“The Appetite as Voice”

[Pages:30]Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37.2 September 2011: 187-216

"TheAppetiteasVoice":

Gerty, Food, and Anorexia

Hsing-chun Chou Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures

National Chung Hsing University, Taiwan

Abstract

One'sdietaryhabitsareneversimplyanindividualbehavior,butrathera reflection of the interaction between self and sociocultural forces. In this respect,one's dietary practices serve as a language to express one's relationship with the outer world. A woman'sappetiteisthusanimportant expression of her identity, which had been strictly regulated and controlled in the Victorian era. In Ulysses,Gerty'sattitudestowardfoodrepresentthe pathological relationship between women and eating within the anorexic milieu of Victorian culture, a culture which associated femininity with parsimonious appetite, debility, and spirituality, hence contributing to the prevalence of anorexia nervosa as a female disorder in Victorian times. Gerty may not be a confirmed case of anorexia, but her dietary behavior reveals several symptoms of the disorder, which was related to both gender and class identity.ShapedbyVictorianbourgeoisculture,Gerty'sappetitesuggeststhe widespread impact of anorexia nervosa on females.

Keywords

Ulysses, Gerty MacDowell, appetite, anorexia nervosa, fasting, femininity

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Food, which Roland Barthes calls "an immediate reality" (22), is

indispensable to human life and history. Once being deprived of food, human

beings are denied a fundamental element for survival, and the evolution of human

history would be impossible. In her influential book, Food in History, Reay Tannahillarguesemphatically:"For50,000yearsandmore,humanity'squestfor

food has helped to shape the development of society. It has profoundly influenced

population growth and urban expansion, dictated economic and political theory,

expanded the horizons of commerce, inspired wars of dominion and precipitated the discoveryofnewworlds"(xv)."Withoutfood,"Tannahillstresses,"therewouldbe nohumanrace,andnohistory"(xv).Tannahill'sargument suggests that the import

of food is not merely biological: it is also sociocultural. Indeed, despite the divergence in their disciplines and approaches, food scholars--whether anthropologists, sociologists, or historians--generally agree upon the significance

of the sociocultural context in which food is produced and consumed. Sidney W. Mintz, for example, declaresthateatingissaturatedwiththe"histories"ofthe

foodstuffs and those who have eaten them (7); Pat Caplan states that food, "intimatelyboundupwithsocialrelations,"isnevernutritionallysignificantonly

(3). Food habits, as a matter of fact, are largely constructed, packed with social and

cultural meanings. Eating practices involve the discipline of the body within a sociocultural milieu,inwhichone'sdietarytasteandbehaviorareshapedand

regulated, and rules and such classifications as gender, class, and ethnicity are

created. Food, in other words, serves as a means for social stratification, differentiatingbetween"us"and"them,""self"and"other,""inside"and"outside"; itiscloselyrelatedtoone'sidentity.One'sdietarybehaviormayindicatetoa

considerable extent his/her social status and cultural identity. It is in this respect that Caplanconsidersfoodtobe"amarkerofdifference"(9).Seeing"meaning"beyond food's"survivalfunction,"LindaCivitellomaintainsthat"[i]dentity--religious, national, ethnic--isintenselybound up with food"(xiii-xiv). Tobias D?ring, Markus Heide, and Susanne M?hleisen argue thatbyoffering"powerfulwaysto make and communicate cultural meanings," food and dietary behavior "define

group and gender identities, celebrate social cohesion and perform rituals of cultural belonging"(2).CaroleM.Counihan'scommentcanbereadasasummary of the recentattemptstodefinethesignificanceandimplicationsoffood:"Class,caste,

race, and gender hierarchies are maintained, in part, through differential control overandaccesstofood.One'splaceinthesocialsystemisrevealedbywhat, how much,andwithwhom oneeats"(8).Tobebrief,foodstudiesmaydifferin

methodologies and interpretations, and yet the interrelationships between food and

Hsing-chun Chou 189

sociocultural forces have been generally acknowledged by scholars who have sought to investigate meanings behind food and dietary behavior.

