Le goût [du peuple] est amor fati, choix du destin, mais un choix forcé, produit par des conditions d'existence qui, en excluant comme pure rêverie tout autre possible, ne laissent d'autre choix que le goût du nécessaire.

(Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique social du jugement)

Ce sont mes parents, les miens, et je les vois bâfrer avec vulgarité, sans pudeur, leur seul plaisir, comme les clients, manger. Ils sont faits comme ça.

(Annie Ernaux, Les armoires vides)

Sisyphe de son rocher qu'il remonte sans cesse, ça au moins quelle gueule, un homme sur une montagne qui se découpe dans le ciel, une femme dans sa cuisine jetant trois cent soixante-cinq fois par an du beurre dans la poêle, ni beau ni absurde.

(Annie Ernaux, La femme gelée)

The determinist theories of the twentieth-century sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, largely gathered in his massive volume, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement, find particular resonance in the novels of Annie Ernaux. For Bourdieu, a disposition towards what he calls high or legitimate cultural practice lies in the controlling hands of the upper classes. The working class, deprived, for economic, social and historic reasons, of an elitist educational formation and, characteristically, of a family inherited commitment to high cultural awareness and aesthetic appreciation, find themselves socially disadvantaged, dispossessed of a cultural attitude, even bereft of cultural goods. If the present French educational system, moulded from the ideals of the Revolution, has worked in principle towards offering equal opportunity for cultural acquisition, Bourdieu's solid sociological evidence undertakes to show that, unhappily, this has not proved to be so. In one significant section of his survey that pre-empts Barthes's seminal essays on the culturally distinctive nature of culinary codes,¹ he claims that the very food we eat is a manifestation of our social condition and that gastronomic habits, like educational attainment, are exemplary indicators of the hierarchical social differences that continue to separate the “classes dominantes” from the “classes dominées.”

The role of food as class-defining is a persistent preoccupation in Annie Ernaux's Les armoires vides and La femme gelée.² Both novels, fictionalised accounts of the author's upbringing in Yvetot in Normandy, differentiate upper- and lower-class provincial societal values by persistent references to conflicting gustatory mores and codes. In both, Ernaux's clever heroines rise from working-class origins—the parents' livelihood comes from their café-épicerie—through to an adolescence marked by academic success and earned placements in bourgeois schools. Yet, in both, attempts at social migration and bourgeois acceptance falter, not merely because upper-class cultural capital is reluctantly conferred by its elect upon others, but also because ingrained lower-class manners are presented as difficult to lose. In Les armoires vides, the story of a university student who recalls her past while undergoing an abortion after a disastrous relationship with a young bourgeois snob, the question of social inequality is problematised as Ernaux explores the types of frictions engendered by incompatible gastronomic customs and rules. In La femme gelée, what is initially a recasting of the same story, told from the anonymous heroine's first-person point of view, eventually becomes a discourse on the oppressions of marriage and motherhood as the author takes to task the frustrations of the feminine identity as circumscribed by her traditional role as the giver of food.

In Les armoires vides the empty cupboards of the title signal the author's obsession with working-class impoverishment, and metonymically establish social deprivation as one of the book's key themes. As the mature heroine is emptied of her unwanted child by her abortion, she recalls the paucity of wares in her parents' shop with dismay. In Ernaux's frequent evocations of the middle- and lower-class diet, it is the former that is associated with wealth and leisure, and the latter with basic consumption and struggling to pay one's way. Whole sequences devoted to the heroine's family business construct a portrait of the physically exhausting rhythm of the petit commerçant's day: the supplying of plain provisions, the exchange of small money and goods, the unrelenting catering to clients' alimentary needs. While the young protagonist plays under the counter of the mother's grocery amidst sacks of staple products: retail biscuits, lentils, sugar, salt and oil, the father serves tinned cassoulet and cheap wine in his bistro to local bingers, factory workers and uncouth youths. Typically, in the Ernaux novel, lower-class food is distinguished as either common pleasure or commodity; it is a measure of taste as curbed by social rank and economic means. The middle-class is identified with the professions and easy living, the lower-class with trade and toil. Adequacy and affluence are the social extremes around which much of the food thematic of Les armoires vides and La femme gelée revolves. Of the wares in the family shop the young Denise, Ernaux's alter ego, laments: “y'a jamais rien chez nous de ce que veulent les gens chic. C'est pas une épicerie fine” (AV [Les armoires vides] 98).

