Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction (review)
- Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction
The image With Posture and Orderliness on the cover of Andrea Adolph’s Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction serves as an excellent entry point to Adolph’s critical examination of the mind/body binary supported by modern Western culture. The lithograph and relief print by artist Angela Nichols depicts the silhouette of a woman bent over a large mixing bowl, furiously whisking. The dark cloud above her head reflects her consternation and overlaps with the snatches of words printed in the background—among them “posture,” “orderliness,” “fitting together,” and “dovetailing jobs.” Adolph’s short but powerful book deftly weaves together feminist theories of the body, women’s housekeeping manuals, and contemporary women’s fiction by writers such as Barbara Pym and Helen Fielding. What emerges is a thought-provoking analysis of the way that contemporary writers (and readers) have sustained this mind/body split.
Adolph’s book opens with a chapter that establishes a critical framework for her later readings of twentieth-century women’s novels. In her introduction, Adolph builds upon the work of Michel Foucault and Susan Bordo, noting that while their work provides an excellent springboard for discussions of the body, the way in which both perpetuate the mind/body binary is rather limiting.1 Instead, Adolph hopes to “imagine new models beyond the binary for future thinking about women in social and cultural contexts, as well as for imagining embodiment beyond the narrow function of physical vehicle for the intellect” (p. 8). Here, Adolph establishes [End Page 490] key concepts for her study such as auto-objectification, and she defines her parameters, noting that women’s consumption practices in contemporary British women’s fiction, particularly in regards to food, become an excellent site for exploring how the mind/body duality supported by Western culture affects female subjectivity.2
In her subsequent chapter, “Regimentation of the Private: Hunting Down ‘Matter out of Place,’” Adolph elaborates upon the ideas presented in her introduction and expounds upon Mary Douglas’s 1970 work, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. She details how Douglas’s links between dirt, order, and morality are expressed in British housekeeping manuals from the early twentieth century and builds upon Douglas’s work to show how this discourse also extends into the policing of women’s bodies regarding food consumption. Adolph continues this discussion in the subsequent chapter, “And the War Taketh Away: Female Embodiment and Sexual Excess in the Age of Austerity,” where she focuses upon the rhetoric of World War II radio broadcasts, cookery books, and women’s magazines, which encouraged housekeepers of the time period to reduce their consumption and to use what they had to nurture others rather than feed themselves.
The strength of Adolph’s work rests with her close reading of the five core novels she examines—Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953), Helen Dunmore’s Talking to the Dead (1996), Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop (1967), Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), and Rachel Cusk’s Saving Agnes (1993).3 While her opening chapters are very dense, Adolph’s chapters devoted to these close readings concretize the concepts previously discussed and more clearly illustrate how the various theories raised are interconnected. Her analysis of Dunmore’s and Carter’s works is particularly strong as she uses reader-response theory to show how these authors rely upon their readers’ acceptance of the mind/body split in order to distract readers’ attention away from the primary narrative and, in turn, successfully subvert reader expectations of both novels’ resolutions. Adolph describes these parallel narrative threads as “fat” and “thin,” an analogy that coincides nicely with her overall argument about consumption (p. 135).
While Adolph admits that Pym, Dunmore, and Carter complicate the clear divisions between the mind and body, she acknowledges that they have not dissolved that fixed border. Her closing chapter, which looks at contemporary food writer Nigella Lawson alongside...