The emergence and development of food studies have shed light on literary criticism in recent decades: critics have taken interest in exploring the representation and signification of food in literary texts. In Food, Consumption and theBodyinContemporaryWomen'sFiction, for example, Sarah Sceats examines theimageryoffoodandeatingrepresentedincontemporarywomenwriters'texts, investigating food images and eating practices in relation to issues of love, desire, maternity, identity, and social behavior. Sceats concludes the account of her researchbyemphasizingtheimpactofsocioculturalforcesonindividuals'dietary behavior (186).

James Joyce and Food

As the quintessential modern epic of thebody,JamesJoyce'sUlysses has inevitably inspired a great number of studies of its handling of the corporeal theme, especially as this theme relates to gender politics, consumption culture, and the issue of identity.1 In spite of its significance to the body, food receives little attention in these researches--a blank that sits strangely beside the numerous representations of food and eating in Joyce. Joyce himself, in fact, was a gourmet: bothIraB.NadelandVikeMartinaPlocknoteJoyce'sfondnessfor and detailed descriptionsoffoodinhisletters(Nadel213;Plock31).Joyce'sconcern,Nadel suggests,"waswitheatingasanevent,aritualgatheringoffamilyandothers,"and "anopportunitytodisplayIrishhospitality"(221).Thispersonalfondness is reflected in his texts: not only does Joyce carefully represent images of food in his works, but the text of Ulysses begins and ends with the eating practice of the main characters.In"Telemachus,"StephenDedalushasbreakfastwithMulliganand Haines,andmeanwhilethemilkwoman'sserviceandattitudeinducehisreflection on nationalist problems. For the rest of the day, Stephen goes on a fast, consuming nothing but liquid substance such as alcohol and cocoa. As eating signifies the literal incorporationoftheouterworldintothehumanbody,Stephen'srefusalof solid food is symbolic enough to insinuate his problematic relation to the outside world. Like Stephen,LeopoldBloom beginshisdaywithfood.In"Calypso,"we see Bloom busy himself in the kitchen--a household space traditionally regarded as women's--preparing breakfast for Molly, himself, and the cat. In the following

1 See, for example, Froula; Devlin and Reizbaum; Wawrzycka and Corcoran; Leonard; and Davison.

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episode,"Lotus-Eaters,"Bloom witnessestheobservanceofHolyCommunionin

the church and muses upon the connotations of the Eucharist. Then, with the approach of lunchtime, Bloom's mind is occupied with food images and associations: intheepisode"Lestrygonians,"we see his choice of the dining place,

his association of eating with cannibalism, and his ambivalent speculation about foodasthesourcesofpleasureanddisgust.In"Sirens,"musicmaybeanimportant seductionthatstirsBloom'slongingsanddesires,butsoisfood.Later that day, Bloom buysapig'scrubeenandasheep'strotter,takesStephentothecabman's shelter for some refreshment, and invites him home and serves him cocoa--as shownintheepisodes"Circe,""Eumaeus,"and"Ithaca,"respectively.Bloom'sday on16June1904,inshort,isfilledwithfood.Histransgressionintowoman'sspace,

his food preference and associations, his service to other people, and his solitary

eating are all socioculturally meaningful, revealing his adulterous inclination and suggestinghisalienationfrom theDublincommunity.MollyBloom'sinterior monologuein"Penelope"endsJoyce'sepicofthebody.Thisfinalepisodebegins withMolly'smistakencomplaintthatBloom ordershertopreparebreakfastthe

next day, and ends with her recollection of mouthfeeding Bloom with the seedcake

and accepting his marriage proposal. Her thoughts, though rambling and chaotic,

center mainly on food and sex, and thus suggest the interconnection between food, sex,thebody,andtheself.FoodisalsorepresentedinnotablewaysinJoyce's

