The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Michael Parrish Lee (review)

It has long been a truism that courtship and marriage constitute the very marrow of nineteenth-century British fiction; without the marriage plot, the realist novel may be said to have little plot at all. Theorists of the novel as disparate as Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong have concurred with Whiggish historians of marriage such as Lawrence Stone in insisting on the emergence of companionate marriage and its valorization of individualism, self-determination, and erotic fulfilment within marriage as the defining characteristic of the realist novel. If the marriage plot corresponds with narrative or plot itself, its opposite is made up of scenes of eating, which Franco Moretti (among others) defines as the "perfect filler" (qtd. in Lee 4). Yet, if the marriage plot exemplifies "the power of desire to consolidate identity, motivate action, and drive narrative toward a resolution," it is attended and besieged by what Michael Parrish Lee in The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel denominates as a "food plot," which threatens to frustrate the narrative closure and future-oriented maturity that the former has as its goal (2). The food plot is one in which the inexorability of bodily hunger and eating functions as a powerful narrative principle, overcoming sexual desire as the engine of plot. In juxtaposing these two plots he takes his inspiration from Malthusian population theory, which famously posits the heterosexual instinct and the necessity of eating as the two irreconcilable hungers that govern human nature. Like Catherine Gallagher in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006), Lee underscores Thomas Malthus's capacious understanding of (hetero)sexuality as encompassing intellectual and emotional and not just physical fulfilment, and existing on an equal footing with self-preservation. In this the political economist is, he suggests cannily, "almost . . . an early theorist of the marriage plot" (12). At the same time, Malthus also insists on the tragic result of heterosexual passion, which is "a never-ending need to eat" such that "the reproductive future threatens to devour itself" (12). Insofar as the nineteenth-century British novel assumes "a double form," oscillating between desire and appetite, Malthusian thought may be said to constitute the very grammar of novelistic narrative (3).

Jane Austen's novels constitute for Lee the paradigm of the marriage plot, in which "heterosexual interiority . . . is defined against gustatory appetite" (22). Romantically viable protagonists establish themselves as such by holding bodily hunger in contempt relative to the consolations of emotional responsiveness and literary taste. Hence the young Fanny Price's refusal of the consolation of gooseberry tart when she first arrives at Mansfield Park assures us of her fate as a heroine. In contrast, figures outside the circuit of reproductive sexuality—childless men like Mansfield Park's (1814) Dr. Grant, or widowers and spinsters like Emma's (1815) Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates—demonstrate an avid interest in food and eating that is entirely at odds with such refusal. In the Victorian novel, however, hunger becomes a more pressing matter, calling for a new kind of narrative attention to the travails of the hungry in an era of increasing scrutiny of the physical deprivations of the impoverished classes; it cannot be dismissed with the insouciance that belongs to the Austenian model. The narrative force of appetite features in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, but of all the Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens comes closest to portraying "the need for food as the primal driving force of human nature" (80). Novels of the fin de siècle such as those by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, produced in the crucible of evolutionary thought, underscore the sheer difficulty of maintaining an apartheid between marriage and food plots, and even of distinguishing between the two. And late-Victorian romances like those of Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells jettison the marital drive of the realist...