At first glance the elegant corpus of Jane Austen might seem like a strange place to begin a book on nineteenth-century eating. Indeed, the descriptions of food in Austen’s published novels are sparser and sparer than those in the Victorian texts that constitute the bulk of this study. I thus approach Austen not by asking how food is interesting in her work but instead by asking the more difficult question of how it is uninteresting. This query grants us a surprising degree of critical leverage precisely because Austen’s fiction works so diligently to make and remake just this point—that food is fundamentally not interesting. For example, in Sense and Sensibility (1811), after Mrs. Dashwood and her daughters Elinor and Marianne receive the misinformation that Elinor’s love interest, Edward Ferrars, has married another woman, we learn that
This passage not only shows the emotional tribulations of romantic love to take precedence over the need to eat but affiliates the interest in such love with adult consciousness and fellow feeling (Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood lose their appetites in their concern for Elinor). At the same time, the passage relegates the concern with eating to the marginal perspective of the child Margaret, the infrequently mentioned “other sister” (9) whose unblunted appetite signals a social immaturity that contrasts with the deeply sympathetic feelings of the older Dashwoods. While such grown-up feelings are oriented around the marriage plot, Margaret’s childish thoughts belong to a food plot that is no sooner introduced than rejected and abandoned as unworthy of narrative interest.Marianne had already sent to say that she should eat nothing more, Mrs. Dashwood’s and Elinor’s appetites were equally lost, and Margaret [the youngest sister] might think herself very well off, that with so much uneasiness as both her sisters had lately experienced, so much reason as they had often had to be careless of their meals, she had never been obliged to go without her dinner before. (330)
The question of interest is paramount to this analysis—the question of who and what the novelistic narrative marks out as interesting or uninteresting. Informing this question is Alex Woloch’s theory of characterization in The One vs. the Many. For Woloch, novelistic character is inseparable from narrative form, as individual characters belong to a larger “character-system,” a “distributed field of attention” that “relies on reference and takes place through structure” (17). Such a structure of characterization is uneven, relying on a “distributional matrix” in which “the discrete representation of any specific individual is intertwined with the narrative’s continual apportioning of attention to different characters who jostle for limited space within the same fictive universe” (13). In her construction of sexuality against appetite, Austen develops a matrix that privileges those characters whose hearts tie them to the marriage plot over those characters whose bellies dwell on food. Eating plays a major role both in Austen’s creation of what Woloch calls an “asymmetric structure of characterization” (30) and in her coinciding uneven dichotomy between the marriage plot and the food plot. As we shall see, those Austenian characters showing interest in eating are themselves represented as uninteresting and structurally circumscribed along with the food plots they introduce.
If Austen’s fiction has long been interpreted by critics and novelists alike as the “maturation of the novel” (Armstrong, Novels 7) and the wellspring of “unprecedentedly rounded characters” (Miller, Style 59),1 her work is habitually reminding us that maturity and roundness are incompatible with interest in eating. Austen’s published work dwells on matters of food and eating only to subordinate them to those elements that we now regard as being the true subjects of the Austen novel: marriage plots and the psychologically complex characters who navigate them. Not simply fashioning a desexualized anorexic femininity, Austen’s fiction develops a general model of heterosexual interiority that is defined against gustatory appetite. In Austen’s novels, food, eating, and meals form not only a ground for, but also a pervasive, constitutive limit to the marriage plot and the model of subjectivity that this plot works to produce.
