[In the following essay, the critics explore the prescribed roles for women in Victorian society involving food preparation and food serving, and the ways in which Brontë and Eliot incorporated those roles into their fiction.]

[Cooking] means the knowledge of Medea, and of Circe, and of Calypso, and of Helen, and of Rebekah, and of the Queen of Sheba. It means the knowledge of all herbs, and fruits, and balms, and spices; and of all that is healing and sweet in the fields and groves, and savoury in meats. … [It] means much tasting, and no wasting; it means English thoroughness, and French art, and Arabian hospitality; and it means, in fine, that you are to be perfectly, and always, “ladies”—“loaf givers.”¹

In this advice to his young female pupils John Ruskin, with that combination of blind arrogance and penetrating insight which so often characterizes him, adumbrates the thesis which we will argue in this paper: that Victorian society prescribed for women a variety of roles associated with food (ladies as loaf-givers), and that women were able to convert these roles into a means of empowerment through the forms of privileged knowledge (Medea, Circe, Calypso) and control (Helen, Rebekah, Queen of Sheba) which the roles provided. An examination of the preparation and serving of food in the major novels of the two most prominent women novelists of the period reveals much about the social structure and the position of women in nineteenth-century Britain. We shall demonstrate also the ambivalence which so often characterizes this association of cooking and serving food with women, an ambivalence which carries over into Brontë's and especially Eliot's social philosophy. And we shall go on to show that these prescribed roles gave women the power to assert control over their own lives and the lives of others—a power which often could be a source of liberation, but which at other times could constitute the means for expressing the dark secret of how women direct their anger inward by denying themselves the nourishment they need.

Preparing and serving food often seems the simplest, the humblest of women's work, despite the time and energy and creativity which many have given to it. Perhaps for this reason critics have found it easy to ignore the many ways in which Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot have depicted women engaging in these activities, and they have therefore missed the subtextual commentary which emerges when these subjects are considered.² This essay will try to attune the reader to the muted discourse which the novels reveal. At the same time it will be possible to observe significant differences between Brontë and Eliot, differences which go some way toward defining the characteristic strengths of each.

WITCH OR PRIESTESS?

That both Brontë and Eliot should know about and use food and food preparation in their novels will not surprise those familiar with their personal histories. Charlotte Brontë's years at Haworth were marked by many happy hours in her beloved Tabby's kitchen, as Emily's diaries clearly show,³ and when a reviewer of Jane Eyre objected that “Currer Bell” could not be a woman because “no woman trusses game and garnishes dessert-dishes with the same hands,” an indignant Brontë dismissed “that rather coarse observation” as proof that its author simply did not understand the subject as well as she did.⁴ Similarly, we know of the young Marianne Evans that her household duties at Griff included overseeing the dairy, supervising the kitchen, and making pies, damson cheese, and currant jelly.⁵

Both novelists offer a rich variety of scenes associated with cooking and eating. The reader encounters simple breakfasts of porridge and milk, elaborate breakfasts of ham, potatoes, and pie, Belgian-style breakfasts of stewed pears and tartines. The midday meal can range from sandwiches taken in deserted schoolrooms to elegant luncheons sur l'herbe. Social occasions often focus on a special dinner, from Louis Moore's market-dinner and Arthur Donnithorne's coming-of-age dinner to Gwendolyn Harleth's archery dinner and Mrs. Bretton's Christmas dinner. The more intimate family meal can be as familiar as the milk and bread which Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone share and as elaborate as the Jewish ritual dinner which Daniel Deronda observes in Ezra Cohen's house and as abundant as the Sunday feasts which attract young Martin Yorke. The reader can also find careful and knowledgeable descriptions of the food itself, of Victorian theories of diet, and of disputes about the best way to prepare certain items: the proper way of making café au lait, for example, or whether to use sugar or treacle in the preservation of black cherries, or how much thickening to put in porridge.

But more important than the food and the meals themselves is what they reveal. Both novelists use the serving of food as a device for illuminating the structure of the societies they portray. For example, Mr. Yorke in Shirley (1849) very quickly separates unexpected guests into gentry, who are ushered into the parlor for one kind of food, and men of the lower classes, destined for the kitchen and another kind. Meanwhile Mrs. Yorke calculates the social favor she will bestow on Hortense Moore by agreeing to come and “take tea,” while the curate Mr. Donne stands revealed as no gentleman by his lack of proper table manners. With Middlemarchers like Mrs. Bulstrode who have risen above their class, society gains its revenge by criticizing “her complacency … in light dishes for a supper-party,”⁶ a showiness and temerity incompatible with her position as the wife of a newly-disgraced man. As for the Dodson sisters in St. Ogg's, they believe that for the honor of the family's social position “it was of equal necessity to have the proper pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral.”⁷ Mr. Tulliver remembers that as a boy he had equated the prosperity of their new malt house with a celebratory plum pudding and had assumed his mother would make the pudding every day so their diet could reflect their new, more elevated social position. And Esther Lyon, while she has come to like the cooking odors which permeate the small living quarters she shares with her father, cannot help but reflect on the fact that rich people like the Transomes never have to have that experience and do not understand what it means.

