Food, Femininity, and Achievement: The Mother-Daughter Relationship in National Velvet

National Velvet was an enormous success with both children and adults when it was first published in 1935. A selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in America and of the Book Society in England, it has since gone through more than two dozen printings and was made into the popular 1944 MGM film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney. In New York people lined up for blocks in the dead of winter waiting to see the film, which broke box office records at the world's largest theater (Friedman 44, Sebba 158). The New York Times gave it a favorable review, and the film garnered Academy Award nominations for director Clarence Brown and cinematographer Leonard Smith, as well as for art decoration and set decoration.¹ Anne Revere, who played Velvet's mother, won an Oscar for best supporting actress. Even the author, Enid Bagnold, liked the film, for reasons which perhaps explain its popularity. She later commented that, knowing Hollywood, she was:

prepared for anything . . . prepared that Velvet should be 18, in a ball dress[,] dangerously in love with Mi Taylor, the scene laid in Monte Carlo. Thus ready I found I watched the film with delight. . . . I had a passing regret for the loss of a few subtleties, I thought once or twice with a brief passion, "Ah if they had me over there," but when we came to the race I was enthralled. They'd got what of course I could never put in, the heart of it, the excitement, where I'd had to invent and go sideways offering horses, as it were, in a mirror, they could go far better. It's a different medium.

(qtd. in Sebba 158)

The success of that film sparked a less successful sequel decades later, the artistically disappointing 1978 film International Velvet, starring Tatum O'Neal, Anthony Hopkins, and Christopher Plummer, with Nanette Newman as a grown-up Velvet.²

Perhaps the prototypical story of a girl and her horse, National Velvet is about 14-year-old Velvet Brown, a butcher's daughter who wins a piebald horse in a raffle and, disguised as a boy, rides it to victory in the Grand National.³ She is the youngest daughter in a lower middle-class family of five children, four girls and one four-year-old boy, and the novel offers an enchanting depiction of everyday family life. Most importantly, however, the story depicts a mother-daughter conflict worked out in terms of the body. Central to the novel is the complex relationship between anorexic Velvet and her obese mother. Velvet's incipient eating disorder reflects her confused acceptance of her mother's implicit warning about the incompatibility of femininity and achievement. The young girl both emulates her mother's youthful athleticism and strives to avoid her mother's ultimate fate: being literally trapped in a grotesquely maternal body.

Velvet regularly responds to stress physically. As her friend and trainer, Mi Taylor, explains, "She's got a terrible stomach, and when she gets excited she's an awful vomiter" (Bagnold 209). When her sister Edwina implies that their mother was hurt by a runaway horse, another sister, Malvolia, complains, "Velvet'll be sick all night" (28). An older gentleman shoots himself and unexpectedly leaves Velvet his five horses in a will, but a distraught Velvet is unable even to talk about what happened. When a neighbor asks her about the bequest, her mother explains: "Better leave her. . . . Turns her stomach" (64). At the family dinner that follows, Velvet "couldn't manage dumplings and onions" and whispers to her mother, "My plate makes me retch"; when her four-year-old brother Donald proudly announces that "I gotta huge, huge caterpillar in my greens," Velvet not surprisingly asks to leave the table, and her mother excuses her: "'No good keeping her,' said Mrs. Brown. 'She'll vomit'" (71-72).

Velvet is afraid that she will be sick at a local equestrian competition but manages not to be (119). When Mi tries to tell her about the Grand National course, she responds, "I'm getting sick...