It is therefore possible to see the inclusion of food and eating within Austen’s work as a narrative means of mastering those elements that the self that is generated by the marriage plot excludes. By making the domestic plot “cohere” around “the give and take of meals” (Lane xi), Austen is able to define a thinking, feeling, individuated subject (the “figure”) above and against a highly ritualized form of the very food and eating (the “ground”) that serves as a trace and reminder of the hungering body.2 The marriage plot remains stable so long as meals and eating stay subordinated as background and benign narrative structure and do not in themselves become the focus of interest. Similarly, the characters who people this plot remain psychologically complex only while they continue to participate without interest in the culinary rituals that serve as the most persistent textual remainders of bodily necessity.3 The moments in which eating enters the foreground as an object of narrative attention in its own right generate what I call “the food plot,” a kind of shadow plot—fleeting, discontinuous, and multiple—that briefly disrupts or threatens to displace the marriage plot, only to be subordinated by the marriage plot, a process that ultimately affirms the latter plot’s centrality. In structuring the marriage plot above and against the food plot, and deep interiority above and against appetite, Austen’s fiction naturalizes an economy of attention in which subjects who don’t have food on their minds are positioned as complex and interesting in contrast to subjects who are flattened through fixations on eating.4
For an example of how such flattening occurs, we might turn to the scene in Emma (1815) where, during a country walk, Emma Woodhouse watches without hearing a conversation between her friend Harriet Smith and Mr. Elton, the man she hopes to align Harriet with in marriage. Emma observes the two “being evidently in a conversation which interested them. Mr. Elton was speaking with animation, Harriet listening with a very pleased attention” (71). However, as Emma moves into earshot, she is “disappoint[ed]” to find that, rather than declaring his romantic intentions, Mr. Elton is “only giving his fair companion an account of the yesterday’s party at his friend Cole’s,” cataloging “the Stilton cheese, the north Wiltshire, the butter, the celery, the beetroot and all the dessert” (72). Emma’s attempt to manufacture a marriage plot is thus briefly superseded by Mr. Elton’s own food plot, which momentarily seems capable of generating “animation” and holding “attention.” Yet far from attaching importance to Mr. Elton’s fascination with food, the text uses this as an opportunity to reassert the centrality of marriage plots to novelistic interest: “‘This would soon have led to something better of course,’ was [Emma’s] consoling reflection; ‘any thing interests between those who love; and any thing will serve as introduction to what is near the heart. If I could but have kept longer away!’” (72). More than simply resuscitating this particular marriage plot, Emma’s “consoling reflection” functions to assert more generally that romance is a far more interesting subject than food. Emma quickly reduces the topic of eating to a bottom-of-the-barrel “any thing,” an arbitrary and empty screen that becomes interesting only when projected on by those in love. Even though a moment before, Mr. Elton was “still talking, still engaged,” lavishing sustained attention on the party’s food as an “interesting detail” to dwell upon, Emma’s imagination converts the subject into a mere “introduction” to the real subject of love—“to what is near the heart” (72).
However, as the reader already likely suspects, and as the narrative will soon confirm, this particular love match is doomed to fail, and Emma’s reading of the situation is an imaginative misreading. In one sense, then, the revelation of Mr. Elton’s food catalog functions comically to show how far off the mark Emma’s speculations are—Elton is even less interested in Harriet than he is in food, which the text through Emma disparages as “any thing.” But while food here undercuts the viability of this particular romance, it does so in a way that moves food into a subordinate position, reducing it from a topic of Elton’s interest to a tool for showing his lack of interest in Harriet. So, if the text uses food as a periphery meant to reaffirm the centrality of the marriage plot in general, it also makes food a subordinate appendage to this particular marriage plot that will turn out to be a nonmarriage plot.
Yet if Emma’s reading is a misreading and Mr. Elton cares nothing for Harriet, we must then return to Mr. Elton’s fascination with food, a fascination that the text works to render highly uninteresting. By juxtaposing contrasting forms of attention—Elton’s, occupied with food, and Emma’s, occupied with individuals and romance—the text not only asserts that marriage is more interesting than eating but also shows how much more interesting and complex those people are who are interested in people and marriage than those who are interested in food. Mirroring the narrative reduction of food to a dull “any thing,” Elton’s consciousness, as it centers on food, comes across as flattened and confined. Where Emma’s nullification of the food plot presents an active mind imaginatively rewriting the present and its possibilities, elevating its own misreading to the status of general truth (“any thing interests between those who love”), and predicting how revised former actions might have influenced the future (“If I could but have kept longer away!”), Mr. Elton’s gastronomic passion generates only a list of items recalled from the past. Thus his culinary animation is shown to be without dimensionality and depth, his engagement defined only by fixation and repetition.5
