Food
Michele Roberts on the way to a woman's heart
Published 15 September 2003
Nothing reveals a woman's character more than her attitude to eating
A woman's character, as well as her notions of class, can be read through her complicated attitude to food. This is one premise on which Elizabeth Gaskell's wonderful novel Wives and Daughters is based. Gaskell, as a realist writer fascinated by the social structures of communities, did not neglect the undercurrents of feeling and thought swirling silently between people. Long before Freud got around to it, she was describing the eruption of the unconscious into everyday life, the way the self is built on fictions, the importance of dreams. She used food imagery to comment on all these topics.
Wives and Daughters, set in the 1820s (though written 40 years later) in the invented county town of Hollingford in the Midlands, concerns itself with mobility and change. Various newcomers, emblematic of the upheavals taking place in traditional farming practices, upset all kinds of apple-carts. One of these is the ex-governess Mrs Kirkpatrick, a widow who returns from running a school in France, that dangerous enemy country, to woo and marry the local doctor, Mr Gibson, a widower with one daughter. Chapter Two reveals her as both greedy and dishonest. Finding little Molly Gibson weeping, left behind in the gardens after a fete at The Towers, the big house, Mrs Kirkpatrick affects kindness, getting a footman to bring the child a tray of food: "bread, and some cold chicken, and some jelly, and a glass of wine". Molly is too shy and miserable to touch anything so Mrs Kirkpatrick scoffs the lot, later pretending she hasn't touched a thing and letting the aristocratic ladies laugh at the little peasant's overeating.
Mrs Kirkpatrick, desperate for money and a home, and equally desperate to be thought elegant, to rise in the world, cannot admit to her desires. Once she has captured the doctor by a stratagem, she sets forth on her mission of civilising both Gibsons. No more big bowls of strawberries and cream for Molly; no more unladylike climbing of the cherry tree to pinch cherries. The new Mrs Gibson engages a Frenchified cook and forces the doctor, who has previously enjoyed bachelor meals of bread and cheese, toasted cheese and blackcurrant dumplings, to submit to the "new-fangled notion of a late dinner". As his super-genteel wife "really cannot allow cheese to come beyond the kitchen", poor Mr Gibson has to "satisfy his healthy English appetite on badly made omelettes, rissoles, vol-au-vents, croquettes and timbales; never being exactly sure what he was eating".
When Lady Harriet from The Towers calls on her former governess, Mrs Gibson instructs her daughter Cynthia on hypocritical strategy: "She is very fanciful, is dear Lady Harriet! I would not like her to think we made any difference in our meals because she stayed. 'Simple elegance,' as I tell her, 'always is what we aim at.' But still you could put out the best service, and arrange some flowers, and ask cook what there is for dinner that she could send us for lunch, and make it all look pretty, and impromptu, and natural." So when Lady Harriet requests "a little bread and butter, and perhaps a slice of cold meat", Mrs Gibson rings the bell twice, the pre-arranged signal, and down in the kitchen Cook falls to: "the brace of partridges that were to have been for the late dinner were instantly put down to the fire".
The townspeople can only grumble among themselves: "The late dinners which Mrs Gibson had introduced into her own house were a great inconvenience in the calculations of the small tea-drinkings at Hollingford. How ask people to tea at six, who dined at that hour? How, when they refused cake and sandwiches at half-past eight, how induce other people who were really hungry to commit a vulgarity before those calm and scornful eyes?" However, Dr Nicholls, a visitor, routs Mrs Gibson over lunch, "when everyone was merry and hungry, excepting the hostess, who was trying to train her midday appetite into the genteelest of all ways . . . Dr Nicholls . . . would keep recommending her to try the coarsest viands on the table; and at last, he told her that if she could not fancy the cold beef to try a little with pickled onions . . . ever afterwards she spoke of Dr Nicholls as 'that bear'."
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