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
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
viii
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
You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate
ix
CHAPTER FIVE: CONTEMPORARY CUISINE
A. Never the Right Food”: Eating and Alienation in John Updike’s
Rabbit Angstrom Saga............................................................................ 331
RICHARD G. ANDRONE
B.
Food, 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 ................................................. 345
YA-HUI IRENNA CHANG
C. A Marriage made in the Kitchen: Amanda Hesser’s Cooking
for Mr. Latte and Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia as Foodie Romance ..... 367
JESSICA LYN VAN SLOOTEN
D. The Joy of Cooking and Eating: Cultural Hybridity and Female
Empowerment in Oreo and Mona in the Promised Land ........................ 409
WILLIAM DALESSIO
Contributors............................................................................................. 447
Index........................................................................................................ 451
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 ruin─a 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
xii
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
You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate
xiii
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
Mara Reisman
3
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”
4
Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction
environment and set of relationships.8 But, Farber theorizes, while these
idealized relationships reflected the conformity of the suburbs, in reality,
“[t]he differences between men and women were [. . .] magnified in the
new suburbia.”9 She-Devil and The Fat Woman’s Joke highlight these
differences in order to emphasize that the problems of the suburbs were
gender-specific.
In her influential book The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
addresses the role of women, particularly the housewife and mother, in
American life. Within the context of a post-war era, Friedan argues that
the suburban housewife was “the dream image of the young American
woman and the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The
American housewife [was] freed by science and labor-saving appliances
from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her
grandmother.”10 Contemporary women’s magazines, social scientists, and
medical authorities informed American and British women that their lives
were better in fundamental ways from those of their ancestors.
Weldon addresses the very premise of progress when she observes:
“Of course things have improved. They must have. Our life expectancy is
greatly increased.”11 “They must have” raises questions rather than
reassures. Weldon cautions that while women live longer, are well-fed,
and better groomed, these improvements do not guarantee happiness. As
she goes on to note: “with improved health, prosperity, the advent of
contraception and women’s control of her own fertility, comes a new set
of problems.”12 This new set of problems—women’s unhappiness,
depression, and anger—was precisely what Weldon and Friedan were
exposing. They were making women’s problems a subject of discussion
and reform.
In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan maps out the landscape of
women’s discontent. In The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, Weldon
populates this space and gives it a name—Eden Grove. Eden Grove could
be a suburb anywhere, and Weldon comments on this shifting setting in an
interview: “The predicaments of women seem to be universal, in every
culture where you have an enormous, aspiring middle class. A mother of
three is the same anywhere. The geography of The Life and Loves of a
She-Devil is actually the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia, but in
Scandinavia, where the book is selling very well, it’s assumed to be set
there. American readers may assume it’s set in America. And that’s very
good, that’s what I want, really, to illuminate woman’s lot.”13 Despite its
name, woman’s lot in Eden Grove is not edenic.
The protagonist, Ruth, describes the paradise that life in the suburbs
should be:
Mara Reisman
5
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
6
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
Mara Reisman
7
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,
8
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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9
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:
10
Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction
“What are you doing with that butter?” [. . .]
“Don’t be stupid.” She sneered quite visibly, her top lip curling over her
tiny sharp teeth. “How can you make an omelette without butter?”
“I don’t know, but you’ve got to!”
“Then you do it!” She shouted at him.48
Esther throws down the cooking gauntlet. Her bared teeth and her later
comment to Phyllis that her adept cleaning was only a way of irritating
Alan suggest that her offer of the buttery omelette was at least an act of
passive aggression if not a conscious invitation to war. Later, the domestic
becomes a more open war zone. Esther has previously explained to Phyllis
that: “Toast is one of the triumphs of our civilization”49 so when Esther
burns the toast, it is a signal of danger as civilization and domestic
tranquility go up in smoke.50 The burnt toast symbolizes Esther’s
rebellion against her roles of wife and housewife and is a challenge to
Alan’s power.