Not surprisingly, both novelists depict a society which assigns the preparing and serving of food almost exclusively to women. Caroline Helstone rages at this limitation and sees it as imposed by patriarchy:

What do [fathers] expect [daughters] to do at home? If you ask,—they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else: a doctrine as reasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook …⁸

Every novel offers illustrations of this duty devolving upon women. Sometimes the responsibility for cooking and serving may fall to someone hired for this purpose: the novels abound in the Hannahs and Lyddys and Mrs. Galeses and Mrs. Fairfaxes who served in every Victorian middle- and upper-class household (and whose hospitality, as Mrs. Gale pointedly observes regarding the curates, was so often abused). But even if most of the preparation fell to someone else, ultimate responsibility for overseeing the cooking and serving still belonged to the wives, mothers, and daughters of the family. If domestic help was not available they were the ones who served instead. In short, cooking and serving sometimes might be linked with class in terms of physical labor, but were always linked with gender in terms of responsibility.

For Brontë no woman escapes this role. Jane Eyre, for example, can protest that women “need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; … and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say they ought to confine themselves to making puddings …” But Jane makes puddings anyway. And at the end of the novel she renews her relationship with Rochester by appearing at his Ferndean retreat in the guise of a woman servant carrying his tray, saying “I must mind not to rise on your hearth with only a glass of water, then: I must bring an egg at the least, to say nothing of fried ham.”⁹ Similarly, Shirley may affect her “Captain” Keeldar role as the emancipated woman who dares do and say what any man would dare do and say, but she still supervises luncheon parties and nurses Louis Moore with grapes and toast. Even Lucy Snowe in Villette (1853) who explicitly denies that she fits the normal Victorian stereotypes for women, finds it natural that Monsieur Paul should require her and the girls to spread butter on fifty rolls while a farm woman makes café au lait for their country outing.

Eliot more frequently portrays women who have little to do with food or its preparation. Maggie Tulliver, Dorothea Brooke, and Gwendolyn Harleth, for example, rarely fix or serve meals. But all of them at one time or another preside at tea, that most essential (it sometimes seems) of an upper-middle-class woman's duties.¹⁰ And for every Maggie, Dorothea, or Gwendolyn in her novels there are dozens of female characters like Lisbeth Bede, who rises early to fix Adam's breakfast and will not believe her day's work is over until she can put out his late supper, and Mrs. Tulliver, who fusses to get Tom's supper and worries if his new school will allow him a second helping of pudding. Even the formidable Mrs. Glegg serves food to her insipid husband and adheres to the Dodson proprieties in “making the cowslip wine, curing the hams, and keeping the bottled gooseberries.”¹¹ Such psychological and social opposites as Rosamond Lydgate and Mrs. Garth share a common lot:

“Have you dined, Tertius? I expected you much earlier,” said Rosamond …

“I have dined. I should like some tea, please,” said Lydgate, curtly, still scowling …

[Mrs. Garth] said, “There you are, Caleb. Have you had your dinner?”

“Oh yes, a good dinner …”¹²

And in Felix Holt (1866) when Esther Lyon, stung by Felix's rebukes of her laziness, wants to prove her accuser wrong, she does so by serving tea to her father and then later preparing his porridge.

On a more ominous note, both Brontë and Eliot show how women's very identities can sometimes be absorbed by their relationship to the food they prepare. Stephen Guest, for example, can declare that Mrs. Tulliver “should be represented by her brandy-cherries and cream-cakes” and that they are “agreeable proxies” for her actual presence;¹³ Mrs. Tulliver's acquiescence in this identification of who she is with what she bakes is shown by the way she sees her pies as extensions of herself. Similarly, Lisbeth Bede, in imagining her future death, assumes the principal effect on Adam will be that she can no longer get his breakfast in the morning, while Mrs. Poyser is astonished anyone in her family would want to see her before “foddering-time.” In Middlemarch (1872) the only characterization given of Miss Noble is the image of her snitching sweets from the table. Mrs. Bretton of Villette has her identity confirmed for Lucy Snowe when she sets out “an English tea whereof … I knew the very seed-cake of peculiar form.”¹⁴ Jane Eyre knows Grace Poole, keeper of the demented Bertha, only by her routine of bringing food trays.

Grace Poole suggests another aspect of women as food-preparers. One of the few visual images of Grace in the novel shows her bending over a saucepan on the fire, stirring a “‘boiling mess’ like a witch out of Macbeth.”¹⁵ George Eliot offers a similar scene in The Mill on the Floss (1860) when Maggie meets an old gypsy woman “poking a skewer into the round kettle that sent forth an odorous steam.” Like the witch of “Hansel and Gretel,” the old woman entices the innocent Maggie to eat: “‘We've got nothing nice for a lady to eat,’ said the old woman, in her coaxing tone. ‘And she's so hungry, sweet little lady.’”¹⁶ Nina Auerbach has reminded us of the frequency and the power of this image of woman-as-demon. Victorian literature, she observes, often evokes the image of women's nature as “broadly demonic rather than fallibly human” because it suggests the deeper belief that “woman is not frailer than man is, but stronger and more powerful.”¹⁷