earlier texts; instances include the Christmas dinner scene and the description of fooditemsafterStephen'sconfessioninA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the forgottenapplein"APainfulCase,"andthefeastin"TheDead."FoodinJoyceis,

in summary, always socioculturally significant and inseparable from the issues of

sex, power, and identity. Despite the numerousdepictionsoffood and eating in Joyce'stexts,

researches into this theme have been in short supply: though there have been some

journal and book articles on the subject, only two books on this topic have so far appeared,AlisonArmstrong'sThe Joyce of Cooking: Food and Drink from James Joyce'sDublin(1986)andLindseyTucker'sStephenandBloom atLife'sFeast: AlimentarySymbolismandtheCreativeProcessinJamesJoyce'sUlysses (1984).

The former is not even a work of academic research but, rather, a cookbook inspired byJoyce'sworks,whichmakesTucker'sthesoleacademicworkfocusedonthe subject of Joyce and eating. In her study, Tucker explores "the function of the digestive processes astheyrelatetothecreativityandlanguage"(2).WithStephen andBloomashertargets,Tuckerexaminesthemaleprotagonists'dietarybehaviors, whichrevealontheonehandStephen'sfearofbeingdevouredandhistendencyto

Hsing-chun Chou 191

project uponDubliners"threateningaspectsinvolvingeatingaswellasthemouth andteeth"(22),andontheotherhand"Bloom'sabilitytoincorporate,toingesthis experience,"andhencetocreate(46).InadditiontoTucker'sbook,somearticles do tackle the issue of eating.2 All of these articles center on Joyce the writer or the three main characters, and few of them pay attention to the sociocultural forces whichshapeaperson'sdietarybehavior.Inthispaper,IwillinvestigateJoyce's canonical novel as part of a consideration of the sociocultural contexts that become significantforanindividual's dietary practices. My main focus will not be upon the book'smuch-written-about main characters but a comparatively minor one: Gerty MacDowell,fromthe"Nausicaa"episode.

Although Gerty'sdietarybehaviorisreferredtoonlybrieflyinUlysses and so easy to ignore, her attitudes and reactions to food can be shown to represent the pathological relationship between women and eating within the anorexic milieu of Victorianculture.PlockconsidersGerty'sacaseof"latentanorexia"(39).Tosee Gerty as an anorexic patient might seem to be to exaggerate her symptoms, but her dietary behavior does in fact reveal some characteristics of anorexia nervosa, which, accordingtoJoanJacobsBrumberg,"hadagreatdealtodowithgenderandclass identity" (8).

Anorexia Nervosa in the Victorian Era

"InthelateVictorianera,arguablyforthefirsttimeintheWest,thosewho

2 Nadel, in "Molly's Mediterranean Meals and Other Joycean Cuisines: An Essay with Recipes,"argues for Joyce's fondness for Mediterranean cuisines as they symbolize the intermingling of cultures (210-22). In "Modernism's Feast on Science: Nutrition and Diet in Joyce's Ulysses,"Plock maintains that Joyce incorporates into Ulysses nineteenth-century scientific discourses about nutrition and diet, and thus disposes of the distinction between science and literature (30-42). Robert Gibb, in "Cloacal Obsession: Food, Sex, and Death in `Lestrygonians,'"contends that, to Bloom's mind, food acts as a surrogate for sex and Molly, and that he associates food with death and fears to have sexual intercourse with Molly on account of his obsession with the death of Rudy and the probability of another birth/death (268-73). Also placing the focus on Bloom, Jaye Berman Montresor, in "Joyce's Jewish Stew: The Alimentary Lists in Ulysses,"analyzes the food lists pertaining to Bloom and suggests that they reveal his problematic Jewish identity (194-203). In the article "Breakfast at 7 Eccles Street,"Austin Briggs examines the uncertainties surrounding the Blooms'breakfast on 17 June 1904 as they relate to the uncertainties regarding the Blooms'future (195-209). Miriam O'Kane Mara's attention falls on Stephen in the article "James Joyce and the Politics of Food."Somewhat in the manner of Tucker, Mara remarks that Stephen dreads ingesting food for the reason that food seems to threaten his bodily borders and therefore represents a threat to his troubled, colonized, and feminized identity (94-110).

