Table Of ContentSpilling the beans
Spilling the beans
Eating, cooking, reading and writing
in British women’s fiction,
1770–1830
Sarah Moss
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively
by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © Sarah Moss 2009
The right of Sarah Moss to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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First published 2009
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Contents
Acknowledgements Page vi
Introduction 1
1 Eating her words
The politics of commensality in Frances Burney’s
fiction and letters 44
2 The maternal aliment
Feeding daughters in the works of
Mary Wollstonecraft 82
3 The bill of fare
The politics of food in Maria Edgeworth’s
children’s fiction 122
4 Eating for Britain
Food, family and national identity in
Susan Ferrier’s fiction 160
Afterword 191
Bibliography 193
Index 202
Acknowledgements
I began work on this book as the Randall McIver Research Fellow at
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and I thank the trustees and the fellows
for their support. In Oxford, Lucy Newlyn offered useful advice
on my earliest ideas, and the Women’s History Group gave me a
friendly forum for thinking aloud. Rebecca Park helped me refine
my ideas about gender and consumption from a perspective new to
a literary critic as well as offering invaluable fellowship in the early
days of combining motherhood and scholarship.
This book’s greatest and most pleasurable debts were acquired in
the School of English at the University of Kent. I cannot adequately
thank Jennie Batchelor for her endless generosity with her time,
which is short, and her expertise, which is great. Rod Edmond
provided support which made me feel able to combine new profes-
sional and domestic commitments with ongoing research, and
Scarlett Thomas, Jennie Batchelor and David Stirrup in particular
provided an environment of sociable scholarship in which anything
is possible. Nicki Humble, Sinead Mooney, Debbie Lee, Alec
Badenoch and the students on my Food and Literature courses have
helped to shape my ideas. I am particularly grateful to everyone at
Manchester University Press for good humour combined with intel-
lectual thoroughness.
I would like to thank Mary Eminson for showing me that it is
possible and useful to apply one’s intelligence to what happens
at the table, and my parents for abundant opportunities to do
so. I thank Anthony Maude, without whose support this kind of
productivity would be unthinkable, and Max and Tobias, whose
intellectual curiosity is a constant inspiration. This book is for them,
and in loving memory of Irene Gummersall and her opportunities,
missed and taken.
Introduction
Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at a woman’s breast.1
— Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
[T]he power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth
to produce subsistence for man.2
— Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population
I began with the idea that there are, essentially, two ways in which
we might understand food in literary texts. The first, for the last
century informed by psychoanalysis, sees food as a manifestation of
love, a confirmation (which may be self-administered) that the eater
is deserving. Eating, in this reading, is a way of both constructing
and imagining a ‘subjectivity’ that has become steadily more prob-
lematic over the last thirty years of literary theory.3 It is in this tradi-
tion that recent scholarship on Romanticism and food has tended to
work, attending to the bodies in the poems of Wordsworth, Keats,
Byron and Shelley in ways shaped by psychoanalysis and decon-
struction.4 The second, developed from social contract theories of
1 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. James Strachey et al.), vol. iv (London:
Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 204.
2 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985),
p. 71.
3 See in particular Jacques Derrida, ‘ “Il faut bien manger” ou le calcul du sujet’, in Points de
suspension: entretiens (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1992).
4 See Timothy Morton (ed.), Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism (New
York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and Denise Gigante, Taste: A literary
history (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2005).
2 Spilling the beans
the eighteenth century via Karl Marx, understands food as a basis of
economics, the fundamental reason why people labour, and in this
tradition we might find recent historicist work on ‘consumption’ that
is, interestingly, rarely literal.5
Like all the best binary oppositions, of course, this neat alignment
of Freud/Marx, deconstruction/historicism, Romanticism/long eight-
eenth century, opens up on closer inspection. In The Interpretation
of Dreams, Freud recounts a dream of his own, in which ‘tired and
hungry after a journey … the major vital needs began to announce
their presence in my sleep’:
I went into a kitchen in search of some pudding. Three women were standing
in it; one of them was the hostess of the inn and was twisting something about
in her hand, as though she was making Knödel [dumplings]. She answered
that I must wait until she was ready …
When I began analysing this dream, I thought quite unexpectedly of
the first novel I ever read … The hero went mad and kept calling out the
names of the three women who had brought the greatest happiness and
sorrow into his life. One of these names was Pelagie … In connection with
the three women I thought of the three Fates who spin the destiny of man,
and I knew that one of the women – the inn-hostess in the dream – was
the mother who gives life and furthermore (as in my own case) gives the
living creature its first nourishment. Love and hunger, I reflected, meet at
a woman’s breast.6
Freud goes on to associate the movement his mother made rubbing
her hands together to shape Knödel (dumplings) with the move-
ment she made to produce by friction ‘the blackish scales of epider-
mis … as a proof that we were made of earth’. The professor who
taught Freud about the epidermis had had his work plagiarised
by a man called Knodl. The dream-work connects Knodl the man
with Knödel the dumpling and Pelagie the fictional heroine with
the actual villainy of plagiarism. But Freud’s analysis connects the
pleasures of reading with the gratification of eating, and women’s
manufacture of food with the dust to which we shall all return. The
woman’s body makes milk, and her hands make food, in exactly
the same way as they make dead bodies. ‘Giving life’, as we know,
5 See particularly Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and
Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and
Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000).
6 Freud, ‘On the Material and Sources of Dreams’, in Interpretation of Dreams, Standard
Works, vol. iv, p. 204.
Introduction 3
is also ‘giving death’. So far, so Kristevan. But Freud, who often
discusses wet-nurses and mothers as if they were interchange-
able, elsewhere remarks that the breast is to the baby as an inn is
to a (male) adult. From the perspective of recent work on gender
and economic productivity in the late eighteenth century, it clear
that part of what is repressed in the announcement that ‘love and
hunger meet at a woman’s breast’ is the economic. The inn-hostess,
like the wet-nurse, does not ‘give’ life but ‘sells’ it. In some cases, it is
not love, or not only love, and hunger that meet at the breast. Money is
there too.
And yet the ‘opposite’ approach to the meanings of food also
contains its own contradiction. In Two Treatises of Government, John
Locke sets out eating as the basis of work and ownership of food as
the model for all other, subsequent, kinds of ownership. Food, here,
is money rather than love, even if, as Locke implies, the presence of
raw material is the sign of divine love for humanity. Locke writes,
Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet
every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right
to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may
say, are properly his …
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the
apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated
them to himself. Nobody can deny but that the nourishment is his. I ask
then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he eat?
or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked
them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing
else could.7
Consumption, here, seems to be a form of production. Eating makes
property. Paul Youngquist comments in his essay on ‘Romantic
Dietetics’ that for Locke, ‘Eating is the epitome of human agency
both because it requires work and because that work is trans-
formative … The agency of eating transforms common matter into
personal property, giving all men a property in their own person.’8
The act of incorporation is indeed the basis of ownership here, but
it is not in fact eating but ‘gathering’ that constitutes the legitimate
taking of possession. One can, as Locke goes on to explain, feed
another person. ‘Children or servants’ may share in ‘the meat, which
their master or father had provided for them’, but ‘Though the water
7 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. C. B. McPherson (Indianapolis and
Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 237.
8 Paul Youngquist, ‘Romantic Dietetics’, in Morton (ed.), Cultures of Taste, p. 241.
