly commits. Seeing herself as a supposed murderess, Lena tries to solve her problem through eating again, though at that time she is an anorexic teenage girl. Lena says, “That night . . . I gorged myself. I had stolen a half-gallon of strawberry ice cream from the freezer, and I forced spoonful after spoonful down my own throat.”61 Notice that Lena uses the word “stolen” to describe the action that she has taken to obtain the ice cream. This word implies that Lena believes she is illegally taken something from her parents. Moreover, by the time Arnold dies, Lena describes herself: I had become quite thin. I had stopped eating, not because of Arnold, whom I had long forgotten, but to be fashionably anorexic like all the other thirteen-year-old girls who were dieting and finding other ways to suffer as teenagers.62

Her eating disorder explains why she has to force ice cream down her own throat, even though she considers ice cream as something good to eat. However, why does she suddenly want to eat something sweet and palatable in a big quantity in an isolated environment—her own room—

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after learning the news of Arnold’s death? Could it be that unable to seek comfort for her distressed heart from her mother who seems to take the side of Arnold, Lena eats a milk and sugar product to console herself? In other words, could Lena eat with the mentality of “Pity poor me; let me have some thing nice to eat if I can’t have the other nice things I want?”63 Carole M. Counihan points out that women with eating disorders tend to “gorge, purge, or starve in secret” and that “[t]he solitude of women with eating disorders is often characterized by competition with and mistrust of others, particularly other women.”64 So, Lena’s sudden change of eating behavior and her decision to eat alone indicate that she is trying to get help from food itself rather than the provider of food—her mother Ying-ying— whom she cannot trust now. Looking back, Lena comments on this experience: “I remember wondering why it was that eating something good could make me feel so terrible, while vomiting something terrible could make me feel so good.”65 It seems that the acts of gorging and vomiting have purged Lena from her feelings of guilt and removed the stigma—murderess—from her conscience and identity. Lena’s eating habits serve as an example of how a person’s food choice and intake are closely related to or a reflection of his or her mental state and identity. As Lena tries to solve her problem through food, so does Marie in Love Medicine (1993) attempts to secure Nector’s love for her and her identity as Marie Kashpaw through eating. Even though Nector chooses to marry Marie, Marie knows that Nector is having an affair with Lulu after he marries her and that this affair threatens her identity as Marie Kashpaw. Marie is quite proud of the fact that she is the wife of Nector Kashpaw, which can be seen from how Marie prepares herself mentally and physically to visit Sister Leopolda years later after her hand is poked by the nun. Marie tells herself: I would visit Leopolda not just to see her, but to let her see me. I would let her see I had not been living on wafers of God’s flesh but the fruit of man. Long ago she has tried for my devotion. Now I’d let her see where my devotion had gone and where it had got me. For by now I was solid class. Nector was tribal chairman. My children were well behaved, and they were educated too. I went to the wardrobe and pulled out the good wool dress I would wear up the hill, even on a day this hot. Royal plum, they called the color of it in the Grand Forks clothing shop. I had paid down twenty dollars for it and worn it the day they swore Nector to the chair with me beside him.66

It is ironic that the morning after Marie leaves to visit Sister Leopolda, Nector gets off bed and leaves a note under the sugar can in the kitchen to

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tell Marie that he is leaving her for Lulu.67 Just when Marie is so proud of her identity of being the wife of the tribal man, that identity is at the brink of obliteration. Through a twist of fate Nector stays with Marie, but Marie is always haunted by the fear of losing her identity as Nector’s wife. Lipsha, a grandson of Marie and Nector, describes Marie’s feelings for Nector: I saw that tears were in her eyes. And that’s when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. . . . You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn’t hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. . . . She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead.68

Therefore, even in their old age, Marie feels the need to feed Nector love medicine to secure his love for her forever, and Lipsha is the one whom she asks to help her get the medicine. According to Lipsha, “love medicines is something of an old Chippewa specialty”69 and the medicine should be handled with care because the consequences of mishandling the medicine could be severe. He has heard of three different kinds of love medicine: “a charm of seeds that looked like baby pearls,” “frogs in the act,” and “nail clips and such.”70 After contemplating the difficulties of acquiring these love medicines, he decides to invent his own version of love medicine. When he looks up, he “see[s] two honkers, Canada geese, the kind with little masks on their faces, a bird what mates for life.”71 So, Lipsha thinks to himself: Them geese, they mate for life. And I think to myself, just what if I went out and got a pair? And just what if I fed some part—say the goose heart— of the female to Grandma and Grandpa ate the other heart? Wouldn’t that work? Maybe it’s all invisible, and then maybe again it’s magic. . . . If it’s true that the higher feelings of devotion get lodged in the heart like people say, then we’d be home free. If not, eating goose heart couldn’t harm nobody anyway.72

The invention of Lipsha’s version of love medicine is based on the following beliefs: the emotion of love resides in an internal organ called the heart of a person or animal; emotions are transferable from one to the other through the act of eating; eating certain items not only can fix physical illnesses, but also can repair emotional distances. However, Lispha’s plan is not executed successfully. He waits for a long time, until the air becomes chilly, for a pair of geese that seems to be in love with each other to land. Finally, two geese land near him, but he

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misses the shots. Too tired and too cold to try again, he decides “to go down to the Red Owl store”73 to buy two turkey hearts as the ingredients of his love medicine. To justify his action, he tells himself that “faith could be called belief against the odds” and “convince[s] [him]self that the real actual power to the love medicine [is] not the goose heart itself but the faith in the cure.”74 To remedy the situation, he brings the hearts to “get official blessings from the priest,” but the priest tells him to “bring this matter over to Sister Martin.”75 Neither would the nun do as Lipsha asks. So, on his way out, he “put[s his] fingers in [the cup of holy water] and bless[es] the hearts, quick, with [his] own hand.”76 Lipsha’s actions indicate that through a religious ceremony the turkey hearts will work wonders just like those of any two geese that are in love. When Lipsha presents Marie the two turkey hearts, she does not question if they are true goose hearts. Lipsha describes Marie’s reactions when she sees the two hearts: “her hard agate eyes went soft. She said she wasn’t even going to cook those hearts up but eat them raw so their power would go down strong as possible.” He then tells us how he feels when he watches Marie eats the love medicine—“I couldn’t hardly watch when she munched hers. Now that’s true love.”77 If the cooked is associated with culture and the raw with nature,78 Marie’s decision to eat the turkey heart raw reflects her deepest desire: she hopes that her relationship with Nector is maintained by the law of nature (attraction and love) rather than the law of culture (marriage and obligations). Maybe the two turkey hearts, which she thinks are two goose hearts, remind her that it is the weight of the two geese “on [Nector’s] arms [that] helps pin her” down on the ground, and according to Nector, it is in that encounter that he “lose[s] [him]self”79 in Marie’s embrace and gives up his plan of marrying Lulu. Marie also recalls, “Fourteen years, that was all the older I was at that time, yet I was a woman enough to snare Nector Kashpaw.”80 Obviously, Nector and Marie’s marriage is based on physical attraction, and now in her old age, she wants the attraction back. What happens next is a comic scene that ends with a tragedy. Marie “put[s] that heart smack on a piece of lettuce like in a restaurant and then attache[s] to it a little heap of boiled peas”81 and puts it in front of Nector, but Nector refuses to touch the heart, and only after some coercion from Marie does he pops the heart into his mouth. Then, he uses his tongue to play with the heart in his mouth. It’s a war of will between Nector and Marie over the raw turkey heart. She wants him to eat it, but he refuses to comply. Moore says that a person’s “refusing food is a concomitant of basic distrust and resentment of those who feed him.”82 Lipsha observes that Nector refuses to swallow the turkey heart because “he knew she was

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Food Symbolism in Three Children’s Literature Texts “Do you really think so?” inquired the Rat seriously. “It’s only what I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it very fine.”5

The above passage is both comedic and sweet, but the sheer profusion of food here and throughout the text forces a deeper reading. Wendy Katz describes The Wind in the Willows as being “an exceedingly domestic tale, and food as a sign of cosiness, plenty and cheer is much in evidence.”6 She asserts that “Breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners abound here, good fellowship and good food being synonymous.”7 Peter Hunt echoes Katz’s assessment when he writes that The Wind in the Willows is a story about friendship, home and security and that food is a symbolic reflection of these themes.8 For the Riverbankers, food showcases both a creature’s need for companionship but also Grahame’s Arcadian dream of domestic contentment. Indeed, the recurring themes of the text involve an individual’s need for not only community but also the comfort and physical/emotional security of home and a sense of belonging/identity. The Riverbankers must possess all of the above in order to be truly happy in Grahame’s imagined rural paradise. The aforementioned picnic scene with Rat’s gastronomic litany is a wonderful above-ground transition for Mole. Mole has forsaken his lovely, but lonely, shelter underground and soon decides to live by the river with Rat, most likely one of the most hospitable characters in all of literature. The sheer abundance of food in Rat’s listing underscores the welcoming environment of the River Bank. This is Mole’s new home and he is content. Home and the community and comfort it brings are of paramount importance in this world, but sometimes the animals, specifically Toad, forget this and take to wandering. All of the treks beyond the river bank, including the traveling in Toad’s caravan on The Open Road, commence with a sense of fun and excitement: “Poor Mole! The Life Adventurous was so new a thing to him, and so thrilling.”9 These manic emotions quickly change as the animals face scary and uncomfortable situations, start rethinking their initial impulse to leave, and begin missing the comfort of their homes: “ ‘I don’t talk about my river,’ replied the patient Rat. ‘You know I don’t Toad. But I think about it.’ He added pathetically, in a lower tone: ‘I think about it - all the time.’ ”10 In the end, all of the animals bitten by the travel bug return to their homes and are content in their society: “Then they got out their boat from the boat-house, sculled down the river home, and at a very late hour sat down to supper in their own cosy riverside parlor, to the Rat’s great joy and contentment.”11

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Chang, Betty. 1974. “Some Dietary Beliefs in Chinese Folk Culture.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 65: 436-38. Chin, Jean Lau. 2005. Learning from My Mother’s Voice. New York: Teachers College Press. Conner, Mark, and Christopher J. Armitage. 2002. The Social Psychology of Food. Philadelphia: Open University Press. Counihan, Carole M. 1999. “What does it mean to be fat, thin, and female?: A review essay.” The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. New York: Routledge. Dix, Carl. 1996. Thoughts on The Color Purple. The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficulty: A meditation on Life, Spirit, Art, and the Making of the Film The Color Purple Ten Years Later. Written and Comp. Alice Walker. New York: Scribner. 191-98. Douglas, Mary. 1997. “Deciphering a Meal.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 3654. Erdrich, Louise. 1993. Love Medicine. New York: Harper Perennial. Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol. New York: Routledge. Hall, Calvin S. 1973. A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York, Penguin. Holy Bible, The: The New King James Version. 1999. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Hughes, Marvalene H. 1997. “Soul, Black Women, and Food.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 272-80. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1976. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. The Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage Publications. Meigs, Anna. 1997. “Food as a Cultural Construction.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik, New York: Routledge. 95-106. Mennell, Stephen. 1997. “On the Civilizing of Appetite.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 315-337. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking. Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon.

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Moore, Harriet B. 1957. “The Meaning of Food.” Journal of Clinical Nutrition 5: 77-82. Pumpian-Mindlin, E. 1954. “The Meaning of Food.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 30: 576-580. Solar, Jean. 1997. “The Semiotics of Food in the Bible.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge. 55-66. Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Penguin Books. Walker, Alice. 1982. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Warde, Alan. 1997. Consumption, Food & Taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: Sage Publications. Weigert, Andrew J., J. Smith Teitge, and Dennis W. Teitge. 1986. Society and Identity: Toward a Sociological Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. 1988. “Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Art and the Ethnic Experience.” MELUS 15.1: 3-26.

Notes 1

Mintz, Sidney W. 1996. Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom. Boston: Beacon. 7. Barthes, Roland. 1997. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 20-27: 21. 3 Douglas, Mary. 1997. “Deciphering a Meal.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 36-54: 36. 4 Warde, Alan. 1997. Consumption, food & taste: Culinary Antinomies and Commodity Culture. London: Sage Publications. 199. 5 Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage Publications. 1. 6 Warde. 1997. Consumption, Food & Taste. 199-200. 7 Conner, Mark, and Christopher J. Armitage. 2002. The Social Psychology of Food. Philadelphia: Open University Press. 124. 8 Ibid., 126. 9 Solar, Jean. 1997. “The Semiotics of Food in the Bible.” Food and Culture: a Reader, ed. Carole M. Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, New York: Routledge. 55-66: 55. 10 Weigert, Andrew J., J. Smith Teitge, and Dennis W. Teitge. 1986. Society and Identity: Toward a Sociological Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 53. 11 Ibid. 2

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Cappon, Daniel. 1973. Eating, Loving, and Dying: A Psychology of Appetites. Toronto: U of Toronto P. 22-23. Italics original. 13 Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1976. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 21. 14 Moore, Harriet B. 1957. “The Meaning of Food.” Journal of Clinical Nutrition 5: 77-82; 78. 15 Chin, Jean Lau. 2005. Learning from My Mother’s Voice. New York: Teachers College Press. 43. 16 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 21. 17 Douglas. 1997. “Deciphering a Meal.” 41. 18 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 23. 19 Holy Bible, The: The New King James Version. 1999. Nashville: Thomas Nelson. Matt 4:1. 20 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 25. 21 Mennell, Stephen. 1997. “On the Civilizing of Appetite.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 315-337: 316. 22 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 25. 23 Ibid. 24 Fiddes, Nick. 1991. Meat: A Natural Symbol. New York: Routledge. 207. 25 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 25. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 26. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. 1988. “Necessity and Extravagance in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Art and the Ethnic Experience.” MELUS 15.1: 326: 20. 33 Holy Bible, The: The New King James Version. 1999. Matt 4:11. 34 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 27. 35 Ibid. 36 Pumpian-Mindlin, E. 1954. “The Meaning of Food.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 30: 576-580: 577. 37 Hall, Calvin S. 1973. A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York, Penguin. 34. 38 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 34. 39 Walker, Alice. 1982. The Color Purple. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 29-30. 40 Moore, Harriet B. 1957. “The Meaning of Food.” 80. 41 Walker. 1982. The Color Purple. 32. 42 Hughes, Marvalene H. 1997. “Soul, Black Women, and Food.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik. New York: Routledge. 27280: 273. 43 Walker. 1982. The Color Purple. 35. 44 Ibid., 54.

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and resource, and all that he was capable of if he only gave his great mind to it; and the cure was almost complete.18

The gaoler’s daughter perseveres and then succeeds in her efforts: When the girl returned, some hours later, she carried a tray, with a cup of fragrant tea steaming on it; and a plate piled up with very hot buttered toast, cut thick, very brown on both sides, with the butter running through the holes in it in great golden drops, like honey from the honeycomb. The smell of that buttered toast simply talked to Toad, and with no uncertain voice; talked of warm kitchens, of breakfasts on bright frosty mornings, of cozy parlour firesides on winter evenings, when one’s ramble was over and slippered feet were propped on the fender; of the purring of contented cats, and the twitter of sleeping canaries.19

The “cure” is then complete. Toad is revived at first by her delicious food and then by her sympathetic conversation and his usual humor is soon restored as a result. So much so that Toad, a very vain creature, “thought that her interest in him proceeded from a growing tenderness; and could not help half regretting that the social gulf between them was so very wide.”20 This possibility of romantic love is raised briefly for comedic levity and then dropped just as quickly. Toad is now so much himself that in a few days time he is receptive to the gaoler’s daughter’s plan for his escape. Toad’s flight from prison and his further adventures eventually end with the taking back of Toad Hall from the squatting weasels and a celebration with, of course, a large feast when the “Toad – Came – Home!”21 Ulysses, therefore, ends his exile and returns to the comfort of his house and companionship of his animal comrades. Life’s balance and the contentment it brings are once again restored all because of the sensible application of the buttered toast cure and its emotional effect on a despairing amphibian. In his book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, author Roald Dahl utilizes the popular food equivalents of community, home and security symbolism but, of course, with a twist. The story begins with the Buckets, a loving family including son, mother, father and grandparents. The Buckets are caring, compassionate and hardworking. They overflow with love towards one another. If the typical food symbolism were to be employed here then the Bucket Family’s dinner table should be bountiful. It is not. In fact, despite Mr. Bucket’s working in a toothpaste factory, the Buckets are poor, very poor:

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84 Meigs, Anna. 1997. “Food as a Cultural Construction.” Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. C. Counihan and P. V. Esterik, New York: Routledge. 95-106: 104. 85 Erdrich. 1993. Love Medicine. 250. 86 Ibid. 87 Kingston. 1976. The Woman Warrior. 88 Tan. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. 89 Walker. 1982. The Color Purple. 90 Erdrich. 1993. Love Medicine.

A MARRIAGE MADE IN THE KITCHEN: AMANDA HESSER’S COOKING FOR MR. LATTE AND JULIE POWELL’S JULIE AND JULIA AS FOODIE ROMANCE JESSICA LYN VAN SLOOTEN

Take one flawed, high maintenance, urban woman; add one likewise flawed, yet easygoing, urban male; mix in a liberal number of distinctive friends and family members; whip in romantic story elements, complete with arguments and kisses; fold in numerous foodie adventures; include delicious, detailed descriptions and/or recipes; place the entire concoction in a fun, pastel, and most importantly, “girly” cover with cute drawings of the aforementioned characters and/or adventures...and you have romance meets chick lit meets foodie memoir in a new hybrid genre I like to call “foodie romance.” Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes (2003)1 and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously (2005)2 capitalize on the popularity of romance, chick lit, and foodie memoir trends, illustrating the similarities between the genres, all of which chronicle the pleasures and complications of relationships and consumption. As both authors sketch their love for their partners and food itself, they mix and overlap the literary conventions of all three genres in their discussion of tales from the career front, relationships with family and friends, sex, and classed consumption. Ultimately, Hesser’s blend of two popular genres offers a more romantic and sentimental approach to food representation than witnessed in other foodie texts, further broadens the non-fiction chick lit sub-genre, and ushers in a new category of “food romance,” whereas Powell’s text adds to the sub-genres of non-fiction and married chick lit, in which self-discovery and culinary adventure are shared via a brazen, darkly funny wit. Together these two texts represent a new hybrid genre that provides possibilities to a new generation of women who are returning to the kitchen to find love and meaning.

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The non-fictional memoir Cooking for Mr. Latte chronicles Hesser’s courtship, betrothal, and marriage to Tad Friend. Hesser’s tale brings famous foodies, fellow writers, and a multitude of friends and family to the table, which illustrates that this marriage is one between two adults with strong relationship networks. Hesser highlights the confusions, potential deal-breakers, and frustrations of a new relationship, and celebrates the myriad joys of discovery and sharing one’s life with another. Cooking for Mr. Latte adopts the diary-like structure and style ubiquitous in chick lit. The book, much like Candace Bushnell’s “novel” Sex and the City,3 was originally a series of columns in The New York Times Magazine. Hesser notes in the introduction that “For a year or so, I kept a diary. Out of it came these stories...”4 The writing style and overt subject matter—her evolving courtship with “Mr. Latte” — a classic romance plot, and the work details and conspicuous consumption are similar to those found in chick lit novels. Hesser balances the romance plot with tales of her on-going culinary adventures as a food writer for the New York Times, including detailed recipes, descriptions of both everyday and lavish dishes, restaurants, and fellow foodies. Hesser follows classic food memoir protocol and includes the recipes at the end of the chapters, in traditional recipe format, though with added notes and suggestions. Hesser’s style reflects a journalistic sparseness and clean line, without becoming too personal or confessional. Powell’s non-fiction memoir Julie and Julia grows out of Powell’s blog, the Julie/Julia Project, in which she chronicled her massive undertaking: cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s classic tome, Mastering the Art of French Cooking,5 in one year. Powell’s book uses material from the blog, as well as imaginative sections based on letters between Julia Child and her husband Paul, to create a narrative of Powell’s year as both a amateur French home chef and a prolific blogger. She includes humorous and horrifying stories of the challenges of cooking some of the more labor intensive recipes, as well as anecdotes about her relationships with her husband cum dishwasher Eric and a handful of close friends, as well as her travails of working at a governmental office in Manhattan postSeptember 11. Julie and Julia ranges over a variety of topics but is ultimately a story of the transformative power of food, the creative act of cooking, and the quiet comforts of unconditional love. Powell never includes a direct recipe—after all, her recipes are strictly Julia Child’s, and readers could quite easily follow along with their own copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But Powell does detail some of the steps she goes through in preparing the recipes, not to be didactic but to highlight her struggles, and resulting failure or achievement. Her obscenity laced

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onset. The day before the factory tour, Charlie finds a one dollar bill on the ground. First making sure nobody in the area dropped it, he goes to a store, buys two Wonka bars, and pledges that he will bring the remaining money back to his starving family. Amazingly, the second candy bar contains Wonka’s Golden Ticket, the catalyst for the rest of the story’s plot. Rationalization of this tiny selfish action is easy. The boy is starving, he finds money on the street, the money becomes his to do with as he pleases, and so he feeds himself. Charlie is easily forgiven for this moment of weakness. The perfectly unselfish person would have brought the entirety of the sum home to purchase food for everyone, but Charlie is not perfect. Charlie is just a “good sensible loving child.”26 He is exactly the person Wonka has been searching for. It is only at the conclusion of the book that the readers come to understand the real meanings of both Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket contest and the Bucket home’s disturbing food imagery that appeared earlier in the text. Wonka, the creator of some of the most enjoyable and interesting candy in literature, is in sole possession of large amounts of food but has no family to share it with. Food imagery is as disconnected for his situation as it is for the Buckets’. The secret motivation for the Golden Ticket contest and Wonka bringing the children to the factory was to find an heir to inherit the factory. In the end, Wonka takes Charlie under his wing and the Buckets then have enough food to truly reflect their loving family. The food symbolism that appeared to be lost in the beginning of the story is now invoked with force. One could even read the entire plot of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as a way of righting the initial food symbolism wrongness. As if to cement the symbolic correction, Dahl ends his tale with one last exchange concerning food. As Wonka, Charlie, and Grandpa Joe usher the rest of the Bucket family into the glass elevator so that they can all travel to the factory to live, Grandma Josephine, not understanding the nature her grandson’s newly inherited institution, asks Charlie the burning question: “Will there be anything to eat when we get there?” asked Grandma Josephine. “I’m starving! The whole family is starving!” “Anything to eat?” cried Charlie, laughing. “Oh you just wait and see!”27

J.K. Rowling uses food imagery to great effect in the Harry Potter novels. On one level Rowling’s descriptions of the various Wonka-style novelty foods and candies found in the wizard world - such as chocolate frogs that can really jump and canary creams that transform the eater into the song bird for just a few moments - are simply delightful and clever and

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conventions of classic romance, while some of the particular situations she recounts resonate more with chick lit conventions. The broad category of romance, which chick lit can clearly fall under as a sub-genre, has been a misunderstood and derided genre throughout much of its history, largely because of its status as fiction by women and for women, according to Pamela Regis, one of the most respected romance scholars currently studying the genre with a critical and sympathetic eye. Regis’ book A Natural History of the Romance Novel details the genre’s “eight essential elements.”8 Cooking for Mr. Latte nicely follows these eight narrative elements, whereas Julie and Julia does not fit the general categories of because Powell is already happily married and therefore her narrative does not chronicle her courtship. Romance novels begin by defining the society in which the heroine lives, a society that “is in some way flawed; it may be incomplete, superannuated, or corrupt. It always oppresses the heroine and hero.”9 The society Hesser and Tad inhabit—urban, fast-paced, career-oriented and quintessentially Manhattan—lacks nothing besides fulfilling romantic relationships for both Hesser and Tad. The only real incompleteness for both Hesser and Tad is their singleness, and it is this shared missing piece that leads them together to form a more complete union. According to Regis, the next key narrative element is the first meeting between the would-be lovers, which significantly shares “some hint of the conflict to come.”10 Hesser immediately shows trepidation at Merchants, Tad’s choice of restaurant for their first date, which “is the Manhattan equivalent of an Outback Steakhouse. Starbucks decor, loud music and utterly forgettable urban bar food.”11 For Hesser, and by extension the foodies reading her text, such a restaurant immediately registers alarm, because gourmands typically eschew chain restaurants and noise when dining out, in favor of local flavors and quiet rooms in which to talk and savor their meals. Restaurants play a significant role in most contemporary courtship. As Eva Illouz suggests, “The emotional invigoration of the romantic bond that usually accompanies the consumption of food in a restaurant can be traced to the formal, ritualized nature of interactions there and the conventionalized significance of the various articles involved.”12 However, this particular restaurant, with its various distractions, does not forge intimacy, especially since Hesser is a culinary professional to whom restaurants hold even greater significance. Next, the first glints of real trouble shine through the positive first date vibes as Hesser introduces “the barrier,” the third element in Regis’ assessment of the romance novel. The barrier “is a series of scenes often scattered throughout the novel establishing for the reader the reasons that

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this heroine and hero cannot marry.”13 These reasons can be internal or external. In Hesser and Tad’s case, Tad’s seemingly unreconstructed food practices and Hesser’s inflexibility threaten their future. Hesser notes that despite Tad’s wit and humor, he reveals a potential deal-breaker on that infamous first date: “He told me that if he had to give up one of his senses, he’d give up taste. I drank more Budweiser. Then he ordered a latte. After dinner. He needed a lot of reform.”14 Hesser’s willingness to follow his lead in beverage choice, a French practice “to express appreciation of each other.”15 and to “reform” him shows her flexibility, as well as her hope that the barrier is not insurmountable. She states that “Over the next few weeks, we marked our culinary territory. He introduced me to the burgers at All State. I paced him through six courses at Café Boulud”16 Hesser’s tastes run towards haute cuisine, whereas Tad’s are much more democratic, and while such differences may seem trivial to an average romance reader, to a seasoned foodie, such differences carry true ideological weight. These scenes of conflicting tastes and values pepper the story, all casting doubt on the couples’ ability to overcome the barrier. Attraction, the next narrative element, “establishes for the reader the reason that this couple must marry ...attraction can be based on a combination of sexual chemistry, friendship, shared goals or feelings, society’s expectations, and economic issues.”17 After the first date, Hesser notes that Tad is “tall and handsome…witty, impossibly smart and very, very funny.”18 She feels a clear physical and intellectual attraction to him, which bodes well for their ability to overcome the more political barriers of food choices. In romance novels, attraction, along with the growing affection between the heroine and hero together form a force strong enough to overcome any barriers. That Hesser continues to find Tad a lively intellectual companion, as well as a handsome man, provides readers hope that the couple will form a strong union. After the romance author clearly establishes attraction, readers watch for the declaration of feeling, “the scene or scenes in which the hero declares his love for the heroine, and the heroine her love for the hero, [which] can occur anywhere in the narrative.”19 Tad’s shifting relationship to food declares his willingness to compromise for Hesser. When each one cooks a simple yet intimate dinner for the other in their home, the act of cooking and caring communicates their strong feelings. Illouz notes that “The symbolic meaning of restaurants can be skillfully reconstructed by respondents within their homes through manipulations of the boundaries implied in the ritual.”20 As Illouz discusses, restaurants are typically coded as romantic, because “they enable people to step out of their daily lives into a setting saturated with ritual meaning.”21 As Hesser and Tad begin