While Elton’s interest in food is a fleeting affair, a brief possession by a character-flattening force, there are characters in Austen’s canon whose sustained or repeated interest in eating renders them consistently flat. For example, Dr. Grant of Mansfield Park (1814) is referred to almost exclusively in terms of his appetite. When we first hear of Grant, Tom Bertram predicts that, “plied well with good things,” he will “soon pop off” (24). His next appearance is in the words of Mrs. Norris, who notes that he is “very fond of eating” (31). Mary Crawford describes him as a man “who must have his palate consulted in every thing” (114) and later explains his absence from a theatrical rehearsal with the comment that he “has been ill ever since; he did not eat any of the pheasant to day. He fancied it tough—sent away his plate—and has been suffering ever since” (176–177). Edmund Bertram refers to him in terms of his enjoyment of turkey (220). And the last we hear of Grant is when he fulfills Tom’s prediction of “popping off”: “Dr Grant had brought on apoplexy and death, by three great institutionary dinners in one week” (488). It is as though a character once stuffed with food has little room left for psychological interiority. Adding to Dr. Grant’s appearance of flatness is the fact that his representational space within the narrative is confined largely to the words of others, with his love of eating usually explaining his absence (whether staying at home or dropping dead) from the social network that the narrative foregrounds. In the few instances when Grant himself speaks, his speech fixates on topics of eating, whether bickering with Mrs. Norris about the flavor of an apricot (55) or talking to his wife about turkey (222). On one of the rare occasions when the narrative draws our attention to Grant’s presence in (rather than absence from) a given scene, it does so only to compress him into the food he eats and turn him into scenery for a love plot. As Edmund listens to Mary play the harp, the narrator muses: “it was all harmony; and as every thing will turn to account when love is once set going, even the sandwich tray, and Dr Grant doing the honours of it, were worth looking at” (67).
We see a similar flattening of character in Pride and Prejudice (1813) when Elizabeth Bennet arrives at Netherfield to visit her sick sister, Jane. After a long walk through muddy fields, Elizabeth enters the breakfast parlor and soon encounters two men who are reticent in very different ways: “Mr. Darcy said very little, and Mr. Hurst nothing at all. The former was divided between admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as to the occasion’s justifying her coming so far alone. The latter was thinking only of his breakfast” (23). Woloch astutely observes that this juxtaposition of Darcy’s “divided consciousness” to Hurst’s functions as “an extension and an elaboration of Darcy’s depth of character,” whereby Darcy’s psychological complexity is brought into relief by the single-mindedness of “a quintessentially reduced and flattened caricature” (53). In addition to being more multivectored, Darcy’s thoughts seem to convey a more complex subjectivity because they are directed toward another person and thus are part of a social network. Hurst, in contrast, focuses on his food, which fixates his thoughts and acts as a kind of social short circuit, effectively merging him with the breakfast parlor. Until now, this parlor has served as the narrative background against which various characters could express their attitudes toward the heroine: Miss Bingley’s and Mrs. Hurst’s incredulity and contempt, Charles Bingley’s “humour and kindness,” Mr. Darcy’s burgeoning admiration (Pride 23). But while Mr. Hurst merges with a background affiliated with eating and food, he also brings this background strangely into focus as something against which psychological depth can be defined, so that again we come upon a textual logic wherein interesting people are not interested in food.
Returning to Emma, we find a similar background absorbing multiple characters. While waiting for Harriet to make a purchase at Ford’s shop in Highbury, Emma looks outside for amusement:
The “liveliness” of Emma’s consciousness comes into relief against a scene that, as Adela Pinch notes, is oriented around food (“Introduction” xxv). The text contrasts Emma’s “mind” with a set of figures who are given no interiority and little description, who function, rather, as description in a composite referred to as “nothing.” Each of these figures is reduced and absorbed into his or her absorption in food; and the only activity that animates them (traveling, quarreling, dawdling, eyeing) is driven by and oriented toward food. The butcher consists of an occupation and a tray. The only figure elaborated with adjectives—the “tidy” woman—is hardly more distinguished than her own “full” basket or the dogs’ “dirty” bone. Rather than individuals defined by interior qualities, we have a living conglomerate merged with food—a “string” of children, dogs and humans nearly interchangeable—a crowdlike “many” strengthening the impression of Emma’s individuality. And as much as the text constructs Emma’s liveliness of mind against this “nothing,” it also pairs such liveliness with a kind of creative tolerance: the ability to patiently, if distantly, rewrite the nothing of the food plot as nothing to “complain” about and even as “nothing that does not answer.”[W]hen her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker’s little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer. (183)
But then Emma looks down the road: “The scene enlarged; two persons appeared” (183). The narrative entry of Frank Churchill and Mrs. Weston does not so much expand as entirely replace the previous paragraph’s tableau; and the given description suggests that it is these characters, these players in love plots, rather than the tableau’s vanquished population, who fit into the novel’s category of “person.” And it would seem that these two characters gain this very title of person at the expense of the crowd of figures they have displaced. By framing this discrepancy in terms of interest, the novel naturalizes the representational triumph of the marriage plot over the plots of those who are occupied with the materiality of food.
