Racial Indigestion
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Racial Indigestion

Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

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Racial Indigestion

Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

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About This Book

The act of eating is both erotic and violent, as one wholly consumes the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists outside her body. Racial Indigestion explores the links between food, visual and literary culture in the nineteenth-century United States to reveal how eating produces political subjects by justifying the social discourses that create bodily meaning.

Combing through a visually stunning and rare archive of children’s literature, architectural history, domestic manuals, dietetic tracts, novels and advertising, Racial Indigestion tells the story of the consolidation of nationalist mythologies of whiteness via the erotic politics of consumption. Less a history of commodities than a history of eating itself, the book seeks to understand how eating became a political act, linked to appetite, vice, virtue, race and class inequality and, finally, the queer pleasures and pitfalls of a burgeoning commodity culture. In so doing, Racial Indigestion sheds light on contemporary “foodie” culture’s vexed relationship to nativism, nationalism and race privilege.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2012
ISBN
9780814770054

1
Kitchen Insurrections

We begin at the hearth. Here, at the mouth of the fireplace, at the bottom of the chimney’s throat, lies the ground for what follows in chapters 2 through 5, a conversation about the literature and visual texts that flowed from nineteenth-century eating culture. Across this conversation the hearth—and its descendant, the kitchen—will become less and less the primary location of U.S. food culture, and a more public eating culture will emerge, shaped by the ideology, literature, and architecture of domesticity in the early republic but rooted, as the material in this chapter argues, in early modern feast and banquet literature and transatlantic pantomime theater. Out of this olla podrida of environmental, cultural, and political forces will emerge a charged eating culture, in which racially marked and working-class bodies are as closely bound to food imagery as they are infused with a suppressed political affect barely contained by eating spaces and the literary forms they produce.
By focusing on the hearth and then the kitchen not simply as ahistorical spaces but as work sites whose symbolic function changed radically across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even when actual architectural changes may have lagged quite far behind, I join in a long line of feminist critics who have investigated the central role of cooking spaces in organizing and defining the value of female labor and the valence of women’s political and cultural citizenship across the nineteenth century.1 My interest in the hearth and kitchen as the literary and architectural sites from which the United States’ eating culture emerges is an attempt to invest feminist, literary, and cultural criticism with a more nuanced idea of the links between food and literature across the nineteenth century, in part by connecting images of the hearth to the early modern and transatlantic cultural flows that consistently linked food and eating imagery to class and bodily inversion.2 In this chapter, then, I build on these feminist critics’ work to argue that the hearth and kitchen have a specific literary history of their own, which produced effects on nineteenth-century literature and its bodies through a persistent connection to orality, construed broadly as vernacular language, as eating and ingestion, and finally as a series of sensual and erotic intensifications centered on the mouth. Finding their literary heritage in the European and colonial hearth, the hearth and kitchen discourses I will examine adhere—“stick” in Sara Ahmed’s useful term—to those subjects who labored with or close to food.3 As the United States’ hyperembodied notions of class, race, and gender were expressed in terms of food—the central matter of the kitchen—so the bodies that labored in kitchens came to be represented, in the unconscious of popular culture, as food. Materialization, and the material conditions that make possible the exemplary act of consumption, are thus central concerns of this chapter.
If the seeds of the images that became the late nineteenth century’s obsessive kitchen and food comedies about race lie in the hearth and kitchen literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, those images, as I will show, germinate in earlier representations of class difference and inversion. Class must be at the center of this chapter if we are to understand, first, the series of transformations by which the fireplace- and hearth-centered kitchen became the modern kitchen and, second, the articulation of the kitchen as a separate room from the rest of the house, a change that paralleled the articulation of class difference in the antebellum United States. It is in literature of the hearth—sometimes represented as the fireplace or chimney—that I trace the legacy of a discourse that came from Europe to the New World and linked the hearth to storytelling, ingestion, and moments of theatrical and carnivalesque class, gender, and (at times) species inversion.
The hearth lingers in the memory of antebellum U.S. writers, suturing food and eating to literary culture. As it disappears as a practical space, the hearth reemerges as a specter that haunts later overdetermined representations of the kitchen and the racially burdened bodies that labored there. In other words, what began as early modern and colonial-era class discourse was exploited to provide the protocols for later mid-and late nineteenth-century narratives of racial difference and consolidation. The hearth, with its link to dirt, the pleasurable possibilities of transformation, inversion, and bodily fluidity, repeatedly returns to haunt the complex public food cultures that descended from it and in particular the hegemonic project of white middle-class embodiment.
As we understand the political economy of domestic space through discourse, so should we understand the cook. The kitchen is not only where the cook performs her designated labor; it is the space from which the cook, that servant-figure so broadly stereotyped over the past two centuries, threatens to speak. In so doing she threatens to infuse the food she produces—that her employers will eat—with the stifled political affect that the walls of the kitchen are supposed to contain. Thus, not only does the kitchen come to be associated with the mouth, more specifically, with the mouth that will not close (and thus the mouth that laughs, eats, speaks, and screams); it becomes the central space where the threatening porosity between bodies—most specifically between ruling-class and subaltern bodies—is most apparent. As a practice, the intimacy of everyday nineteenth-century middle-class life necessarily took place across categories and spaces of social difference within the home. The cook who knew the tastes of the master, the mistress, and the children knew an intimate detail about them, a secret, something beyond her subordinate function. The cook inhabited the mouths of her “superiors” at the same time as she functioned as a proxy for their mouths in the cooking spaces of the home. Like the hearth, the cook’s mouth lay at the center of domestic well-being; the food that passed from the hands and body of the kitchen servant to the dining room figuratively passed through her mouth to the mouths of the master’s or mistress’s family; it was therefore fraught with the possibility of poison, pollution, and race and class contamination.
Beyond the lines of class and race, other boundaries are upset in relation to eating and cooking in the kitchen’s unconscious, boundaries that also parallel the evolution of the United States’ scientific and juridical racisms. The line between human and animal seems to disappear in stories that revolve around the hearth, but so does the line between person and thing, an image that becomes more important in pre–Civil War literature such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Food thus becomes a metalanguage for multiple forms of difference in these passages, as animals exhibit human consciousness and human bodies are presented as food objects, often as meat. The kitchen, in turn, is increasingly the space into which disorder, garbage, contagion, dirt, noise, and other abject sensory experiences are projected. Those projections, all associated with the ideological work of disgust and therefore constituted by disgust’s other, desire, stick to the kitchen’s residents, the hyperembodied subjects—disruptive, forbidden, marginally social, and therefore deliciously attractive—who come to be associated with its labor and products.