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entertaining one another at home with some degree of formality—each prepares a meal alone, without input or consultation from the other, and is served as an intimate guest—they create a more lasting bond than at their first restaurant meal. Moreover, as Leon Rappoport argues, these moments of culinary performance, both in and out of restaurants, convey “some sort of progression toward sexual intimacy [...] through the medium of shared food consumption.”22 Hesser, and increasingly, Tad, use food to communicate their growing affection and deep romantic interest in one another. These moments of declaration also provide the attendant recognition of the beloved, the narrative element in which “the author represents the new information that will overcome the barrier. In romance novels, the heroine is at the center of the recognition scene, where any number of things can be ‘recognized.’”23 In a chapter aptly titled “Show Me, Don’t Tell Me,” Hesser details their difficulties (barrier): “Mr. Latte and I were not getting along as well as I had hoped. Over the months since we met, our contrasting opinions on food and dining had become combative.”24 Unfortunately, this obstinacy and ideological stalemate begins to “infect other areas of [their] relationship.”25 The chapter chronicles Hesser’s reflections on the relationship, from her concerns that Tad is too set in his ways, to her awareness of the ways he changes, for example, not ordering so many post-prandial Equal laced lattes.26 Rappoport notes, “Initially, no matter how similar their food preferences may have appeared to be before marriage or cohabitation, some degree of compromise is necessary.”27 That Hesser and Tad are beginning to shift their culinary habits and mirror one another speaks to a real investment in the relationship. Hesser’s compromises begin after she reflects on the qualities she loves in Tad: “He is trustworthy, sensitive and has an incredible talent for writing.”28 At the end of the chapter, she realizes that she needs to “be more generous, so he would be seduced by food in the same way [she] had been.”29 Hesser provides readers with the key elements at the heart of the romance narrative all in one chapter—the key barrier issues, the recognition, and in subtle ways, some tentative declarations, as when Tad begins discussing haute cuisine himself (restaurants Craft and Blue Hill), while Hesser cooks him simple foods (summer succotash) in her home, swapping their earlier tastes for democratic and haute cuisine, respectively.30 Their growing understanding of each others’ tendencies, food histories, and overlapping attention to details—both as writers and prodigious eaters—allows for a suitable recognition that they will overcome their differing ideologies. The ultimate moment in the romance narrative remains the betrothal, though in many contemporary novels the actual proposal and marriage can

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Another wonderful example of the comforting nature of food in the Harry Potter novels concerns the Dementors. Guards of the Azkaban Prison, these hideous creatures thrive on human spirit by sucking happiness from their victims and leaving the poor people with only feelings of deep despair and memories of sadder times. Extended exposure to the Dementors drives most insane. Some are more susceptible to the Dementors’ effect than others. The unhappier of a past one has, the more one is vulnerable to the Dementors’ power. Harry, whose parents were murdered by Voldemort when he was a baby, is especially “delicate.” In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry “hears” his parent’s last screams of horror before they were killed whenever a Dementor turns towards him. Harry often faints as well. This outcome is mild compared to what can happen. If uncontrolled, a Dementor will perform the Dementors Kiss. Essentially, the Dementor sucks the soul from a victim, leaving him alive but having “no sense of self anymore, no memory, no…anything. There’s no chance of recovery. [He will] just – exist. As an empty shell. And [his] soul is gone forever…lost.”32 While there is no cure for those that have endured the Dementors Kiss, there is some treatment for general Dementor exposure. That treatment is the ingestion of chocolate. After Harry first meets a Dementor on the Hogwarts Express, Professor Lupin gives Harry the chocolate remedy. Harry “took a bite and to his great surprise felt warmth spreading suddenly to the tips of his fingers and toes.”33 Incidentally, the physical and emotional healing powers of chocolate are also featured in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: “Suddenly, Mr. Wonka, who was sitting on Charlie’s other side, reached down into the bottom of the boat, picked up a large mug, dipped it into the river, filled it with chocolate, and handed it to Charlie. “Drink this,” he said. “It’ll do you good! You look starved to death! Then Mr. Wonka filled a second mug and gave it to Grandpa Joe. “You too,” he said. “You look like a skeleton! What’s the matter? Hasn’t there been anything to eat in your house lately?” “Not much,” said Grandpa Joe. Charlie put the mug to his lips, and as the rich warm creamy chocolate ran down his throat into his empty tummy, his whole body from head to toe began to tingle with pleasure, and a feeling of intense happiness spread over him.”34

In both Charlie’s and Harry’s worlds, chocolate makes the eater feel warm, comforted and happy. For Charlie, the warmth and happiness that eating chocolate brings may simply be the result of a finally full tummy. For Harry, chocolate’s magic is much deeper. Chocolate is the antidote for Dementor exposure. It breaks the victim’s depressive emotional cycle by

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combination of openness, humor, wit, and slang. The typical chick lit heroine turns to consumer goods and conspicuous consumption to assuage their longing to “have it all” and to consciously craft their identities. Though romance appears in all chick lit works, the relative importance of the love plot varies widely from one text to another. Chick lit readers do not expect a traditional happy ending, with marriage happening or implied. Rather, the heroine’s career and friendships receive considerable elaboration. Finally, chick lit novels tend to be packaged in pastel colors, with some version of shoe, cocktail, and handbag cover art visually marking the genre. Fielding and Bushnell's ur-texts have bequeathed a trove of similarly pink covered texts detailing the career woman’s search for love and fulfillment in an urban scene awash with luxury consumption, and now the genre is shifting into further sub-genres: Mommy Lit, Teen Lit, and non-fiction chick lit. Hesser and Powell squarely fit into the nonfiction chick lit sub-genre, drawing on the power of the bestselling chick lit genre on narrative, thematic, and marketing levels. Chick lit in and of itself is already a hybrid genre. Scholars, authors, and readers alike recognize the similarities between chick lit and classic literary works by Jane Austen and Edith Wharton, among others. Stephanie Harzewski notes that “Chick Lit has adapted several major literary traditions, including traditional prose romance, popular romance, and the novel of manners.”37 This particular blend of genres represents the concerns of many contemporary women—the desire for romantic adventure, happy endings, and a well-defined and clearly critiqued society. Harzewski claims that “chick lit presents a new novel of manners not as an exaggerated version of its codes but as a synthesis of diverse popular and literary forms.”38 Hence, chick lit may communicate the codes with various lists and rules that the heroine and/or others creates for herself. Hesser clearly shares her personal aesthetics of cooking and eating, not through a didactic set of rules, but through portraying her relationship with food. In addition to narrating the challenges of foodie dating previously discussed, Hesser also includes two chapters about dining alone and “single cuisine.” She reasons: In the same way that you should get massages and take naps or meditate, you should, everyone should, make a point to eat out by yourself from time to time. You should be kind enough to yourself to lavish your appetite with good food without the interruptions of company.39

Not only does Hesser share a story illustrating “the art of dining alone,” she also provides the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings for treating oneself well. Towards the end of her life as a single woman, she

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muses on cooking for one, and notes that the meals she concocts “[are] less structured and more self-soothing—separate entities tied together by nothing more than the fact that I liked each part...There was nothing guiltmaking about the foods I had chosen. They were simply flavors and textures that I love.”40 That Hesser nourishes herself with food, even while alone, and encourages other women to do so, sets forth a new value system where food brings a deep and satisfying pleasure. Powell, on the other hand, shares her project parameters: “I’ll be cooking every night and writing every morning. It’ll be like a regimen.”41 Unlike Hesser, whose dining aesthetics are clearly meant to tempt other women to treat themselves to the pleasure of food, Powell’s regimen serves merely as a personal code. With all the harrowing details she includes, reader’s would be hard-pressed to follow her example. She also exposes the codes of blogging, from interacting with readers, to protecting others’ privacy, to maintain one’s job in the face of potentially incriminating information on the blog. Powell uses infamous diarist Samuel Pepys as the impetus for a discussion on the creative act of blogging. She ponders the limits of the genre: There’s a dangerous, confessional thrill to opening up your eminently fascinating life and brain to the world at large, and the Internet makes it all so much faster and more breathless and exciting. But I wonder—would we still have Sam’s jack-off stories, the records of his marital spats, if he’d been a blogger rather than a diarist? It’s one thing to chronicle your sexual and social missteps to satisfy your private masochistic urges, but sharing them with the world at large? Surely there are some limits, aren’t there?42

Because blogging is such a new, innovative, and hybrid form, Powell’s questions are insightful. Is the internet the great liberating technology of our generation? How do bloggers shape their lives for a largely anonymous audience they never meet? As Powell continues her project, she realizes the power of her audience—her “bleaders”—to carry her through the project and to provided a sounding board: “One thing about blogging is that it gives you a blank check for whining. When Eric simply couldn’t stand another moment of it, I could take my drone to cyberspace. There I could always find a sympathetic ear.”43 Powell then includes posts from her bleaders—posts that suggest the ways her life could be worse. Besides moral support, bleaders also send her unsolicited gifts, ranging from her favorite Religious Experience hot sauce to chocolate and rosemary. The gifts continue to pour in when Powell adds a donation button to her website to help pay her butcher bills.44 These examples all show the code of the blogger and the bleader as a mutually sustaining relationship, where writers and readers are invested in the stories and even

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codify that interest through material gifts. Hesser and Powell tailor the requirements of the novel of manners to an evolving and often confusing society by depicting women who navigate dating—and in this case— culinary waters with confidence, if not always competence. Besides such classic literary roots, chick lit owes its success to popular media forms. Harzewski posits that Chick lit emerged as a subset of commercial print entertainments: its foundational texts, Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, were both originally newspaper columns published in book form in 1996. Numerous chick lit authors are former or current media professionals, the sector in which heroines are typically employed...Chick lit presents itself as a literary form yet does not avoid alliances with popular entertainment. As a result, it calls attention to the tensions between high and popular culture.45

Chick lit’s prominent and proud relationship to popular culture and the entertainment industry allows for astute cultural portraits and critiques, and can also beset the genre with problems of literary credibility, reviving old debates about the mass popularity of women’s fiction. Like Fielding and Bushnell before them, both Hesser and Powell originally published their work in other formats. Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia are consciously crafted, shaped, and marketed versions of their earlier columns and blog entries, respectively. And like Fielding and Bushnell before them, as well as Austen and Wharton, their insider status lends an air of authenticity to their cultural insights and critiques. For Hesser and Powell, the particular culture wars they engage with are food-centric. For example, consider Hesser and Tad’s previously discussed disagreements about haute and democratic cuisine, as well as Powell’s oscillation between eating high French cuisine and Domino’s bacon and jalapeño pizza. Foodie romance still chronicles cultural battles and women’s place in those charged debates, but more often than not these tensions are related via food rather than other forms of sexual politics that one might find in other chick lit texts or in classic romance fiction. In addition to the inevitable cultural politics the genre reflects and challenges, one of the primary differences between chick lit and popular romance fiction is the required happy ending. Rather than insisting on a conclusion in which marriage is attained or implied, chick lit allows for various scenarios. This variation proves that the love plot is not necessarily the most important element of the story. Also, the issues facing a Chick Lit heroine are not necessarily primarily romantic in nature, but reflect their problems dealing with “too many choices,” the provenance of

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the cold weather in the Three Broomsticks. Harry finds the drink enjoyable: Harry drank deeply. It was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted and seemed to heat every bit of him from the inside.37

Later in that same novel Harry and Professor Lupin drink butterbeer together after Lupin tutors Harry on the Patronus charm, a notoriously difficult charm that Harry finds physically exhausting. The two then share a moving conversation about life and death.38 In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix all of the students that later become Dumbledore’s Army members meet in the Hog’s Head to discuss plans while drinking butterbeer. It is here where they enter into a secret pact to better train themselves in defense against the dark arts.39 In these above contexts, butterbeer is a comforting drink shared between and among friends and allies. It even sounds like something that Rat would have packed in his picnic basket between the lemonade and the soda water. The fact that butterbeer is somehow alcoholic or addictive is not mentioned until Winky, the displaced and disgraced house-elf, becomes dependent on it as a way to try and curb her sadness about losing her position in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Harry looked over at the fireplace too. Winky was sitting on the same stool as last time, but she had allowed herself to become so filthy that she was not immediately distinguishable from the smoke-blackened brick behind her. Her clothes were ragged and unwashed. She was clutching a bottle of butterbeer and swaying slightly on her stool, staring into the fire. As they watched her, she gave and enormous hiccup. “Winky is going through six bottles a day now,” Dobby whispered to Harry. “Well, it’s not strong that stuff,” Harry said. But Dobby shook his head. “’Tis strong for a house-elf, sir,” he said.40

Winky has no home and is devastated. Like Toad she despairs, but unlike Toad she is not refusing nourishment. Instead, she drowns her sorrow in butterbeer and uses the drink’s lesser known alcoholic quality to deaden her pain. Here “food” is somewhat of a comfort, but it is a false comfort, a delusion. Winky is not the only character in the Harry Potter novels to suffer from an addiction to alcohol. Sibyl Trelawney and Mundungus Fletcher are also shown to have issues with drink, as does Harry’s godfather Sirius Black, who was “unshaven and still in his day clothes (with) a Mundungus-like whiff of stale drink about him”41 when Harry and the Weasley children make an unexpected trip to Number

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A Marriage Made in the Kitchen: Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia as Foodie Romance Sometimes I’m irritated by my husband, and sometimes I’m frustrated. But I can think of two times right off the top of my head when it’s particularly good to be married. This first is when you need help with killing lobsters. The second is when you’ve got an inspirational story to relate regarding a large African American woman who runs an S&M dungeon. I told it to him as we sopped up the last of the buttery lobster juice with some hunks of French bread.51

Eric’s delight in the story, as well as his indispensable assistance in the ghastly business of lobster killing, show the unconditional love that comes with marriage. Powell does not gloss over the tough times, but her book celebrates the everyday ways that husbands and wives make marriage work. “The Project,” touted in Powell’s provocative synopsis as a marital risk, is an attempt to work out her dissatisfaction with those expectations she has faced and found lacking—namely, working at a satisfying job, and having a baby. Creating and completing the project allows her to reclaim power and control over her happiness, and move beyond the world of work and fantasy, typified by her penchant for watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer to something more elemental, concrete, and life-giving—food. One of chick lit’s great triumphs is a new voice—one that is redolent of modern speech, and immediately communicates the protagonist’s persona. Harzewski states that “the [chick lit] protagonists’ selfdeprecating humor, readers claim, lends the novels an identifiable, friendly voice and approachable comfort level.”52 On the other hand, Wells asserts: “In terms of language, chick lit’s greatest achievement is its satiric employment, and sometimes invention, of contemporary slang and lingo.”53 Here again, the range of chick lit authors, plots, and attendant narrative voices vary widely. Hesser’s narrative voice betrays her journalistic training—her style is specific yet sparse, and her personality shows through more in details and individual word choice than effusions of personality. A typical Hesser description reads: I began slicing the beets into small cubes for a salad. They glistened in the light of my kitchen. The potatoes and parsnips were simmering, the bubbles wiggling up to the surface before flattening out. I was running behind and for once was at ease about it. I’ve known Sherry for most of my life and Mark for several years. They would understand.54

Her word choice and voice comes alive when describing food and the process of creating a dish, but turns taciturn when describing people. Powell’s acerbic, bitingly funny, and obscenity laced voice, although offputting at times, certainly creates an atmosphere of approachability in the way that Hesser’s cooler, elegant voice does not. Powell’s voice possesses

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the free-ranging language of the blog writer, who writes without rules and with only self-censorship (though some of Powell’s blog commentators apparently chided her language use). Here Powell details killing lobsters to prepare Homard Thermidor: ...In the end I just dumped them out of the paper bag into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetables. And then freaked the fuck out. The pot wasn’t big enough. Though the lobsters didn’t shriek in horror the second I dropped them in, their momentary stillness only drew out the excruciating moment. It was like that instant when your car begins to skid out of control and before your eyes you see the burning car wreck that is your destiny. Any second the pain would awaken the creatures from their asphyxia-induced comas, I knew it, and I couldn’t get the goddamned lid down! It was just too horrible.55

Cursing and vivid similes bring the traumatic scene alive on the page and also manage to create a sense of comic hilarity as Powell struggles with some of cooking’s more difficult tasks. The book revels in the frequent yet well-placed obscenity to evoke Powell’s tougher side, and to provide dark humor. Finally, a heightened awareness of consumption and consumerism marks the chick lit genre. Most chick lit texts are urban centered, and the protagonists navigate the ever-present consumption in the modern metropolis, often over-spending and over-indulging to help shape their ideal identities and to fill the lack of not quite “having it all.” The consumer nature of the novels reveals itself in both the content of the narratives and their form as objects of consumption. Harzewski asserts that The connection between frivolous novels and fashion has resurfaced with chick lit, as critics, judging a book by its cover, have conflated its fashionconscious exterior with inferior literature. Admittedly, a fixation with clothes permeates the genre in content and form.56

Fashion serves the genre well because it communicates on multiple levels: self-creation, conspicuous display of wealth and status, politics, and even gender. The fashions that permeate the genre are typically highend designers, what James Twitchell terms the “opuluxe,” high-end, status-laden items that help communicate that “you are what you consume.”57 As Twitchell argues, the material world, rather than being meaningless, is rather “too meaningful.”58 Fashion plays a limited role in Hesser and Powell’s narratives, though its limited deployment is telling. When Hesser shops for a wedding gown, she shops on ritzy Madison Avenue, communicating that this wedding will be classy and expensive,

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even if it is non-traditional and low-key. Powell, on the other hand, alludes to her vintage clothing fixation, shopping on ebay for such items. Her clothing serves as a symbolic sign of liberal otherness at the government agency where she works with slews of Republicans. Co-worker Nate even quips that “Republican’s don’t wear vintage.”59 For the most part, however, food takes the place that fashion might occupy in traditional chick lit texts in Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia. Food items, grocery stores, and restaurants are coded as hip or down-scale, communicating class and identity much the same way that fashion does in other chick lit texts. One of the chief criticisms leveled at chick lit by its detractors is the overt commercial nature of the genre’s form. Harzewski notes: “Chick lit’s denigration stems in part from its gendered reclamation of the novel’s commodity roots. The connection goes beyond an interest in fashion to a full-fledged embracing of commercialism in all its manifestations.”60 Particularly with texts that previously appeared in another format, like Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia, one questions whether the books represent a purely commercial interest or an act of re-invention of a previous text. Although I did not actively read the original columns and blogs upon which Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia are based, both texts represent a conscious shaping of that earlier material into a more traditional narrative form. Cooking for Mr. Latte also functions as a cookbook, with a substantial selection of detailed recipes and a separate index for recipes only, making it much more useful in the kitchen than a collection of newspaper clippings. Likewise, Powell’s book appeals to readers who want the spirit of her mission but may be adverse to reading a blog for a variety of reasons ranging from lack of access to unfamiliarity with the genre. Finally, the chick lit genre is marked by what Harzewski calls the “pinking” of the genre: Chick Lit’s association with pink is not only a textbook case of the novel’s feminization, compounded with covers frequently featuring an exposed female knee, but also a marketing move to attract and bring back readers through a recognizable visual appeal.61

The hardback copy of Cooking for Mr. Latte itself becomes an object of consumption, beckoning us from the bookshelves with its admittedly “cute” cover, coded as “chick lit,” but categorized as “cooking” on the back cover. The critical blurbs on the back cover too are from celebrity chefs like Mario Batali and John-Georges Vongerichten, other food writers, and cookbook offers. The textual packaging declares its hybrid status, and the text inside does not disappoint readers who are familiar

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food because food is of this world while ghosts truly are not. By including food in their celebrations the ghosts try to behave like the beings they once were. The food they “eat” is putrid and rotting in order to increase the possibility of making a sense impression on the ghosts, but it also brings to mind the transitory nature of life that these beings are trying to recapture. Approaching this type of food imagery from a more violent and graphic standpoint, the rotten food is like the ghosts’ beloved but discarded corporal bodies that they long for and the “life” they cannot give up even though they should. Like Butterbeer is for Winky, food here is a false comfort for creatures without a true home. More examples of the growing complexity of food are related to potions. Potions by themselves are purposely not included in this analysis because although they are consumed, technically, they are not food. There are occasions in the series, however, where food acts as a conduit for potion consummation. Like the other food symbolism in the Harry Potter novels the food/potion relationship becomes much more difficult and dangerous as the series develops. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry, Hermione and Ron have to incapacitate Crabbe and Goyle in order to masquerade as them and glean information about a recent rash of student attacks from Malfoy. For this they hide the sleeping potions inside of cakes that they know Crabbe and Goyle will eat. But to Harry’s and Ron’s utter amazement, stage one of the operation went just as smoothly as Hermione said. They lurked in the deserted entrance hall after Christmas tea, waiting for Crabbe and Goyle who had remained alone at the Slytherin table, shoveling down fourth helpings of trifle. Harry perched the chocolate cakes on the end of the banisters. When they spotted Crabbe and Goyle coming out of the Great Hall, Harry and Ron hid quickly behind a suit of armor next to the front door. “How thick can you get?” Ron whispered ecstatically as Crabbe gleefully pointed out the cakes to Goyle and grabbed them. Grinning stupidly, they stuffed the cakes whole into their large mouths. For a moment, both of them chewed greedily, looks of triumph on their faces. Then, without the smallest change of expression, they both keeled over backward on the floor.45

Although this is suspicious and sneaky behavior, the readers are able to accept this from the heroes without difficulty because the Crabbe and Goyle characters are despicable and the protagonists are using this sneaky subterfuge in a noble effort to save lives. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Fred and George Weasley place an engorgement charm in one of their Ton Tongue Toffees and “mistakenly” drop one of the candies when

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of culinary memoirs is the blending of narrative elements and recipes. Kelly notes, While it may appear that the recipes interrupt the stories or vice versa, the combination of the two elements actually provides a strong framework for organized recollection—it’s just not a form we are accustomed to seeing. The recipes provide verisimilitude for the stories, and the stories explain the food.66

Together, the narrative and the recipes lend authenticity to the story and draw the readers into the story by allowing them to make the same foods as the author and connect to the story on a more visceral level. Kelly, while noting that not all texts can be easily categorized, divides personal culinary writing into three main sub-genres: culinary memoir, autobiographical cookbook, and culinary autobiography. Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia exhibit elements of all three types, showing that within the food memoir genre they too present challenges of categorization. Culinary Memoir emphasizes memories and stories more than recipes and foods, Kelly notes, citing Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone as a primary example of this genre. Kelly writes: In culinary memoirs like these, the main purpose is to set forth the personal memories of the author. Food is a recurring theme, but it is not the controlling mechanism. Within the text, there may or may not be recipes. What sets this kind of culinary autobiography apart from the others is that if recipes are included in the book, they are not indexed. While this may seem a minor point, when recipes are not indexed, the author is decidedly emphasizing the importance of the story in contrast to the recipes. If the recipes were important to the author beyond casting verisimilitude (influenced by the recipe-sharing tradition), the recipes would be indexed. When the recipe index is missing, the intent is for the reader to focus on the life story, not to carry the book into the kitchen and pull out the pans.67

Hesser’s subtitle clues readers as to her dual emphasis—this is “A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes.” The love story is of primary importance, but the recipes receive their own distinct recognition. She includes a separate index for the recipes; within the text, the recipes follow the narrative rather than being integrated into the story. The recipes themselves feature Hesser’s personal suggestions for success, which indicate her desire for readers to recreate the foods and emotions she experienced, which makes her narrative more closely fit Kelly’s second category. Hesser aims to include readers by allowing them the space to make their own dishes, and to become part of the narrative by also cooking and eating the same dishes. However, Powell’s text nicely fits

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into this category since recipes do not actually appear in her narrative. On a pragmatic level their absence can be attributed to copyright issues, since they are not her recipes or substantial modifications. Rather, Powell consults an existing body of recipes that readers may already own or can easily purchase, if they want to cook these same foods. On an artistic level, Powell emphasizes her encounter with Julia Child’s venerated Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One. Though these recipes loom large in Powell’s narrative, they are not the focus. Powell’s text encourages readers to identify with Powell’s struggles, but not necessarily to duplicate them at home. From the harrowing details Powell shares, few readers would embark on a similar mission. She focuses on the act of cooking, as much as the act of blogging. Since Powell does not aim to teach readers how to cook or even necessarily to encourage readers to recreate her experience, no recipes are needed. While Powell regularly shares the process of cooking, she does so because the process is central to her project—reclaiming the joy in living. In Kelly’s second category of autobiographical cookbooks, Recipes play an integral part in the revelation of the personal history. Because they are part of the self that is being revealed in the prose, the recipes are not removed from the prose flow. As well, the recipes are indexed, conveying the notion that the author wants the book and its reader to move readily between the reading room and the kitchen. The text can be read as autobiography alone, it can be used as a cooking reference alone, or it can be used for both simultaneously. The recipes may be embedded into the prose text of the memoirs, but they are not separate from the flow of the prose.68

Hesser’s text neatly fits into this category. The recipes, though physically separated from the narrative, are integral to the story. Each chapter will feature several dishes or foods that connect Hesser to friends and/or family, and the recipes follow at the end of the chapter. Hesser’s own instructions and additions to the recipes help forge the connection between the prose narrative and the recipe, allowing readers to feel that they too are part of Hesser’s circle, with the same foods to link them together. As noted before, the subtitle sets up a dualism of love story and cookbook, and this category seems to best match Hesser’s structure and content. Because Powell does not include recipes, but only detailed processes imbedded in her narrative, there is little overlap with this category. Finally, Kelly argues that

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A Marriage Made in the Kitchen: Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia as Foodie Romance The culinary autobiography, then, in its autobiographical assertion combined with the task of illuminating the practices of community and family, can appropriately be called an autoethnography. It uses a familiar form (the cookbook) to reinvent the perception of the author and her family or community for those outside her immediate realm to challenge or alter preconceived notions.69

As autoethnography, this form of memoir shares the traditions and rituals of a group of people to an audience who very well may not be familiar with these traditions. To categorize a text as such would heavily depend on the cultural context of the readers and the degree to which they part of the culture and traditions. Kelly notes, As readers and cooks, we learn more than just some recipes or one person’s life story; the text reveals and decodes traditions and rituals for people who are not familiar with them. These kinds of autobiographical assertions reveal aspects of culinary traditions, as manifested within the author’s range of experience. At the same time, we learn culinary skills and methods particular to that culture.70

Hesser shows the blending of two families and their attendant culinary traditions, traditions that are heavily steeped in family, and, like Powell, the heritage of Julia Child. Neither Cooking for Mr. Latte nor Julie and Julia matches the structure Kelly describes; their content seems at times to be a meditation on our rituals and cooking traditions. Both Hesser and Powell mention Julia Child in connection with their foremothers, and her cookbook becomes a reference point for “fancy” dishes and entertaining. Hesser and Powell stake out their own culinary ground, attempting to figure out their place in kitchens where the shadows and spirits of relatives, friends, and Julia Child linger.

