Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

1. Kitchen Insurrections

15 1 Kitchen Insurrections We begin at the hearth. Here, at the mouth of the fireplace, at the bottom of the chimney’s throat, lies the ground for what follows in chapters 2 through 5, a conversation about the literature and visual texts that flowed from nineteenth-century eating culture. Across this conversation the hearth—and its descendant, the kitchen—will become less and less the primary location of U.S. food culture, and a more public eating culture will emerge, shaped by the ideology, literature, and architecture of domesticity in the early republic but rooted, as the material in this chapter argues, in early modern feast and banquet literature and transatlantic pantomime theater. Out of this olla podrida of environmental, cultural, and political forces will emerge a charged eating culture, in which racially marked and working-class bodies are as closely bound to food imagery as they are infused with a suppressed political affect barely contained by eating spaces and the literary forms they produce. By focusing on the hearth and then the kitchen not simply as ahistorical spaces but as work sites whose symbolic function changed radically across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even when actual architectural changes may have lagged quite far behind, I join in a long line of feminist critics who have investigated the central role of cooking spaces in organizing and defining the value of female labor and the valence of women’s political and cultural citizenship across the nineteenth century.1 My interest in the hearth and kitchen as the literary and architectural sites from which the United States’ eating culture emerges is an attempt to invest feminist, literary, and cultural criticism with a more nuanced idea of the links between food and literature across the nineteenth century, in part by connecting images of the hearth to the early modern and transatlantic cultural flows that consistently linked food and eating imagery to class and bodily inversion.2 In this chapter, then, I build on these feminist critics’ work to argue that the hearth and kitchen have a specific literary history of their own, which produced effects on nineteenth-century literature and 16 Kitchen Insurrections its bodies through a persistent connection to orality, construed broadly as vernacular language, as eating and ingestion, and finally as a series of sensual and erotic intensifications centered on the mouth. Finding their literary heritage in the European and colonial hearth, the hearth and kitchen discourses I will examine adhere—“stick” in Sara Ahmed’s useful term—to those subjects who labored with or close to food.3 As the United States’ hyperembodied notions of class, race, and gender were expressed in terms of food—the central matter of the kitchen—so the bodies that labored in kitchens came to be represented, in the unconscious of popular culture, as food. Materialization, and the material conditions that make possible the exemplary act of consumption, are thus central concerns of this chapter. If the seeds of the images that became the late nineteenth century’s obsessive kitchen and food comedies about race lie in the hearth and kitchen literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those images, as I will show, germinate in earlier representations of class difference and inversion. Class must be at the center of this chapter if we are to understand, first, the series of transformations by which the fireplace - and hearth-centered kitchen became the modern kitchen and, second , the articulation of the kitchen as a separate room from the rest of the house, a change that paralleled the articulation of class difference in the antebellum United States. It is in literature of the hearth—sometimes represented as the fireplace or chimney—that I trace the legacy of a discourse that came from Europe to the New World and linked the hearth to storytelling, ingestion, and moments of theatrical and carnivalesque class, gender, and (at times) species inversion. The hearth lingers in the memory of antebellum U.S. writers, suturing food and eating to literary culture. As it disappears as a practical space, the hearth reemerges as a specter that haunts later overdetermined representations of the kitchen and the racially burdened bodies that labored there. In other words, what began as early modern and colonial-era class discourse was exploited to provide the protocols for later mid- and late nineteenth-century narratives of racial difference and consolidation. The hearth, with its link to dirt, the pleasurable possibilities of transformation , inversion, and bodily fluidity, repeatedly returns...