If cooking sometimes partakes of the demonic, more often in these novels it assumes a quasi-religious, almost sacramental value. Consider, for example, Christmas morning at the Tullivers, with food as the symbol both of renewed hope and of Saturnalian abundance:

The midnight chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of common days; and then there was the smell of hot toast and ale from the kitchen, at the breakfast hour. … The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it had been heroically snatched from the nether fires into which it had been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans …¹⁸

Similarly, Jane Eyre makes cooking a beautiful religion, an “ambition” worthy of a woman's devotion—and worthy too of description in language more commonly associated with religious liturgy:

[T]he two days preceding that on which your sisters are expected will be devoted by Hannah and me to such a beating of eggs, sorting of currants, grating of spices, compounding of Christmas cakes, chopping up of materials for mince pies, and solemnizing of other culinary rites, as words can convey but an inadequate notion of to the uninitiated like you (italics ours).¹⁹

Cooking in sum is a priestly ministry. It has its sacred rites known only to those privy to its secrets. Its priesthood is open to, is in fact reserved almost exclusively for, the sex which has been so pointedly excluded from other priesthoods and positions of power. As Lisbeth Bede mutters, no man could ever master the art of making even a good porridge or oatcake—much less understand its importance in creating an environment within which human beings can thrive.

COOKING AS SELF-EMPOWERMENT

If cooking is sometimes religious and sometimes demonic, what unites these two conceptions is the idea of cooking as a means of empowerment. Through their roles as preparers and servers of food the women in these novels, denied other kinds of influence by a patriarchal society, still gain some measure of control over those with whom they live. More importantly, they also use food to gain control over their own lives, either positively by taking responsibility for their own nourishment, or negatively by using this power to will their own destruction.

One form of control is economic. Patricia Branca has estimated that in mid-century food represented 54 percent of the budget of a typical Victorian middle-class family.²⁰ Supervision of that portion of the budget fell almost exclusively to women and gave them an economic power of no mean significance. Potentially the exercise of that power could offer independence from the control of fathers or husbands, and these novels do show some women who exhibit financial self-sufficiency through their “women's work” associated with food. Mrs. Poyser in Adam Bede, for example, manages her kitchen and her dairy with knowledge and authority. She pronounces ex cathedra on such topics as the amount of milk yielded by shorthorn cows and the ethics of the egg market, and it is clear that the family's substantial income is owing to the way she superintends her work and her workers. Through subordinates Shirley Keeldar exhibits a similar kind of mastery. Economic independence through food-related activities can also manifest itself in less obvious ways, as when women hold bake sales to raise money for projects of their own devising.

But in these novels the most frequently exercised power is social rather than economic: the use of food preparation to stimulate affection and fellowship. Affection in this context means giving food as a sign of love, while fellowship means sharing food as a sign of mutuality.

Brontë more often portrays women using food as affection. In Villette little Polly delights in serving her father:

“Put papa's chair here, and mine near it, between papa and Mrs. Bretton; I must hand his tea. …”

And again, as she intercepted his cup in passing, and would stir the sugar and put in the cream herself, “I always did it for you at home, papa; nobody could do it as well, not even your own self. …”

[H]er father, blind like other parents, seemed … wonderfully soothed by her offices.²¹

Hortense Moore in Shirley expresses her love for her brother by fixing his breakfast plate and then relishing the appetite with which he eats. Meanwhile Miss Ainsley shows her favoritism among the curates by giving little Mr. Sweeting “slices of sponge-cake, and glasses of cowslip or primrose wine”²² while Shirley nurses her secret love with grapes and toast. Jane Eyre, having felt welcomed at Thornfield because Mrs. Fairfax brought her negus and a sandwich, in turn woos little Adèle with chicken and tarts. Related to these gestures of affection is the use of food as consolation: Mrs. Bretton ministers to the lonely Lucy Snowe with tea and toast, for example, and both Helen Burns and Miss Temple bring Jane Eyre special seed-cakes to alleviate her misery at Lowood school.

For Eliot also food can be a means whereby her female characters express their affection. Lisbeth Bede, for example, puts out Adam's supper “in the loving expectation of looking at him while he ate it”²³ and later makes him his favorite kettle-cake, while Mrs. Poyser expresses her appreciation of him by serving the kind of potatoes he likes. Mrs. Tulliver sneaks the hungry Tom an extra portion of supper despite the comparatively barren cupboard which has resulted from the disastrous lawsuit.