Taking into account their autobiographical inspiration, both Les armoires vides and La femme gelée can be read as the young author's angry reaction to her inherited social role. In both, the fictionalised parents, despite their industry, are blamed for having chosen a “métier dégoûtant” (AV 102). Against the backdrop of the modest café-shop, insistent comparisons are drawn between the life-styles of the rich and the poor. It is not only what Ernaux's characters eat that defines them socially; where they choose to eat, too, reflects differences in codes of work and play. Denise, Ernaux's mouthpiece, is ashamed to bring her bourgeois friends to her family's “boutiquette de quartier” (AV 98). In a revealing passage the author pits her protagonist's dream of social amelioration against the reality of her common lot. Denise feels her parents could have owned “un de ces beaux cafés du centre, où s'arrêtent les cars de touristes, où les jeunes gens du collège, les secrétaires boivent un Vittel-délices ou un crème, des banquettes, des glaces, un percolateur,” or else “une de ces belles épiceries qui s'appelaient la Coop, le Familistère, bien rangées, avec des comptoirs blancs, des frigidaires pour le lait et les yaourts” (AV 103). Instead, she says, “on vend à boire et à manger, et tout un tas de foutaises, en vrac dans un coin” (AV 103), indeed, “tout ce qu'il y a de plus ordinaire, du vin d'Algérie, le pâté en bloc d'un kilo, des biscuits au détail” (AV 102). In effect, in having her character defer to elitism, Ernaux supposes the validity of gastro-signs of class difference: that bourgeois taste is trendy and particular; that the working class appetite is served by bulk; that eating in the up-market centre has a fashionableness with which the out-of-town location cannot compete; that there are those, the favoured, who are, as it were, “in,” and those, the disfavoured, who are “out.” For Ernaux, mobility between classes is in essence difficult to attain. Denise finds herself chained to her milieu and her local environment. “Ligotée,” she says “… la fille de l'épicière et du cafetier, coincée entre l'alignement de mangeaille d'un côté, de l'autre les chaises remplies de bonhommes qui s'affalent autour de la table” (AV 101).

Food and meals serve as a crucial index of the protagonists' changing desires and fortunes in Les armoires vides and La femme gelée. They also betray the author's distinction between what Bourdieu terms the proletarian goût de nécessité and the bourgeois goût de luxe (Bourdieu 195). Both books recount the narrator's growth from an idyllic childhood through to puberty and the disillusionments of adulthood. In the early pages of Les armoires vides Ernaux pays attention to the innocence of her young protagonist who thrives on the produce of the family shop, unaware of the gastronomies of the outside world. For the young Denise the home cupboards are full; the grocery is a gourmand's Aladdin's cave. In a key episode, the child ranges indiscriminately through the mother's wares, tasting and touching at will: “mottes de beurre,” “lamelles de fromage,” “[cuillères de] moutarde,” “cubes de viandox” “bananes,” “oranges,” “cerises confites” (AV 31). Smells, tastes and colours convey the protagonist's hedonistic juvenile appetite. Yet, compared with Ernaux's descriptions of the bourgeois table, the list strikes as a telling inventory of the modest delights of the poor man's diet. Moreover there is something mildly vulgar and unbefitting in the jumble of foods the heroine prods and eats. The more the author defines food as raw pleasure in her reconstruction of childhood, the more bourgeois gustatory refinement is thrown into relief.