Such logic has clear class implications, since a narrative system in which characters who are oriented around food appear uninteresting has the possible effect of naturalizing the denial of interiority and attention to those who cannot afford to take eating for granted. For example, while Emma walks with Harriet and Mr. Elton, we briefly encounter the child of poor cottagers “setting out, according to orders, with her pitcher, to fetch broth from Hartfield” (71). But this child and her barely glimpsed food plot are circumscribed as a prop for Emma’s marriage plotting. No sooner does the child appear (through reference, not description) than she becomes an excuse for Emma to hang back and allow Harriet to walk on with Mr. Elton, Emma using an unheard conversation with this child as her “means” of getting the would-be couple alone together (71). I think it is therefore a mistake to read the interest in food as a moral defect or flaw in character, as Maggie Lane does when she suggests that Austen’s “most esteemed characters are rarely if ever” preoccupied with eating and that “[t]o take interest in food in a Jane Austen novel is to be almost certainly condemned as frivolous, selfish or gross” (78). Barbara M. Benedict similarly asserts that characters in Austen “who eat too much or care too much about food clearly exhibit greed” and “show one key way in which fleshy, or worldly, values encroach on spiritual ones” (352). While persuasive to a degree, these types of readings conceal the very mechanism that makes them possible—the mechanism that imbues the interest in eating with what might sometimes seem like a range of negative qualities but is actually a consistent force of negation. Austen does not simply condemn certain characters through their enjoyment of food but rather develops and naturalizes a more general narrative mechanism through which a character’s interest in food corresponds with his or her representational flattening or narrative contraction within what Woloch calls the “asymmetric structure of characterization” (30). This mechanism’s smooth and subtle operation is precisely what allows us so easily to accept interest in food as a character flaw rather than seeing its role in a narrative system that defines the novelistic social against the materiality of eating. Moreover, if we take stock of the upper- and middle-class characters in Austen who show interest in or concern with food, we see a pattern: children like Margaret, bachelors like Mr. Elton, spinsters like Miss Bates, widowers like Mr. Woodhouse, and married men without children like Dr. Grant and Mr. Hurst. They are all figures of pre-, post-, failed, or refused reproductive genital sexuality—a sexuality that is the telos of the novelistic marriage plot and the privileged site of mature subjectivity.
Malthus and the Marriage Plot
We can understand Austen’s investment in the subordination of appetite by locating her writing at the intersection of a shifting understanding of literary character and the emergence of Malthusian thought that I traced in the Introduction. The new emphasis on “deep” character in the nineteenth century, we saw in the Introduction, was bound up with notions of aesthetic “taste” that devalued literal gustatory taste and appetite, and this new model of character emerged amid shifting views of hunger informed by Malthusian population theory. Austen would have been familiar with the central ideas of Malthusian thought (see Knox-Shaw 174–177 and O’Brien 222–224), which seems to have influenced her work especially through its reconceptualization of sexual desire. Arguing for Malthus’s powerful influence on nineteenth-century thought, Catherine Gallagher notes that even when Romantic-era writers like William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley criticize or misinterpret Malthus, they tend to do so in ways that unintentionally replicate his claims about sexuality, arguing for “the necessity as well as the goodness of the passion between the sexes” (15). And we have seen how Malthusian thought specifically naturalizes the kind of desire privileged by the companionate marriage plot: monogamous, reproductive, rational, and synonymous with sympathy, companionship, and complex subjectivity.
Malthus’s sexualization of the inner person looks forward to the convergence of deep interiority and romantic love that Austen would make the gold sta...