Second Course: Thematic Issues The themes of both Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia fit with the conventions of romance, and/or chick lit, with a foodie twist. Whereas a typical chick lit novel will chronicle the heroine’s search for the perfect pump or shade of lip gloss, Hesser and Powell are more likely to scour the markets of Manhattan for the freshest Dover sole or an obscure marrow bone. In their tales of the city, food bears the symbolic and literal weight of the narrative, and therefore imbues the stories with a deeper and more complex materialism. Since both Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia are non-fiction, they bring the readers a healthy does of realism, showing how real people, not fictional characters, navigate the essential

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Kenneth Grahame, Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling have written three wildly popular texts for children where food and what food signifies play a large role in the understanding of the deeper themes of the novels. These stories utilize food imagery that spins off the popular motifs of food as a symbol for the domestic and food as a symbol of pleasure to different effects. The Wind in the Willows, with its packed picnic baskets and well stocked kitchens, is a lovely and nostalgic story about home and the various types of enjoyments that home brings into one’s life. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory uses similar food imagery in a very different way. While the Riverbankers’ meals represent community and security, the Bucket Family’s meager and almost non-existent portions are downright disturbing. The story also includes a perverse re-imagining of food as a tasty temptation that leads to a sticky end for selfish children that is satisfying, if not a little sadistic. Food symbolism in the Harry Potter novels begins with food as a symbol of friendship, home and security but becomes more complex and ambiguous in nature as the series continues. In this case, the food imagery reflects the protagonist’s emotional growth from an innocent child to an experienced adult. In all three texts, food functions as an ideal physical symbol for many aspects of the human condition that young readers can read and easily digest with delight because, as Norman Lindsay said, children have always “liked eating.”

Works Cited Dahl, Roald. 1964.Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Reprint, New York: Puffin Books. 1988. Grahame, Kenneth. 1908. The Wind in the Willows. Reprint, New York; Simon & Schuster. 1989. Hunt, Peter. 1996. “‘Coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssan dwichespottedmeatgingebeer-lemonadesodawater….’ Fantastic food in the books of Kenneth Grahame, Jerome K Jerome, H E Bates and other Bakers of the Fantasy England,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 7 1: 5-22. —. 1994. The Wind in the Willows: A Fragmented Arcadia. New York: Twayne Publishers. Katz, Wendy. 1980. “Some uses of food in children’s literature,” Children’s Literature in Education 11: 192-199. Lacoss, Jann. 2002. “Of Magicals and Muggles: Reversals and Revulsions at Hogwarts.” The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a

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Foodie culture also signifies to many people a certain snobbishness towards ingredients, meals, and restaurants; gourmands reel off restaurant names and exotic dishes in the manner that a chick lit heroine name drops luxury designers. Hesser shows herself caught in foodie competition in the chapter “Foodies’ Face-Off.” As Hesser explains, Foodies are competitive. It’s not enough to just eat well and enjoy it. You must be able to whip off commentary about the amuse-bouche at Daniel, know the bodega in Red Hook that makes the best churros, and be able to recite the last five restaurants that Wylie Dufresne has worked at.74

As Hesser chronicles a meal at Craft, a new Manhattan restaurant, she shows the foodies’ outrageous behavior, one-upmanship conversation, as well as her own frustration by being caught up in a dining “circus,” when she would prefer to have more control over her menu choices. She presents the glamorous foodie world with its apparent flaws, yet she also shows her own place in this world when she ends the chapter by trumping Jeffrey Steingarten, who hasn’t yet been to Craft. Hesser’s depiction of her foodie career accomplishes several important tasks: she establishes her credibility as an authority on food, shows the fullness of her life outside of her relationship with Tad, and also provides context for her decidedly strict foodie ideology. As Molly O’Neill notes, In addition to training and experience particular to the edible world, food writers enjoy a rare and intimate bond with readers. Shared tastes imply shared values and aspirations. A food writer is, therefore, trusted to disseminate the issues that can affect what readers put in their mouths.75

Hesser’s references to her career with the venerable New York Times establishes a bond with readers. Whether or not readers identify with and agree with her assessments depends largely on their own context. Hesser’s tales of foodie adventure, paired with the accompanying recipes, attempt to draw readers into her world of shared values. Powell, unlike Hesser, begins the Julie/Julia Project as a culinary amateur. She is a self-defined “government drone by day, renegade foodie by night.”76 Therefore her career tales involve her job as a secretary at a governmental agency charged with decided on the memorial for the World Trade Center. She explains the nature of her work: Sometimes I’ll have four or five people on hold at a time. I talk to screamers, and patient explainers, and the lonely old, who are the worst, because I can never think of a nice way to say to the housebound old lady in Staten Island who is sure her idea for the memorial is being stolen by some big architect somewhere because the picture she saw in the paper

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looks like the collection of crystal paperweights she keeps in her knickknack hutch, ‘Thank you for your input, you loon—bye now!.77

Through stories like this, and long, rambling sentences, Powell evokes the frustrating, mind-numbing nature of her work, which therefore heightens readers’ excitement for “The Project.” By spending so much time discussing her work life, Powell also establishes a rapport with readers who are culinary amateurs. Her confessional demeanor, and her devil-may-care attitude convince readers that they too can come home from work and attempt to attain culinary heights. And if they fail, there’s always a stiff drink waiting, as when Powell finishes off an intricately layered Poulet en Gelée á l’Estragon (chicken in aspic with tarragon): “One last cup of jelly got poured over the chicken, which kattywhompused the tarragon leaves. Screw it. I threw it back in the fridge, mixed myself a vodka tonic—what the hell—and settled down on the other kitchen stool.”78 The casual language and drinking are staples throughout the memoir, though at times Powell is more emotionally invested in the dishes she prepares. Whether positive or negative, cooking moves Powell away from the pain of work and into another world altogether, one where she can entertain and feed her family and friends and forget the demands of her secretarial duties.

Relationships with Family and Friends In her feminist sociological approach to gender, food, and the family, scholar Marjorie DeVault discusses how “For generations, women’s caring work has sustained life and community. For many, caring has been a source of deep satisfaction and pride.”79 Of course, as DeVault notes, such caring work can be oppressive and go unrecognized. Hesser and Powell lavish such caring on their family and friends, through the careful preparation of and sharing of meals with loved ones. As cultural studies scholar Terry Eagleton notes, “Food looks like an object but is actually a relationship, and the same is true of literary works.”80 Relationships of all kinds abound in romance, chick lit, and foodie memoir genres. Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia marry food as caring work with food and writing as relationship. Their writings on food broaden their social network by connecting them to a broad audience, whereas the content of their writings shows their care for their immediate circle of family and friends. The emotional strength of both texts revolves around Hesser’s and Powell’s ability to connect with others, both other characters within the narrative world and readers.

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In food writing, the food itself, and, in Hesser’s case, the recipes in particular, give readers their own place at the table. In her introduction, Hesser quotes celebrated food writer M.F.K. Fisher, who notes that “Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”81 Hesser takes Fisher’s words to heart, and her series of stories, ostensibly recorded to answer a popular reader question of “what do you eat,” illustrates that food itself is about relationship, and the food can make of break relationships.82 Hesser’s stories range from quiet dinners with friends, to tense meals with family. One of the most interesting stories— and one that strikes reviewers as illustrative of Hesser’s character, are the two chapters that detail her family’s trip to Rome. She yearns to share her excitement and passion for traditional Italian dining with her family, but they refuse to eat the courses she selects. Frustrated with her family, Hesser becomes more shrill as they pull away from her and from the authentic Italian table. Hesser’s friend Heidi, a Swiss ex-pat living in Rome, invites the family over for dinner, allowing Hesser to bridge the tensions between her family’s appetites and her personal food ideology of adopting local food practices. Heidi serves a luscious, traditionally coursed meal, the experience of which, “to [Hesser’s] delight, the evening also put me back in favor with my family and changed the tenor of our vacation.”83 This example strikes some reviewers as illustrating Hesser’s coldness towards her own family and her inherent foodie snobbishness, but a close reading reveals that Hesser feels excited about sharing her passion for the genuine Italian meal ritual with her family, and frustrated when they fail to listen to her insights and follow her lead. She feels the pull between identifying with and pleasing her family alongside an equally strong respect for the Italian food culture. That another relationship serves to bridge the gap between these desires strengthens the importance of people and food working together to create community. Powell’s family and friends appear throughout the text, from her mother sentencing her to a cooking time-out to her friends gamely consuming any number of strange dishes, such as Oeufs in Gelée (eggs in aspic) as a Thanksgiving dinner starter. Her circle of friends expands as her blog garners attention from readers around the world, all sharing advice and eventually sending her surprise treats and even monetary donations to finance her increasingly expensive endeavor. Powell’s friends Gwen, Sally, and Isabelle provide considerable chick lit drama of bad dates, failed marriages, and mind-blowing sex. Powell discovers that her culinary adventure brings her circle even closer together, as on the night of Pot-au-Feu and Bavarian dinner party when many friends gather at her

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Rowling. 1998. Chamber. 214. Rowling. 2000. Goblet. 53. 47 Rowling, J.K. 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. New York: Scholastic. 186. 48 Rowling. 1998. Sorcerer’s. 21. 49 Rowling. 2000. Goblet. 27. 50 Ibid. 46

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attention to detail that a fashion savvy chick lit character will assemble an ensemble for an event, hence the simple act of consumption becomes layered with meanings. One of the best examples is Hesser’s naming of her suitor, Tad Friend, as Mr. Latte, based upon his misguided habit of ordering post-prandial lattes. Hesser follows the European tradition in which milky drinks are not consumed after eleven o’clock. Mr. Latte becomes known for his alternate (and perhaps uncritical) food ideology. Hesser is further horrified when Tad adds the artificial sweetener Equal to his lattes, further marking his consumption as outside of Hesser’s purview. Tad’s consumption, symbolized by the Equal swishing, latte drinking habits, becomes a major criteria for Hesser’s evaluation of him as a suitable partner. Once their relationship settles, they still struggle with issues of power in the kitchen—since they have both lived on their own for sometime they have their own methods and rituals. When they move in together, Hesser finds herself turning into her mother, frenetically cleaning every surface and “[guarding] the kitchen like it was my kin.”86 Tad finally tells Hesser that “It doesn’t do you any good to have the kitchen be exactly the way you want it if, as a result, I never want to set foot in it.”87 They work together to make the kitchen a space they can both work in, and their relationship settles into a true partnership. Powell’s marriage fits in with a romantic fantasy: “Eric and I were high school sweethearts...Our courtship was straight out of one of the ickier films from the John Hughes oeuvre.”88 She draws comparisons to her “traditional” marriage and her friends’ Sex and the City infused love lives, but throughout all of her stories and jokes, her deep love and appreciation for Eric is evident. Eric’s “pushing” and “suggesting” lead Powell to start the Project. And his role in the Project proves indispensable, from primary taster, to bone marrow fetcher, to plumbing guru, to talking Powell down from the ledge and suggesting Domino’s pizza when a dish goes awry. He is also, significantly, the primary dishwasher throughout the project. Rather than feeling subservient in cooking for her husband, Powell “discovered that in the physical act of cooking, especially something complex or plain old hard to handle, dwelled unsuspected reservoirs of arousal both gastronomic and sexual.”89 Cooking serves as an aphrodisiac and a heady power in which Powell luxuriates. Powell also includes fictional snippets from Julia McWilliams’ (Child’s) budding relationship with Paul Child, the man who would become her husband and be instrumental in transforming her life. These sections, based on Child’s autobiography and real letters between the two friends-turned-lovers, help connect Powell’s experience to a larger

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commentary on the marriage of food and love. This love story—of Julia for Paul, for food, and for France— infuses the text of Mastering the Art of French Cooking with “the deeply buried aroma of hope and discovery of fulfillment in it.90 Powell notes at the end of Julie and Julia that “I thought I was using the Book to learn to cook French food, but really I was learning to sniff out the secret doors of possibility.”91 By ending her text with such thoughts, Powell provides readers a version of the HappilyEver-After they expect from Romance Novels. Powell’s text illustrates that romance—that emotional justice—does prevail, even in unsuspected ways. Romance can exist in all facets of our lives, not just traditional romantic relationships, but most notably with ourselves and with the foods we eat.

Sex The link between food and sex has reached near-cliché status, and explicitly linking the fantasy of food and sex has become a prevailing trend in mass media representation of food. In a 2003 Columbia Journalism Review, food writer Molly O’Neill notes that “Food porn— prose and recipes so removed from real life that they cannot be used except as vicarious experience—has reigned.”92 Food porn is typified by the soft lighting and glossy, perfect food photography seen on some Food Network Shows and in foodie magazines like Gourmet. Food representation becomes a form of escapism and pleasure divorced from the reality of readers/viewers lives. Since both Hesser and Powell’s books focus on romantic relationships, they easily could have exploded the connection between food and sex, titillating readers with erotic tales of romance and soft-lit foodie fantasy. Yet while sensuality and sex plays a role in both texts, they remain within the realm of reality. Cooking for Mr. Latte even resists the overt gratuitous sex of numerous chick lit texts and instead reads like a contemporary “sweet” romance. Physical interaction is limited to understated kisses. The proposal and wedding are likewise portrayed quietly and matter-of-factly, rather than offered up with every intimate detail. Hesser follows the adage that less is more, and in doing so makes the story seem more romance than lust, and in some ways seems almost old-fashioned. Indeed, the choice of “courtship” in the text’s subtitle also anchors us in an older world where etiquette demands a certain sexual restraint. In this way, her text seems more realistic than some of the seemingly outrageous plots of chick lit novels or Sex and the City episodes. Hesser’s book offers a taste of fantasy when she includes recipes for fantasy food like foie gras mousse and tart

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berry jam “PB&J” sandwiches. However, most of the foods that figure in her courtship tale, and most of the recipes she includes are simple, delicious foods that real people might cook, such as an old family favorite, the prosaically named “Chocolate Dump-Cake.” Whereas Cooking for Mr. Latte is remarkably “chaste” for a modern courtship tale, Julie and Julia revels in linking food and sex. Her first memories of Mastering the Art of French Cooking are linked with secretly reading her Dad’s hidden copy of The Joy of Sex. She quips: “ If The Joy of Sex was my first taste of sin, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was my second.”93 Years later, when she reads Child’s classic tome, “I thought this was what prayer must feel like. Sustenance bound up with anticipation and want. Reading MtAoFC was like reading pornographic Bible verses.”94 The link between food and sex carries a transformative, at times spiritual sense throughout Powell’s text, despite her attempts at humor, shock, and lightness, by mentioning S & M dungeons and dildos. In a chapter that ranges from her work comforting families of September 11 victims, hearing the details friend Isabel’s dream involving a dildo, Powell tackles Child’s recipe for steak with beef marrow sauce. The bone proves difficult to locate, and once procured, even harder to crack open and extract the marrow from. Finally, Powell succeeds, serves the dish, and comments that: The taste of marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly too-much way. In my increasingly depraved state, I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like really good sex. But there was something more than that, even. (Though who could ask for more than that? I could make my first million selling dirty-sex steak.) What it really tastes like is life, well lived. Of course the cow I got marrow from had a fairly crappy life—lots of crowds and overmedication and bland food that might or might not have been a relative. But deep in his or her bones, there was the capacity for feral joy. I could taste it.95

Here Powell compares food to sex in a non-food porn way, by simply stating that the dish tasted like sex. She approaches sentimentality with her comment that “it really tastes like...life, well lived” but steers away from the simple emotion by broaching the reality of the cow’s life. While she could have lingered on the politics of a cow’s life, she instead shares a moment of visceral joy. Though Powell resists overt discussion of politics, eschews pure sentiment, and avoids lavish food porn language, she gives us just enough overtures to all of these qualities to wittily show how her narrative both engages current foodie trends and turns them on their edge with her irreverent prose.

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child. The tree gives an apple, a child receives. Let us hold that thought for later and open the book. The only color appears on the cover. Silverstein’s story begins thus, with line breaks indicating a turn of page, each sparely illustrated by black pen-and-ink line drawings (italics are mine, and no page numbers are cited throughout this essay because picture book texts do not use page numbers): Once there was a tree… and she loved a little boy. And every day the boy would come and he would gather her leaves and make them into crowns and play king of the forest. He would climb up her trunk and swing from her branches and eat apples. 15

While many picture books are written and illustrated in such a way that any young reader may take the subject position of the child protagonist, The Giving Tree closes that option by using gender-specific nouns and pronouns. Obviously, he and she behave in traditionally sex-typed ways from the start, with the female tree engaged in loving and the male engaging in actions that, we can infer, provide evidence of her love: she allows him to gather her leaves, make them into a crown, play king of the forest, climb on her, swing from her, and—most poignantly, given our food metaphor—eat apples that we know from the cover must be hers, though Silverstein omits the possessive pronoun here. Perhaps her apples would make his cannibalistic consumption of her flesh too conspicuous, as we see two cores dropping from the tree, where the boy hides in the leaves, undrawn. Interestingly enough, in her study of preschool and kindergarten student storytelling, Counihan notes that “boys more often use food symbols for aggression and violence through images of devouring, while girls more often use them for parental identification through food tasks and feeding.”16 Silverstein reflects this. She loves, he eats. At any rate, she is no ordinary tree, given her emotive and nurturing abilities. The Giving Tree bears fruit, apples, symbols of fertility, of abundance. So, who is she? What is she about?

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well as creating a shorthand for taste and value.100 They also denote a certain celebrity status that Hesser moves into with relative ease. Hesser’s “branded” consumption shows that she fits well in media celebrity and foodie worlds. Hesser’s search for a wedding dress betrays her desire for an opuluxe fashionable identity. She describes shopping for her wedding dress with her mother: A few hours of power walking around Bergdorf’s and up and down Madison Avenue worked [lunch] off, and we were back in action. I was determined not to buy a traditional wedding dress. And since I was going to shop for a stylish party dress, I wanted to go to all the stores I normally only read about.101

Hesser then visits Valentino where she buys a “dress that cost[s] as much as a Viking stove,” and then falls for a different dress at Prada.102 This interlude illustrates that in the world of fashion, Hesser is out of her element, and she interprets fashion by comparing it—at least price-wise— to the world of luxury cooking, in which she is well-versed. This scene recurs when she shops for underwear for her wedding day with her friend Paula, and admits that “I’ve never been good at embracing feminine rituals.”103 Her discomfort melts away when she and Paula visit Agata e Valentina, a gourmet food shop, where “Seeing the piles of exotic fruits, proscuitti hanging from the ceiling and heaps of cheeses put me at ease.”104 Hesser’s experiences with the luxury worlds of fashion and food illustrate that one may be accustomed to a certain level of taste in one area of life and not another. However, Hesser still chooses the luxury fashion labels to communicate her sense of taste on her wedding day, to correspond with the delicious foods she will serve. Her consumption is decidedly luxury, and follows the current foodie trend of the Alice Waters effect: using the best possible ingredients in simple preparation. Powell, on the other hand, actively steers away from the Alice Waters effect, and instead embraces Julia Child’s effusive and retro-philosophy of butter rivulets and elaborately prepared dishes, a difference that Powell sees as being inherently classed. She includes this excerpt from her original blog: Wealthy Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our dewy organic berries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow...But Julia Child isn’t about that. Julia Child wants you—that’s right, you, the one living in the tract house in sprawling suburbia with a dead-end middle-

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management job and nothing but a Stop and Shop for miles around—to know how to make good pastry, and also how to make those canned green beans taste alright...And that blows heirloom tomatoes and first-press Umbrian olive oil out of the fucking water.105

Powell’s strident tone and characteristic cursing highlight her investment in a populous, democratic style of cooking. However, she clearly speaks the other foodie language as well, illustrating her ability to move between conflicting food philosophies and their attendant socioeconomic classes. While positing her Project and Julia Child’s philosophy as decidedly middle-class, Powell does not acknowledge that this approach is both time and money consuming—late nights of cooking and the aforementioned monetary donations contribute greatly to her project success. Powell’s fashion tastes run towards the vintage, and she grocery shops at small neighborhood markets, stands in Chinatown, and stores like Western Beef. She even rants against Dean& DeLuca: Every time I go to Dean & DeLuca, a.k.a. Grocery of the Anti-Christ, I swear “Never again!” Often I swear this aloud, while in the store, slicing through moneyed idiots as if they were swaths of artisanal Belgian grain, as they wait in line for the $150 caviar, or pick up their plastic trays of sushi, or exclaim over all the varieties of green tea, or buy their coffee and croissants, which to do at Dean & DeDevil is just asinine.106

Powell’s humorous diatribe communicates Dean & DeLuca’s elevated socio-economic class and supposedly gourmet taste level. Powell, the self proclaimed “renegade foodie,” rejects current foodie standards and instead revives older, more classic traditions—classic French cuisine a la Julia Child—that ironically denoted a higher level of class and distinction when first published in the 1960s. Her own consumption is not so easily categorized, and she proudly celebrates her syncretic foodism, ranging from the highs of French cuisine to the lows of Dominos pizza.

Third Course: Reviewers Reflect on Genre Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia clearly embody qualities of romance, chick lit, and foodie memoir, and this new hybrid genre promises interesting commentary on the intersection of food and relationships. Yet these hybrid texts can prove challenging to readers, who are largely accustomed to more traditional genres and might not know how to read such multi-genre texts. Perusing the blogosphere, customer reviews at amazon.com, and foodie message boards reveals that readers

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react strongly, and often unfavorably, to these texts because of the genre’s hybridity and also because of the dismissal of chick lit. Both Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia have been compared to aforementioned ur-chick lit texts; Powell’s text even proudly displays this connection in the blurb chosen for the paperback cover: “Irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef,” from a review by Dianna Marder of the Philadelphia Inquirer.107 While the blurbs on Hesser’s hard copy text do not mention chick lit specifically, they also comment on her twin subjects; celebrity chef Mario Batali is quoted on the back cover as saying that “Amanda Hesser writes about both food and love in the same passionate, fascinating voice...”108 The significant themes of love, career, and New York city complete the chick lit trifecta and serve as a strong marketing tool. Many reviewers of both texts cite the cover art as part of the chick lit appeal. To cite one representative example, Marina Taylor, writing for Eugene Weekly speaks to the hybrid nature of Cooking for Mr. Latte, but not without calling attention to the cover: Here’s further proof that sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover. Cooking for Mr. Latte is pink and lavender, frilly, and features a drawing of Amanda Hesser prominently on the cover...the voice in the book can be confusing. If this really is a diary, as it claims to be, it’s not always a completely honest one, and glosses over things like Hesser’s relationships with friends and family. And if it’s a story about food and New York, as it seems to be, it includes more intimate and tedious everyday details the I really needed to know.109

By highlighting the cover, Taylor forges a strong link with chick lit. And what Taylor sees as a narrative fault—not falling squarely into the chick lit or food memoir genres, precisely proves my point: Cooking for Mr. Latte combines and overlaps elements of both genres to create something new, a hybrid genre of foodie romance, a genre that will likely face tough criticism for its association with seemingly superficial genres, but a genre that has great possibility to shift the cultural focus to the intimacy and relationships that flow from sharing food. Powell’s text likewise receives sharp critiques because of her association with chick lit. Several reviewers at amazon.com expressed dismay that the book includes “more pages about sex, politics and friends then [sic] cooking”110 and “Powell probably spends as much time talking about her friends as she does about cooking.”111 Both of these disappointed reviewers mention that they are food genre readers, and as such, their expectations are not met because Powell’s text is a new hybrid. Foodie readers also express dismay at the chick lit elements of Cooking

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attacks during the 1970s. As Carolyn Daniel has generalized about mothers in children’s books, “The powerlessness and subordinated status of her socially assigned domestic role is acknowledged and accepted as a natural aspect of her gender.”19 Some view The Giving Tree as a parody of the Jewish mother and son relationship often found in stereotypical jokes such as this one: A man calls his mother in Florida. “Mom, how are you." " Not too good," says the mother. "I've been very weak." The son says, "Why are you so weak?" She says, "Because, I haven't eaten in 38 days." " Mama," the man says, "that's terrible. Why haven't you eaten?" The mother answers, "Because I didn't want my mouth to be filled with food if you should call."

Read as a Jewish mother joke, The Giving Tree works the same way it works if read as tree-hugger snark: not for kids. They don’t get it. Nor do most of the adults who read it to them, for that matter, most likely because of its context as a children’s book. Perhaps it should have been published in Playboy?

The Great Mother, Archetype or Trap? The Giving Tree may be read as a good mother, but, according to Eric Neumann’s theory of feminine development in The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype20—is she Great? Trained by Carl Jung, to whom his book is dedicated, Neumann believed in the concept of the collective unconscious and developed his archetypal analysis based on feminine images in art and literature from different cultures and times all around the world. His analysis traces the unconscious back to a matriarchal world that he claims predated patriarchy. He describes the ways that early experiences of the Great Mother continue to shape collective culture as well as individual psyches, both male and female. On the book’s back cover, we are told: [The] primordial image of The Great Mother…finds outward expression in the ritual mythology, (sic) and art of early man and in dreams, fantasies, and creative works of both the sound and the sick man of our day.

Of course, since the publication of The Great Mother in 1955, the second and third waves of feminism have had their day, making obvious the masculine intellectual and imaginary bias of Neumann’s theory as well

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The mere association with chick lit renders Powell’s text suspect, and Tingle Alley, like many other reviewers, outright dismisses chick with a strident, unwavering conviction that the genre—though immensely popular—is worthless. As for Cooking for Mr. Latte, chick lit bloggers react more kindly, and several also astutely note the hybrid status. Shiny Media posted this review on “Trashionista”: While the book is technically a memoir, that makes it sound drier than it is. Latte is rather a touching tribute to a developing relationship, and an imaginative take on the traditional love story. Although not fiction, it bears many of the hallmarks of successful chick lit - there are celebrity encounters, New York apartments, glamorous cast members who are the cream of the Manhattan media elite, cocktails, and chance encounters in the places to be seen. The fact that all these things happen to a real person would be enough to have me screaming with jealousy were Hesser not so obviously likable...While this is a book tailored to foodies, anyone with a sense of romance will enjoy watching their relationship develop. It may be as predictable as many works in the chick lit oeuvre, but I defy anyone to put it down without a renewed enthusiasm for food, for cooking, and for eating, and to read the recipes without doing a mental kitchen inventory.118

Shiny Media argues that unlike other chick lit texts, Cooking for Mr. Latte has the power to engage readers through their stomachs, leading them back to their kitchens in search of something delicious and pleasurable. This is no small feat—rather than providing only a diverting read, Hesser and Powell provide us engaging reads that also encourage readers to test our own culinary boundaries, and to turn back to the kitchen as a place of power and pleasure. Ultimately, both Hesser and Powell were harshly critiqued by reviewers who too simply read for one genre or another, neglecting to consider the possibility that the texts were actually breaking new ground and carving out a new genre where food and relationships, romance, and, yes, even the greatly derided chick lit can coexist and flourish. It is in this hybrid space that true innovation occurs, and delicious new possibilities explored.