192 Concentric 37.2 September 2011

could afford to eat well began systematically to deny themselves food in pursuit of anaestheticideal"(Bordo185).SusanBordomakesthisstatementinherinfluential book, Unbearable Weight, in which she examines the connections between contemporaryWesterncultureandwomen'srelationtofood.Bordo'swordssuggest thatfoodcontrolisnotthe"privilege"ofpresent-day women: Victorian women had startedtolimittheirfoodintakeinordertoachieve"anaestheticideal,"thatis,the ideal of femininity. Food and femininity were so closely linkedthat"restrictive eating"wasactuallypromotedinVictoriansociety(Brumberg174).Thepromotion ofrestrictiveeatingcontributedtowomen'ssystematic denial of food ingestion, which manifested the Victorian cultural milieu of anorexia. Anorexia nervosa, as Brumberg declares,"is a historically specific disease thatemerged from the distinctiveeconomicandsocialenvironmentofthelatenineteenthcentury"(6).It wasadiseaseexclusivelydiagnosedamong"affluentyoungVictorians"(8)--that is, among the middle and upper classes--for those who were at the bottom of social hierarchy like the Dedalus daughters would do their best to feed rather than to starve themselves. Simply put, anorexia refers to the lack of appetite. But more

accurately, anorectics did not necessarily resent food or really lose their appetites, but rather controlled their food intake in the extreme to achieve their purpose. Hilde Bruchobserves:"Thoughfoodintakeissharplycurtailed,thisisnotbecauseof

poor appetite or lagging interest in food. On the contrary, [anorectics] are frantically preoccupied with food and eating but consider self-denial and discipline the highest virtue and condemn satisfying their needs and desires as shameful self-indulgence"

(xxi-xxii). In other words, food was denied for the pursuit of an ideal. The emergence of anorexia nervosa in the nineteenth century had a great deal

todowiththeculturalpresuppositionsoftheera,"whentheprevailingidealof

femininity was the delicate, affluent lady, unequipped for anything but the most sheltered domestic life" (Bordo 157).To achieve this feminine ideal,young Victorian women had to watch out for their body size and appetite. This explains

why the disorder was fundamentally a female one: ninety percent of anorectics were young women (140). It has to be emphasized that although all women dwelt in this cultural milieu, not all women were anorectics by definition: a modern woman then

as now could be obsessed with her weight without necessarily suffering from the disease.Anorexianervosais"amultidetermineddisorder"(Brumberg 161); its onset could be attributed to both individual factors and environmental influences, andfrustrationsplayamajorroleintriggeringthedisease,including"inappropriate romantic expectations, blocked educational or social opportunities, struggles with parents"(127).Symptomaticofanorexiaornot,awoman'sappetiteis"an

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importantvoice"inheridentity(184),asBrumbergputsitin"TheAppetiteas Voice,"achapterin the highly acclaimed study of eating disorders, Fasting Girls. Thatawoman'sappetitefunctions as"voice"residesnotonlyinthesensethatit offers her an opportunity to be heard, but also in the sense that it provides sufficient messages for us to decode the working of sociocultural forces on the construction of her identity. Her appetite could signify a gesture of self-expression, but it could also serve as clues to the operation of public forces. Whichever it is,the"voice"of appetite had been strictly regulated and controlled in the Victorian era--a cultural milieu whose impact was palpable in the early twentieth century. It is within such an anorexic milieu that Gerty strives to achieve the ideal of femininity by means of eating and food control.