But Eliot more frequently than Brontë will depict symbolic moments of the kind described a generation earlier by Jean Brillat-Savarin in his Physiology of Taste (1825). “[A] table,” says Brillat-Savarin, “establishes a kind of tie between two parties to a bargain.”²⁴ This tie constitutes a fellowship of equals created and maintained by the sharing of food. The Mill on the Floss affords numerous examples of such bonds. By the simple gesture of packing Tom and Maggie a food basket for their journey, Mrs. Stelling, the narrator tells us, performs one of those “bare offices of humanity which raises [people] into a bond of loving fellowship.”²⁵ During their childhood Tom brings Maggie a piece of plum-cake:

Maggie's sobs began to subside, and she put out her mouth for the cake and bit a piece; and then Tom bit a piece, just for company, and they ate together and rubbed each other's cheeks and brows and noses together, while they ate, with a humiliating resemblance to two friendly ponies.²⁶

But the next time there is a dessert to share Tom unjustly criticizes Maggie for taking the better half of a jam puff. This deliberate disruption of their fellowship prefigures his later betrayal of Maggie's love, a betrayal which would not be mended until the final flood when brother and sister are at last “one with each other in primitive mortal needs.”²⁷ Just as food can celebrate fellowship, it can also mark its absence. One needs only to remember the scene from Daniel Deronda (1876) of Gwendolyn and Grandcourt dining alone on their yacht, their stony silence at that meal symbolizing their severed relationship and the unbearable tension between them.

More overt forms of control emerge when we examine the feminine subtexts of these novels. Of particular interest is the way female characters use their role as “loaf-giver” to subvert the power structures of a patriarchal society which has prescribed this role for them.

On the simplest level both Eliot and Brontë show women withholding food to control the behavior of men. Aunt Glegg, for example, “can't bear” her husband's disagreement with her views on money matters, so she resigns her duty: “Mr. Glegg, you'll please to order what you like for dinner. I shall have gruel.” When this stratagem fails to move him, she withholds his tea, then responds to his demand for the milk jug by “pouring out the milk with unusual profuseness, as much as to say, if he wanted milk he should have it with a vengeance.”²⁸ Mr. Glegg capitulates almost immediately. Dorothea Brooke, wounded by her husband's suspicions, cancels dinner so that Casaubon “might wonder and be hurt at her message.”²⁹ Mrs. Yorke in Shirley punishes young Martin for missing tea by giving him dry bread instead of muffins. For a similar offense of tardiness Mrs. Bretton of Villette threatens to deprive John Graham of his tea. By contrast we almost never see women withholding food from each other (Mrs. Reed in Jane Eyre is an exception) or men withholding food from women, although men do occasionally use food for disguised aggression, as when John Graham Bretton uses ale to tempt and thus gently taunt Polly.

The giving of food can sometimes be just as controlling a device as the withholding of it. As a child Polly gives the same attention to John Graham at tea-time as she had bestowed on her father, using treats as a way of enkindling his love and thus prefiguring their later attachment:

“What will you have besides tea—what to eat?”

“Anything good. Bring me something particularly nice; that's a kind little woman. …”

She selected a portion of whatever was best on the table. … Graham was shortly after heard lauding her to the skies; promising that, when he had a house of his own, she should be his housekeeper, and perhaps—if she showed culinary genius—his cook …³⁰

Mrs. Caldwallader of Middlemarch believes “It is the same thing, the dinner or the man,”³¹ and exercises the identical kind of firm control over both. Less calculating but no less effective is Lucy Deane, who, we are told, “was fond of feeding dependent creatures, and knew the private tastes of all the animals about the house”—this just moments before we learn that the most manageable of her “animals about the house,” Stephen Guest, had decided “this slim maiden of eighteen was quite the sort of wife a man would not be likely to repent of marrying.”³²

On a deeper level, attitudes toward food and food preparation offer an index by which the reader can judge the male characters in the novels. This judgment of men constitutes an increasingly important dimension of women's empowerment, as we shall see in a moment.

For Brontë the test regarding a male character is simple: can a man at least on occasion relinquish his society-given “rights” and prepare food, especially for a woman? If so, according to Brontë's implicit social philosophy he has an innate goodness and humility which will compensate for his sins, whatever they may be. Thus Robert Moore in Shirley first appears in the novel as a man dismissing his maid so he can make his own supper. Moore's basic simplicity and integrity have been established in the reader's mind and will not be dislodged, whatever stubbornness and folly Moore may exhibit later on. Similarly Mr. Helstone, Caroline's uncle and guardian, appears cold and withdrawn almost to the point of being psychologically abusive. Yet when Caroline falls ill he insists that he can make tea “better than any housewife can”³³ and then patiently nurses her back to health. This “housewifely” side to his nature liberates his tenderness and allows him to show both his love for her and that he “understands nursing.” Young Henry Sympson makes tea when Shirley demurs, an office which seems to suit this favored “poor lame darling” whose description partakes much more of the feminine than the masculine.

In Jane Eyre the heroine arrives, cold, wet, and hungry, at the doorstep of St. John Rivers. Her first image of him is associated with food: “‘[She is] famished, I think. Hannah, is that milk? Give it me, and a piece of bread. … Not too much at first—restrain her … she has had enough.’ And he withdrew the cup of milk and the plate of bread.”³⁴ This observation reveals at once both his generosity and his severity, the very qualities which first attract and then repulse Jane. As for Rochester, his initial unsuitability as a lover is illustrated by his decadent taste for bon bons³⁵ and by the trenchant observation of little Adèle, who when Rochester jests that he will take “mademoiselle [Jane] to the moon,” comments drily, “She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her. … If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you.”³⁶ Rochester's ultimate redemption is signalled by his effort to bring food and wine to a despairing Jane. Although she refuses this first offering and leaves Thornfield, his solicitude regarding food makes the reader aware of his tenderness and his recognition of the enormity of the pain he has inflicted on her.