Within the trajectory of their episodic and largely linear narratives, both Les armoires vides and La femme gelée describe a bitter coming of age. In Les armoires vides chinks appear early in what Denise had first perceived as the unchallengeable armour of her family's locally held esteem. Repeatedly in the book, events related to eating show that social breeding is borne out not only by what is eaten, but how and where it is shared. Landmark events in the heroine's upbringing are vividly brought to trial in scenes where the manners of social intercourse are seen to fall short of those of the middle-class. In the sequence describing the heroine's first communion the breakfast augurs well with its menu of salmon and chicken served in the parental café. Yet the occasion, marred by the invitees' crass behaviour, offers a negative portrait of encoded lower-class festive traits. The guests are impolite, their manners boorish, the children fight with a mustard spoon, staining the heroine's white dress. Ernaux's preoccupation with upper-class propriety is foregrounded by the young protagonist's regrets: “J'avais pensé que ça ressemblerait aux réceptions des gens bien. La journée était à moitié et je voyais que ça ne tournait pas comme prévu. Le repas était trop long. Ma mère gueulait, plus fort que tout le monde” (AV 88-89).

Good and bad manners are in fact much commented on in Ernaux's two books. Indeed, where a certain standard of etiquette is not met, the heroines invariably report feelings of disgust (dé-goût). Ernaux's recurrent choice of words for working-class eating (“bouffer,” “se bourrer,” “bâfrer,” “gober,” for example) emphasise the partaking of food as feeding rather than savouring. The lower-class act of eating as appeasing hunger is distanced from the perceived seemly upper-class practice of eating to socialise. In the Lesur household “on mange la bouche ouverte” (AV 108), “le nez dans l'assiette” (AV 114). “Quand c'est bon, du poulet, des gâteaux à la crème” says Denise of her parents, “ils plongent, ils écartent les bras, ils aspirent, ils ne se parlent pas. Les bouchées passent et repassent avec la langue, un bon coup pour enfoncer, le petit soupir d'aise … Ma mère ramone ses gencives de l'index” (AV 114). One can of course suppose that the lower class eats lustily because it is nourishment well warranted after a hard day's work, whereas the rich, with their regular life-styles have the time to linger, appreciate and digest. Yet such passages also reveal Ernaux's sensitivity to the culturally exclusive nature of gastronmic rites. In her heroines' search for a new elevated role in society, lower class manners are seen as barriers to success. Denise longs to replace her parents' “précipitation,” “débordement,” “bruits de nourriture” (AV 115), by bourgeois gentility. The dream is to “manger du bout des dents,” like “[les] dames des salons de thé aux gestes raccourcis” (AV 115).

The problems Ernaux encounters in representing the working-class favourably create tensions in Les armoires vides and La femme gelée, the social significance of which is not resolved. The heroines of both novels habitually express feelings of physical cumbersomeness, of bodily weight, that contrast with the apparent lightness of being of the bourgeois state. Ernaux's working-class characters simply do not have the grace and delicacy which seem to belong so naturally to the middle-class. Denise repeatedly refers to herself as “lourde” and “poisseuse” (AV 61), as she compares her “grossièreté” (AV 61) to her school friends' “facilité du corps et des mouvements” (126). Indeed, heaviness is presented throughout the novels as an unprepossessing proletarian trait, all the more so since it appears as much apparent in demeanour and presence as in the quality of the spoken language and of the language of food. Lower-class family meals are consistently portrayed as stodgy and bland. Whereas Ernaux's heroines are brought up on a diet of noodles, potatoes, bread and tinned peas, the middle-class characters consume freshly washed strawberries, cakes and hand-whipped mayonnaise. In training herself to become the ideal bourgeois woman, the protagonist of La femme gelée undertakes to master the art of the mousse au chocolat and, when married, to produce the fluffiest of meals: the soufflé. For Ernaux a cultural chasm exists between the roughness of the lower-class diet and the finesse of the bourgeois palate, just as it exists in the way words are differently employed. Her milieu, notes the heroine of Les armoires vides, uses “des paroles grasses, grosses, bien appuyées, qui s'enfoncent dans le ventre” (AV 77); her family's conversations are peppered with patois idioms and “gros mots” (FG [La femme gelée] 60), with “phrases courtes et épaisses” (AV 45); the rich, however, speak “un langage bizarre, délicat, sans épaisseur, bien rangé” (AV 77) that singles them out as belonging to “un monde plus beau, plus pur” (AV 77); bourgeois women, paragons of elegance and discretion, never use “un mot plus haut que l'autre” (AV 96). Ernaux labours the point. For the young Denise the only viable escape from the weightiness of food and indeed of the language of her class is in the realm of magazines and books. “Les livres,” she says, “ne me reprochent rien, la vie claire et transparente de mes héroïnes ne me ramène pas à mes vols de nougat” (AV 80). “Je déguste ma tartine, mais elle s'est changée en poulet froide, celui de la villa des Iris Bleues et j'ai soif des rafraîchissements de mon héroïne” (AV 79). It is, then, in the imagination, rather than in reality, that Denise transcends her lot.