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Dessert: Foodie Romance and the New Domesticity Amanda Hesser and Julie Powell’s paths overlapped in 2003, when Hesser visited Powell’s apartment to write about The Julie/Julia Project in the New York Times. Powell chooses to prepare a meal of kidneys, potatoes, onions, Clafouti, and, the coup de grace, a bottle of Chateau Greysac Haut Medoc. Powell humorously comments on Hesser’s size— “very, very tiny” and mentions Hesser’s own critics: “hating Amanda Hesser is something of a cottage industry in certain, admittedly small and perhaps excessively navel-gazing, circles, and it would be an easy enough bandwagon to jump onto.”119 However, Powell suspends judgment and seems pleased with Hesser’s interest in “The Project.” Hesser’s ensuing feature of Powell, “A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking,” published in the Times on August 13, 2003, details the intricacies of Powell’s project, as well as notes Powell’s salty language. Hesser quips that “so that this report may be welcomed at breakfast tables and in classrooms, the word ‘cookie’ has replaced the occasional expletives.”120 Powell’s determination and creativity strike Hesser as ingenious, as when Powell rigs up a spit-like contraption out of a clothes hanger. Hesser and Powell continue to meet again, as Powell notes in a November 3, 2005 blog entry (a new blog, dedicated to chronicling Powell’s life postproject): “Night before last I did a reading with Amanda Hesser at the KGB Bar in the east village...And Amanda really is tiny. And she really is cute.”121 Surely their paths continue to overlap, as Hesser still writes for the Times and Powell is now a frequent contributor to the Times’ Dining section. One of Hesser’s observations in her review of Powell’s project leads toward an insightful conclusion about both books. Hesser writes: The Julie/Julia Project, though structured and a little manic, is reminiscent of the way many young women taught themselves to cook decades ago. Young wives would latch onto a cookbook and work their way through it, learning basic techniques and finding a handful of recipes they could master.122

Hesser and Powell’s projects meditate on young women’s place in the kitchen in the age of post-feminism, suggesting that the time has come to reclaim the kitchen and learn the art of sustenance. When Julia Child died in 2004, Powell wrote a quiet tribute on her blog, which she quotes in Julie and Julia: “I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it’s the claim one who has nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean.”123 Though some reviewers see this message as forced,

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Powell clearly sets forth Julie and Julia as a tale of overcoming ennui and despair by throwing herself into a grueling culinary project that provides some surprising rewards. Powell continues: Julia taught me what it takes to find your way in the world. It’s not what I thought it was. I thought it was all about—I don’t know, confidence, or will or luck. Those are all some good things to have, no question. But there’s something else, something that these things grow out of. It’s joy.124

This joy, discovered through the kitchen, challenges much of the twentieth-century history of women and the domestic arts. According to culinary historian Laura Shapiro, the turbulent twentiethcentury witnessed the rise of domestic science as a legitimate academic study for women, which lead to the erasure of pleasure and taste from the kitchen, and “these women were proud of their lifeless palates.”125 The science of cooking “triumphed in 1953 with the appearance of the first TV dinner,” and during the middle twentieth-century, “cookery could be seen, in the light of technology, as a brief and impersonal relation with food.”126 This anaesthetized relationship to cooking and food itself began a slow reversal in the 1960s with the advent of Julie Child’s cooking show The French Chef and later cookbooks creating a movement towards delicious home-cooked foods.127 Since that time, food has become more than mere necessity and has begun to exert a real cultural power. By the 1980s, “the national enthusiasm for food and cookery constitutes a more general expression of unashamed hedonism on the part of a middle class that’s pleased with itself,” and such patterns favored luxury food rather than political issues related to food.128 And yet, as Shapiro mentions, the culture as a whole remained suspicious of women’s appetites, and “all the passion and imagination that domestic scientists had devoted to taming the appetite was revived and magnified in the dieting industry.”129 On many levels, this link has remained. With the burgeoning “obesity epidemic” on one hand, and the culture’s obsession with thinness and eating disorders on the other, food is often figured in the mass media as an enemy combatant. In this cultural vortex, Hesser and Powell offer another possibility: food as transformative, love-inducing, and overall, a source of deep pleasure. Cooking for Mr. Latte and Julie and Julia do not lecture about nutrition, nor do they share diet tips. They even steer away from the food politics pervading other popular texts—most notably Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma130 and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.131 Aside from Powell’s quips about gaining “butter fat,” the books sidestep the stereotypical—and schizophrenic— presence of food in

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As Jessica Benjamin summarizes, psychoanalytic thinkers describe “the transfer of power to the father as the only means by which the child can free himself or herself from the helpless subjection to the omnipotent mother and enter the reality of the wider world.”36 “Yet, even as mother is all-powerful,” social scientist Shari Thurer notes, “she ceases to exist. She exists bodily, of course, but her needs as a person become null and void. On delivering a child, a woman becomes a factotum, a life-support system”37—words that could easily have been written about Silverstein’s Giving Tree as mother. The rooted tree and the worldly boy are intertwined in perhaps a warped version of what Neumann calls the “participation mystique,” that is, “an indissoluble bond between mother and child” that derives from the “original situation of container and contained.”38 At its most primal level, the Great Mother as earth—as the symbol unifying the change of seasons, of life and death—the archetypal Feminine in the participation mystique “takes everything that is born of it back into its womb of origination and death.”39 Ironically, though, when the boy returns to her “womb,” the tree’s uterus ship, it is her death, not his, at least not yet. The Giving Tree also illustrates another of Benjamin’s key points: “The adult relation between men and women becomes the locus of a great reversal, turning the tables on the omnipotent mother of infancy.”40 This is why psychoanalytic critic Nancy Chodorow, similarly to her contemporary Dinnerstein, argues: Any strategy for change whose goal includes liberation from the constraints of an unequal social organization of gender must take account of the need for a fundamental reorganization of parenting, so that primary parenting is shared between men and women.41

Once the nascent psyche experiences the Masculine and the Feminine equally, then perhaps we can get the Good and the Terrible into gender balance—and ultimately balance the Supreme Court. In my work-in-progress on the reproduction of mothering in children’s and young adult literature, I have noted some recurring patterns in relationships between picture book mothers and sons, especially in stories that are about mother-child relationships. Interestingly enough, the most popular texts seldom focus on daughters. The Giving Tree, The Runaway Bunny (1942) by Margaret Wise Brown, and Love You Forever (1986) by Robert Munsch are the bestselling mothering books,42 and all are about how incredibly much she loves her child, as if that is her only role in life. The mother-child relationship is intense, one-on-one, all-consuming. There’s no career for the woman, no interest in non-domestic activities.

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Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Buford, Bill. 2006. “TV Dinners: The Rise of Food Television,” New Yorker, October 2, 2006: 42-47. Bushnell, Candace. 1997. Sex and the City. New York: Warner Books. Cabot, Meggin. 2002. The Boy Next Door. New York: HarperCollins. Child, Julia, Simone Beck, and Loisette Bertholle, 1961. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One. New York: Knopf. DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eagleton, Terry. 1998. “Edible écriture.” Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, edited by Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, 203208. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fielding, Helen. 1998. Bridget Jones’s Diary. New York: Penguin. Harzewski, Stephanie. 2006. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, 29-46. New York: Routledge. Hesser, Amanda. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes. New York: Norton. —. 2003. “A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking,” New York Times, August 13, 2003. Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/dining/12JULI.html (accessed August 20, 2007). Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Julie and Julia, Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031610969X/102-29253387510510? Kelley, David E., producer. 1997-2002. Ally McBeal. Fox. September 1997-May 2002. Kelly, Traci Marie. 2001. “‘If I Were a Voodoo Priestess’: Women’s Culinary Autobiographies.” In Kitchen Culture in America: Popular Representations of Food, Gender, and Race, edited by Sherrie A. Inness, 251-269. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins. O’Neill, Molly. 2004. “Food Porn.” The Best Food Writing 2004, edited by Holly Hughes, 2-19. New York: Marlowe and Company.

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Pollan, Michael. 2007. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin. Powell, Julie. 2005. Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. New York: Back Bay Books. —. 2006. post on Barnes and Noble “Julie Powell on Julie & Julia” Questions for the author, posted on December 11, 2006. http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/bn/board/message?board.id=julie julia&message.id=215 (accessed on August 20, 2007). Powell, Julie. Blog. http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/ —. Blog. 2005. http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html Rappoport, Leon. 2003. How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food. Toronto: ECW Press. Regis, Pamela. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Reichl, Ruth. 2002. Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table. New York: Random House. —. 1999. Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. New York: Broadway. Shapiro, Laura. 1986. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Steingarten, Jeffrey. 1998. The Man Who Ate Everything. New York: Knopf. Taylor, Marina. 2003. “A Whole Latte Love: Amanda Hesser Chronicles Recipes for Romance,” Eugene Weekly, June 19, 2003. Online. http://www2.eugeneweekly.com/2003/061903culture.html (accessed on August 27, 2007). Tingle Alley Blog, http://www.tinglealley.com/index.php?cat=21. Trashionista Blog. http://www.trashionista.com/rating_55/index/html. Twitchell, James. 2002. Living it Up: Our Love Affair with Luxury. New York: Columbia University Press. Veblen, Thorstein. 1912. The Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Macmillan. Wells, Juliette. 2006. “Mothers of Chick Lit? Women Writers, Readers, and Literary History.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young, 47-70. New York: Routledge. “Whither Amanda Hesser,” Chowhound.com, Food and Media News, http://www.chowhound.com/topics/343825.

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Notes 1

Hesser, Amanda. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship, with Recipes. New York: Norton. 2 Powell, Julie. 2005. Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. New York: Back Bay Books. 3 Bushnell, Candace. 1997. Sex and the City. New York: Warner Books. 4 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 13. 5 Child, Julia, Simone Beck, and Loisette Bertholle, 1961. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume One. New York: Knopf. 6 Reichl, Ruth. 1999. Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table. New York: Broadway. 7 Reichl, Ruth. 2002. Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table. New York: Random House. 8 Regis, Pamela. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 30. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 31. 11 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 17-18. 12 Illouz, Eva. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. 129. 13 Regis. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. 32. 14 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 19. 15 Ibid., 19. 16 Ibid., 19. 17 Regis. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. 33. 18 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 19. 19 Regis. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. 34. 20 Illouz. 1997. Consuming the Romantic Utopia. 131. 21 Ibid., 128. 22 Rappoport, Leon. 2003. How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food. Toronto: ECW Press. 163. 23 Regis. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. 36. 24 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 105. 25 Ibid., 105. 26 Ibid., 106. 27 Rappoport. 2003. How We Eat. 164. 28 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 107. 29 Ibid., 109. 30 Ibid., 109. 31 Regis. 2003. A Natural History of the Romance Novel. 37-38. 32 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 168. 33 Fielding, Helen. 1998. Bridget Jones’s Diary. New York: Penguin. 34 Bushnell, Candace. 1997. Sex and the City. New York: Warner Books.

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Yet it can be argued that the symbolic mother is forced into sacrificing herself by centuries of Feminine archetypal imagery conditioning her acquiescence. “Death, extinction, rending to pieces” are considered part of the Terrible Mother archetype, but they “originally took the form of sacrifice and ritual execution” in homage to matriarchal power and resulting in regeneration, as in fertility rituals.53 But this is patriarchy. The boy as a man wishes to return to the tree’s matriarchal comforts, but he has taken her Feminine strength, and the only time the tree is “not really” happy is when her trunk is gone, for, as she tells the old boy upon his final return, “I am sorry…but I have nothing left to give you.” Ironic regret. According to Neumann, the true spirit mother’s power “is living and saving; her overflowing heart is wisdom and food at once. The nourishing life that she communicates is a life of the spirit and transformation, not of earthbound materiality.”54 The Giving Tree is food, but where is her wisdom? Her entire life is devoted to giving the boy things he wants. The transformation she enables out of her feeding is not spiritual but material. In fact, in giving him her trunk for a boat, she has sacrificed her soul, for archetypically Neumann tells us “the tree trunk is a container, ‘in’ which dwells its spirit, as the soul dwells in the body.”55 Neumann would likely suggest that Western patriarchy accounts for this, for “with its masculine, monotheistic trend toward abstraction,” Judeo-Christian thought has “disenthroned and repressed” the goddess “as a feminine figure of wisdom,”56 a powerful statement when juxtaposed with this idea: As mother and earth woman, the Great Mother is the “throne” pure and simple, and, characteristically, the woman’s motherliness resides not only in the womb but also in the seated woman’s broad expanse of thigh, her lap on which the newborn sits enthroned.57

The Giving Tree’s little “king of the forest” “would sleep in her shade,” between her roots drawn in lines that hold him like a Great Motherly lap, cores of her eaten apples in the foreground. In the end he is enthroned on her stump. Some king. In fact, Neumann asserts that in Western development, “the patriarchal element nearly always overlays and quite often submerges the matriarchal.”58 Hence in Silverstein we have a tree that embodies many of the positive traits of the Great Mother, from the perspective of the male son who yearns for all she can give but offers nothing in return except his company in death. Neumann warns that “modern consciousness is threatening the existence of mankind, for the one-sidedness of masculine development has led to a hypertrophy of consciousness at the expense of

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Ibid., 258. Ibid., 260. 70 Ibid., 262. 71 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 81. 72 Ibid., 82. 73 Steingarten, Jeffrey. The Man Who Ate Everything, (New York: Knopf, 1998). 74 Ibid., 49. 75 O’Neill, Molly. 2004. “Food Porn,” in The Best Food Writing 2004, edited by Holly Hughes, 2-19. New York: Marlowe and Company. 3. 76 Powell, Julie, posted on The Julie/Julia Project, The Julie Powell Blog, posted on August 25, 2002, http://blogs.salon.com/0001399, (accessed on August 27, 2007). 77 Powell. 2005. Julie and Julia. 62-63. 78 Ibid., 141 79 DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2. 80 Eagleton, Terry. 1998. “Edible écriture,” in Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, edited by Sian Griffiths and Jennifer Wallace, 203-208. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 204-205. 81 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 13. 82 Ibid., 13 83 Ibid., 161. 84 Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 115. 85 DeVault. 1991. Feeding the Family. 143. 86 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 252. 87 Ibid., 253. 88 Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 18. 89 Ibid., 216. 90 Ibid., 305. 91 Ibid., 305-306. 92 O’Neill. 2004. “Food Porn.” 4. 93 Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 30. 94 Ibid., 15. 95 Ibid., 76-77. 96 Ibid., 177. 97 Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class, (New York: Macmillan, 1912). 98 Twitchell. 2002. Living it Up. 99 Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 100 Twitchell. 2002. Living it Up. 101 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 266. 102 Ibid., 266. 103 Ibid., 267. 69

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Ibid., 267. Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 41. 106 Ibid., 245. 107 Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 108 Hesser. 2003. Cooking for Mr. Latte. 109 Taylor, Marina. “A Whole Latte Love: Amanda Hesser Chronicles Recipes for Romance,” Eugene Weekly, June 19, 2003, Online, http://www2.eugeneweekly.com/2003/061903culture.html, (accessed on August 27, 2007). 110 rodboomboom, comment on Julie and Julia, Amazon.com, comment posted October 31, 2005, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031610969X/1022925338-7510510?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance, (accessed August 20, 2007). 111 Westley, comment on Julie and Julia, Amazon.com, comment posted November 21, 2005, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031610969X/1022925338-7510510? v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance, (accessed August 20, 2007). 112 travelmad478, comment on “Whither Amanda Hesser,” Chowhound.com, Food and Media news comment posted November 23, 2006, http://www.chowhound.com/topics/343825, (accessed August 15, 2007). 113 nicolars, comment on “Whither Amanda Hesser,” Chowhound.com, Food and Media news comment posted December 6, 2006, http://www.chowhound.com/topics/343825, (accessed August 15, 2007). 114 Marold, B. comment on Julie and Julia, Amazon.com, comment posted September 26, 2005, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031610969X/1022925338-7510510?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance, (accessed August 20, 2007). 115 Ibid. 116 Tingle Alley, comment on The Julie & Julia dialogue,” The Tingle Alley Blog, comment posted October 7, 2005, http://www.tinglealley.com/index.php?cat=21, (accessed on August 20, 2007). 117 Ibid. 118 Shiny Media, comment on Book Review Cooking for Mr. Latte by Amanda Hesser, Trashionista Blog, posted on January 24, 2007, http://www.trashionista.com/rating_55/index/html, (accessed on August 27, 2007). 119 Powell, posted on The Julie/Julia Project. 258. 120 Hesser, Amanda. “A Race to Master the Art of French Cooking,” New York Times, August 13, 2003. Online. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/dining/12JULI.html, (accessed August 20, 2007). 121 Powell, Julie. 2005. post Julie Powell Blog, posted on November 3, 2005. http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html, (accessed August 20, 2007). 122 Hesser, “A Race…” 123 Powell. 2005. Julie and Julia. 303. 105

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Ibid., 305. Shapiro, Laura. 1986. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 6. 126 Ibid., 228. 127 Ibid., 230. 128 Ibid., 232. 129 Ibid., 233. 130 Pollan, Michael. 2007. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin. 131 Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: HarperCollins. 125

THE JOY OF COOKING AND EATING: CULTURAL HYBRIDITY AND FEMALE EMPOWERMENT IN OREO AND MONA IN THE PROMISED LAND WILLIAM DALESSIO

She ordered a hamburger and a black-and-white milk shake. She changed the hamburger to a grilled cheese; since she would soon see her father, she wanted to be in a state of kosher grace.1 —Ross, Oreo But then again, maybe her kitchen would be exactly like this. A bargain basement, hardly elegant, hardly a place where you could execute with efficiency your culinary intentions; but where you might start out making one thing, only to end up, miraculously, with a most delicious dish du jour.2 —Jen, Mona in the Promised Land

In the novels Oreo (1974) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996), Fran Ross and Gish Jen, respectively, include instances of food preparation and food consumption to explore the ways in which one’s racial and/or ethnic identity, which Werner Sollors classifies as a descent quality, affects the expansion, limitation, or subversion of one’s cultural identity in a society that values descent over consent-based changes.3 Jen’s protagonist, Mona Chang, converts to Judaism and thus consents to a Jewish cultural identity, which she initially believes will allow her to forsake her Chinese heritage, a byproduct of her Asian descent. By storming out of her mother’s kitchen and running away from home, Mona

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conclusions focus on good and bad examples of giving and taking, development and change, love and materialism, with no basis in gender. Perhaps Carlsson has oversimplified the students’ understandings; or, more likely, this list suggests that young readers accept ubiquitous gender role stereotypes to the point that they are rendered invisible, mere vessels to contain higher abstract morals. With all of this, it’s no wonder that Ellen Handler Spitz has ranked The Giving Tree as “The Most Overrated Children’s Book,” saying: Totally self-effacing, the “mother” treats her “son” as if he were a perpetual infant, while he behaves toward her as if he were frozen in time as an importunate baby. This overrated picture book thus presents as a paradigm for young children a callously exploitative human relationship— both across genders and across generations. It perpetuates the myth of the selfless, all-giving mother who exists only to be used and the image of a male child who can offer no reciprocity, express no gratitude, feel no empathy—an insatiable creature who encounters no limits for his demands.65

Arguments against the book’s place as a “classic” go back decades. In 1979, Jacqueline Jackson and Carol Dell began their Language Arts essay, “The Other Giving Tree”: It is hard to believe that anyone would take Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree (Harper and Row, 1964) seriously, as an admirable story of selfless giving. Yet after hearing a number of sermons using the book as an example of Christian love worthy of emulation; watching the Little Theater of the Deaf act it out nonsatirically; seeing college students handle it with reverence, and reading articles in teachers’ magazines (one as recent as 1978) on how to build value units upon it, we realize that there are large numbers of persons of all ages who do consider the book a profound expression of love.66

Jackson and Dell counter the profundity with a parody of the story that they use in classrooms to trigger critical discussion. Their version introduces the character of a second tree next to the Giving Tree. The second tree does give apples for the boy to sell when he asks but refuses all of the boy’s other requests until finally, in the end, the old boy gets hot sitting on the stump and asks to sit in the shade. The second tree agrees, And the stump wept.67

A fittingly ironic end for those who use the Giving Tree to stump for Christ.

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satisfy a woman’s emotional and sexual hungers. Despite this thematic difference, both authors depict young women who not only challenge descent-based definitions of cultural identity, but also work to undermine the masculine-feminine dichotomy that exists in any patriarchal and heterosexist culture.

I. Ethnic and Racial Hybridity: The Importance of Descent As Ross and Jen demonstrate the transient and fluid nature of cultural identities, they suggest that racial and ethnic identities, which inform and shape our cultural identities, occupy an unstable and sometimes elusive place in contemporary American culture. In this way, each author works to undermine, what Samira Kawash calls, “some originary, authentic, pure identity” that is “conceived most often in biological terms as ‘blood’” and “can only be an appeal to a mythical purity.”4 Through their respective protagonists Oreo, a racial hybrid, and Mona, an Asian by descent, Ross and Jen work to blur the color line that reduces racial identity to black or white terms and thus dispel any mythical notions of pure identity. At first glance, though, the name of Ross’s title character appears to reinforce a further demarcation of the color line and thus the “mythical purity” of race. In one of the novel’s four epigraphs, Ross defines an “Oreo” as “[s]omeone who is black on the outside and white on the inside” or, as Harryette Mullen notes, someone who “has assimilated European American cultural styles in order to escape the supposed inferiority of African American culture or to be more acceptable to the mainstream.”5 As Mullen explains (and Ross suggests), the term Oreo “belong[s] to a popular discourse regarding the divergence of racial identity and genetic heritage from cultural behavior, class identification, and political attitudes”6 or, in Sollors’ terms, the divergence of descent from consent. Ironically, this definition of an Oreo does not apply to the novel’s title character but, instead, works to simplify, limit, and misrepresent, in black and white terms, the complex reality of her racial identity that in fact does make her partially “white on the inside” as well as the outside. Even the label “mulatto,” half black and half white, cannot account for Oreo’s mixed race, for although her maternal grandparents, James and Louise, are identified as African Americans, each is on an opposite end of the “color scale”7 and thus racially different. In the text, Ross includes a chart called “Colors of black people,” which designates James, the darkest shade or “the color of the pips,” as a ten and Louise, “an albino manquée,”

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as “a just-off-the-scale-1.”8 Ross explains that Louise, Oreo’s “whiteskinned black grandmother,”9 is part African, French, and Native American, hence her light skin color. Despite her mixed racial heritage, however, Louise, like her more racially homogeneous husband, is considered, first and foremost, an African American, especially by Caucasian Americans. Louise’s perceived racial identity may be traced to the antebellum South’s one drop rule, according to Kawash, an “asymmetrical definition of white and black,” which is “characterized as follows: one is white if all of one’s ancestors are white; one is black if any of one’s ancestors are black.”10 By demonstrating the complex racial identities of Oreo and her ancestors, Ross suggests the inaccuracy and simplicity of this racist rule that was created by hypocritical white men who attempted to conceal and/or deny their own participation in America’s long history of miscegenation. Nevertheless, the one drop rule, however misleading, suggests society’s emphasis on descent in the process of identity formation. Although one may consent to a specific cultural identity and perform behaviors, such as cooking and eating, that validate this choice, one may continue to be identified as a cultural outsider because of descent qualities, most notably one’s race and ethnicity. Ross further confounds the reductive black-or-white view of race when her novel’s narrator explains that Oreo inherits her “kinky hair” and dark complexion, traditional African features, from “the Jewish side of her family,”11 specifically her father, who has very curly hair, and “her darkskinned white grandfather.”12 Conversely, Oreo inherits the “sharp features” of her face, stereotypically Jewish qualities, from “the black side of her family.”13 When Oreo meets her Jewish father, however, she discovers that his “noble-savage nose and cheekbones”14 may have been the source of her “sharp features.” Of course, Oreo’s maternal grandmother, part Native American, also may have passed down these “savage” features to her granddaughter. By offering multiple and inconclusive reasons for her protagonist’s physical features, Ross complicates and challenges the out-dated assumptions about race, specifically the physical characteristics of race, and in so doing, suggests the blurring of the color line in contemporary America. Furthermore, Ross envisions a day, specifically “[t]wo years after [her] book ends,” when Oreo, a product of this racial mixing, “would be the ideal beauty of legend and folklore—name the nationality, specify the ethnic group. Whatever your legends and folklore bring to mind for beauty of face and form, she would be it, honey.”15 Thus, through Oreo, Ross foresees a

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racially-mixed America where racial labeling is an irrelevant if not impossible practice. Like Ross, Jen suggests the limitations of the black-or-white racial paradigm, for as an American of Asian descent, Mona, like the raciallymixed Oreo, occupies a precarious position, straddling both sides of the color line. As Naomi, the college roommate of Mona’s older sister Callie, observes, Mona is not black or white, but “yellow. A yellow person, a yellow girl.”16 Even the color yellow is an insufficient label since Mona “is not exactly a textbook primary” and “especially since Mona’s summertime color is most definitely brown.”17 In fact, the suntanned Mona is practically the same color as Naomi, who “is not black either” but is “closer in color to a paper bag.”18 Thus, Mona, a dark-skinned Asian American, and Naomi, a light-skinned African American, both “brown” in color, do not fit neatly on either side of the dominant culture’s color line. In this way, Jen suggests the inadequacy of this reductive view of racial identity, noting that if Naomi “were a cabinet door or a shade of hair dye, people would have a name for her exact shade. But she is only a person, and she is called black, just as Mona and Callie are called yellow.”19 Like Ross, Jen suggests how the dominant white culture implements the onedrop rule as a way of marginalizing all people of color: Because “yellow is a color” and because Mona and Callie are yellow, they, like Naomi, are “color folk” who are “stuck” to Naomi “by a special invisible but allweather glue”20 that binds them as ethnic Others in the dominant American culture.