Finally, in Villette, Lucy Snowe falls in love with M. Paul in part because he seems so liberated from gender roles. He divines Lucy's taste: “How he guessed that I should like a petit pâté à la crème I cannot tell; but he went out and procured me one.”³⁷ Later on he divides a portion of fruit intended by Lucy for his plate and insists that she eat a generous share. And at the end, the depth of their newfound intimacy finds an appropriate symbol in a kind of engagement dinner: Lucy sets out new china and delights in serving M. Paul, while he responds by arranging for the food to be brought in from a nearby restaurant.

This element of Brontë's social philosophy applies to everyone, not just men. Anyone, for example, who ignores conventional class roles regarding cooking or serving food also gains her praise: Caroline Helstone earns her maid's gratitude by helping make coffee in the kitchen, and the Rivers' servant Hannah celebrates her new fellowship with Jane by sticking out her floury hand as the two of them make gooseberry pie. But gender roles seem even harder to break out of than class roles, and part of the muted discourse in Brontë's novels concerns the suitability as marriage partners of those men who are willing to do so.

Eliot develops the same theme, but adds to it her characteristic irony. Middlemarch affords the most interesting example, illustrating as it does Eliot's convictions about the relationship of men and women to their community. Tertius Lydgate, for example, has a commendable lack of social pretension regarding meals: “He would have behaved perfectly at a table where the sauce was served in a jug with the handle off, and he would have remembered nothing about a grand dinner except that a man was there who talked well.”³⁸ The narrator clearly endorses Lydgate's egalitarianism. But this imperviousness to distinctions which are important to almost everyone else in Middlemarch society prefigures the misunderstandings and cross purposes which will dog Lydgate's every step in the hospital affair and result in his financial and social disgrace.

In the case of Fred Vincy, readers can gauge the maturation of his character by observing his changing attitudes toward food. At first he exhibits a “gentlemanly” selfishness about a late breakfast:

“Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Prichard?” said Fred, to the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast; while he walked round the table surveying the ham, potted beef, and other cold remnants, with an air of silent rejection, and polite forbearance from signs of disgust.

“Should you like eggs, sir?”

“Eggs, no! Bring me a grilled bone.”³⁹

Later, thinking of the possibility he might not inherit old Featherstone's money, Fred cannot imagine the “thoroughly unpleasant position” of eating cold mutton. But after undergoing suffering and humiliation and then learning the redemptive value of work, he comes to admire and imitate Caleb Garth, the same Caleb who can say “Oh yes, [I had] a good dinner—cold mutton and I don't know what.”⁴⁰

Among the other male characters in the novel Will Ladislaw exhibits the greatest willingness to flaunt conventional gender roles: he provides gingerbread feasts for children, for example. But this trait Middlemarchers call an “oddity” in Will, part of the evidence for his “dangerously mixed blood and general laxity.”⁴¹ He will pay severely for these social sins, despite the fact that the narrator clearly approves of his unconventionality.⁴²

Eliot, while implicitly endorsing the same destruction of sexual stereotyping as Brontë does, underscores the pain which such disruptions can bring to those who cause them. She makes us aware of the cost attendant upon any movement toward liberation. Yet at the same time her social philosophy, while emphasizing the role of the community as a living organism resistant to abrupt change, still affirms the truth that the liberation of one person, however painful the process, cannot help but loosen bonds for others. Her novels illustrate the truth of Marx's dictum that “every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships.”

For both writers the connection between judging males and female empowerment is subtle but decisive. Our analysis supports Nancy Armstrong's argument that Victorian novels both endorsed and helped to create a “feminized household” and thus exercised enormous political power, a power all the more effective for being concealed. Reading such novels did not merely offer examples of desirable social change, she contends. Rather it caused them to happen: in her words, such reading “initiate[d] the historical transformations.”⁴³ If one accepts Armstrong's thesis, then Brontë's and Eliot's tests for judging male characters assume special importance. To ratify the destruction of a gender stereotype and to broaden the definition of maleness, as we have shown these novelists do, is both to recommend a choice and to help women make it. If in the 1990s current social models for both men and women contain fewer gender restrictions, so that cooking can be seen as no more a woman's work than a man's, the persuasiveness of these models—indeed even their very existence—may be attributed in part to the image of Robert Moore making his own supper or of Will Ladislaw distributing his gingerbread.

COOKING AS SELF-WOUNDING

If giving or withholding food serves as a means of control for women whereby they can gain some measure of governance over the sex and the social structure which oppress them, the darkest undercurrent in these novels has still to be explored: the way this controlling power can be turned inward—in other words, the way women can literally starve themselves. Both Brontë and Eliot depict women victimized by self-hatred, by feelings of unworthiness, and by an anger towards others which they have turned back upon themselves. Both novelists clearly know, long before such terms as anorexia nervosa and bulimia would gain popular currency, that food could be the principal means for this self-destructive reaction to patriarchy—knew that the angel in the house was often ethereal because she was malnourished, and she was malnourished as an enduring sign of the starvation of her opportunities.

