The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food

Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Donna Lee Brien

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351216005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food explores the relationship between food and literature in transnational contexts, serving as both an introduction and a guide to the field in terms of defining characteristics and development. Balancing a wide-reaching view of the long histories and preoccupations of literary food studies, with attentiveness to recent developments and shifts, the volume illuminates the aesthetic, cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of the representation of food and eating in literature.

PART I

Consuming Bodies

Gender, Hunger, and the Senses

1
“NEW MOTIONS OF THE FLESH”

Chocolate, Pleasure, and the Rise of the Novel

Kevin Bourque

Introduction

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding – that bedrock of Enlightenment thought – John Locke illustrates empiricism with an unlikely example: the pineapple, for only direct experience can give one “the true Idea of the Relish of that celebrated delicious Fruit” (1710, 2.28). In truth, many of the century’s most influential texts have intimate connections to food. Robinson Crusoe’s hard-won bread, cultivated from “perfect green Barley of the same Kind as our European, nay, as our English Barley”, counterpoints the “monstrous appetites” of native cannibals (Defoe [1719] 2007, 67; Campe 1789, 129). Voltaire’s Candide traces the limits of thinking as it embraces the virtues of eating, pushing away philosophy to reach for “candied citron peel, oranges, lemons, limes, pineapples and pistachios” ([1759] 2005, 92). Cultural history has begun to align the Enlightenment appetite for new ideas with the Enlightment appetite for new tastes. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power (1986), now a food studies classic, demonstrates how the eighteenth-century sugar trade ushered the West into modernity. In Fruits of Empire, James Walvin traces how a “British addiction to key tropical staples”, among them tea and tobacco, “changed forever the domestic face of Britain” as it transformed the world (1997, x and xi). And recent work by Markman Ellis – most notably, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History (2004) – elaborates and complicates the Habermasian link between the Enlightenment coffee-house and the emergence of a public sphere. Fewer scholars, however, have related food to the rise of new genres in the period – most notably, the novel, perhaps the century’s most enduring contribution to literature.

This chapter links the incipient novel with another “key tropical staple” of the period: chocolate, introduced to Europe by Spain in the early sixteenth century and available in English markets, for a price, after the 1655 capture of Jamaica. Critics of the later novel frame food in terms of cultural unease: for Annette Cozzi, for example, Victorian fiction reveals “anxieties of ingestion that resulted from, among other things, imperialism and industrialism” (2010, 5). In similar fashion, chocolate sparked characteristically eighteenth-century anxieties – uncannily enough, the same misgivings triggered by the early novel. Both chocolate and popular fiction became lodestones for anxieties over sex, leisure, and domesticity; in fact, the early and mid-eighteenth century used the selfsame charged metaphors for both. The two also underwent the same domestication through the course of the 1700s, moving from volatile markers of female sexuality to emblems of genteel respectability (on chocolate and gentility, see You 2016 and Coe and Coe [1996] 2013). Indeed, the novel provided a primary stage for the cultural elevation of chocolate. Perhaps more surprisingly, chocolate also served a key role in the elevation of the novel as a cultural form. Pioneers of the genre drew on chocolate’s scandalous associations while also managing them, transforming racy trash into respectable reading – an essential stage in the evolution of the genre (Warner 1998). This chapter considers the intertwined cultural resonances of chocolate and fiction in the period, as well as the meaning of chocolate in the developing novel – particularly as it connected to sex and class. It also considers the integral function of chocolate in one novel: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), by some estimations the first English novel and by the majority of estimations among the most important. Pamela punctuates turning points in its plot with chocolate: Mr B asking Pamela’s father for her hand in marriage, the presentation of the wedding ring, a post-nuptial breakfast. In so doing, Richardson manages to both evoke and control the licentious connotations of his text – sublimating sexual pleasure, domestic leisure and women’s reading to good moral ends, such as wifely duties and childbearing. Because this is precisely the same management that made the novel respectable – that is, the transformation of pleasure into the right use of pleasure – chocolate serves a critical cultural function not only in this novel, but also in the evolution of the novel as a genre.

Novel Tastes

Foreign, volatile, heady, dangerous: new foodstuffs and new reading habits precipitated intense debate in the long eighteenth century, and Enlightenment culture obsessed over their possible effects on the most vulnerable – namely, women and the young. Such cultural anxieties are particularly visible through metaphors that blurred the two: for example, how frequently critics of the formative novel likened bad reading to bad eating. “It is not exaggerating much,” stresses Sarah Moss, “to say that nearly all images or accounts of women’s reading in this period use eating as a metaphor for the consumption of text” (2009, 16). The metaphor – that good reading nourishes and sustains, while bad reading is the eighteenth-century equivalent of junk food – runs through the century. “Novels vitiate the taste” was a go-to truism about the genre (Jones 1780, 27), and Clara Reeve, one of the novel’s first historians, equated a steady diet of such reading to poison: “a person used to this kind of reading will be disgusted with every thing serious or solid, as a weakened and depraved stomach rejects plain and wholesome food” (1785, 278). Through novels, writes one late-century critic, “the palate is vitiated, the stomach is squeamish, the juices are corrupted, [and] the digestion is spoiled” (Jones 1780, 27). Another advises the wise reader to abandon the novelist for “a solid historian, who will give you good roast beef and plumb-pudding instead of kickshaws and whipt-syllabub; and plain truths instead of insipid, monstrous, or ill-contrived fables” (Alves 1794, 232). The wrong reading, like the wrong food, perverts the taste.