In portraying conflicting social attributes, Ernaux comes to express overall apprehensions about the possibility of changing class. It is not just heaviness that distinguishes proletarian food as in bad taste; whole distinctions about where it is prepared and served identify class comportments with domestic spaces that are worlds apart; in both novels the kitchen bespeaks the passage of daily grime and grind; it lacks airiness and privacy; rather it is disorganised and cramped; the heroine of Les armoires vides regrets her “cuisine coincée entre le café et l'épicierie” (AV 109), “la table couverte d'une toile cirée” (AV 109), “l'évier rempli de vaisselle ou de la cuvette des débarbouillages [de son père]” (AV 109) It is the thoroughfare through which the mother lugs stored goods from the cellar to the shop and where, in the evenings, the parents discuss the day's earnings around a table littered with soup dishes, accounts and bits of bread; if Denise is asked to describe it in a school essay she prefers to invent one modelled on the magazine ones about which she has read; the bourgeois kitchen, on the other hand exudes all the virtues that the protagonist associates with upper-class “aisance”: it is clean, well-equipped, neat and pristine white; it reflects the ordered life-style of privileged women who don't work, who have a salle à manger and the time to concoct dishes in the hygienic environment of a “cuisine miroitante” (FG 60). “Silence, lumière. Propreté” (FG 61) distinguish the upper-class kitchen from the “salété” of its lower-class counterpart. In striving to improve her social standing the growing Denise Lesur longs to attain what she sees as bourgeois spotlessness. “La blancheur d'un frigo, de jolis casiers, le propre, le médical presque, j'aurais aimé … pour faire oublier qu'on vendait du sel, du café” (AV 109).

For Ernaux not only is domestic space class-specific; gender roles, too, are portrayed as class-entrenched. Economic pressures, she shows, can cause the conventional functions of nurturer and provider to be reversed. In both books the rich carry out traditionally defined feminine and masculine duties; the poor do what makes ends meet. It is the heroine's father who prepares the meals, peels the vegetables and does the washing up. Except for special occasions, “la cuisine, c'est son affaire à lui” (FG 23); it is the tenacious, resourceful mother who mans the shop and takes charge of the accounts. For the young heroine of La femme gelée the sexually distinct notions of “virilité” and “féminité” (FG 32) are of no account. Yet later in her story, and in the wake of her bourgeois initiation, she deplores what she sees as her parents' embarrassing difference. The mother, she remarks, does not fit the magazine stereotype of “des maîtresses de maison qui mijotent de bons petits plats dans les intérieurs coquets” (FG 60). When a friend derisively comments on the father mashing the potatoes at her home she feels a loss of face: “la gentillesse de mon père se transforme en faiblesse, le dynamisme de ma mère en port de culotte” (FG 75).