Brontë's novels show this self-starvation as taking two forms: either a passive refusal by women to control their own nourishment, or else an active determination to renounce food. Passive refusal occurs, for example, when Miss Temple, the mistress at Jane's school, will not openly oppose Mr. Brocklehurst's policy of semi-starving the orphan girls. Instead she suffers with her pupils, only occasionally smuggling them bread and cheese to supplement particularly wretched meals. In Villette, Lucy will suffer for nine days without solid food while everyone at Mme. Beck's school is away on vacation before she dares go to Père Silas, who ministers to the “deadly famine” in her soul while taking her to Dr. John for physical fortification. Caroline Helstone's severe illness is brought on most directly by the exertion of walking back from Hollow's Cottage, but she had already weakened herself by eating little and allowing herself to decline from the “rounder and rosier” young woman she had been two years before, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have demonstrated the pervasiveness of the hunger motif throughout the depiction of her in the novel.⁴⁴

The willed renunciation of food is more dangerous yet. Feminist psychoanalysts have noted how “throughout history, women's feeding others has been coupled with the necessity of self-denial.”⁴⁵ For a woman to hunger for food is the same as for her to hunger for a future; to renounce food is to renounce a future. “That is why eating seems forbidden and food dangerous,” observes Kim Chernin. “When we eat, we know.”⁴⁶

Brontë's novels offer several characters who illustrate this trait. Jane Eyre as a child thinks that if she starves herself the Reeds will realize how she needs to be fed, emotionally as well as physically. Injustice compels her to summon this “precocious though transitory power; and Resolve, equally wrought up, instigated some strange expedient to achieve escape from insupportable oppression—as … never eating or drinking more, and letting myself die.”⁴⁷ Later on, when she discovers the “insupportable oppression” both of her and of Bertha represented by Rochester's proposal to her while he yet harbors the “madwoman in the attic,” she responds by refusing every bit of food offered to her. Then she steals away in the middle of the night and wanders through fields and hedgerows for three days until, quite literally, she almost starves to death.

Similarly, in Villette little Polly, like Jane, practices self-denial, and refuses to touch the marmalade with what the narrator ironically terms “nice perceptions and delicate instincts.” She also renounces sweets and justifies it by claiming her sex does not deserve them: “One little piece—only for him [John Graham]—as he goes to school: girls—such as me and Miss Snowe—don't need treats, but he would like it.” Later Lucy Snowe takes a position as companion to Miss Marchmont where she deliberately accustoms herself to eat the tiny meals served the invalid. She explains, “I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.”⁴⁸

Not all women in Brontë's novels starve themselves, and the same woman who denies herself in one scene can, as a sign of her growing emancipation and empowerment, reassert control over her own nourishment at a later point in the novel. Jane Eyre realizes that she gets more intellectual nourishment at Lowood than she had received from the abusive Reeds at Gateshead, so despite her hunger she can control her desire to imagine the rich Gateshead supper of hot roast potatoes, white bread, and new milk. As an adult she refuses to let the arrogant guests at Rochester's dinner party annoy her; instead she leaves them in order to create a feast for her little women's circle of Adèle, Sophie, and herself. Later she confronts Rochester with an angry determination to secure her own food:

Do you think I … can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips[?]

… Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong—I have as much soul as you, and full as much heart.⁴⁹

And when she banishes herself from Thornfield and is taken in by the Rivers, she covets a cake of bread because “the wish to have some strength and vigor returned to me as soon as I was amongst my fellow-beings.”⁵⁰

Lucy Snowe also takes crucial steps to better her lot through controlling her own nourishment. She finds the courage to tell M. Paul that she will not starve in a garret while rehearsing for his play, and she avowedly craves both the physical nourishment of butter and biscuits and the spiritual nourishment of friendship which Mrs. Bretton provides. The very act of moving first to London and then to the continent shows her willingness to take charge of her life, and she celebrates her victories by explicitly equating her physical and spiritual hungers:

[M]y spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life. … [It] was years since I had felt such a healthy hunger. … I dined on two dishes—a plain joint, and vegetables.⁵¹

Both appetites earn their satisfaction.

Eliot too recognizes the dark secret of female self-deprivation. Sometimes she only hints at the secret, as when the saucy Rosamond Lydgate threatens not to eat in order to have her own way: “You [her father] would not like me to go into a consumption, as Arabella Hawley did.”⁵² At other times the self-denying strain becomes much more direct. Dinah Morris, we are told, eats only the odds and ends of food left over from other people's plates. Mrs. Poyser claims Dinah eats only “a bit o' sparrow's victual”⁵³ and worries that when she returns to Snowfield, where no family can look after her, she might starve herself. Young Maggie Tulliver, thinking life useless if Tom does not love her, resolves: “Well, then, she would stay up there [in the attic] and starve herself … and then they would all be frightened, and Tom would be sorry.”⁵⁴ While the threat itself is merely comic, the form that the threat takes is revealing. Later on, when the two children are served Aunt Pullet's tea-cakes, Maggie feels she must deny herself and refuse them while Tom, troubled by no such instinct, gobbles them up. Then as a young adult Maggie falls under the spell of Thomas à Kempis and his doctrine of renunciation, imposing on herself as many privations as she can, including food—although fortunately, we are told, her innate physical strength prevents her from suffering long-term effects.

