American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2016 Research Post 2

Umaymah Shahid

16 November 2016

What’s Up with the Food? 

          A significant portion of Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Susan B. Warner’s The Wide Wide Word, Maria Susana Cummins’ The Lamplighter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin take place within the domestic sphere in the Romance narrative, allowing the reader to catch a glimpse of the bustle of the kitchen and walk away with a whiff of the various smells within the slave cabins and plantation homes. While reading the cooking scenes within these novels, I wondered what role they played within the domestic and slave narrative, in specific, and the Romantic genre overall. Is food merely a convention of the domestic narrative or is it symbolic for something more? Glimpses of women cooking seem to suggest that food not only serves as a means of sustenance, but as an integral part of social change and assembling.

In the Romantic period—both American and European—food was pivotal in determining social hierarchy and jump-starting certain social and political movements within the society. Timothy Morton, in his introduction to the book Cultures of Taste / Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism explores the social and political implications food had within the Romantic period. The type of food one ate, as Morton points out, indicated where in the social hierarchy a certain person stood. For example, the labor class during the Romantic period was surviving on barley or oatmeal bread and potatoes because they were unable to afford basic wheat bread and meat. They demanded “red meat and fine white bread” not only because they desired those items, “but also for respect” (4). Barley or oatmeal bread, and potatoes were a clear sign of poverty and, thus, social shame. When the food riots broke out in the 1790s it was due, largely, to that class demanding wheat, oatmeal, and meat (Booth 87). Nearly fifty food disturbances took place within England (1800-1801), which strongly suggests that this uprising in the lower class was because they were not satisfied with having food fit for animals, but, for their own dignity and respect, wanted food that humans would have the decency of eating. Food, in this instance, meant more than survival: it showed social status.

Just as food was and is an indicator of social hierarchy, it is also “the material embodiment of all kinds of social practices, including the formation of ideology” (Food Studies 1). Vegetarianism was a popular ideological movement in the Romantic era that responded to the commercial capitalism that engulfed society by refraining from showing cruelty towards animals through slaughter (6). Vegetarianism flourished in the Romantic era because it “encouraged a greater environmental awareness,” which was an important aspect of the Romantic period (Morton 5). As food indicated social class, it also bred the popular saying, “you are what you eat,” which seems to have been the crux of vegetarianism. For example, prisons also advocated for vegetarianism as an effective means of pacifying criminals. By restricting wine and animal flesh or food, the prisoners’ “hardened character” would soften. However, what is interesting is that vegetarianism slowly settled “within the rhetoric of bourgeois humanitarianism” because the poor were already vegetarians by their sheer economic situation, yet it was the luxury of the upper class to deprive themselves of meats in order to practice good morals and sympathy for animals (7). As vegetarianism had its social and political implications, refusing to eat sugar was also a movement used by abolitionists to protest against slavery because there was oftentimes a moral correlation between production and consumption. For example, a vegetarian by refusing to consume meat was rejecting ideas of butchery and slaughter, while those who consumed sugar were associated with drinking the blood of slaves (Morton 11). Food, in the Romantic era, proved to be a means of survival, and, more importantly, a social, political, and ideological motivator.

          Romantic writers also used food as a form of outer expression of inner trauma or distress. Diane Hoeveler in her article “‘A Draught of Sweet Poison’: Love, Food, and Wounds in Jane Eyre and Villette” explores the trope of self-starvation prevalent in all of Brontë’s novels as “an outcome of love offered and rejected throughout” and not simply because women are guilty about their bodies or trying to embody the idealized feminine beauty (150). Hoeveler specifically looks into how trauma affects one’s ability to eat and thus stimulating self-starvation. Throughout her novels, Charlotte Brontë used “food imagery to embody her characters’ emotional needs and to cauterize their wounds” (151). In Jane Eyre, Jane resolves, yet is unable, to starve herself to death in order to escape the abuse in her uncle’s home. Once in Lowood, Hoeveler points out that Jane gains no nourishment, and food becomes a means of creating “appropriately submissive middle-class females who will serve the emerging industrialized culture” rather than food being a source of energy and vitality (156). When in the presence of Miss Temple, Jane seems to eat well, and this directly correlates with Hoeveler’s theory that food was an indicator of emotions and trauma. When in traumatic situations, Jane would deprive herself from food, where as when she felt safe she ate. Hoeveler notes that as the romance between Jane and Rochester builds, “the number of blatant references to food, eating, and starvation” decrease while visual and oracular imagery increases (157). This is in part due to the progression of the mind from concern for survival to a more personal and object-driven mind. Similarly, Lucy in Villette starves throughout the novel due to repeated traumatic circumstances. Losing family, a lover, and under the constant watch of the director of the school she teaches at, Lucy, due to her trauma and low station in life, is subject to loss of food. Hoeveler accurately points out that food is also an indicator of social status in Charlotte Brontë’s novel. Seldom do the wealthy suffer from insufficiency in food, whereas the poor and often solitary heroines in the novel are often deprived of food. Thus in Brontë’s novels, food symbolizes loss, trauma, and social status.

