Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century Women Writers (review)

Early in her study of modernist representations of eating, mealtimes, and the socio-cultural semiotics of 'dinner,' Diane McGee cites Roland Barthes's claim that 'One could say that an entire "world" (social environment) is present in and signified by food'; food, Barthes argues, is 'a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.' McGee's book then goes on to delineate a number of instances in early twentieth-century literature where meals not only intersect with and perform discursive protocol and etiquette, but also illuminate class structures, propriety, ritual, and codes of desire. For her principal sites of inquiry she turns to Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, and Virginia Woolf, while we also find brief but telling examples from figures including Nella Larsen, Gertrude Stein, and Isak Dinesen.

McGee's inquiry reveals wide-ranging interests, with one of her most provocative threads centring on her examination of the ways eating, socialization, and discourse have been conjoined at least since the Greek symposium. As she phrases it in a chapter devoted to 'Edith Wharton and the Dinner Tables of Old New York,' 'the mouth is not only used to ingest food: speaking is, arguably, a more important part of dinner than eating.' Meals, that is, signify in large part through language, even though their ostensible function as nourishment or social event may appear to be beyond the strict purview of the linguistically discursive. McGee's diversity of approaches - from the literary, to the historical, the anthropological, and the sociological - is indeed one of the most exciting aspects of this study. In her first chapter she stresses an anthropological interest in the material culture of food; in her second she chronicles the historical rise of etiquette manuals, cookbooks, cooking schools, and nutritional 'science'; and in her third chapter, in turning to Edith Wharton, she emphasizes a more explicitly literary focus that will engage her for the rest of the project. McGee's book takes up important questions in the still-burgeoning interdisciplinary fields of literary studies and food culture, nevertheless she sometimes tantalizes us with the promise of more analysis than she delivers.

What is missing throughout McGee's study is an adequate theorization of her key terms. As late as chapter 6, she notes that eating and social conventions around mealtimes are both channels and metaphors for larger issues of 'desire' and 'community,' though we never hear exactly how McGee wants to define these crucial subjects. This lack of explication persists with other central terms in her study. Even though she makes provocative preliminary gestures to Barthes, Tilley, and Lévi-Strauss in her introduction, for the remainder of the text it is difficult to know precisely how she wants to unravel and pursue the connections between food and other corporeal, social, discursive, and psychic phenomena. Furthermore, McGee has a tendency to make rather broad claims - again, without developing the full range of their implications. She suggests at one point that the meal 'civilizes, categorizes, and hierarchizes the raw. Through this process of ordering and transforming the world, cooking can be viewed as the basis of thought.' A few lines further down on the same page, she ventures the following: 'If, arguably, the preparation of food defines humanity, so, on a smaller scale, food habits define both individual and group characteristics.'

Putting these limitations aside, McGee does offer interesting observations throughout in support of her main argument that links mealtimes with discourse and culture making. In her section on Katherine Mansfield she notes that 'If the dinner table fails in these stories, this failure is frequently linked with a failure of communication,' while in her discussion of Virginia Woolf she points to the important fact that 'Woolf explores the burden of meaning inherited by twentieth-century hostesses and providers of food: the Victorian ideological model of women's domestic work as a civilizing force.' Her examples are telling...