"I cannot live without a macaroon!": Food, Hunger, and the Dangers of Modern American Culture in Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo

Most theatre-goers in 1919 would have recognized the dual significance of the banquet in Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo as a reference to both the war effort and elite popular culture. Two years earlier, the Food Administration had launched an aggressive publicity and volunteer campaign for food conservation. The decadent food being eaten in the opening scene of the play, however, raises questions about the effectiveness of these efforts and the propaganda used to achieve them. At the same time, this banquet offers a parody of the growing entertainment and restaurant culture in New York City. By 1913, New York was the restaurant capital of the United States. Lobster palaces and other ostentatious dining establishments were hotspots for prosperous urbanites and the uptown theatre crowd — people seeking an escape from everyday life to indulge in material pleasures and the illusions of extreme wealth. The meanings associated with food here reinforce Millay's message about some of the dangerous excesses of American culture more broadly — a culture that often valued escapism over social and political engagement and encouraged audiences to forget history rather than to contemplate its consequences. Just as this play condemns the brutality of war and the coercive power of nationalistic propaganda, it warns that the escapist pleasures of entertainment and modernist art could be socially irresponsible as well. They could, as the title of the play suggests, lead people and nations into thoughtless repetition, into committing the same atrocities over and over again.