And for eighteenth-century women, novels were the wrong kind of reading, just as chocolate was the wrong kind of eating. Emma Robertson notes chocolate’s reputed sway over women, a historical association that lingers into the present: “chocolate has supposedly addictive properties which women are unable to resist” and women “have historically been depicted as obsessed” (2009, 35). In the 1700s, chocolate and novels shared the same high-risk, habit-forming reputations; writers warned women away from both for the same reasons, and often in the same breath. The Spectator 365 advises its “fair Readers” to take particular care in “how they meddle with Romances, Chocolate, Novels, and the like Inflamers” (1744, 5.193). An earlier issue, number 323, provides “the Picture of a Life filled with a fashionable kind of Gaiety and Laziness” – namely, reading novels, drinking chocolate and pining for men in deliciously attractive “new Liveries” (1718, 5.5–9). The shared tendency of novels and chocolate to “inflame” recurs in John Hawkesworth’s The Adventurer 14 (1752, 1.81) and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, whose eponymous antihero seduces women through the use of “certain dangerous books, calculated to debauch the minds of young people” and “some mischievous preparations, which were mingled in her chocolate” (1753, 1.48). Fiction and chocolate work a kind of debasing, dissipating magic on the female consumer, and for that reason both – to prevent “depraving” the digestion – must be painstakingly controlled.

Eighteenth-century novelists, then, faced an onerous task: they “had to cope with the aura of sexual scandal which clings to the early novel, and respond to the accusation that they were corrupting to their enthusiastic readers” (Warner 1998, 4). Samuel Richardson’s brilliance, and his considerable contribution towards the institution of the English novel, came in adapting the sexual scandal of earlier texts – the amatory bodice-rippers of Eliza Haywood, for example – and transforming the genre “for ethical ends” (ibid., 181). In one of the several puff-pieces prefacing Pamela, a letter praises Richardson for doing something novel with the novel: bringing a moral tale into a world “which is but too much, as well as too early debauched by pernicious Novels” ([1740] 2001, 9). Richardson managed this by capitalizing on the sexual overtones of the novel, and managing their most problematic associations – directing pleasure, in short, towards good moral ends. Fascinatingly, what Richardson did for the novel mirrors what he did with chocolate: harnessing what made them fascinating, such as their association with sex and luxury – and channelling that magic towards respectability. In using chocolate to elevate the novel – borrowing its associations with sex and luxury, then making those associations virtuous – Richardson also elevated chocolate, shifting both the genre and the foodstuff from dissipation to domestication.

Sex

The learned Doctor Pangloss, in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), reminds us that without syphilis we could not have chocolate and, in truth, chocolate went hand-in-hand with venery from its first arrival on the continent. Early treatises on the subject exhibit a preoccupation with chocolate’s sexual effects. Henry Stubbe’s The Indian Nectar, or, a Discourse Concerning Chocolata, promised on its title page to elucidate the “alimental, medical and venereal qualities” of the drug (1662), while a contemporaneous poem forewent Latinate descriptors for a more direct assessment of chocolate’s effect on women:

’Twill make Old women Young and Fresh,

Create New Motions of the Flesh,

And cause them long for you know what,

If they but Tast of Chocolate.

Wadsworth 1652, 6

Even as other dubious claims fell away – snake-oil assertions, for instance, that chocolate cured “sundry desperate Diseases” – chocolate’s reputation for inspiring ardour, and its supposed ability to make women “long for you know what”, lingered. Enlightenment visual and material culture framed scenes of romantic attraction around chocolate pots; in hand-painted porcelain statuettes, watercolours, portraits, and engravings, young lovers flirt, canoodle, and imbibe chocolate (Boucher 1739; Kändler 1744; Kitty Fleecing 1766; Rowlandson 1787). Even in medical literature of the period, chocolate’s aphrodisiac properties persisted well into the century. As late as 1748 – eight years after Pamela’s debut – popular medical tracts confirmed that chocolate “promotes Venery” (Best and Easiest 1748, 62).