Unlike Brontë, Eliot can portray men denying themselves food. Bulstrode regiments his diet, drinking water and eating thin sandwiches; Will Ladislaw “experiments in ecstasy” by fasting until he faints; Felix Holt prides himself on his willpower: “As for me, I can live on bran porridge. I have the stomach of a rhinoceros. … I'll never marry, though I should have to live on raw turnips to subdue my flesh.”⁵⁵ The difference is that her male characters use food deprivation as a means of increasing their power over others or over their circumstances. (Bulstrode's dieting, we are told, gives him “a vampire's feast in the sense of mastery.”⁵⁶) The women by contrast express a redirecting inwards of an anger which would be focused on the injustice of their lot were it not for the powerful social strictures which inhibit that anger.

Eliot, like Brontë, recognizes that the power to control one's nourishment means the power to control one's life. Dinah Morris, for example, seems to intuit that her sparrow's appetite reflects the restriction of other appetites. Some of these restrictions she has imposed upon herself (e.g., celibacy), some she has not (e.g., her society's distrust of women preachers). In the novel's epilogue, when she has married Adam, borne children, and made peace with both her social and religious communities, in short when she has made the adjustments which Eliot's social philosophy requires, we find that her face is “fuller” and her figure has taken on a more “matronly” form.

As we noted earlier, the preparation and serving of food seems among the simplest, most humble of women's work. But the very plenitude of references to and images associated with food in these novels suggests that we recognize its importance as a way of understanding the characteristic themes of both Brontë and Eliot. For Brontë the most driving concern is psychological: the deep inner torment experienced by unhappy young women who find their present desolate and their future hopelessly restricted. The most natural response to that constriction is anger, and Brontë's novels contain a great deal of direct and sublimated anger. The most fitting image is Rose Yorke's shuttered china closet:

I will not deposit [my talent] in a broken-spouted tea-pot, and shut it up in a china-closet among tea-things. … [L]east of all, mother—(she got up from the floor)—least of all will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be ranged with bread, butter, pasty, and ham on the shelves of the larder.⁵⁷

For Eliot by contrast the most driving concern is social: the sense of alienation experienced by intelligent young women who find themselves torn between what they themselves desire and what those whom they love expect of them. Here the most natural response is sadness, the natural consequence of anger turned inward. The most fitting image is young Maggie Tulliver's repeated attacks of hunger:

[T]his hunger of the heart [is] as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world. … [Tragedy] lies in the conflicts of young souls, hungry for joy, … thirsty for all knowledge. … [E]very rational satisfaction of [their] nature that [they] deny now, will assault [them] like a savage appetite.⁵⁸

Sadly, Maggie's appetite for life can be quieted only by death.

Those images of shuttered closets and spiritual hungers prove to be extraordinarily powerful both in what they describe and what they demand. For individual women in these novels, their work as “loaf-givers” becomes subsumed in the role prescribed for them by their society, and images of closets and hungers speak eloquently of how confining and how malnourishing that role was proving to be. The only proper adjective to describe the plight of a Rose Yorke or a Maggie Tulliver is tragic.

But these novels also move beyond the level of the individual and the anger or sadness her “dark secret” might inspire. They operate as well on the level of society and the constructs by which it organizes and thus understands itself, which is to say they operate on the level of ideology. For Brontë and Eliot, to be a loaf-giver, in other words to undertake work which seems so unimportant, so easily ignored (as indeed it has been), is nevertheless to enact a role of genuine political significance, a significance which extends far beyond the fictional lives depicted in these novels. Both novelists contest the dominant ideology of their day. That ideology posited a binary opposition between the sexes with men and women inhabiting separate spheres because of ineradicable differences, as Mary Poovey and others have shown.⁵⁹ Brontë and Eliot suggest that such opposition is a social construct, and thus a political construct. They accept that cooking and serving food have been women's work historically, and for the present continue to be women's work. At the same time they explicitly deny that such an appropriation of labor is either just or inevitable. To borrow a relevant political distinction, they observe that cooking has been and is women's work de facto. But they repudiate the premise that it is women's work de jure, if we understand “law” here to mean any kind of natural law argument. Loaf-giving emerges in these novels as an undervalued service—undervalued because of its association with women, undervalued because the ideals of affection and fellowship which it embodies and promotes run counter to the aggressive materialism of the dominant ideology. Neither Brontë nor Eliot sees the feminine ideal of a woman preparing a meal or serving at the urn as insidious in and of itself. Rather they call for a broad infusion of this ideal into society as a whole so it becomes part of the norm for men as well as women.