II. Black-and-White Milkshakes: Cultural Hybridity in Oreo Oreo and Mona consent to cultural identities that, like their racial and ethnic ones, resist easy categorization. Prior to meeting her father, for example, Oreo visits a diner where she orders a grilled-cheese sandwich, which allows her “to be in a state of kosher grace,” and “a black-and-white milk shake,” which compliments her “zebra-print paper dress” and “a black headband and a white headband,”21 all of which suggest her multicultural identity. In addition, Oreo, like Mona, enjoys a variety of foods from many ethnic and national cultures: Her refined palate, trained and coddled on chez Louise, still had blotches and patches that brooked nothing but junk foods. Thus she could within hours savor her grandmother’s thrifty, piping haggis and the rotten potato salad from Murray’s delicatessen; Louise’s holey, many- tongued fondue

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I agree with her. But how do we accomplish this restoration? How do we give our stump mother back a real body—whole, fully crowned, and laden with apples—when in their study of gender equality in nonsexist literature, Amanda B. Diekman and Sarah K. Murnen find that even nonsexist stories may “perpetuate gender inequity through the reinforcement of the traditional feminine ideal,” or “benevolent sexism”?75 Benevolent sexism says there’s nothing wrong with the Giving Tree because She’s a Good Mother. The benevolent book buyers who continue to keep the book in print as a bestselling hardcover title are unconsciously contributing to a malevolent ideology of the self-sacrificing mother and the narcissistic taking boy. Notice: he does not fare well in the deal, either, as he winds up alone at the end of his life. Where are the wife and kids for whom he needed the house? Why did he have to sail away in a boat? “The result of this ‘giving mother’ is kids who themselves will make poor husbands, wives, and parents,” Strandburg and Livo point out.76 Only the primary bond remains to a boy who expects a Giving Tree wife. Had the all-giving Feminine ever given him some tough love instead of all her apples, perhaps he would have learned to make some real connections rather than having to revert to the symbolic primal womb. Authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, critics, librarians, teachers, parents, and everyone else involved with disseminating children’s books must stop idealizing traditional Good Mother traits and restore the mythic Great Mother her full range of terrible power and ambivalence—no more splitting her apart into monsters and madonnas. At the same time we need to develop nurturing power in men and give women a powerful symbolic space beyond the sex roles of virgin, vixen, mother. Let’s dig up that poor old dead stump and plant some new apple seeds.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. 1961. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Reprint 1997. Food and Culture: A Reader. Ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. NY: Routledge. 20-27. Benjamin, Jessica. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality. Representations of Motherhood. Ed Dona Bassin et al. CT: Yale UP. 129-146. Brown, Margaret Wise. 1942. The Runaway Bunny. Reprint 1972. New York: HarperCollins.

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be subsumed under the general classification “Food” was exempt from criticism and was endued with all the attributes of pleasure.29

By satisfying her “universal palate” and sampling the dishes of “unnumbered ethnic and international cuisines,”30 Louise gains a connection to the world around her. Furthermore, by acting as a selfindulgent food consumer, Louise undermines a central component of traditional femininity, which defines proper women as self-sacrificing food preparers, and instead provides an example of female strength and autonomy, which her granddaughter will follow. Fortunately for those who know her well, Louise, “one of the great cooks of our time,”31 prepares dishes that suit her eclectic and undiscriminating taste and, in so doing, introduces her family and friends, for whom she also prepares the food, to the culinary traditions of many ethnic and national cultures. For example, to celebrate the return of her daughter Helen, a professional pianist, from one of her concert tours, Louise goes “straight to the kitchen to begin preparing a nice little homecoming meal”32 that consists of nine courses, each with ten dishes. Louise makes hors d’oeuvres such as dim sum, pickled herring, and empanadas, entrées such as braised short ribs of beef, osso buco, and tori mushiyaki, and desserts such as spumoni, halvah, and kyogashi. Louise’s most notable culinary creation is “apple pie with Oreo crust,”33 a variation of the quintessential American dessert, which replaces the pie’s dough crust with one made from crushed Oreos, an edible reminder of her granddaughter. Thus, Louise, a “cook for the ages,”34 foresees, in comestible terms, America’s future, an age of racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity. Louise’s meals also work to suggest her and her family’s mixed racial and ethnic heritage. For example, one of Louise’s signature dishes is “a providential dish called rabbit-on-the-run supreme, in commemoration of the French and Indian Wars.”35 By preparing this “oldest handed-downfrom-generation-to-generation recipe,”36 whose name alludes to the tumultuous historical relationship between Native Americans and French explorers, Louise, in culinary terms, acknowledges and works to preserve her ancestors’ history. Significantly, “[one] of Helen’s earliest memories was of sitting on her mother’s lap and being urged to ‘tayce dis yere tonado Bernice,’ (taste this here tournedos Béarnaise) as she looked over her mother’s shoulder to compare Louise’s startlingly white face with the portrait of her grandfather.”37 From a young age, Helen sees the similarities between Louise’s skin color, a product of her mixed descent, and her food, which blends ingredients from the cultures of her descent. As an adult, Helen, who calls herself “Hélène Sun-See-A-Ray”38—a name

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that alludes to her French and Native American heritage—follows her mother’s example by consenting to an inclusive identity that embraces the racial and ethnic cultures of her descent. Like his wife and daughter, James Clark, Oreo’s maternal grandfather, assumes a multicultural identity; however, while Louise and Helen consent to their identities, James inadvertently and perhaps unknowingly assumes his. Although James observes and practices many Jewish traditions and customs, and thus acts as a harbinger of Jewish culture, he claims to hate everyone and everything Jewish, including Kosher foods. James’s so-called hatred begins when, as a shipyard welder during the Second World War, he visits a Jewish deli where he is denied food presumably because he is an African American, so “[from] that time on, James hated Jews.”39 To avenge the deli owner’s slight, James starts a mail order business that sells, among other items, Kosher foods, such as “cheese blintzes for Shevouth” and “honey for Rosh Hashanah,” and foodrelated items, such as “wine goblets for Passover,” to “a strictly Jewish clientele, whom he overcharge[s] outrageously.”40 To run a successful business, James immerses himself in Jewish culture, studying the Torah and the Talmud as a way of learning “the significance of feasts and holidays,”41 and appropriates Jewish customs and behaviors, both inside and outside of his home. For example, at home, James not only enjoys Louise’s Kosher meals, but also integrates Hebrew and Yiddish words into his speech, thereby creating a hybrid language that he and his daughter Helen speak.42 Furthermore, outside of the home, James appears more expert on Jewish traditions and practices than do his Jewish customers to whom he must “explain everything,”43 including the significance of the Kosher foods, which he claims to hate but eats with relish. James’s so-called hatred intensifies when he learns that Helen will “wed a Jew-boy” and he subsequently “turn[s] to stone, as it were, in his straight-backed chair, his body in a rigid half swastika.”44 In his petrified state, James, after “croak[ing] one anti-Semitic ‘Goldberg,’”45 abandons all language in a self-imposed silence: “He could have talked, but he just had not tried.”46 Although James forsakes all verbal communication, including his hybrid language, he inadvertently continues to assume a multicultural identity when he samples Louise’s “latest recipes. According to her reading of his facial twitches, veal stuffed with ham mousse barely beat out lamb bobotie as his postaffliction favorite.”47 Thus, the actions of mute James, like those of his “mushmouthed” wife, demonstrate, in the most literal sense, what Roland Barthes calls, “communication by way of food.”48

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James passes on his knowledge of Jewish culture to his daughter Helen, who like her father, becomes a harbinger of this culture and its culinary traditions. Throughout her childhood, Helen explains these traditions to her Jewish-born friends, most notably Brenda Schaeffer, the “daughter of the biggest pretzel maker in Wynnfield,” and Arlene Melnick who, “like an ignorant shiska,” knows next to nothing about her cultural heritage.49 For example, Helen must explain “the tradition of the shabbes candles” after Brenda describes “a Friday-night dinner [at] the home of a business acquaintance of her father.”50 After Brenda demonstrates how “at this house, a little old lady with burning eyes of a fanatic was lighting candles,” she wonders aloud “what was all that fuss about,”51 believing it is “some weird European way of warming your hands”;52 consequently, “[i]t is left for Helen the shvartze to explain to these apikorsim the tradition of the shabbes candles.”53 Because Helen, African American by descent, understands and appreciates the importance and gravity of the Sabbath dinner, she appears, in a cultural sense, more Jewish than do her ignorant classmates, who are Jewish by descent.

III. Peking Duck in Pepsi: Cultural Hybridity in Mona in the Promised Land Like Oreo and her family members, Mona Chang consents to a multicultural identity that manifests itself in her appetite for a variety of foods from many ethnic and national cuisines. On a regular basis, Mona eats ice-cream sundaes from her father’s pancake house, bagels from one of her neighborhood’s many Jewish delis, and a variety of dishes from her mother’s kitchen, which contains a “veritable jumble” of foods: “[T]here too are the Mediterranean-looking cabinets crammed full of cans and bottles, rolls of things, years of stuff, . . . jam-packed with glass and clay and plastic containers full of shrivelly, pickley, primordial foods, all of them pungent, and unlabeled, and probably unlabelable.”54 Helen’s kitchen, with its assortment of mystery ingredients, is indicative of her and her family’s racial and cultural identities, which, like the foods that abound the kitchen’s shelves, resist restrictive labels and rigid categorizations. Significantly, Mona, who openly embraces her hybrid status, hopes one day to have a kitchen like this, a place “where you might start out making one thing, only to end up, miraculously, with a most delicious dish du jour.”55 Despite her culinary creations, such as turkey stuffed with stir-fried rice and Peking duck marinated in Pepsi-Cola—“Westchester style,”56 Helen Chang, unlike the “mush-mouthed” Louise, verbally advocates a

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rigid separation of racial and ethnic cultures. For example, as Helen prepares one of her hybrid meals, she forbids Mona to have “a mixed baby” because if she does, Helen will “throw it in the garbage.”57 Later that night, after falling asleep, Mona dreams that both she and Helen have given birth to half Jewish and half Chinese babies, whom Helen initially demands get discarded in the trash. However, after Helen realizes that she has given birth to a son, she orders Mona to throw “herself in the garbage instead”58 because, although the baby is “mixed,” he is a male and, according to Chinese culture, has some redeeming value. In Mona’s dream, Helen’s reaction to the garbage, specifically the eggplant on which Mona lands, suggests Helen’s belief in culinary authenticity and, by implication, cultural authenticity. Initially, Mona thinks that the discarded eggplant is a remnant of an Italian meal, but “Helen insists it’s Chinese” because it lacks mozzarella cheese,59 a food that, according to Helen, signifies an Italian entrée. Helen fails to realize, however, that in the contemporary United States, the many racial and ethnic cultures have rubbed off on each other and that, because of this, her belief in racial and ethnic authenticity is wishful thinking. Jen further demonstrates the flaws in this theory of cultural authenticity when Mona questions her mother’s “authentic Chinese homecooking,” specifically her stir-fried beef and tomatoes.60 In response, Helen states, “I’m telling you, tomatoes invented in China . . . . In China, . . . we eat tomatoes like fruit. Just like we eat apples here.”61 Helen not only discounts other cultures that include tomatoes in their cuisines, but also ignores China’s long history of international trade, including the importation of non-indigenous foods. In another conversation with Mona, Helen concedes that she ate bagels “every morning in Shanghai”62 and thus inadvertently traces the origins of her multicultural identity to her birth nation. By demonstrating the hybridity of Chinese cuisine, Jen suggests that there is no pure or authentic culture, not even in the Old Country. Nevertheless, Helen fervently argues that tomatoes are an authentic Chinese food and that, by implication, there is an authentic Chinese culture of which she is a member. However, Helen is as much American as she is Chinese; that she eats apples in the United States “just like” she ate tomatoes in China suggests that by consuming the indigenous American fruit, she, in fact, has consented to an American identity, which, of course, is composed of many ethnic identities. Furthermore, despite her “culinary intentions” to prepare authentic Chinese dishes, Helen cooks Americanized versions of Chinese food, such as her stir-fried hot dogs and rice.

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305

Ibid., 148. Ibid., 15. 31 Ibid., 43. 32 Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise. New York: Harpercollins. 161. 33 Ibid., 163. 34 Ibid., 166. 35 Ibid., 167. 36 Benjamin, Jessica. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother: A Psychoanalytic Study of Fantasy and Reality. Representations of Motherhood. Ed Dona Bassin et al. CT: Yale UP. 129-146: 130. 37 Thurer. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood. xvii. 38 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 29. 39 Ibid., 30. 40 Benjamin. 1994. The Omnipotent Mother. 141. 41 Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender With a New Preface. Reprint 1999. Los Angeles: U California P. 215. 42 Roback. All-Time Bestselling Children’s Books. 43 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 55. 44 Ibid., 242-43. 45 Thurer. 1994. The Myths of Motherhood. 23. 46 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 326. 47 Strandburg, Walter L. and Norma J. Livo. 1986. The Giving Tree or There Is a Sucker Born Every Minute. Children’s Literature in Education 17(1): 17-24: 21. 48 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 123. 49 Chodorow, Nancy J. 1978. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender With a New Preface. Reprint 1999. Los Angeles: U California P. 212. 50 Ibid., 209. 51 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 245. 52 Daly, Mary. 1987. Gyn/ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon P. 90. 53 Neumann. 1955. The Great Mother. 79. 54 Ibid., 331. 55 Ibid., 49. 56 Ibid., 331. 57 Ibid., 98. 58 Ibid., 332. 59 Ibid., 57. 60 Ibid., xlii. 61 Natov, Roni. 2002. The Poetics of Childhood. NY: Routledge. 64. 62 DeVault, Marjorie L. 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. IL: U Chicago P. 18. 30

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done. For example, Mona invites Sherman to her home where she “introduces him to turkey pot pies. . . . They bake them, eat them, agreeing that turkey is just like chicken, only spelt different.”68 That Mona and Sherman compare turkey, an “American” food, to chicken, a familiar food prepared by their Asian mothers, suggests the difficulty and futility of attempting to discard or at least to ignore the culture of one’s descent. Furthermore, as Mona and Sherman gorge themselves on turkey pot pies, Jen suggests the importance of context in the process of culinary signification. Eating the pot pies does not signify Sherman and Mona’s entry into the dominant American culture but, instead, emphasizes their Other status in that culture. Most children would have the standard cookies and milk for a quick after-school snack; they would not take the time to defrost, bake, and consume these frozen entrées, which, instead, would be eaten at a family dinner. Importantly, Mona discusses her thoughts on identity formation with some of her classmates, who question whether an individual may freely assume any identity that he or she chooses. On one occasion, Mona and her friends learn that their classmate Eloise has decided to “switch” identities twice: After Eloise, who was raised as a “Wasp” (i.e. a member of the dominant American culture) by her father and stepmother, learns that her biological mother was Jewish, she chooses to “switch” to an exclusively Jewish identity. However, “after a few weeks,” Eloise is sick of being Jewish, so she decides “to go back to being Wasp”69 and “switch” once more. Some of Eloise’s classmates believe that one’s descent or “blood” determines one’s cultural identity and that any choice Eloise makes is irrelevant because she “is actually still a Jew.”70 However, others believe that Eloise cannot switch identities, not because of her blood, but because of her “diet,” a product of her cultural environment and “how she was brought up”: “‘Think about what she grew up eating,’ they say. ‘That’s who she is, you can’t deny it.’ ‘Like an Eskimo who prefers hamburgers to walrus meat is American,’ says somebody.”71 Although these individuals believe that one’s culture, especially its food, determines one’s identity, they, like those who favor descent, suggest that an individual, such as Eloise, cannot “switch,” no matter how she tries. Still others, such as Mona, believe that “Eloise can be what she wants,” that she can switch back and forth between identities or that she can “be both” at the same time: “Who are they to say what she is actually, because of her blood or her diet, either?”72 With this statement, Mona not only suggests the transience and fluidity of one’s cultural identity, but also asserts that one may consent to any identity, regardless of one’s descent or cultural environment.

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Jen, however, clearly suggests the naïveté and idealism of those who ignore the importance of descent and the limitations of consent. For example, Naomi, the African American roommate of Mona’s older sister Callie, “thinks it’s great for Callie to be in touch with her ancestry”73 by majoring in Chinese at Harvard. Because Naomi believes that Ralph and Helen, Chinese Americans, cannot help Callie assume an “authentic” Chinese identity, she states, “Forget your parents.”74 When Callie responds to this advice by rhetorically asking if her parents are her “ancestors,” Naomi answers, “Only if you so choose”75 and thus advocates an identity based exclusively on consent. However, throughout the novel, Jen suggests the inaccuracy of such a simplistic view because Ralph and Helen are Callie’s ancestors and, as such, directly and indirectly have imparted Chinese values and customs to their daughter. Although Ralph and Helen’s values may be tempered with an American sensibility, they are no less important in shaping Callie than are her Chinese classes at Harvard or her African American roommate. Naomi, on the other hand, believes that an “authentic” Chinese cultural identity, free of Western influences, is the only one of value and thus imagines a China that even the immigrant Helen, who ate tomatoes and bagels throughout her childhood, never inhabited. Significantly, when Jen contrasts Naomi’s “authentic” Chinese cooking to the hybrid dishes prepared by Helen, she further demonstrates the sometimes tenuous relationship between descent and consent in the process of identity formation. At breakfast, Callie and Naomi eat “sheevah, with assorted pickled and deep-fried condiments, something like what [her] parents used to eat in China,” while “Helen and Ralph now prefer raisin bran—less work, they say, and good for your [digestive] performance.”76 Furthermore, unlike Helen, who prepares her “Peking duck” by soaking it in Pepsi-Cola, Naomi makes “an authentic tea-smoked duck that involves burning tea leaves in a wok and smoking the duck in it for sixteen hours”—a dish “so genuine” that it becomes “an encounter.”77 After eating Naomi’s food, Callie claims that “she didn’t understand what it meant to be Chinese until she met Naomi”78 because she believes that Naomi’s dishes, prepared from cookbook recipes, offer her a stronger connection to her Chinese heritage than do her immigrant mother’s hybrid culinary creations. Of course, Jen suggests the absurdity of Callie’s claim, which ignores the importance of descent, because Ralph and Helen— Chinese by descent—were born and raised in China and thus have a visceral and emotional connection to Chinese culture, which Naomi, despite all of her studying and cooking, can never have. Furthermore, unlike Ralph and Helen who, in society’s eyes, are Chinese Americans,

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Naomi, no matter how fervently she consents to a Chinese identity, will be identified, first and foremost, as an African American because of her descent. Jen continues to explore the role that society plays in the process of identity formation when she depicts Mona’s conversion to Judaism, explaining that after her conversion, “there are people who do not accept her”79 as an “authentic” Jew. The parents of Mona’s friends, for example, continue to treat Mona “like [a] permanent exchange student”80 and thus distinguish themselves, Jewish by descent, from Mona, a converted Jew of Asian descent. Likewise, Mona’s conversion is questioned by non-Jews, such as Alfred, an African American cook in the restaurant owned by Mona’s father. When Alfred learns of Mona’s conversion, he states, “You expect me to believe that? Uh uh. Not until you grow your nose, baby.”81 Because Alfred believes that one’s racial and ethnic identities must determine one’s cultural identity, he concludes that Mona’s Asian descent, evidenced by a nose so “flat” that “she can hang a spoon on the end of [it,]”82 precludes her from being Jewish. As Ericka T. Lin writes, “It is not possible, [Jen] suggests, to think of bodies that do not have cultural meanings attached to them, and these culturally-infected bodies are materialized only in and through practice” (51).83

V. Culinary Passing Ross and Jen complicate the issue of identity formation further by distinguishing the more permanent change of assimilation from the temporary switch of passing or, what Laura Browder calls, “ethnic impersonation.”84 More specifically, Ross and Jen include acts of “culinary passing,” according to Camille Cauti, trying “to gain acceptance among an ethnic group to which one does not belong via the preparation and eating of certain foods.”85 Unlike assimilation (or in Mona’s case, conversion), passing, culinary or otherwise, does not require consent but, like assimilation, does require the individual to perform behaviors, such as cooking and eating, that allow him or her to be identified as a member of the group into which he or she hopes to pass. Often as the individual passes, he or she, intentionally or unintentionally, works to uphold “essentialist racial and ethnic categories”86 by performing culturallyencoded behaviors that, often inaccurate, uphold racist and ethnic stereotypes. If the individual performs before an ignorant and/or racist audience, then he or she may have to perform stereotypical behaviors in order to pass.

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Perceptive Appetites: Food Issues in Mother Goose and Nursery Literature

An example of an attempt at behavior modification is evident in the first stanza of “Three Little Kittens” which indicates the withdrawal of dessert as punishment inflicted on kittens who lost their mittens: Three little kittens they lost their mittens, And they began to cry, Oh! Mother dear, We very much fear, That we have lost our mittens. What! Lost your mittens, you naughty kittens, Then you shall have no pie. Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow. Yes, you shall have no pie. Mee-ow, mee-ow, mee-ow.4

Even though the protagonists are kittens, children will easily relate to animals, and yet these animal characters provide some distance between the child and the characters. “It’s easier to deal with the difficult issue of being selfish or dishonest or afraid when the character is an animal.”5 In the Mother Goose rhyme, the three little kittens exhibit irresponsibility by losing mittens given to them as protection by their mother. The attempt at trying to appeal to “mother dear” falls on unsympathetic ears and the kittens are initially punished for their lack of understanding regarding the magnitude of their “naughty” behavior. Once the mittens are found, the initial punishment is repealed and the mother exclaims: What! Found your mittens, you little kittens, Then you shall have some pie. Purr, purr, purr. Yes, you shall have some pie. Purr, purr, purr.6

The nursery song continues when once again their behavior does not meet with the approval of their “mother dear” and instead of “crying” as in the first stanza, they “sigh” in the third stanza when they soil their mittens after wearing them while they ate up their pie. Once again they are labeled “naughty kittens!” They make an effort to once again to right their wrong by washing their mittens and hanging them “out to dry,” in order to gain their mother’s praise, and they are soon to be ultimately rewarded with a substantial food source to which the mother alerts them in the nursery song:

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their racist, exclusionary, and thus descent-based definition of a true American. In addition to depicting Mona’s successful and failed attempts at passing, Jen depicts similar acts performed by Seth, Mona’s second boyfriend and eventual husband. When Seth calls the Jewish youth hotline, Mona’s place of employment, he passes as her former boyfriend Sherman. As Seth speaks to Mona over the phone, however, he does not pass as the actual Sherman who, unbeknown to Mona, has returned to Japan, but as a fictional Sherman who, according to Seth/Sherman, has moved to Hawaii and has assimilated into mainstream American culture. Significantly, Seth passes as an assimilated Sherman not only by speaking without a Japanese accent94—something that the real Sherman could not lose—but also by claiming to enjoy American foods and beverages, especially beer,”95 a drink that typically signifies American masculinity. While passing as Sherman, Seth also hopes to embody, what he perceives to be, an Asian sensibility of moderation and respect for all life. Thus, when Mona explains that she “knows someone who once caught a lobster so big it had to be cooked in a garbage can, Sherman [i.e. Seth] thinks it’s a shame to eat lobsters that old; it’s not very respectful.”96 Seth/Sherman’s reaction to Mona’s story, however, may suggest less about Sherman and more about Seth, a child of the 1960s who claims to detest the decadence and wastefulness of the dominant American culture. Because Seth believes that only a member of the dominant culture—not a person of Asian descent—would partake in this “shameful” act of killing and eating an old lobster, he condemns this act of consumption as he passes as his version of Sherman, an immigrant-turned-American. Of course, for all Seth knows, the real Sherman, who, as a thirteen-year-old, was a voracious eater, may have delighted in the lobster’s untimely demise. Like Jen, Ross depicts incidents of ethnic impersonation and, more specifically, culinary passing, distinguishing these temporary acts from the more permanent process of assimilation. While passing through Happiness, Montana, for example, Oreo’s mother Helen Clark uses her knowledge of Jewish culinary practices to pass as Mel Blankenstein, “the only one of Jewish persuasion in the town.”97 After reading the local “twopage phone book,” however, Helen believes that she has discovered another Jewish resident, “a crypto-Jew” whom Helen believes is passing as a WASP: “Leonard Birdsong III. Leonard (surely Lenny) Birdsong (Feigelzinger, perhaps, or is the last name simply a flight of Wasp-inspired fantasy?). And III, of course means third generation on Rivington Street. . . . My God, he’s passing—the geshmat [convert].”98 Of course, because in

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reality Leonard Birdsong III may be a Native American or a WASP, Helen may only guess Lenny’s true identity, which she assumes is Jewish. To help Lenny reconnect to (what she believes is) his Jewish heritage, Helen, posing as Mel, the town’s confirmed Jewish resident, sends Lenny a written dinner invitation: Dear Lenny: Can you come over Friday night? My wife will fix you a meal like in the olden days. A little gefilte fish, a little chrain, some nice hot soup, a nice chicken. Who knows? Maybe a kugel even. . . . It would be an averah if we Jews didn’t stick together, especially way out here. I am so sick and tired of looking at goyim I could plotz! We’ll expect you early. Best, Mel. P.S.: If you like pepper, please bring your own. We don’t keep it in the house. It’s such a goyische thing, pepper, but to each his own. M.B.99

By writing this letter, Helen believes that she has “performed a real mitzvah” or blessing for Lenny, “the meshumad,”100 a defector from Judaism, whom she believes will befriend Mel, reconnect to his Jewish heritage, and thus find true happiness in Happiness, Montana. Significantly, in this letter, Helen/Mel speaks to Lenny in their shared hybrid language as she/he reminds him of the food that he ate during the “olden days” when he did not try to conceal his ethnic identity. Thus, to perform her act of ethnic impersonation, Helen uses her knowledge and familiarity with language and food, two central components of any cultural identity. Like her mother, Oreo masters the art of ethnic impersonation partly because she recognizes the importance of food and language in the process of identity formation. For example, when she visits the recording studio where her father works, Oreo, at the request of the sound engineer Slim Jackson, records a radio commercial for “Tante Ruchel’s Frozen Passover TV Seder.”101 Posing as Tante Ruchel’s niece, Oreo describes a TV dinner with eight sections, each of which contains a “gem of a dish”:102 Matzoball soup, chopped chicken liver, gefilte fish, chrain, a hard-boiled egg, a baby lamb shank, charoseth (a sweet blend of apples, nuts, and cinnamon), and “[w]here state laws permit, . . . a two-ounce container of holiday wine in the eighth and final tray section.”103 As further testimony to each dinner’s “authenticity,” Oreo/the niece explains that “each and every lamb is led to the slaughter by [the company’s] own shoctet [butcher], who, if he didn’t work for [them,] would be a world-famous surgeon.”104 Ironically, these so-called authentic frozen dinners are not prepared in small Kosher kitchens as Oreo/the niece claims, but are massproduced in large factories, thereby demonstrating, what Mullen calls, “the commodification of ethnicity.”105

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As Oreo passes as Tante Ruchel’s niece, speaking in a “slight Jewish accent”106 and reading copy that includes Yiddish words and phrases,107 she “trie[s] to think of how her mother would do this.”108 That Oreo remembers her African American mother, not her Jewish father, to speak with a Jewish accent suggests that one’s environment (more specifically, one’s ability to consent in that environment) takes precedence over one’s descent in the process of identity formation. Importantly, though, during this same scene, Ross suggests the importance of one’s descent in determining our identities because, although Oreo gets her accent and ability to pronounce Jewish and Yiddish words from her African American mother, she inherits the tonal quality of her voice from her Jewish father. Slim, who is unaware of who Oreo’s parents are, praises Oreo’s performance, telling her that her voice reminds him of the voiceover artist Sam Schwartz, Oreo’s father.109

VI. Eating Away at Traditional Femininity In each novel, the author suggests how an individual may construct a gender identity that, like her cultural identity, functions as an “open coalition,” in Judith Butler’s terms, “an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure.”110 In Oreo, Ross depicts characters who build these coalitions or assemblages within themselves by acting as food consumers and food preparers. Throughout the novel, Ross shows that depending on its context, an act of food preparation may signify subordination, self-sacrifice, and submissiveness (traditionally feminine qualities) or creativity, autonomy, and resistance to oppression, qualities that the patriarchy does not define as feminine. For example, as Ross depicts Oreo’s radio commercial, she suggests the burden that food preparation places on a traditional Jewish woman, who is expected to spend her days making time-consuming and complicated meals. With Tante Ruchel’s Seder, however, a Jewish wife and mother will “be able to sit back, calm and cool” because nobody “will be able to point the accusing finger at [her] and say, ‘See she forgot the parsley.’”111 Thus, with the commercial, Ross, in Mullen’s words, “offers an oblique comment on the reality that in traditionally ethnic families the burden of keeping a Kosher household falls mainly on the women.”112 Certainly, Helen Clark recognizes this culinary burden when she mocks a male rabbi, ironically, during the nine-course homecoming dinner prepared by her mother Louise: Addressing “dirty [Jewish] women,” Helen/the rabbi states, “Don’t defile our scholars with your monthlies and

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spin seems relatively simplistic, it is no less plausible than some of the contrived references Katherine Elwes Thomas included in her book, The Real Personages of Mother Goose14 Thomas discusses the assertion that Humpty Dumpty was identified as the tragic figure from the year 1483, Richard III, who was slain on Bosworth Field; however, the actual nursery song may have been part of an oral tradition prior to this. A preface to a nursery chap-book of the Douce Additions in the Bodleian, written “By a very Great Writer of very Little Books,” there is a reference to Humpty Dumpty: This kind of composition has been employed in a satirical manner of which we have a remarkable instance so far back as the reign of Henry the fifth…well knowing that music had often the power of inspiring courage, especially in the minds of good men.15

It is not difficult to see why more in-depth analysis might be suggested for Mother Goose rhymes that reference Kings and Queens; however, just as the nursery rhymes could refer to politically focused issues, so too could the rhymes serve as instructive devices to curb inappropriate behavior. One example of a nursery rhyme with monarchical subject matter is “The Queen of Hearts”: The Queen of Hearts She made some tarts, All on a summer’s day; The Knave of Hearts He stole those tarts, And took them clean away. The King of Hearts Called for the tarts, And beat the knave full sore; The Knave of Hearts Brought back the tarts, And vowed he’d steal no more.16

Here a Knave stole tarts which had been made by the Queen for the King. Again the nursery rhyme takes the monarch off her throne and places her in her kitchen. Once the errant behavior of the perpetrator was discovered, the King meted out his punishment by “beating the knave full sore” which resulted in the Knave returning the tarts after which the Knave “vowed he’d steal no more.” It should be noted that the king too was taken off his throne to become the enforcer of his own decree.

