Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (review)

Gwen Hyman's Making a Man: Gentlemanly Appetites in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel is a subtle and persuasive account of the nineteenth-century novel's reliance on shifting relations between "the alimental gentleman" and what that gentleman eats and drinks (10). The book works on two levels. First, it uses the fact that everybody has to eat to get at several ways in which "the table is the site of self-fashioning" in the nineteenth-century novel (12). Food and drink become a conceptual basis on which Hyman places overlapping ideas about class, gender, space, place, nation, and desire. An important part of the book's method is thus a literary anthropologist's faith that looking at a society's rules for preparing and consuming food reveals patterns and values that govern that society in general. Second, the book is a specific engagement with the nineteenth-century gentleman's fraught dependence on a changing food culture that both fueled and was a self-conscious index of modern life. Noting that much has already been written "on women and their appetites" (10), Hyman instead focuses on the vague but pervasive figure of the gentleman, a figure whose claim to gentlemanliness drifts notoriously back and forth from the economic, the social, and the ethical. With this, Hyman adds to and makes historically specific thinking about the ways in which eating helps to produce differences between self and other, inside and outside, and embodiment and disembodiment in the work of Norbert Elias, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglass, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as critics like Joseph Litvak and Mary Ann O'Farrell.

Hyman is most concerned with the role food and drink play in relation to the rise of industrial modernity, a phenomenon associated as much with coffee and cocaine as with coal and steam. Making a Man shows that what connects the figure of the alimental gentleman in Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker is the degree to which accelerating changes in the way food was prepared, bought, sold, and finally consumed affected the presentation and the making of self at a moment when "the promise and the horrors of the modern" threatened to overwhelm a landed, gentlemanly identity (200). Hyman argues that one of the most important—because necessary and ubiquitous—ways in which the gentleman attempted to live through these changes was by working to control what, where, how, and how much he ate and drank.

We see this in the exemplary case of Mr. Woodhouse's favorite dish: gruel. Where readers have tended to see Mr. Woodhouse as a simple hypochondriac, Hyman sees his insistence on simple "homegrown, homemade fare" as—at least in part—a rational response to an increasingly dangerous food culture (22). On the one hand, "the practice of canning foodstuffs in tinned containers" made possible a system of international alimentary trade that threatened the local landed basis of Mr. Woodhouse's almost feudal preeminence (22). On the other hand, an expanding and increasingly alienated free market for food led to the widespread "practice of tainting food and drink for profit" (25), a practice that meant that if you couldn't account meticulously for the progress of bread, meat, pickles, or gruel from ground to table, what you ate could kill you. (The use of "red lead" to give color to the orange rind of Gloucester cheese is one terrible example.) If, however, eating (gruel) locally makes this much sense, it also poses problems for Highbury and for Emma (1816). Unwilling to try new things, "to be reborn into the brave new market-suffused world" of modern Britain (48), Mr. Woodhouse emerges in Hyman's account as an anti-narrative figure whose distaste for new foods, new marriages, new men, or indeed change of any kind points to the structurally problematic and morbidly anachronistic nature...