Both Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot, we have argued, destabilize the ideology of their time by demonstrating its consequences and exposing its illogic. Moreover, since ideologies are always in process, to destabilize is also to help create. If contemporary ideology departs from Victorian models, credit given to writers like Brontë and Eliot may not be misplaced. To return to Ruskin, cookery now means the knowledge of Merlin as well as of Medea. A skill worthy of English thoroughness and French art and Arabian hospitality, it stands open—“perfectly, and always”—to “gentlemen” as well as “ladies,” in other words to whoever wishes to serve. And as both the work and the role are redefined, the door can begin to open and the hunger can start to be satisfied.

Notes

1. John Ruskin, “The Ethics of the Dust,” Works, vol. 18, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: Allen, 1905), 298.

2. The significance of hunger in Shirley has of course been given prominence by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 372-398. In addition, Ann A. Carter wrote an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation on “Food, Feasting, and Fasting in the Nineteenth Century British Novel” (University of Wisconsin, 1979), but her anthropological and theological approach differs considerably from ours. As for how the topic of food preparation by women has been ignored, one need only look at Barbara Kanner's otherwise excellent three-volume bibliography on Women in English Social History, 1800-1914 (New York: Garland, 1987, 1988, 1990), where headings are provided for 107 different subjects, including “domestic service” and “artists and craftswomen”—but not including the part of women's work which has been the most constant and which has required the greatest effort.

3. Winifred Gérin, Charlotte Brontë: The Evolution of Genius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 22.

4. Appendix to Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, ed. Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) 798, 804. Subsequent references to Brontë's novels will be page numbers from the appropriate volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of the Brontës under the general editorship of Ian Jack.

5. Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford University Press, 1968), 28.

6. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 731. Subsequent references to Eliot's novels will be to page numbers from the appropriate volume of the Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot under the general editorship of the late Gordon S. Haight, except for Adam Bede, not yet available in the Clarendon and therefore requiring the text of the Standard Edition as made accessible by F. R. Leavis (New York: New American Library, 1961).

7. Eliot, Middlemarch, 239.

8. Brontë, Shirley, 442.

9. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 133, 561.

10. Serving tea seems to be the one duty which all women had to assume, regardless of class or other circumstance. Even for upper-class women the role of “presiding” at tea was inescapable, and training for it could be a source of considerable anxiety for a young girl—witness Caroline Helstone's “speechless panic, the cups shaking in the little hand, the overflowing teapot filled too full from the urn” when she first undertakes this ritual in public (Shirley, 318). Victorian instruction manuals like Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) contain information on the preparation and serving of what she called “a necessary of life.” The image of the woman beside her tea-table is an important part of Victorian iconography.

11. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 38.

12. Eliot, Middlemarch, 577, 814.

13. Eliot, Middlemarch, 321.

14. Brontë, Villette, 247.

15. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 370.

16. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 94, 97.

17. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 108.

18. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 135.

19. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 498-99.

20. Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (Pittsburgh: Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1975), 48.

21. Brontë, Villette, 19.

22. Brontë, Shirley, 303.

23. Eliot, Adam Bede, 51.

24. Jean Authelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, trans. Arthur Mechen (New York: Doubleday, 1926), 37.

25. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 167.

26. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 34.

27. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 456.

28. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 109-110.

29. Eliot, Middlemarch, 417.

30. Brontë, Villette, 29-30.

31. Eliot, Middlemarch, 166.

32. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 325.

33. Brontë, Shirley, 482.

34. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 430.

35. A taste for bon bons seems to have been a frequent mark of male decadence: Arthur Donnithorne's self-centered disregard for what a girl like Hetty might suffer is signalled to the reader by his conclusion that “if he should happen to spoil a woman's existence for her, [he] will make it up to her with expensive bon-bons, packed up and directed by his own hand” (128).

36. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 336.

37. Brontë, Villette, 190.

38. Eliot, Middlemarch, 340.

39. Eliot, Middlemarch, 98.

40. Eliot, Middlemarch, 227, 814.

41. Eliot, Middlemarch, 455.

42. Bartle Massey of Adam Bede provides a perhaps even more interesting example of unconventionality. An avowed misogynist, he paradoxically embodies those feminine traits he so vigorously denounces. Bartle prides himself on his cooking, and it is Bartle who nurses Adam with bread and wine during the crisis of Hetty's imprisonment and trial.

43. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 87.

44. Gilbert and Gubar, 372f.

45. P. E. Garfinkel and D. M. Garner, “Accepting the Symptom: A Feminist Psychoanalytic Treatment of Anorexia Nervosa,” in A Handbook of Psychotherapy for Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia, ed. David M. Garner and Paul E. Garfinkel (New York: Guilford Press, 1985), 86-87.

46. Kim Chernin, Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (New York: Random House, 1987), 180.

47. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 13.

48. Brontë, Villette, 32, 50.

49. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 317.

50. Brontë, Jane Eyre, 401.

51. Brontë, Villette, 64, 66.

52. Eliot, Middlemarch, 345.

53. Eliot, Adam Bede, 448.

54. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 32.

55. Eliot, Felix Holt, 56, 66.

56. Eliot, Middlemarch, 153.

57. Brontë, Shirley, 452.

58. Eliot, Mill on the Floss, 34, 172, 205, 289.

59. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 8.