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suggests that to lead a fulfilling life, her daughter should act as a selfindulgent food consumer, not a submissive food preparer. For example, in one letter, Helen explains how as a child, she would visit the local movie house and eat “until [she] thought [she] would plotz.”118 Likewise, in another letter, Helen, while on one of her concert tours, explains how she misses the foods of her home town of Philadelphia, especially the “Hoagies (more than four times better than heroes)” and the “[s]teak sandwiches (they don’t make them here the way they do at home; layers of paper-thin beef smothered in grilled onions; melted cheese, optional; catsup, yet another option!)”119 Apparently, Helen has inherited her mother’s hearty and eclectic appetite, an indication of her autonomy and self-indulgence, traditionally masculine qualities that she hopes to pass on to Oreo, also a big eater. In a more telling letter, Helen recounts her break-up with her firstgrade boyfriend Roger, whose eating habits disgust the six-year-old girl. To steal Roger from his former girlfriend Malvina, “the most beautiful first-grader in America,”120 Helen invites him to lunch: “Louise made coq au vin that day,” but “Roger asked for a peanut butter sandwich which he dipped in that divine sauce.”121 When Helen sees this, she thinks, “A chaloshes,” so she “drop[s] him at recess the next day and [gives] him back to Malvina.”122 Rather than sacrifice her own tastes for those of a boy, six-year-old Helen breaks up with Roger, who does not share her sophisticated palate. Thus, this letter serves as a warning against traditional heterosexual relationships which, Helen believes, are inherently unequal and thus detrimental to a girl or woman’s physical and emotional well-being. Of course, Helen, who was abandoned by her husband while she was pregnant with Oreo’s younger brother,123 has good reason to be wary of heterosexual relationships. In a more pointed letter, Helen describes “the oppression of women . . . from prehistoric times to the present” and concludes, with the “inescapable formulation,” that women succumb to male dominance because “men can knock the shit out of women.”124 Because Oreo hopes to follow in her mother’s footsteps and avoid getting the “shit” beat out of her, she does “two things: adopt a motto and develop a system of self defense. The motto [is] Memo me impune lacessit—‘No one attacks me with impunity’”125—and the self-defense is called “the Way of Interstitial Thrust, or WIT.”126 In her “system,” Oreo combines methods of physical defense, such as karate, kung-fu, and judo, with, as the acronym suggests, mental agility; she first outwits potential male attackers and then, if necessary, beats them physically.

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Oreo’s determination not to become consumed physically, sexually, and/or emotionally is reinforced by her “subway reverie.”127 While going to Harlem to meet her father, Oreo envisions a female football fan becoming an actual meal for the male players. After running onto the field, the woman, “who loves football with a doomed and touching passion,” steals the ball and “starts to run a down-and-out pattern. What happens next? This is the Super Bowl, folks. Bon appétit! They Eat Her. Yes, fans, one crackback block and opposing players join in the gorge. They tear that cheeky female apart, devour her, uniform and all.”128 The men eat the woman alive because she dares to walk (or run) onto their turf, in this case Astroturf, takes away their ball, a symbol of their manhood, and beats them at their own game. To conceal this symbolic castration from the general public, “the newspapers insist that a high school student (male) ran onto the field and was escorted off. Everyone, especially the players (who all have a touch of salmonella), agrees that that is what happened.”129 Accordingly, the President, who is “ecstatic” after witnessing this carnage, “has proclaimed football henceforth and forevermore the national sport (and) diet.”130 In this and subsequent scenes, Ross suggests that women who fulfill their own passions are doomed to suffer harsh consequences in a patriarchal society, whose institutions, such as the media, sports teams, and government, force “proper” women to forsake their own desires for those of men. Furthermore, Ross suggests that these male-dominated institutions often work to objectify women, treating them as nothing more than pieces of meat for sexual consumption and enjoyment. Unlike the female football fan, Oreo will not become an object of any type of masculine consumption, physical, sexual or emotional. In fact, at times, Oreo appears more like the male football players and, more generally, those boys and men who objectify members of the opposite sex, in part, by viewing them in edible terms.131 For example, Oreo thinks of testicles as “oysters, gizzards, and turkey wattles at best, a bunch of seedless grapes at worst.”132 More specifically, Oreo objectifies male athletes who, in contemporary America, embody quintessential masculinity: “An inveterate crotch-watcher, she had once made a list of sports figures whom she classified under the headings, ‘Capons’ and ‘Cockerels,’”133 two edible birds. Of course, while the patriarchy allows and even encourages males to act as consumers of sex (as well as food), it requires “proper” girls and women to ignore or at least suppress their appetites, sexual or otherwise, and willingly offer themselves as objects of masculine consumption.

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While camping in Central Park, Oreo’s eat-or-get-eaten theory is substantiated when she witnesses a gang of female rapists who take “yet another victim into some nearby bushes (‘If you can’t get it up, we take it off’). Before the ravishingly ravishing ravished him, the man offered several limp excuses,” pleading “to substitute sucking for fucking.”134 The women, however, want nothing to do with the man’s mouth because, unlike the female football fan, they will not allow themselves to “get eaten” in any way. Instead of trying to rescue the male rape victim, Oreo stops herself “from cracking up over his piteous protests that he was too afraid that he would not be able to get a hard-on,” as she “turn[s] over and [goes] back to sleep.”135 Like the female rapists, Oreo will teach men “a lesson”;136 however, unlike the rapists who arbitrarily attack innocent men, Oreo, through her system of WIT, targets men who prey on unsuspecting girls and women. Fourteen-year-old Oreo first implements her system when, posing as a “college graduate with a degree in Chinese history looking for a job,” she “put[s] an ad in the paper,”137 and subsequently meets Dr. Jafferts, a potential employer who answers her ad. In the initial phone interview, Jafferts, who is not a medical doctor, tells Oreo that he must visit her and give her “a complete [physical] examination,”138 a prerequisite for employment. With Jafferts on the way, Oreo visits Betty Williams, “the neighborhood nymphomaniac,”139 who agrees to impersonate the college graduate, the role that Oreo played on the phone. After Jafferts arrives, Betty/the college graduate, with “a rhythmic opening and closing of her legs,” sexually excites Jafferts, who becomes so sweaty that “he seem[s] in danger of drowning in his own juice.”140 Like a moist piece of cooked meat, the sexually-aroused Jafferts is ready to be “eaten”; however, as Jafferts willingly offers himself to Betty/the college graduate for sexual consumption, Oreo comes “out of hiding,”141 throws Jafferts off of the porch, and makes him promise that he will “never again annoy innocent young women by phone or in person with his snortings and slaverings.”142 Significantly, in this incident and others that follow, as Oreo outwits and overpowers men, she relies on her intellect and physical strength, characteristics that the patriarchy defines as masculine, not her emotional reactions and sexuality, qualities that it defines as feminine.143 Perhaps the most memorable example of Oreo’s implementation of WIT occurs after she is abducted by the pimp Parnell and is taken to his whorehouse, which, coincidentally, is the same establishment that her father frequents. Parnell abducts Oreo because earlier in the day she humiliated him, giving “him a grand-slam clout across the ass” after she observed him kicking and humiliating his female prostitutes.144 At the

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omnipotence: “One Kid” speaks of “a cat” that “came and devoured the kid.”31 The opening act of consumption in “One Kid” is followed by a series of increasingly larger aggressors: one kid that father bought a cat then came and devoured the kid a dog then came and bit the cat , a stick then came and beat the dog, a fire then came and burnt the stick, water then came and quenched the fire, an ox then came and drank the water, a butcher then came and slaughtered the ox, the Angel of Death then came and killed the butcher, the Holy One, blessed is He, then came and slew the angel of death.32

In the final line of the song, the Holy One [God] avenges the original violence against the kid perpetrated by the cat and reduces all subsequent violent acts to one final act which supersedes all others. The kid was originally purchased by the father to feed the family; however, outside forces prevented the family from partaking of the kid as a food source. Because the cat deprived the father and his family of the kid for sustenance, revenge was meted out through a series of increasingly aggressive forces until finally the ultimate outside force, God, punished the Angel of Death. This model of building details upon a single act of consumption is reflected in the “Jack” focused Mother Goose nursery rhymes, “The House that Jack Built”.33 This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt that lay in the house… This is the rat that ate the malt…, This is the cat, This is the dog, This is the cow with the crumpled horn, This is the maiden all forlorn This is the man all tattered and torn, This is the priest all shaven and shorn, This is the cock that crowed in the in the morn, This is the farmer sowing his corn34

This poem, translated as an English nursery rhyme, has probably been carried into every country in the world.35 As an act of accumulating behaviors, the final stanza, as in “One Kid” summarized all the behavior which include eating and consumption as instigating activities that initialized the ripple effect witnessed in this Mother Goose Song:

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example, before Sherman returns to Japan, he asks Mona to “be Japanese”156 and assume the role of a traditional Japanese woman, who wears “her hair up into that big breakfast-bun style you see the geishas wear”157 and, as the hairstyle suggests, willingly offers herself for masculine consumption.158 Mona’s perceptions of a submissive Japanese woman are confirmed when Mrs. Matsumoto visits the Chang household to pick up her son, and Helen invites her “in for a cup of tea” and “a small snack.”159 Sherman’s mother, however, “will not eat unless she can call Mr. Matsumoto” for permission and allow him to bring “a reparation of some sort” to Ralph and Helen.160 By controlling what his wife eats, Mr. Matsumoto maintains his position of authority within his marriage and, more generally, his patriarchal culture. Significantly, when Mr. Matsumoto visits, Mona observes a “strong-jawed businessman, friendly but brisk, he is not at all the type you can imagine bowing to a lady.”161 Like his “strong-jawed” father, Sherman works to maintain a similar position of masculine authority. When he and Mona “sneak back outside for another final good-bye,” Sherman “clenches his jaw; and when he opens his eyes, they’re fixed on that button” of Mona’s blouse that he attempts to open.162 After Sherman kisses Mona “on the cheek, again and again and again,”163 he moves to her neck and begins “licking her,”164 as if he is devouring a delicious piece of food. As Sherman consumes a submissive Mona, he “mutters in Japanese”165 and further suggests the similarities between him and his father, two Japanese immigrants. Significantly, though, as Sherman gets past “first base”166 on Mona’s body, he also behaves as a typical American adolescent boy, who, from a young age, is taught to be the aggressor and initiator in his relationships with girls and women. Thus, throughout this scene, Jen demonstrates the complexities of Sherman’s cultural identity; although his ultimatum that Mona turn Japanese demonstrates that he has not assimilated into American culture, it does show that he, like the American-born Mona, mistakenly believes that individuals can easily switch identities and thus abandon their pasts. When Mona refuses to make the “switch” because, according to her, Japanese culture is too “weird,”167 Sherman “turn[s] pink,”168 a traditionally feminine color, as his masculine authority is challenged. Consequently, he verbally and physically reprimands Mona, attempting to reclaim his dominant position in their relationship. Sherman states, “You just want to tell everything to your friends. You just want to have a boyfriend to become popular”;169 Sherman believes that Mona complies with his sexual advances for the bragging rights, traditionally reserved for

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adolescent males, not “proper” females who should not acknowledge, let alone enjoy, any activity remotely sexual. After Mona refutes this accusation, Sherman retaliates physically: “Then he flipped her. Two swift moves and she went sprawling through the late afternoon.”170 That Sherman flips Mona as if she is a pancake from her father’s restaurant not only suggests how he views her as an object of sexual consumption, but also demonstrates how, in their unequal relationship, he tries to displace her father’s patriarchal power by treating her like a child. Unlike Oreo, who in a similar situation would use her system of WIT to fend off an attacker, Mona acts like a willing victim, even pleading with her assailant to continue their relationship. In fact, after Sherman returns to Japan, Mona sends him a letter, explaining that “Jackie Kennedy married a Greek, but neither one of them switched.”171 Mona hopes that Sherman, like Aristotle Onasis, will compromise and allow his love to maintain her American identity—as if Onasis or Sherman had a choice in the matter. In his reply, Sherman writes, “You will never be Japanese,”172 grudgingly realizing that Mona, who has been influenced by her family,173 friends, and American culture, cannot swap one identity for another. In her relationship with Seth, however, Mona is free to construct a coalitional gender identity that mirrors her hybrid cultural identity. Unlike Sherman, Seth encourages Mona to act as a sexual consumer, a role traditionally reserved for males, just as he encourages her to expand, not switch, her cultural identity. In one discussion before the couple consummates their relationship, Mona coyly rejects Seth’s sexual advances, jokingly comparing him to treif, a non-Kosher food that she, “a nice Jewish girl” who “knows kosher from kosher,” will not consume. To this, Seth puns, “Such a nice Jewish girl, but already you are talking about eating me.”174 In this humorous exchange of double entendres, Seth works to validate Mona’s Kosher (i.e. Jewish) identity and thus her ability to consent, as well as her coalitional gender identity, evidenced by her sexual appetite, which according to the patriarchy, “nice girls” should work to suppress. Significantly, during and after each “[u]tterly nonviolent” sexual act, Mona “feel[s] so full” as she and Seth “laugh, link legs, rock,” and “sink back into themselves pulsing.”175 Unlike Oreo who objectifies and attacks men, Mona engages in a rewarding and satisfying heterosexual relationship. In fact, while Oreo must save herself from being raped, the “avenging angel” Seth prevents Mona from becoming a rapist’s victim.176 Thus, unlike Ross, who wrote during a time of widespread and socially-

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acceptable sexism, Jen, who wrote some twenty years later, includes an enjoyable and healthy heterosexual relationship in her novel.

VII. One Table/One America? The Im/Possibility of Racial and Ethnic Unity Although each author paints a different picture of gender relationships in contemporary America, both depict the tenuous and sometimes strained relationships among members of America’s racial and ethnic groups, who sometimes use descent-based differences to separate and isolate themselves from each other. For example, Jen implicitly criticizes Seth’s utopian vision of a multicultural America, which Seth compares to “a house with no walls between the rooms.”177 Seth dreams of a “wall-less” United States when he moves into a one-room teepee and not only replaces “the smoky-smelling sheepskins” on the teepee’s floor “with tatami mats,” but also begins “using chopsticks” to eat: “Of course, he had been sitting on the floor to eat already. . . . However, through all of this, he’s begun to feel, actually, sort of Japanese. Or at least that the Japanese manner corresponds to something in him.”178 As Seth appropriates and merges the customs of these two cultural groups, he appears to understand their similar histories of cultural marginalization and institutionalized discrimination that forced Native Americans onto reservations and Japanese Americans into internment camps. Jen suggests the real limitations of Seth’s dream, however, when she depicts individuals who often use descent qualities to build “walls” around themselves and each other. For example, Ralph’s African American cook Alfred attributes his indigestion to “all of that deli Jew-food” that he eats but “ain’t used to,”179 and thus suggests that there are biological and descent-based differences among America’s racial and ethnic groups, which cannot be resolved through consent. Similarly, when Alfred mocks Ralph by calling him “the Rice Man,”180 he uses this item of food, which he stereotypically believes is consumed by all people of Asian descent, to signify ethnic difference. In addition, Alfred jokes that when he dies, he will leave Mona’s Jewish friend Barbara his toaster “to burn up her bagels in before she lays on that cream cheese and five-dollar-a-pound lox.”181 In culinary terms, Alfred suggests the ethnic and class differences between him and Barbara, which he believes will prevent them from establishing a meaningful friendship. Like Oreo’s grandfather James, Alfred fails to understand the similarities between Jewish Americans and African Americans, two groups that historically have been discriminated against by the dominant American culture. Consequently, instead of uniting with

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Come, says Jack, let’s knock him on the head. No, says Gye, let’s buy him some bread; You buy one loaf and I’ll buy two, And we’ll bring him up as other folk do.40

There is a question as to how one should behave toward someone already appearing to be beaten or abused “little boy with one black eye” and Jack’s response is to “knock him on the head.” Rather than perpetuate the bodily beating, Gye offers the suggestion to feed the little boy some bread. In fact, Gye generously offers to buy the child two loaves of bread and volunteers Jack to purchase one. If Jack and Gye are two men, there might be a question as to the sexual orientation of the two men since they plan to “bring [the little boy} up as other folk do.” Bringing up children was traditionally posited on woman, but again, the nature of the rhyme lends itself well to the phrase “we’ll bring him up” without concern as to the detail that Jack and Gye are males. Another “Jack” Mother Goose song which may have originated as “Jack and Bill” in a Nortic version but was changed to include a female in the story is “Jack and Jill.” “Jack and Jill” has been translated frequently into many languages, but according to an origin theory presented by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould in Curious Myths of the Middle Ages (1866), “Jack and Jill” referes to the Nortic rhyme related to Eddaic Hjuki and Bil. For the sake of euphony, Bil has been changed to Jill “in order to give a female name to one of the children.”41 It should be noted that a 1765 woodcut depicts two boys: “Jack and Gill.”42 “Hjuki” is pronounced Juki, “which would readily become Jack.”43 Lewis Spence in 1947 claims that some ancient myth can be traced in the rhyme, if only in that “no one in folk-lore sense climbs to the top of a hill for water unless that water has special significance”—dew water, for instance.44 A basic need for consumption is water and a traditional “Jack and Jill” Mother Goose rhyme is intrinsically focused on water gathering. Whether the water is for spiritual purposes or basic existence, the story of Jack and Jill is claimed to have been a long ballad; however, of that “nothing has remained in the nursery save the four lines”45 below: Jack and Jill went up the hill To fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down, and broke his crown, And Jull cam tumbling after.46

A miniature chapbook [2.5 inches by 3 inches] printed by James Kendrew of York in 1820 included four pages with a longer version of

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children, but also saving Jimmie C. from the very real possibility of physical harm. On their way home from the picnic, Oreo reprimands her brother for blindly following his dream, stating, “You are a yold. You and your jive dream parks.”191 Ironically, Oreo’s words suggest the possibility of Jimmie C.’s dream as she combines Yiddish and African American slang and thus, as Mullen argues, linguistically “embodies a possible unity of two groups that share common concerns about their place in American culture.”192 Similarly, Jimmie C. consents to a cultural identity that, with his mixed racial identity, “embodies” racial and ethnic unity, and even his name, like that of his sister, suggests this “possible unity”: When Jimmie C. was born, his father Samuel, via telegram, named his son Moishe because, according to him, it was “funny to name a black kid Moishe. It was the name on the birth certificate”; however, the Clark family nicknamed the baby “Jimmie C., after his maternal grandfather and, inadvertently, after his paternal grandfather (James = Jacob).”193 That James is a variation of the Hebrew name Jacob suggests the biological connection between Oreo and Jimmie C.’s maternal and paternal grandfathers and thus the possibility of racial and ethnic unity in contemporary America. Like Jen, Ross suggests the similarities between ethnic groups, most notably between Jewish Americans and African Americans, who have been marginalized and exploited by the dominant American culture. As Mullen notes, “Both Jewish Americans and African Americans have experienced a marginal or ‘outsider’ status while making significant contributions to ‘mainstream’ American culture. They have regarded one another as strangers or enemies, as possible allies, or as competitors in the American marketplace.”194 Even Jimmie C.’s best friend Fonzelle recognizes the “outsider status” shared by various ethnic minorities, “socalled Japs, Chinks, all them—they all niggers.”195 Throughout her novel, Ross, like Jen, suggests that America’s ethnic groups should unite to become allies in a cultural, political, and economic fight against a common oppressor, the dominant culture, which uses the descent-based differences among the racial and ethnic groups to separate, marginalize, and oppress them further. Like Ross, Jen appropriates Biblical images of food consumption to explore the realities and possibilities of racial and ethnic unity in contemporary America; however, while Ross alludes to the New Testament, Jen refers to the Old, specifically to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. In “The Fall Begins” and the chapters that follow, Jen depicts Mona’s loss of innocence as she, like Seth, begins to understand

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the limitations of consent. After Mona learns of Alfred’s job termination, she visits him in the storage room of the pancake house where he “is holding his old navy-blue windbreaker, the one with the apple tree logo over the left breast. Eden Orchards reads the caption. Bite and You Shall Know.”196 After speaking to Alfred about her parents’ racially-motivated decision to fire him, Mona has taken a “bite” and thus begins to “know”; she begins to realize that there are in fact descent-based differences that cannot be overcome by dreaming or wishful thinking. Furthermore, Mona “knows” the limitations of consent when she learns about Seth’s impersonation of Sherman. Until this point, Mona believed that Sherman switched identities and, more generally, that an individual could undermine his or her descent and construct an identity based solely on consent. Consequently, when Seth tells Mona about his phone calls, she becomes devastated, calling him “two-faced, . . .wily and underhanded.”197 In turn, Seth suggests that by passing as Sherman, he taught Mona a valuable lesson: “One thing becomes another. That’s according to Hegel according to Seth. Here too Mona tries to learn from nature. The apple rots so the tree may grow.”198 Again, Jen uses apple imagery not only to suggest Mona’s loss of innocence, but also to demonstrate the cyclical nature of life and the transient nature of one’s cultural identity. Jen’s appropriation of Edenic imagery is most evident as Mona runs away from home after she confronts her parents about Alfred’s job termination.199 As Mona waits in Grand Central Station for the train that will take her to her sister Callie’s apartment, “she feels, quite unexpectedly, as though she stands in the Garden of Eden.”200 Unlike the Biblical garden, though, Mona’s imagined paradise “will remain a place of sun even after the poor forked whatever have been banished.”201 Unlike Adam and Even, Mona delights in her exile from her parents’ home, feeling as if she has entered a promised land “at the pointy start of time. Behind her, no history. Before her—everything.”202 Initially, while standing in the Eden that is Grand Central Station, Mona believes that because “everything” is possible, she may recreate herself anew and consent to any identity she chooses. However, as Mona envisions this bright future, “streaming with sappy light,” she also feels the “wind of apprehension” as she “can hear Helen’s voice,” an audible reminder of her descent, that in between breezes, whispers, “As if you have no mother! As if you come out of thin air.”203 Mona is not “arrogant” as the voice accuses, for the very fact that Mona “as always” hears the voice suggests that she cannot abandon her past even if she tries.204 Even Mona’s culinary creations, such as “latkes that she deep-fries in a wok,”205 suggest

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how her descent affects her, not only because she implements Chinese cooking methods and incorporates Chinese ingredients, but also because she inherits her mother’s culinary creativity.

America’s Future: A Salad Bowl, Not a Melting Pot Both authors conclude their novels by looking toward a future when all Americans may celebrate the complexities of their cultural and gender identities. Significantly, as Mona awaits her train, she beings to feel “as though she is herself the Garden of Eden,”206 the origin of humanity in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Like the Biblical Garden, the cradle of life, Mona will foster new life that signifies a promising new vision of America’s multicultural future: After becoming pregnant by Seth, Mona gives birth to a daughter named Io, a racially-mixed “pink-prune child” with a “pure Chinese” nose, who resembles both of her parents;207 thus Io embodies Jen’s vision of America as “a salad bowl,”208 a nation of different ethnic cultures that, like a salad’s distinct flavors and ingredients, have rubbed off on each other in often unexpected but delicious ways. Fittingly, Io, with the help of her parents, begins to embrace an inclusive cultural identity, evidenced, in part, by the food that she eats and the language that she speaks: “She loves to eat. Mam! Mam! She says, meaning Mange! Mange! For what else would be the favorite cuisine of a child part Jewish, part Chinese, barely off breast milk? But, of course, Italian. She even got to the spice rack the other day and dumped out a whole bottle of oregano.”209 Io’s eclectic and hearty appetite not only reflects the hybridity of her ethnic and cultural identities, but also suggests that she, like her mother, will not be bound by patriarchal definitions of femininity that define women as hungry food preparers. By the novel’s conclusion, Mona learns how to merge the seemingly competing components of her identity into a unified whole. Jen ends her novel by depicting, in human terms, the merging of Mona’s past and present, her descent and her ability to consent, when Helen, who has disowned Mona since the birth of her racially-mixed granddaughter, surprisingly shows up at her sister-in-law Theresa’s home, where the family is gathered for Mona and Seth’s wedding, planned for the following day. As Helen enters the house, a sobbing Mona runs to her mother “just as Io falls down,” but instead of “crying like Mona,” the toddler “stands right back up on her own two feet” and “claps.”210 Thus, with this final image of Mona with Helen, the origin of her descent, and Io, evidence of her ability to consent, Jen suggests, in human terms, how one can merge the past, present, and future into a unified whole.