Esther’s increasing size also challenges Alan’s power and symbolizes
her rebellion against socially prescribed domestic roles. She explains to
Phyllis, “My world is so small. [. . .] Perhaps that’s why I need to be fat.”51
Although Weldon’s novel predates Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue,
Esther’s compulsive eating can be understood in the terms Orbach
presents: “Getting fat [. . .] is a definite and purposeful act; it is a directed,
conscious or unconscious, challenge to sex-role stereotyping and culturally
defined experience of womanhood. [. . . F]at is a feminist issue. Fat is not
about lack of self-control or lack of will power. Fat is about protection,
sex, nurturance, strength, mothering, substance, assertion and rage. It is a
response to the inequality of the sexes.”52 In regaining the weight she
loses on the diet, Esther tries to balance Alan’s power with her weight.
Contemporary reviews focused on Esther’s grotesque physical
appearance and her prominent role in destabilizing her marriage.53 In
“Neither Loved Nor Lynched,” Christopher Wordsworth uses Esther’s
weight to emphasize her lack of femininity. He writes: “Munching her
way through mountains of tinned and instant food Esther Sussman—too
short of breath to hiss her own name—has put on glissades of chins and a
midriff like the Michelin Man.”54 Shapeless and gluttonous, Esther is
further defeminized by Wordsworth’s contention that she has “abandoned”
her marriage. Later in Wordsworth’s review, Esther’s actions are
described as a “defection.”55 Both words suggest that Esther—rather than
her husband “nibbling his secretary”—is to blame for the failed
marriage.56 Not only is Esther culpable for the marriage’s demise, she is
also guilty of challenging and diminishing Alan’s masculinity.
Wordsworth describes Esther and Alan’s reunion using the language of
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11
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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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction
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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13
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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Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction
By bringing the discussion of warfare down to the level of everyday
experience, the narrator tries to teach the reader a lesson in ethics and
responsibility: while war may be an extraordinary event, its causes are
ordinary.
Weldon appeals to the sensibilities of the “gentle reader” in order to
make her point about war. But she quickly corrects herself:
Gentle reader! What have I said? You are no more gentle than I am. I
apologize for insulting you. You are as ferocious as anyone else. The
notion that the reader is gentle is very bad for both readers and writers—
and the latter do tend to encourage the former in this belief. We all believe
ourselves to be, more or less, well intentioned, nice—goodies in fact,
whether we’re the greengrocer or the Shah of Shahs. But we can’t possibly
be, or how would the world have got into the state it’s in? Who but
ourselves are doing this to ourselves?77
Not only does Weldon strip the reader of her “gentle reader” designation,
but she continues to strip the reader of her gentle self-image as she helps
the reader gain self-knowledge. In an interview, Weldon describes this
process: “The passage from innocence to knowledge is the way you pass
from believing yourself to be good and nice, to discovering that you are
not.”78 Our discovery that we are not as nice as we think we are leads to
the recognition that we are complicit in the history of warfare. In other
words, once we learn that we are not gentle, we also learn that we are
culpable. “It is a process of moral clarification and reduction to basic
issues, chief among these being the link between personal conduct and
mass violence,” observes Mary Flanagan. “Her [Weldon’s] conclusion is
that the least common denominator is and will remain human
relationships. In which case she places the blame squarely where it
belongs—on everyone.”79
The reader must also recognize the link between seemingly innocuous
behavior and the oppression of others. The lack of politeness to those
serving the meal by those eating it fuels the revolution downstairs.
Particularly to their peril, the diners ignore the servant Acorn, who
overhears Shirley worrying about her dog, Harry Peacebarker, being taken
care of by servants: “I hope he’s all right down there with the servants.
You know what these people are. Some of them actually eat dog!”80
Shirley’s smug lack of concern that the servants overhear her contempt for
other cultures is the catalyst for war: “It was unfortunate that just as she
expressed her fear that Peacebarker would be eaten, Acorn was bending
over her right shoulder serving the cranberry jelly which went with the
caribou patty (and how rubily red and rich it looked, rather like congealed
Mara Reisman
15
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
16
Food Fight: War and Domesticity in Fay Weldon's Fiction
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