It is ultimately the question of the woman as “nourricière” that bothers Ernaux in the latter part of La femme gelée. Her heroine, once married and integrated into an ostensibly better class, finds that the suppositions she held concerning conjugal equality and social improvement were false. Not only does she find herself lacking in culinary skills, being but “une intellectuelle paumée incapable de casser un oeuf proprement” (FG 131); her new class, she discovers, expects that she assume responsibility for her husband's (and eventually children's) nourishment, even as she completes her studies and takes up a job in a local high-school. Ernaux's novel, then, comes to give vent to some strongly felt feminist resentments, and ones in which food plays a directive role. It is the so-called liberation of the twentieth-century bourgeois woman that is finally seen as at risk. For Ernaux's heroine the ascension from educated student to educated wife incurs a loss of sense of individual self. Far from finding her new station fulfilling, she finds that she abhors the domestic tasks she must undertake, especially those that require her to take charge of the family's sustenance. She becomes (unfairly, she believes, in the light of her thwarted dream of shared marital rights) “la nourricière, sans [se] plaindre” (FG 132), “la gardienne du foyer, la prédisposée à la subsistance des êtres” (FG 148). Nowhere has Ernaux so thoroughly exposed the hidden drudgery of the modern woman's condition, nor so clearly rearticulated Simone de Beauvoir's assertions of feminine oppression, as expressed in Le Deuxième Sexe.

The conclusion of La femme gelée reads as a woman's fall from a briefly acquired state of grace. The possibility of bourgeois perfection is questioned and lost. The effortlessness with which the mother-in-law whips up little delicacies underlines the heroine's failure to be a successful wife. The food of early childhood is regretted (“Fini la nourriture-décor de [l'] enfance, les boîtes de conserves en quinconce …”, FG 131); the food of bourgeois adulthood (“la nourriture corvée,” FG 131) is associated with subjugation and fatigue. Ultimately Ernaux insists on the bourgeois home as a sterile and lonely feminine place. The “table dressée” (FG 151), the “cuisinière nickelle” (FG 152), the “frigo lumineux” (FG 153), far from representing a purity of life style, are judged to be part of “un système aseptisé” (FG 161) in which men play no active part. Of the conjugal couple it is the heroine who is “la seule à devoir tâtonner, combien de temps un poulet, est-ce qu'on enlève les pépins des concombres, la seule a [se] plonger dans un livre de cuisine, à éplucher des carottes” (FG 130).

Examined together, Les armoires vides and La femme gelée cast doubts on the possibility of achieving social integration by personal efforts at betterment. In each, the heroines come to feel uneasy not only with their own kind, whose life ambitions they surpass, but also with the class to which they aspire, since the acquisition of acceptable upper-class social skills is difficult to effect, all the more so that it is resisted by those who enjoy its fruits from birth. Besides, in La femme gelée gender equality in the upper echelons of society is portrayed as more myth than fact. Even within the upper-class system of economic prosperity women have not necessarily earned independence. One can conclude, then, that there is a certain pessimism on Ernaux's part. Within the context of twentieth-century democratic France, Ernaux exhibits concerns for the fair distribution of cultural knowledge; her socioculturally imbued narratives, informed by personal experience and explored in fictional depth, expose the negative consequences of lower-class marginalisation and bourgeois exclusiveness. It is only later in the overtly autobiographical La place (1983) and Une femme (1984) that the mature author seeks to come to terms with her roots. There, without ever straying from her exposure of class inequalities, she undertakes to redefine her parents' cultural worth, not so much by unfair comparisons with upper class advantage than by reassessments of the validity of their endeavours as plucky members of their class.

Notes

1. R. Barthes, Mythologies, “Le Vin et le lait,” pp. 74-77; “Le Biftek et les frites,” pp. 77-79; “Cuisine ornementale,” pp. 128-130.

2. Future references to these texts will appear in brackets as AV and FG.

Works Cited

D. Fernandez-Recatala, Annie Ernaux (Monaco: Editions du Rocher, 1994)

J. Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

B. Rigby, Popular Culture in Modern France: A Study of Cultural Discourse (London: Routledge, 1991)

D. Robbins, The Work of Pierre Bourdieu (Buckingham: Open University Press, Milton Keynes, 1999)

Marie-France Savéan, “La place” et “Une femme” d'Annie Ernaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)

Claire-Lise Tondeur, Annie Ernaux ou l'exil intérieur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)

P. Bourdieu, La Distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Les Editions de minuit, 1979)

R. Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957)