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Perceptive Appetites: Food Issues in Mother Goose and Nursery Literature Eating of a Christmas-Pie, Putting in his Thumb, Oh fie! Putting in, Oh fie! His Thumb Pulling out, Oh Strange! A Plum54

According to The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1997), Carey’s rhyme is not from a chapbook version, but from an old tale “The Fryer and the Boy dating back to 1520 which is derived from an ancient tale, “Jak and his Stepdame” which is part of the “Tale of a Basyn” (c. 1340). Even though there was a sixteenth Abbot Whiting who was to condemned to death by King’s man, Thomas Horner, the political spin on this nursery rhyme “has not been found in print before the nineteenth century.”55 Another pint to be made here is that even though the politician’s name was “Thomas Horner,” anybody might be called Jack, “particularly if he was believed to be a knave.”56 Another famous Jack is “Jack Sprat.” This rhyme, recorded in 1670 by John Ray,57 implies compromise between husband and wife to eat everything personally palatable in order to consume all food and waste nothing: Jack Sprat could eat not fat, His wife could eat not lean, And so between them both, you see, They licked the platter clean.58

The various versions of this rhyme appear twice in John Clarke’s seventeenth century proverb collection without Jack’s last name. I find it interesting that the message of this rhyme was not altered through the generations as is evidenced twenty years later when the rhyme is found in James Howell’s collection of proverbs with an archdeacon as the central figure: Archdeacon Pratt would eat no fatt [sic], His wife would eat no lean; Twixt Archdeacon Pratt, and Joan his wife, The meat was eat up clean.59

The name “Pratt” was an earlier form of “Spratt.”60 During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “Jack Sprat” was a term for a drawf.61 Whether Jack is a dwarf or the term “Jacky” is used as a means of identifying a young boy, it is clear that the lessons to be learned reflect the behavior portrayed in the rhymes. In a poem “When Jacky’s a good boy,” crying is viewed as punishable behavior:

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future when all Americans, regardless of their race, ethnicity, and gender, will embrace the differences within themselves and each other. Of course, both write fictional accounts, so perhaps they, unlike an autobiographer writing on the same subject,221 can create an America, not as it is, but how it should be. Nonetheless, Ross and Jen, like many before them and, undoubtedly, many after them, suggest the real possibility of a day when all Americans will have a seat at the kitchen table that is America.

Works Cited Primary Sources Jen, Gish. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 1996. New York: Vintage Contemporaries. Ross, Fran. 2000. Oreo. 1974. Foreword Harryette Mullen. Boston: Northeastern UP.

Secondary Sources Barthes, Roland. 1997. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 20-27. New York: Routledge. Browder, Laura. 2000. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of NC P. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cauti, Camille. 1998. “‘Pass the Identity Please’: Culinary Passing in America.” In A Tavola: Food, Tradition and Community among Italian Americans, edited by Edvige Guinta and Samuel J. Patti. Staten Island: American Italian Association. 10-19. Donovan, Josephine. 1985. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of American Feminism.New York: Frederick Ungar. Farb, Peter and George Armelagos. 1980. Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Jen, Gish. 1992. Typical American. New York: Plume. Johnson, Allan G. 1997. The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Philadelphia: Temple UP. Kawash, Samira. 1997. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative. Stanford: Stanford UP.

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Lebra, Taki Sugiyama. 1984. Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P. Lin, Erica T. 2003. “Mona on the Phone: The Performative Body and Racial Identity in Mona in the Promised Land.” MELUS 28.2. Summer 2003: 47-57. Mullen, Harryette. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’: Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel.” MELUS 27.1. Spring 2002: 107-129. Sollors, Werner. 1986. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP. Walker, Rebecca. 2001. Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. New York: Riverhead Books.

Notes 1

Ross, Fran. 2000. Oreo. 1974. Foreword Harryette Mullen. Boston: Northeastern UP.168. 2 Jen, Gish. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 1996. New York: Vintage Contemporaries. 293-94. 3 Sollors, Werner. 1986. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP. 4 Kawash, Samira. 1997. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative. Stanford: Stanford UP. 2. 5 Mullen, Harryette. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’: Fran Ross’s Recipe for an Idiosyncratic American Novel.” MELUS 27.1. Spring 2002: 107-129: 107-08. 6 Ibid., 107. 7 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 4. 8 Ibid., 4. 9 Ibid., 55. 10 Kawash. 1997. Dislocating the Color Line. 132. 11 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 37. 12 Ibid., 55. 13 Ibid., 37. 14 Ibid., 182. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 170. 17 Ibid., 170. 18 Ibid., 170. 19 Ibid., 170. 20 Ibid., 170. 21 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 168. 22 Ibid., 112.

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Ibid., 39. Ibid., 40. 25 Ibid., 11. 26 Ibid., 11. 27 Ibid., 13. 28 See Mullen’s Foreword to Oreo for a detailed discussion of how language functions in the novel. 29 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 11-12. 30 Ibid., 13. 31 Ibid., 4. 32 Ibid., 67. 33 Ibid., 72. 34 Ibid., 13. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 Ibid., 14. 37 Ibid., 13. 38 Ibid., 14. 39 Ibid., 6. 40 Ibid., 6 41 Ibid., 6. 42 See Mullen’s Foreword for a discussion of James’s linguistic hybridity, xxvii. 43 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 6. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 Ibid., 3. 46 Ibid., 16. 47 Ibid., 16. 48 Barthes, Roland. 1997. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In Food and Culture: A Reader, edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, 20-27. New York: Routledge. 21. 49 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 27. 50 Ibid., 27. 51 Ibid., 27. 52 Ibid., 28. 53 Ibid., 27-28. 54 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 293. 55 Ibid., 293-294. 56 Ibid., 186. 57 Ibid., 77. 58 Ibid., 77. 59 Ibid., 77. 60 Ibid., 7. 61 Ibid., 7. 62 Ibid., 42. 63 Ibid., 7. 24

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help suspend disbelief and transport the listener/ reader to a time created by the story teller. “Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren” begins in such a manner and transports the listener/ reader to a place where biological classification of species is inconsequential and wrens and robins can do more than sing; they can offer prepared food such as cherry-pie and currant wine as a means of wooing one another and as a means of offering incentive to change intrinsic appearance. The use of food for altering one’s appearance is apparently not something to which the song subscribed. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book sorts nursery rhymes into various categories, One category within the framework of “Baby Games and Lullabies” is identified as “Knee Rides,” Two interesting subject matter consistencies are part of these knee bouncing rhythmic lyric poems: One, the poems relate to riding a horse and two, the poems seem to be related to some type of food ingredient.74 Rhymes relate stories of little girls such as Jenny who while trotting “spilt all her butter milk” or named horses such as “Neddy” who is spoken to while transporting a child to the fair to buy “A penny apple and a penny pear.”75 Even the popular “To market, to market, / To buy a fat pig.” is identified as a rhyme which is part of the knee bouncing tradition. Personification of birds, especially robins, is another in the series of rhythmic knee bouncing verses. “A robin and a robin’s son/ Once went to town to buy a bun./ They couldn’t decide on plum or plain,/ And so they went back home again.”76 Like the others in this category, this poem focuses on a rhythmic ride likened to the cantering of a horse, even though the subjects are birds and food items such as plum or plain buns. While some Mother Goose rhymes serve as a means of playing with a child on a bouncing knee which is an inexpensive, readily available physical playing game, other Mother Goose rhymes serve as a means to play verbal games with children. One example of many is the “Teasing” lyrics which jumbled familiar Mother Goose rhymes into a mélange of various verses is: Little Jack Horner/Sat in the corner,/ Eating his curds and whey;/ There came a big spider,/ Who sat down beside her,/ And the dish ran away with the spoon.” This is followed in Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book with ‘Daddy, you haven’t got it right!’77 The mention of food from various nursery songs creates a jumble of information that becomes a game which teaches children appropriateness and inappropriateness of certain relationships of consumer and consumable. In conclusion, while many Mother Goose rhymes have errant behavior and assorted punishments for that inappropriate behavior, it should be kept in mind that these are rhymes and songs that were told or sung to children in the presence of an adult or an older sibling. While many Mother Goose

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Ibid., 143. Ibid., 144. 103 Ibid., 144-45. 104 Ibid., 144. 105 Mullen. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’...” 119. 106 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 143. 107 For a discussion of Oreo’s “parody of ethnicity” during this radio commercial, see Mullen. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’...” 121. 108 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 143. 109 Ibid., 146. 110 Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. 16. 111 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 143-44. 112 Mullen. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’...” 141. 113 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 76. 114 Ibid., 73. 115 Ibid., 73. 116 Ibid., 73. 117 Donovan. 1985. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions of Feminism. 142. 118 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 25. 119 Ibid., 28. 120 Ibid., 25. 121 Ibid., 25. 122 Ibid., 25. 123 Ibid., 8-9. 124 Ibid., 54. 125 Ibid., 54-55. 126 Ibid., 55. 127 Ibid., 106. 128 Ibid., 107. 129 Ibid., 107. 130 Ibid., 107. 131 For a discussion on the link between food consumption and sexual consumption, both traditionally masculine activities, see Farb and Armelagos, Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating. 132 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 156. 133 Ibid., 157. 134 Ibid., 122. 135 Ibid., 122. 136 Ibid., 122 137 Ibid., 56. 138 Ibid., 58. 139 Ibid., 59. 140 Ibid., 59. 102

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Ibid., 60. Ibid., 61. 143 For a discussion of stereotypical masculine and feminine qualities, see Johnson, The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. 61. 144 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 149. 145 Ibid., 155. 146 Ibid., 159. 147 Ibid., 160. 148 Ibid., 160. 149 Ibid., 161. 150 Ibid., 160. 151 Ibid., 161. 152 Ibid., 162. 153 Ibid., 101. 154 Ibid., 100-101. 155 Ibid., 101. 156 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 19. 157 Ibid., 17. 158 For an explanation of the roles of traditional Japanese wives and mothers, see Lebra, Japanese Women: Constraint and Fulfillment. 77-216. 159 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 20. 160 Ibid., 20. 161 Ibid., 20. 162 Ibid., 20. 163 Ibid., 19. 164 Ibid., 20. 165 Ibid., 21. 166 Ibid., 20. 167 Ibid., 20. 168 Ibid., 21. 169 Ibid., 21. 170 Ibid., 21. 171 Ibid., 21. 172 Ibid., 22. 173 In Typical American, Jen depicts the extramarital affairs of Mona’s mother Helen and her aunt Theresa, both of whom act as sexual consumers and thus undermine ideals of traditional femininity. 174 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 94. 175 Ibid., 213. 176 Ibid., 103. 177 Ibid., 208. 178 Ibid., 278. 179 Ibid., 154. 180 Ibid., 157. 181 Ibid., 156. 142

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Ibid., 219. Ibid., 119. 184 Ibid., 118. 185 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 43. 186 Ibid., 43-44. 187 Ibid., 44. 188 Ibid., 45. 189 Ibid., 44. 190 Ibid., 45. 191 Ibid., 45. 192 Mullen. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’...” 109. 193 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 9. 194 Mullen. 2002. “‘Apple Pie with Oreo Crust’...” 109. 195 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 65. 196 Jen. 1997. Mona in the Promised Land. 219. 197 Ibid., 279. 198 Ibid., 278. 199 Ibid., 251. 200 Ibid., 255. 201 Ibid., 225. 202 Ibid., 255. 203 Ibid., 255. 204 Ibid., 255. 205 Ibid., 301. 206 Ibid., 255. 207 Ibid., 299. 208 Ibid., 129. 209 Ibid., 303. 210 Ibid., 304. 211 Ross. 2000. Oreo. 184-195. 212 Ibid., 192. 213 Ibid., 205. 214 Ibid., 205. 215 Ibid., 202. 216 Ibid., 79. 217 Ibid., 277. 218 Ibid., 207. 219 Ibid., 207. 220 Ibid., 207. 221 For an autobiographical and, I would argue, more realistic account of racial, ethnic, and cultural hybridity in the United States, see Walker, Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self. 183

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Perceptive Appetites: Food Issues in Mother Goose and Nursery Literature

In England, too, the legend was known and discussed in the "London Congregational Magazine" for 1834, whence it was reprinted in New York, 1835, under the title, "A Kid, a Kid, or the Jewish Origin of the Celebrated Legend, 'The House That Jack Built'" (see an article describing this little book in "The New York Times Saturday Review," Feb. 9, 1901). In the preface it is called a "parabolical hymn." Henry George published in London in 1862 an essay on the same subject: "An Attempt to Show that Our Nursery Rime 'The House That Jack Built' Is an Historical Allegory, . . . To Which Is Appended a Translation and Interpretation of an Ancient Jewish Hymn" (comp. Steinschneider, "Hebr. Bibl." v. 63). 34 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 47-49, 35 Ibid., 44. 36 Ibid., 47-49. 37 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. 21-22. 38 Ibid., 21-22. 39 “H” is an aspirant. 40 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. 265. Maurice Sendak in 1993 used this rhyme for the ending of “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” (Harper Collins). 41 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 267. 42 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. n.267. 43 Ibid., 267. 44 Spence, Lewis. 1947. Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game, and Rhyme. London: Watts. 25. 45 Baring-Gould. 1962. The Annotated Mother Goose. xii. 46 Ibid. 47 Opie. 1955. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book. 266. 48 Opie. 1997. The Oxford Nursery Rhyme Book, Second Edition. n. 267. 49 Ibid., 277. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 277-8. 52 Ibid., 278. 53 Defined as meaning “one who is insipid, sentimental or weak” or “Lacking vigor or decisiveness; spineless” (www.answers.com/topic/namby-pamby). Namby-pamby, a word derived from the name of Ambrose Philips, a little-known 18th-century poet whose verse incurred the sharp ridicule of his contemporaries Alexander Pope and Henry Carey. Their ridicule, inspired by political differences and literary rivalry, had little to do with the quality of Philips's poetry. In poking fun at some children's verse written by Philips, Carey used the nickname Namby Pamby: “So the Nurses get by Heart Namby Pamby's Little Rhimes” (www.answers.com/topic/namby-pamby). Pope then used the name in the 1733 edition of his satirical epic The Dunciad. The first part of Carey's coinage came from Amby, or Ambrose. Pamby repeated the sound and form but added the initial of Philips's name. Such a process of repetition is called reduplication. After being

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Contributors

DARLENE FARABEE, Ph.D. Visiting Lecturer at Temple University. Currently at work on a book project on metaphors of travel in early modern British literature. MARYANNE FELTER, Ph.D. professor of English at Cayuga Community College, Auburn, New York, teaches English Lit, Irish Lit, and World Lit surveys. Dr. Felter has written articles in Eire-Ireland, the Journal of Irish Literature, Nua, New York Irish History and several other journals. She was editor for the Dictionary of Irish Literature. Her book about Irish novelist Mary Rose Callaghan is forthcoming. LISA ROWE FRAUSTINO, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English at Eastern Connecticut State University and Visiting Associate Professor in the Graduate Program in Children's Literature at Hollins University, is both an author of children's books, most recently I Walk in Dread (Scholastic), and a scholar who has published articles related to the reproduction of mothering in children's literature, the topic of her current book project. Dr. Fraustino was a Fulbright Scholar to Thailand in 2006. PAUL GALANTE, a Ph.D. candidate at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. His dissertation topic is "Immaginario Nuova York: New York City in Italian American Narrative and Cultural Production." He currently teaches at Lafayette College, Easton, PA as the Lehigh Lafayette Fellow and also teaches American Literature at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. DEBORAH ISRAEL, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. Dr. Israel is co-author of Fresh Takes, a composition rhetoric and reader, and is currently doing research on contemporary immigration literature. ANNETTE M. MAGID, Ph.D. professor of English at SUNY Erie Community College, Buffalo, NY, teaches Children’s Literature, and a large variety of other literature and writing courses. Her recent publications include “Edward Bellamy’s Notebooks” Utopian Spaces (2007) and “Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” Trans/Forming Utopia, (2009). Dr. Magid is also a published poet, Tunnel of Stone (Mellen 2002). Currently she is working a study of the political impact of utopian writers. ANNE RAMIREZ, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of English at Neumann College, Aston, PA, currently serves as Literature/Humanities Group Leader. Dr. Ramirez publishes on topics concerning Dickinson, women's

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studies, Eudora Welty, the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Christian Literature, Lectionary Homiletics, and Shakespearean drama. MARA REISMAN, Ph.D., adjunct faculty at the University of Connecticut, has published articles in American Drama and Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing. In 2006, Dr. Reisman guest edited a special issue of LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory on contemporary British women writers and is currently working on a book-length study of Fay Weldon’s fiction. MODHUMITA ROY, Ph.D. Stonybrook University in New York, is a faculty member of the English Department and the Director of the Women's Studies Program at Tufts University, Medford, MA. Her areas of interest and expertise include feminist theory, literature, gender and societal structure. Dr. Roy was a visiting fellow in South Africa. KRISTIN SANNER, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at Mansfield University. Dr. Sanner’s current research focuses on the intersections of nineteenth-century American Literature, unconventional science and gender. Recent publications include articles in The Critical Companion to Henry James, The Henry James Review and James Joyce Quarterly. MARLISA SANTOS, Ph.D. is an associate professor and Director of the Division of Humanities in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Dr. Santos has published and presented various papers on film, the most recent being an article on Edgar Ulmer's noirs in the forthcoming anthology Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row (2008). Her latest project is a book-length manuscript on psychiatry in film noir. RICK SANTOS, Ph.D. Comparative Literature and Translation, State University of New York at Binghamton, has published translations, essays and poetry in the US and in Latin America. Dr. Santos co-edited with Bernice Kliman Latin American Shakespeares (2004) and with Wilton Garcia A Escrita de Adé: Perspectivas Teóricas dos Estudos Gays e Lésbic@s no Brasil (2002). He is currently the NEH/Sophia Libman Professor of Humanities at Hood College in Maryland MARYANN TEBBEN, Ph.D. is currently Associate Professor of French at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Following publication of her article on the place of French fries in French

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Contributors

and American culture, she appeared in a documentary on the history of fries, Il était une frite une fois, that aired on French television in January 2008. Dr. Tebben has published previously on French and Italian Renaissance poetry, Italian Renaissance women’s writing, and Molière. JESSICA LYN VAN SLOOTEN, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Manitowoc. Jessica's publications on fashion, romance, and American literature and popular fiction include essays in “Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction,” and “Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature.” JANE M. WOOD, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Park University. Her recent publications include “Internationalizing Women's Rights: Travel Narratives and Identity Formation” published in the Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round Table, Spring (2007) and her collection of creative non-fiction essays, What Eve Didn't Tell Us (2002).

INDEX

A & P,” 331 Acton, Eliza, 214, 215-18, 226, 228, 231, n236, n237 African American women, 31 Água Viva, 100, 112, n113 Albala, Ken, 154, 164, n165 American Dream, 28, 33 American eating, 332, 333, 335, 338-39, 341, see also candy and salty things And the Wife Ran Away, n.iii Anderson, Donald, 132, n134 Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen, 321 Anglo- Indian, 207-08, 209, 211, 219-20, 222, 224-26, 228-29, 232, 233, n234, n235, n236 Angstrom, Harry “Rabbit,” 330, 335-36, 337-38, 342, n342, n343, n344 animalism, 137, 138, 141, 142-43, 144, 147 Anthony, Susan B., II, 28-29, 39, n41, see also Out of the Kitchen--Into the War “Appetite Lost, Appetite Found,” 35, 39, n42, see also Barolini, Helen apple (as signifier), 284-88, 290, 293-95, 297-98, 301 Armelagos, George, 27, 39, n40, see also Consuming Passions Ashram, 61, see also groceries and Gilbert, Elizabeth assimilation, 27, 33, see also cultural assimilation Atkins, Peter, 87, 91, 96, n97 Auto Da Fay, 5 autobiography, see Jewish women

Babette’s Feast, 90, 168, 170-72, 183, 184, n186 “Baby Games and Lullabies,” 323 Baker, William J., 312, 324, n325 Baring-Gould, Rev. S., 313, 317, 324 Baring-Gould, William and Ceil S., 309, 324, n325, n326, n327 Barolini, Helen, 35-36, 39, n42, see also“Appetite Lost, Appetite Found”and Festa Barreca, Regina, 8, 19, n24, see also Untamed and Unabashed Barthes, Roland, 108, 112, n114, 168, 169-71, 175, 182, 184, n186, 284, 301, n303, n304, 345, 361, n363 Beauvoir, Simone de, 38, 39, 40, n42, see also The Second Sex beef, 169, 171, 174-75, 177, 178, 179, 180, 182, 184, n189, see also meat Beeton, Mrs., 214, 216-17, 227-28, 231, 232, 233, n236, n237 Bell Jar, The, 6, see also Plath, Sylvia Benjamin, Jessica, 292, 301, n305 Big Night, 31, 33 blogging, 368-69, 375-76, 379, 380, 383, 388, 394-95, 397, 398, 399, 403, n406, n407 blood, 14-15, 46, 86-87, 90-91, 122, 123, 141, 142, 143, 146, 149, n152, 154, 157, 158, 168, 169, 171, 175, 177, 184, n188, 211, 253, 263, 278, 281, n283, 284, 341, 385, 411, 420, Blum, Virginia, 67, 78, n79 Bocuse, Paul, 176

452 body, 16, 34, 46, 53, 56, 59, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 10507, 108, 110, n113, 125, 140, 141-43, 145, 154, 156, 158, 160, n165, 175, 241, 271, 284, 295, 296, 302, 304, 349, 351, 362, n364, n365, 416, 441, n443, see also “Body, The” and female body “Body, The,” 99, 100, 105-06, n113 Boisard, Pierre, 172, 173, 184, n187 Book on Household Management, 214, 231, 233, n236, n237, see also household management Borden, Lizzie, 141, n152 bouillon, 174, 175-76, 177, 178, 179, 180, n187 boundaries, 56, 59, 63 Bowler, Ian, 87, 91, 96, n976 Brazil, 98, 100, 103, 109, n114 Brazilian, 98, 100 bread, 242, 243, 247-48, 251-52, see also food Bread Givers, 249, 256, see also Yezierska, Anzia Bridget Jones’s Diary, 373, 376, 396, 402, n404 Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme, 175, 177-78, 185, n187, n189 British Indian Empire, 209, 210, 211, 216, 218, 233, 234, n235 British in India, 206, 207-08, 21318, 221, 223, 226-30, 233, n234, n235 British Raj, 213, 228-29, 233, n234, n235, n236 Browder, Laura, 422, 440, n443, see also ethnic impersonation Bruford, Bill, 131, n135 Burton, Robert, 155, 157-58, 162, 164, n165 butcher, 84-96, n97, 170 see also meat Butler, Judith, 426, 431, 440, n444, see also gender identity and gender roles

Index Calof, Rachel Bella, 238, 242, 244-247, 254, 255, n257 Camembert, 172, 173-74, 184, n187, see also cheese “Can a Woman Be a Philosopher? Reflections of a Beauvoirian Housemaid,” 38, 40, n42, see also Eleanore Holveck candy, 266-68, 313, 335, 338, 339, see also American eating Carême, Antonin, 169, 174, 176, 178 Carey, Henry, 319-20, n326, n327 career women, 367, 370, 374, 385, 386, 396, 401, see also women Cauti, Camille, 422, 440, n443, see also culinary passing Chadwell, Sean, 132 cheese, 170, 171, 172-74, 177, 171, see also Camembert chick lit, 367-369, 370, 373-374, 376-78, 379-81, 384-85, 386, 387-88, 390, 391, 393, 395-96, 397-98, 401-03, n405 Child, Julia , 368, 383, 384, 390, 392-95, 399, 400, 402, n404 Chinese American, 27 Chinese food, 397-98, 401-3 Chocolat, 90 chocolate, 260, 265-68, 269, 270, 271-72, 277, 278, 280, n282 Chodorow, Nancy, 292, 294, 302, n305 Christ , 287-88, 295, 297-98, 33235, 349-51 Christ in Concrete, 28, see also Pietro Di Donato Clarke, John, 320 Clements, William, 133, n135 Cohen, Rose, 238, 242, 243, 24749, 254, 255, n257 Color Purple, The, 348, 352, 361, 362, 363, n364, n365, n366 Celie, 352-55 Harpo, 352-56, 361 Sofia, 352-56, 361

You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate Colored People: A Memoir, 32, 39, n41, see also Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “comfort food,” 338, 340 Comfort Me With Apples, 56, 62, 64, see also Reichl, Ruth commodity, 69 community, see food, Jewish Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, 216, 232, 234, n 236, n237 compulsory heterosexuality, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 110, 111, 112, n114 consent, 409-13, 416-18, 419-22, 426, 433-34, 436-39, 441, n441, see also descent consommé, 177, 179-80, n188 Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, 27, 39, n40, see also Farb, Peter and Armelagos, George consumption, 367, 368, 370, 372, 374, 379-80, 385, 390, 393-95 Cookery book, 207, 208, 214, 215, 218-21, 222, 223-25, 227-30, 231, 232, n236, n237 Cooking for Mr. Latte, 367-372, 378, 380-82, 384, 387, 390-92, 396-98, 400, 402-03, n404, n405, n406, n407 Counihan, Carole M., 3, 20, n22, 284, 286, 301, 302, 303, n304, see also Van Esterik, Penny Coyle, Margaret, 132, n134 Cruikshank, Robert, 321 culinary “authenticity,” 411, 41819, 421, 422, 423, 425 culinary creations, 415, 417, 421, 426-27, 437-38 culinary passing, 422-24, 437, 440, n443 cult of domesticity, 75 cultural assimilation, 32-33, see also assimilation

453

Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, 317 curry, 206, 207-209, 210, 211, 214, 217, 219, 220, 221, 226, 228, 233, 234, n234, n235, n236, n237 paste, 206, 215-16, 223, 230 powder, 214-17, 226, 219 recipe, 207, 216, 228, 231, 232, 233, n236, n237 soup, 206-09, 212-20, 222, 22527, 229-30 Curtis, Karen, 132, n135 Dahl, Roald, 260, 265, 266-68, 279, 280, n282 Daniel, Carolyn, 289-90, 302, n304 d’Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine, 181, n189 DeAngelis, Rose, 132, n134 de Bastide, Jean-Francois, 192, 201, n204 decoration of food, The, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, n204, n205 De Gronne Slagtere, 84, 96 Delamar, Gloria T., 309, 324, n325 Delicatessen, 84 Departed, The, 137, 148, 151 Depression, 330, 335, 338 descent, 409-17, 419-22, 424, 426, 434-37, 438-39, 441, n441, see also consent De Silva, Cara, 37, 39, n42, see also In Memory’s Kitchen Desjardins, Gustave, 192 DeVault, Marjorie, 285, 296, 302, n304, n305 Diary of a Mad Housewife, 6, see also Kaufman, Sue Dickinson, Emily, 44-54 Di Donato, Pietro, 27-28, 39, n42, see also Christ in Concrete Diner, Hasia, 132, n135 dining room, 27, 39, see also dining table and main table