Gerty, Food, and Femininity

"[A]sfairaspecimenofwinsomeIrishgirlhoodasonecouldwishtosee"(U 13.80-81),3 Gerty MacDowell acts as a representative of Irish womanhood at the turn of the twentieth century--constructed largely by public discourses and commodityculture.Ifthefreeindirectdiscourseinthefirsthalfof"Nausicaa"tells us about the impact of public culture on Gerty in particular and Irish women in general, it also informs us of the relationship between women and food within the Victorian and Edwardian social milieu. Admittedly, Gerty embodies the Victorian bourgeois ideology of the angel in the house: "[a] sterling good daughter . . . just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth itsweightingold"(U 13.325-26). Such a ministering angel has to create the "feelingofhominess"(U 13.224), which is closely linked with cooking:

She would care for [her manly man] with creature comforts too for Gerty was womanly wise and knew that a mere man liked that feeling of hominess. Her griddlecakes done to a goldenbrown hue and queen Ann'spuddingofdelightfulcreaminesshadwongoldenopinions from all because she had a lucky hand also for lighting a fire, dredge in the fine selfraising flour and always stir in the same direction, then cream the milk and sugar and whisk well the white of eggs though shedidn'tliketheeatingpartwhentherewereanypeople that made her shy. . . . (U 13.222-29)

3 All references to Joyce's Ulysses are to the chapter and line numbers of the 1986 Vintage edition and will be preceded by the abbreviation U.

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For Gerty, to care for a husband is equivalent to be an excellent cook, or, to be more precisely, a first-rate baker. This fits the traditional role of woman as food preparer or feeder: by preparing food and feeding her family, a woman expresses her love for them.AsBrumbergexplains,"[F]ood was used to express love in the bourgeois household. Offering attractive and ample food was the particular responsibility and pleasure of middle-classwivesand mothers" (136;emphasisadded).Itis noteworthy that to offer food was bothawoman's"responsibility"and"pleasure." In other words, women delighted in feeding others, not themselves. Gerty is not the only feeder described in the "Nausicaa"episode. "Tommy Caffrey could never be got to take his castor oil unless it was Cissy Caffrey that held his nose and promised him the scatty heel of the loaf or brown bread with golden syrup on. What a persuasive power that girl had!"(U 13.30-33). The top priority of Cissy as a woman is to feed her brother with what he is unwilling to take--this is her gratification, her "power."Asamatteroffact,adominantnotionconcerningwomenandfoodin Victorian society was thatwomen took immense pleasure "by feeding and nourishing others,notthemselves"(Bordo118;emphasisinoriginal).Bordomakes thisclear:"Denialof self and the feeding of others are hopelessly enmeshed in this construction of the ideal mother, as they are in the nineteenth-century version of the ideal wife. . . . [I]t is here, in the care and feeding of others, that woman experiences the one form ofdesirethatisappropriatelyhers..."(118).Consequentlyand unsurprisingly, it delights Gerty to prepare delicious food, and pleases Cissy to feed her brother.

If women felt immensely gratified in denying themselves and feeding others, women did not need to eat, as the logic goes. Caroline Walker Bynum observes that cookbooksintheWestdid"suggestthatwomen--who prepared the meals--hardly neededtoeatatall"(Holy Feast 191).Suchanassumption"actuallyproduced dietarydeficienciesinwomen"by the nineteenth century andimpactedon"the twentieth-centuryWesterncrazeforfemaledieting"(191).In"Nausicaa,"wesee Gerty and Cissy as food preparer and feeder, but hardly as eater--the role of eater belongs to men, not to women. Indeed, we are told how Gerty bakes delicious cakes and puddings, and what an outstanding baker she is, but we do not see her eating the cake or pudding she bakes. Gerty herself admits that she prefers cooking to eating, and that eating in front of other people embarrasses her. Deborah Lupton pointsoutthatetiquettemanualspublishedinVictoriantimes"ruledagainsteating inpublic,"foritcouldviolate"thedictatesofbourgeoismanners"iftheeaterfailed to perform the ritual with required elegance (22). What was ruled against, in

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