Gibbons, Kaye (Vol. 145) - Veronica Makowsky (essay date Winter 1992)
Veronica Makowsky (essay date Winter 1992)
SOURCE: “‘The Only Hard Part Was the Food’: Recipes for Self-Nurture in Kaye Gibbons's Novels,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 30, Nos. 2-3, Winter, 1992, pp. 103-12.
[In the following essay, Makowsky discusses the relationship between food and nurturing in Gibbons's Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman.]
In an article on Katherine Anne Porter's Miranda stories, Kaye Gibbons observes that “Porter's language, for all its superficial simplicity, pulls the reader vertically towards submerged meanings and horizontally backward through time and memories” (“Planes of Language” 74). The same could be said of Gibbons's own novels. The narrators of Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman are relatively uneducated, but their apparently unsophisticated commentary is actually a palimpsest of meanings, drawing the reader through past, present and future. Food, Gibbons's major metaphor...
[The entire page is 5467 words long]
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