454 dining table, 27, 30, 31, 39, see also dining room and main table Dinner Rush, 115-121, 123, 125, 127-31, 132, 133, n133, n134, n135, n136, see also Girardelli, David Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 291-92, 302, n305 disenfranchised, the, 27, 28, 31-32, 37 Diver, Maud, 211 domestic sphere, 66-67, 70, 71, 72, 75-76, n79 domesticity, see domestic sphere Donne, John, 155, 164, n165 Doriani, Beth Maclay, 49, 55 Douglass, Frederick, 338 Douglas, Mary, 345, 362, n363, n364 Down Among the Women, 6, 9 Dr. Spock, 288, see also Spock, Dr. Benjamin Dumas, Alexandre, 175, 177, 178, 185, n187, n188 East India Company, 210-11, 213 Eat, Pray, Love, 56, 60, 64, n65, see also Gilbert, Elizabeth eating, see also food and guilt, 358, 361 and vomiting, 358 Eating Raoul, 84 Eberwein, Jane Donahue, 45, 55 “Eddaic Hjuki and Bil,” 317, see also Nortic rhyme Eden, Emily, 211-12, 231, n235 Egerton, John, 27, 39, n40, see also Southern Food Eliza Acton, see Action, Eliza El-Koury, Rodolphe, 192, 201, n204 Emily Eden, see Eden, Emily Encyclopédie, 175, 178, 185, n187, n188 “End of the Line, The,” 2 Englishwomen, 210, 211, see also women

Index “Epilogue,” 30-32, 34, 36, 40, n41, see also Hughes, Langston Escoffier, Auguste, 168, 169, 170, 176, 177, 182, n188 “Essay on the Archaeology of Popular English Phrases and Nursery Rhymes,” 313 ethnic impersonation, 423, 425-26, 438 exclusion, 27-28, 33 familial roles, see family family, 3, 6, 9, 11, 16, 20, 30-34, 36-38, 44, 66, 67, 70-4, n79, n80-81, 84, 86, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 111, 115, 116-117, 121, 123, 125-26, 127-31, 146-47, 150, 182, 183, 184, 240, 242-43, 24449, 265-66, 267-69, 270, 280, 285, 290, 296, 302, n304, n305, 314, 318-19, 322, 324, n325, 333-34, 336-37, 340-41, 349, 367, 368, 381, 383-85, 387-88, 392, 396, 402, n406, 410, 412, 415, 417, 419, 420, 423, 427, 433, 436, 438, Farb, Peter, 27, 39, n40, see also Consuming Passions Farber, David, 3-4, 20, n22 Farber, Manny, 137, n151 fashion, 379, 380, 390-91, 393, 39495 “fasnacht,” 339, see also German foods fat-fried, 337 Fat is a Feminist Issue, 2-4, 5-6, 89, 20, n24, see also Orbach, Susie Fat Woman’s Joke, The, 2-6, 8-12, 19 female bildungsroman, 57, 64, n64 gender norms, 57, see also gender and women identity, 56-58, 59-63, n65, see also food and women

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331

plays the role and “led the / parade / the year / the boys came back / from war,” and where excess is associated with an onlooker who may be drunk rather than with Uncle Sam, himself, the ironies are deeper still.2 As the work of a writer often associated with celebration of both positive sensual experience and celebratory joy, the Rabbit series’ consistent pattern of treating eating with irony of one sort or another provides much food for thought. Why is the food never right? Why so seldom do we find simple satisfaction that is sanctioned by the narrative context? Before immersion in the saga’s vast design, we might note some tendencies of Updike’s irony with regard to food in “A & P,” perhaps his most widely anthologized short story. In “A & P,” the characters that Updike gathers in a supermarket are surrounded by food, but there is no eating—a scene that is literally “tantalizing,” if one considers the myth of Tantalus. The lovely “Queenie,” so dubbed by protagonist narrator Sammy, purchases “Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream” in a jar that is never opened.3 The herring snacks function as an image through what they stimulate in the Sammy’s imagination, the vision of an elegant cocktail party the likes of which he has never seen, rather than through being eaten or even tasted. The less-socially-privileged Sammy, a cashier at the market, imagines the men in Queenie’s world as wearing “ice cream coats” (with which her breasts are later associated when compared to “two scoops of the smoothest vanilla”) and as serving the herring snacks accompanied by “drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them [italics mine].” Thus, Updike pairs uneaten food with undrinkable drink, evidently Sammy’s conflation of the bitter martini with a sweet julep, a complex, ironic metaphor for his mixture of innocence, imagination and exclusion.4 It is also ironic that “sour cream” remains sealed in the jar while sweet “ice cream” and “smoothest vanilla” fill Sammy’s mind’s eye, but he is destined never to taste the treat, sweet or sour, and Queenie is gone before Sammy can get outside the market. Here we have many of the hallmarks of Updike’s treatment of food: a tantalizing but ironic mixture of absence and presence—in this case the food is uneaten; food imagery stimulates richer imaginative treats; the food may be plain but the description is delectable; food is not offered as an end in itself; food is associated with love; and a dissonant note is struck. The treatment of food in “A & P” also can serve as a metaphor for much of Updike’s art: ordinary life subjected to an extraordinary depth and eloquence of analysis and representation.

456 foodways, 115, 132, n134, n135, n136, see also Italian American Forever Feminine, 5, 20, n23, see also Ferguson, Marjorie Freeman, Mary Wilkins, 66-78, n78, n79, n80, n81 French fry, 169-70 Freud, Anna, 299, 302, n304 Friedan, Betty, 4, 6, 20, n22, n23, see also Feminine Mystique, The Frye, Marilyn, 100, 112, n113 Gabaccia, Donna, 123, 132, n135 Galen of Pergamum, 154-57, 15960, 161-64, n165, n166 Garcia, José Antônio, 99, 107, 111, 112, n114 Gardaphe, Fred, 132, n134 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 32-33, 39, n41, see also Colored People Gelman, Rita Golden, 56, 58-61, 63, n65, see also Tales of a Female Nomad gender, see gender identity gender identity, 57, 59-61, 63, 66, 67, 70-72, 77, n80, n81, 99, 100, 102, 108, 109, 110, 111, n114, 284-86, 288-89, 292-94, 296301, 302, n304, n305, n306, 410-15, 417-23, 426-27, 432-34, 437-40, 441-442, n444, n445 gender roles, see gender identity George, Henry, n326, see also parabolical hymn German foods, 335, 337, 339 Gigante, Denise, 164, n166 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 56, 60-63, n65, see also Eat, Pray, Love and groceries Girardelli, Davide, 132, see also Dinner Rush Giving Tree, 285-95, 297-301, n304, n305, n306 Glaspell, Susan, 34-35, 39, n42, see also Trifles

Index Glasser, Leah Blatt, 71, 77, 78, n78, n79, n80 Godless in Eden, 4 Goncourt, Edmond et Jules, 173, 179, 185, n187, n188 Goode, Judith 132, n135 Goodfellas, 137, 144-45, 151 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 148, 150, n152 Grahame, Kenneth, 260, 261-63, 267, 270, 280, n281, n282 “Graduation,” 31, see also Langston Hughes Grant, Mark, 164, n165. Great Mother, The, 289-296, 301, 303, n304, n305 Green Butchers, The, 84-85, 90, 96, n96, n97 Greer, Germaine, 11, 20, n25, see also Female Eunuch, The groceries, 61, see also Ashram and Gilbert, Elizabeth Grootendorst, Sapê, 98, 112, n113 Gulden, Ann Torday, 157, 164, n166 Haber, Barbara, 27, 39, 41 Haggadah, 313, 324, n325, see also Passover Seder and “One Kid” Halligan, Marion, 199, 202, n205 Hayden, Peter, 193, 202, n204, n205 Hazan, Marcella, 124, 127, 132, n135, n136 Heart of the Country, The, n.vii Hendin, Josephine Gattuso, 132, n133, n134 hetero-supremacy, 99, 101, 102, 103, 106, 110, 111, 112, n114 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 44, 55 History of Jack Horner, Containing the Witty Pranks he play’d from his Youth to his Riper Years, Being pleasant for Winter Evenings, 319-20, 323 Hoagland, Sarah, 112, n113

You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate Holveck, Eleanore, 37-38, 39, 40, n43, see also “Can a Woman be a Philosopher?” hors d’œuvres architectural, 190-203, n203, n204, n205 architectural to culinary usage, 191-201 drawings, 194-95 exterior architectural, 195-97 fusion of interior and exterior, 197-201 interior architectural, 192-93 horseback banquet, 200-201 Hostert, Anna Camaiti, 132, 133, n134, n136 household management, 214, 216, 221-22, 229, 231, 233, n236, n237, see also Book on Household Management Howell, James, 320 How to Cook a Wolf, 37, 39, 42, see also M. F. K. Fisher Hughes, Langston, 30-32, 34, 36, see also “Epilogue,” “Graduation,” and “Ruby Brown” humors, 154-56, 162, n165, see also Galen hunger, 243-44, 246-53, 255, 256, see also “Hunger Artist, A” and Kafka, Franz and power, 349, 350, 35152, 361 “Hunger Artist, A,” 255, 256, n258 Hungry Hearts, 249, 251, 253, 256, see also Yezierska, Anzia Hunt, Peter, 262, 263, 280, n281, n282 Hurston, Zora Neale, 56-7 hybrid, 224, 227, 230 hybridity, 230 culinary, 409-10, 415, 417-18, 421, 423, 427, see also Chinese

457

cultural, 413-19, 421, 425, 433, 436, 438-39, n442, n446 ethnic and racial, 411-19, 422, 438-439, 440, n441 I Love My Love, n25 icehouses, 195-96 Imitation of Christ, The, 46-47, 55 In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy from the Women of Terezín, 36, see also Cara De Silva inclusion, 27-28, see also inclusiveness inclusiveness, 32, 37, see also inclusion identity, 409-12, 416, 419-22, 42526, 433, 437-439, 440, n443 African-American, 410-13, 41617, 421-22, 426, 434-36, n441 American, 418, 419, 433, 436, 440, n441, n443, n445 Chinese, 421-22 cultural, 409-10, 411, 412, 414, 419-22, 425-26, 431-33, 436, 437-38 ethnic, 409, 425 gender identity and gender roles, 409-14, 416, 426, 431, 433, 339-40, n444, see also gender identity and gender roles Italian, 418-19, 438, 440, n443 Jewish, 409-10, 412, 416, 420, 422, 425, 433, also see Jewish culture and Haggadah male, 439 multicultural, 410, 413, 416-18, 434, 439, 440, see hybridity racial, 411-12, 413, 414, 436, 441, n441, n443 independence, 75 Indian soup, 200 indulgence, 335, 338

458 intertextuality, 54 It Happened in the Kitchen: Recipes for Food and Thought, 36, see also Rose B. Nader and Nathra Nader Italian American, 27-28, 31, 35, 115-28, 130-31, 132, 133, n133, n134, n135, n136 Jackson, Holbrook, 164, n165 “Jacky,” 320-21, see also Mother Goose Nursery Songs Jane Eyre, 49, 55 Jensen, Anders Thomas, 84-87, 93, 96, n97 Jewish community, 239 culture, 409-10, 412, 416-20, 422-27, 433-36, 438-39, 441, n446, also see identityJewish food, 396, 400, 405 holidays, 396, see also Haggadah men, 406 women, 37, 397, 406 women’s autobiography, 239-41, 243-45, 247, 24952, 254, n257 Jones, Barbara, 200, 202, n204, n205 Jooma, Minaz, 164, n166 Joy Luck Club, The, 348, 356, 361, n366 Lena, 356-58, 361 Ying-ying, 356-57 Julia Child , see Child, Julia Julie and Julia, 367-401 Jung, C. G., 351, 362, n364 Kafka, Franz, 253, 255, n258, see also hunger and “Hunger Artist, A” Kalata, Brian, 116, 117, 133, n134 Kamp, David, 121, 124, 133, n135

Index kashrut, 238, 240-41, 244-45, 248, 254, n256, n258, see also kosher foods and traife food debates over, 241 Katz, Wendy, 262, 263, 280, n280, n282, 285, 303, n304 Kaufman, Sue, 6, see also Diary of a Mad Housewife Kawash, Samira, 411-12, 440, n441, see also racial “purity.” Keats, John, 52 Kelly, Ian, 198, 202, n205 Kendrew of York, James, 317-18 Kenney-Herbert, Colonel Arthur Robert, 219, n233, n234, n236, n237, see also Wyvern Ker, John Bellenden, 211, 310, 313 Kerrigan, William, 165, n166 King, C. Richard, 85, 96, n96 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 27-28, 40, n41, see also “Restaurant” kitchen , 27-38, n41, n42, 115, 118-23, 126-27, 133, n134 “Kitchen, The,” 35, see also Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor “Knee Rides,” 318, 322, 323 kosher foods, 238, 239, 241, 24445, 247-48, 255, n256, n257, n258, 396, 409-10, 413, 416, 425-26, 433, see also identityJewish Kosher Meat Boycott of 1902, 241, 255, see also meat and kosher foods Krouse, Agate Nesuale, 20, n24 Lacoss, Jann, 276, 280, n282 Lambert, Deborah, 73, 78, n78 Larousse gastronomique, 171, 174, 175, 185, n186, n187 Last Supper, The, 31, 45, 105, 109, 435 Last Tango in Paris, 108, 109 “‘Laying On Hands’ through Cooking: Black Women’s

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‘Never the Right Food’: Eating and Irony in John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom Saga

you get in Brewer, and the buns had seemed steamed.”13 Yet ironies remain. Harry is alone, and he reads a road map while he eats. The course he had followed was not the most efficient one. He had not intended to eat, furthermore, until he had left Pennsylvania, and it is getting late. The pie reminds him pleasantly of home cooking, but he is on his way away from home to the imagined paradise of Florida, a state where he has never been. In Rabbit, Run, when Harry returns from his all night run, which eventually loops back north to Pennsylvania, he tells Tothero, to whom he comes for advice, “My wife’s an alcoholic.”14 This may be an overstatement—pride regarding her trim figure supplemented by minimal eating habits and a sense of propriety serve to check drinking of the uncontrollable sort throughout the series—but Janice does display what we have come to regard as “addictive tendencies,” tendencies that push her son, Nelson, over the line into a full-blown cocaine habit in Rabbit at Rest. Harry, in contrast, is not much of a drinker, although he does increase his capacity as the saga advances. When Harry and Tothero go out to dinner with two prostitutes, Harry follows the women in ordering a daiquiri, thinking it “will be like limeade,”15 and though he progresses to other drinks, especially after being told that the daiquiri “is a lady’s drink for salad luncheons” in Rabbit Redux,16 overeating rather than overdrinking is a central part of his downfall. “Brewer,” the name of the city at the center of Rabbit’s world, suggests beer, and a huge “Sunflower Beer” sign dominates the city. Harry drinks quite a bit of beer while Janice is away in Rabbit Redux, but he tapers off in Rabbit Is Rich. “Too fattening,” he tells his son Nelson.17 Harry knows good food when he tastes it, however. Toward the end of Harry’s life, Nelson’s wife, Pru, is a good cook who is informed about the relationship of diet to health. When she prepares a nutritious and tasty fish dinner in Florida for the whole family, Harry thinks, “She would take care of me.”18 After his heart attack and an angioplasty back in Pennsylvania, Pru fixes another excellent dinner as he is convalescing: “[I]t is light, delicious, healthful. Baked sole garnished with parsley and chives and flavored with lemon and pepper, asparagus served steaming in a rectangular microwave dish, and in a big wooden bowl a salad including celery and carrot slices and dates and green grapes.”19 Ironically, this delicious dinner is prelude, while Janice is away taking an exam and Nelson is in a drug rehabilitation center, to Pru’s entry into Rabbit’s bedroom with a condom in her pocket: “[t]heir kiss tastes to him of the fish she so nicely prepared, its lemon and chives, and of asparagus.”20 Good food precedes good sex, “a piece of Paradise blundered upon, incredible,” but it seals Rabbit’s doom when Pru later feels the necessity to

460 Jack and Gye, 317 “Jack and Jill,” 317-18, see also “Jack and Gill” “Jack and Jill and Old Dame,” 318 “Jack Sprat,” 320 “Jak and his Stepdame,” 320 “Kindness,” 312 “Little Jack Horner,” 319-20, 323 “Queen of Hearts, The,” 311 “Robin Redbreast and Jenny Wren,” 322-23 “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” 309 “Three Little Kittens,” 308-09 “Tommy Tittlemouse,” 322 mother-son relationship, , 286-87, 288, 290, 291, 292, 293-94, 295, 297-98, 300, 301 Mrs. Beeton, see Beeton, Mrs. Murphy, Kathleen, 144, n152 “My Story,” 238, 244-45, 247, 255, n257, see also Calof, Rachel Bella Nader, Nathra, 36, 40, n42, see also It Happened in the Kitchen Nader, Ralph, 36 Nader, Rose B., 36, 40, n42, see also It Happened in the Kitchen Namby Pamby, 319, n326, n327 Negra, Diana, 90, 96, n97, 133, n134 Neumann, Erich, 284, 289-96, 299, 303, n304, n305 Nicholls, Mark, 140, n151 Nilsen, Aleen Pace, 285, 303, n304 Nortic rhyme, 317, see also“Eddaic Hjuki and Bil,” Oates, Joyce Carol, 335, 342, n343 Odysseus, 57, 63, see also Penelope oille, 179-80, 181, n188, n189 “Once upon a time,” 308, 322, 323 “One Kid,” 313-15, n326, see also Haggadah

Index Opie, Iona, 307. 309, 321, 323, 324, n324, n325, see also Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Opie, Peter, 307, 323, 324, n324, n325, see also Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The Orbach, Susie, 10, 20, n24, see also Fat is a Feminist Issue Out of the Kitchen--Into the War: Women’s Winning Role in the Nation’s Drama, 28, 39, n41, see also Anthony, II, Susan B. Out of the Shadow, 238, 255, n257 Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, The, 308, 320, 321, 324, 325, 326, n326, n327, n328 Pächter, Mina, 37, see also In Memory’s Kitchen “parabolical hymn,” n326, see also George, Henry Paradise Lost, 154-65, n166 Adam eating fruit, 155,157 angelic consumption, 157 banishment of Adam and Eve, 162 eating for sustenance, 154, 163, n166 Eve eating fruit, 154, 155-58, 159, 161 history in, 154, 165, n167 medicinal properties of food, 158-61, n165 Raphael, 156-57, n167 Satan’s description of food, 155, 158-61, 163, n166 sin as illness, 156, 160, 163, 164, 165, n166 temperance, 157, 161, 162, n166 Passover Seder, 313, 315, see also Haggadah and “One Kid” pastry cooking drawings, 197-199 paternity, see family

You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate patissier pittoresque, La, 197, 198, 201, n205 patriarchy, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, n78, n80 Patterson, Patricia, 137, n151 Pembroke, 67-78 Penelope, 57, 63, see also Odysseus Pennell, Melissa, 75, 78 Petit Maison, La, 192, 201, n204, see also de Bastide, JeanFrancois Philips, Ambrose, , n326, n327 Piercy, Marge, 8, 21, n24, 29, 40, n41, see also “What’s that smell in the kitchen?” Pinto-Bailey, Cristina Ferreira, 98, 112, n113 Pitte, Jean-Robert, 175, 176, 185, n187, n188 Plath, Sylvia, 6, see also Bell Jar, The “Polaris,” 3, 17-19 Pollak, Vivian, 44-45, 55 Poole, Gaye, 133, n136 potage, 174, 175, 177-78, 180 pot-au-feu, 168, 172, 174-75, 176, 178-83, 184, n187, n188, n189 Potter, Lois, n165 Poulain, Jean-Pierre, 170, 183, 185, n186, n187, n189 power, 289, 291-93, 295-96, 301, 302, n304 “Pratt, Archdeacon,” 320 Praxis, 5 Proust, Marcel, 173, 177, 185, n187, n188 Pullman, Phillip, 260, 281, n281 “Pumpkin Pie,” 2, 16 Quart, Leonard, 138, n151 queer, 98, 103 Rabbit at Rest, 330, 334, 336, 338, 340, 341, 342, n342, n343 Rabbit Redux, 330, 334, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340, 342, n342, n343,

461

n344 Rabbit Is Rich, 330, 334, 335, 336, 337, 339, 340, 342, n342, n343, n344 “Rabbit Remembered,” 330, 33233, 341, 342, n343 Rabbit, Run, 330, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337, 338, 340, 342, n342, n343, n344 racial “purity,” 411 Raging Bull, 137, 140-41, 144, 151, n151, n152 Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 165, n167 Ray, John, 320 Real Personages of Mother Goose, The, 311-12, 321, 324, n325 Red Ribbon on a White Horse, 238, 249, 253, 256, n257n258 Reichardt, Mary, 66, 78, n78 Reichl, Ruth, 56, 62-3, 64, n65, 369, 381-82, 397, 403, n404, see also Comfort Me with Apples relationships, 367-68, 370, 381, 385, 387-88, 391, 393, 395-96, 398 “Restaurant,” 28, 40, n41, see also Maxine Hong Kingston restaurants, 368, 370-372, 380, 386, 393 Barcelona, 62-63 Thailand, 62 Vietnamese, 57-8 Rich, Adrienne, 103, 112, n114 Ricks, Christopher, 163-64, 165, n167 roast beef, 337, see also meat Room of One’s Own, A, 22, n23, n26, see also Woolf, Virginia Romance fiction, 367, 368-70, 374, 376, 384-85, 390, 398, 402, 403, n405 Rouff, Marcel, 168, 174, 180-81, 182, 183-84, 186, n186, n188 Rowling, J.K., 260, 268-70, 272, 278, 280, 281, n282, n283

462 “Ruby Brown,” 31, see also Hughes, Langston salad, 334, 337, 339 salty things, 336, 340 Sand, George, 182, 186, n189 sauce, 171, 176-77, n188 béarnaise, 177, n188 espagnole, 177 mousseline, 177, n188 Robert, 177 sauces, 175, 176 sausage, 138, 145, 147 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 156, 160, 165, n165, n166, n167 Sciorra, Annabella, 129, 133, n136 Sciorra, Joseph, 129, 133, n136 Scott, Campbell, 131, 132, n134 Second Sex, The, 39, see also Beauvoir, Simone de Sendak, Maurice, n326 separate spheres, 71, n80 Sévigné, Madame de, 179-80, 186, n188 sex, 367-68, 371-73, 375-76, 385, 388, 390, 391-92, 397, 402, n404, see also sexuality Sex and the City, 368, 373, 376, 390-91, 402, n404 sexual, see sex and sexuality sexuality, 67, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, n78, n79, n80, 81, see also sex Shaughnessy, Rick, 116, 117, 133, n134 “shoo-fly pie,” 337-38 Shrapnel Academy, The, 3, 12-17 silence, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 10607, 108, 111 Silverstein, Shel, 285-86, 288, 290, 292, 294-95, 298, 302, 303, n304, n306 Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae, 35, 40, n42, see also “The Kitchen” and Vibration Cooking

Index social change, 32, 35-37, see also social transformation and transformation social transformation, 30, 32, 34, 36-37, see also social change and transformation Sollors, Werner, 409, 411, 441, n441, see also consent and descent Sopranos, The, 117, 128-30, n136 soup, 206-09, 212-20, 222, 225-27, 229-30 Indian soup, 207 spicy soup, 227 Southern Food: At Home, on the Road, in History, 27, 39, n40, see also John Egerton Spence, Lewis, 317, 324, n326 spicy soup, 220 spinsterhood, 67 Spitz, Ellen Handler, 287, 290, 298, 303, n304, n306 Spock, Dr. Benjamin, 288, 303 starvation, 266, 267-69, 270, 271, 272, 273 steak, 141, 143, 146, 168, 169-70, 175, 182, 184 Steel, Flora Annie, 216-20, 222-30, 232, n236, n237 Steinbach, Alice, 56-9, 60, 61, 63, 64, n64, see also Without Reservations Sweeney Todd, 84 “Tale of a Basyn,” 320 Tales of a Female Nomad, 56, 58, 63, n65, see also Gelman, Rita Golden Tannahill, Reay, 192, 203, n204 Taxi Driver, 137, 151, n151 terroir, 175, 184 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 226, 230, 232, n237 Theophano, Janet, 132, n135 “There was a poor man of Jamaica,” 321

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Harry has a new vegetable garden, furthermore, just “lettuce and carrots and kohlrabi,” behind the handsome stone house in fashionable Penn Park that Janice and he had bought at the height of his success. Yet this garden, like the other at the Springer house, is an imitation of his’ parents’ vegetable garden long ago,31 and the description of all of these fictional gardens was enriched by Updike’s childhood memories of his own family garden. The Rabbit series abounds in references to Pennsylvania Dutch food, and they grow increasingly ironic, as the overall action advances. In Rabbit, Run, after his first night of love with Ruth, Harry goes out for groceries and brings back, among other things, “a Ma Sweitzer’s shoo-fly pie,”32 suggesting his transference of hearth and home to Ruth’s abode. Surveying his purchases, she notes ironically but mildly, “`You’re kind of a bland eater.’” When Janice’s family clergyman, Jack Eccles, goes to talk to the Angstrom family’s Lutheran minister Fritz Kruppenbach about Rabbit’s infidelity, he encounters a house filled with the heavy smell of roast beef, suggesting serious German eating to accompany Kruppenbach’s rigorous brand of Christianity. The Episcopal Eccleses, by way of contrast, drink tea in the library, and Mrs. Eccles feeds Rabbit Cheerios with his choice of milk or cream,33 ironically commenting on Eccles’ support of Rabbit’s “feel good” brand of religion. In Rabbit Redux, we begin to encounter even more ironic treatment of Rabbit’s ancestral diet: “[I]n these last years several roadside restaurants have begun proclaiming themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch, with giant plaster Amishmen and neon hex signs.”34 Updike’s narrator notes with sharp satire that citizens of Rabbit’s home region are trying “to sell what couldn’t be helped. Making a tourist attraction out of fat-fried food and a diet of dough that would give a pig pimples.”35 While Janice is away having an affair with Charlie Stavros, one of her father’s automobile salesmen, Rabbit is caught up in the social turbulence at the end of the 1960s and plays host to a young, privileged Connecticut dropout, Jill, and a Black Power advocate, Skeeter. Charlie draws Janice temporarily toward Greek food, and Jill brings the dietary ways of the Stonington upper middle class to Harry’s modest home: Her cooking has renewed his taste for life. They have wine now with supper, a California white in a half-gallon jug. And always a salad: salad in Diamond County cuisine tends to be a brother of sauerkraut, fat with creamy dressing, but Jill’s hands serve lettuce in an oily film invisible as health. Where Janice would for dessert offer some doughy goodie from

464 middle age, 56-57 travel, 56-9, 60, 63, 64, n64 writing, 56-57, 63 women’s movement, 2, 410 Woodford, Donna C., 272, 273, 281, n282 Woolf, Virginia, 19, 20, 22, n23, n26, see also Room of One’s Own, A, and Three Guineas Wyvern, 207-08, 218-26, 229-30, 232, n234, n235, n236, n237,

Index see also Kenney-Herbert, Colonel Arthur Robert Yezierska, Anzia, 238, 242, 243, 249-54, 255, 256, n257, n258, see also Bread Givers and Hungry Hearts Zola, Emile, 173-74, n186