          Within the slave narrative food serves two purposes: a necessity for survival and a rebellion against institutionalized dehumanization. Vivian Nun Halloran in her article “Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food” discusses the symbolic significance of African American recipe books in giving culinary ownership to slaves and honoring their life and culture (148). Food cooked by slaves within their own homes and those of their masters was “borne out of oppression, adversity, and necessity” and so cooking becomes a form of emancipation for slaves within their own oppression (151). Halloran brings to light Abby Fisher’s cookbook, the first to be published by an ex-slave. In her cookbook, Abby provides a number of recipes, but what is more interesting is that after she is freed, she forges a new life for her and her family by selling her recipes and helping other ex-slaves begin a new life through cooking. Through cooking Abby freed herself while enslaved and once outside the folds of slavery. Although slaves had access to a handful of ingredients, they “greatly enhanced American cooking” but were not recognized for their contributions because they were slaves (Halloran 153). Abby Fisher and countless other slave cooks have proven that with a few ingredients that were controlled by their masters, the cooks were able to exhibit their creativity and thus the food they made became theirs to possess. On the one hand, the fact that slave food had everything to do with nourishment and survival makes it a part of Realism; on the other hand, that basic necessity for survival coupled with the harmony of the kitchen seems to exemplify the Romantic style of transcending the drab reality.

          Food plays an integral role in Romantic literature in both a literal and symbolic way. The subject of food can be found it all genres and sub-genres and through my research I have discovered that each works with food differently. Romantic poets used food and taste as a way to elevate the mundane and challenge age old poetic formulas; Romantic novelists used food to depict varying emotions such as trauma and satisfaction, while also using it as a means of emancipation and indication of social hierarchy. The reader runs the risk of glossing over food as though something mundane, but in Romantic literature even the mundane has significance, and food has political, social, and anthropological significance within literature. As Jocelyne Kolb states in her book, The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism, “to assume that food is a trivial subject not deserving of attention is to misconstrue the very nature of Romantic aesthetics, where any subject can become a poetic, political, or even revolutionary vehicle, regardless of the setting” (21). Thus the reader can note that in the texts studied throughout the semester, food, though seemingly insignificant, holds more weight than simply what one consumes on a literal level.

Works Cited

Booth, Alan. “Food Riots in the North-West of England 1790-1801.” Past &Amp; Present, no. 77, 1977, pp. 84–107. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/650388.

Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Recipes as Memory Work: Slave Food.” Culture, Theory, and Critique, vol. 53, no. 2, 2012. MLA International Bibliography, doi: 10.1080/14735784.2012.682791.

Hoeveler, Diane. “‘A Draught of Sweet Poison’: Love, Food, and Wounds in Jane Eyre and Villette.” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, vol. 7, 1999, pp. 165-189. MLA International Bibliography, http://icr.byu.edu/prisms/.

Kolb, Jocelyne. The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism. University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Morton, Timothy. “Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic Period.” Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, edited by Timothy Morton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 1-18.

---. "Food Studies in the Romantic Period: (S)mashing History." Romanticism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1-4. Literary Reference Center, http://libproxy.uhcl.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=21657848&site=ehost-live&scope=site.