Chocolate’s amatory associations allowed the novel, particularly during the first half of the century, to use it as shorthand for sexuality. In the mid-century High Life: A Novel, chocolate accentuates a heavy-lidded romantic encounter:

Emilia raised her eyes, and fixed them on mine, with bewitching tenderness; I took my seat by her…. With obliging officiousness, she brought me a dish of chocolate – I pressed the fair hand that presented it – She blushed and resumed her seat; I never saw her look so handsome.

Higgs, 1768, 2.283

In some novels, men serve women chocolate as a prologue to “more indecent liberties” than should be allowed (Cleora, 1752, 166; see too The Auction, 1770, 1.93, and The Adopted Daughter, 1767, 1.105). In others, like Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy, couples sip “a Dish of Chocolate” during “the Intervals of Love” (1709, 137; see too The Treacherous Friend, 1718, 4, and The Progress of a Harlot, 1732, 20). In the incipient novel, chocolate – thanks to its longstanding medical and cultural associations – meant sex.

Chocolate, Sex, Pamela

Chocolate functions in much the same way in Pamela, a novel whose plot (master sexually assaults his female servant, until, finally, she reforms him and the two marry) already tends towards lewdness. Chocolate neatly bookends the marriage between Pamela and her master, Mr B., served on the morning of the ceremony – where Pamela’s “hand shook so”, she spills her cup ([1740] 2001, 343) – and the morning after their wedding night, when the heroine drinks it “with great Pleasure” (ibid., 367). Its placement in the text seems to wink towards the more prurient perks of marriage – that “still more pleasing Amusement” Mr B. insinuates when the two discuss married life together, one Pamela’s “bashful Modesty would not permit [her] to hint” (ibid., 265). At the same time as these scenes evoke sexuality, however, they also manage it. Just as Richardson directs the concupiscent tendencies of fiction to a virtuous goal (the moral instruction of young women), chocolate, in Richardson, directs sexual excitement to its right use: namely, the sublimation of sexual pleasure to good moral ends, such as wifely duties and the generation of progeny. This gesture, which simultaneously domesticates chocolate and the novel, rests on chocolate’s Enlightenment reputation both as an aphrodisiac and an enhancer of fertility.

All three of the century’s favourite caffeinated beverages were reputed to have “a Power of stimulating to Venery”, to use the words of Simon Paulli in 1746 (165). Richardson could just as easily have steeped tea for Pamela’s table, or brewed coffee. Unlike chocolate, however, coffee and tea were believed to cause sterility. Through tea-drinking, warned the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737, “women become barren; or if they breed, their Blood is made so poor, that they have not the Strength to suckle”. Heavy users “either have No Children at all, or but very Few: Or have Frequent Miscarriages” (“Observations” 1737, 213–14). In men, tea “diminishes the prolifick Energy” or adulterates “the Animalcules in Semine, by that means preventing the Facility of Conception” (Essay on the Nature 1725, 44 and 53). A 1774 sermon on the subject linked tea to a Pandora’s box of obstetric horrors: tea-drinking mothers, “unable to bear the convulsions of child-birth”, give birth to stillborn infants, or children made so weak by tea they fall “a speedy martyr to her ill judged diet” (Sermon on Tea 1774, 7–8). Coffee was no better. “‘Tis true indeed,” concedes the physician Daniel Duncan, that “the business of Amours and Procreation may be in some measure promoted by the moderate Use of Coffee” (1706, 218). Yet coffee also “renders both Sexes less Fruitful” and “Men and Women who take too much Coffee, expose themselves to the Mortification of Sterility” (ibid., 124 and 220; see also Chamberlayne 1682, 4–6, and Paulli 1746, 118–19 and 163–5). Of the three drinks, chocolate alone promoted fertility as well as desire. “I do not find it expressly affirmed by Authors,” divulged Paulli in his medical overview of the topic, “that Chocolate, as well as Coffee, produces Sterility and Impotence; since they rather assert, that it proves a Stimulus to Venery” (1746, 166).

Chocolate, then, had quite the opposite effect. Medical tracts, herbals and recipe books promote chocolate as “procreative” through the end of the eighteenth century; as late as 1792, Alexander Buchan recommended serving chocolate to women in labor (Grivetti 2009b, 74). Doctors reprinted anecdotes of chocolate’s surprising tendency towards fertility for decades, from a 1682 account of a wife “who took a great fancy for Chocolate”, only to be “brought afterwards to Bed of three Sons at one birth” (Chamberlayne 1682, 17), to another six decades later whose chocolate-drinking proclivities resulted in “several Children, though she was looked upon before not capable of having any” (Lémery 1745, 366). In matters of sex, conception and delivery, chocolate operated strong magic: it healed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Consuming Bodies: Gender, Hunger, and the Senses
• Part II History, Culture, and National Identities
• Part III Meals, Feasting, and Commensality
• Part IV Literary Food Genres
• Index