Hearth, Fireplace, and Chimney

Cooking was one of the central activities of colonial and early U.S. homes in the Northeast; it was generally performed around fireplace-hearths. Indeed, through the mid-nineteenth century, for most people in the mostly rural United States, the fireplace continued to be the central space around which members of the household met and socialized. The size of the traditional hearth is an indicator of this centrally unifying function. In the seventeenth century many New England houses were built around massive stone chimneys, as were most houses in Plymouth Colony and Rhode Island. In order to keep new rooms warm houses often expanded through add-ons to the main house, usually on the side of the house where the chimney was located. This house arrangement was slightly different in the Chesapeake area, where houses, particularly those of the genteel class, tended to be framed by chimneys on opposite ends of the house.4
Not surprisingly, most of the original homes in British North America followed on the vernacular architectural designs of their early modern counterparts in England. As historian John Crowley has written, “The plans, amenities, and finish of the houses in which most Americans still lived at the end of the eighteenth century—room-and-loft house plans, wood and clay chimneys, few and small windows, and construction from local raw materials—would have earned them the derogatory designation ‘cottages’ in England.”5 In early New England homes often resembled the two-room buildings of southeastern England, with one room designated for sleeping and storage, another for cooking, sleeping, and eating. The division between these spaces was marked by the central fireplace.
For most colonists what constituted home improvement was not expanding the size of the house structure but rather adding then-expensive windows and window panes, which allowed more natural light into the home and moved reading, writing, and household duties away from the light afforded by the central fireplace. Artificial lighting using candles, whale oil lanterns, and tallow was expensive. As Jane Nylander points out, making candles was part of the regular regimen of domestic duties, and the household manufacture of candles for home use persisted in rural areas until the advent of cheap kerosene in the late 1860s.6 The expense of glass windows was due partly to the cost of transport. Francis Higginson, writing to advise his friends in England about coming to America and New England’s plantation, reminds them that “here are yet neither markets nor fayres to buy what you want.” Thus, one must bring a number of goods not only to furnish but to build the household, among which are “glasse for windowes and many other things which were better for you to think of them than to want them here.”7 Oiled paper was commonly resorted to instead of glass. Still, the best and cheapest source of illumination was, by process of elimination, the central fireplace, which could be used for indoor entertainment and domestic activity on cold days and evenings, as well as for cooking.
Because the colonial house had not yet developed the kind of specialized spaces and furnishings that are allowed in a society that has developed “fayres” and markets and manufacturing, the technological issues relating to cooking and domestic labors pertaining to food were inseparable from those related to heating and light. Faced with cold temperatures they could never have imagined before colonizing the northern Americas, heat was a central concern for colonists and their descendants. This was partly because fireplace technology was so poor: in fact, such was the inefficiency of fireplace construction that by 1637 colonists had cleared most of the old-growth forest from Massachusetts Bay to warm themselves. Within these homes, fireplace chimneys sent a great deal of heat up and outside, and lack of insulation—cracks in the house’s wooden frame, for instance—made retaining heat in the room difficult. To produce a minimal level of comfort, then, a prodigious amount of wood had to be used, which exacerbated another problem, because if heat leaked out, smoke often stayed in.8
In fact the colonists transplanted fireplace models from England and continental Europe that were outsized, considering the “cottage” size of their houses. They were often so big that one might consider the fireplace a room of its own: at times dominating an entire wall, the hearth was often topped with an enormous low-hanging hood that cooks and others had to stoop under to stir up the fire. On cold days the prized seat of the house was in fact inside the fireplace and next to the fire. More than a few feet away it might still be cold enough for water to freeze; too close and one got burned. Cotton Mather complained in his diary entry for January 23, 1697, that “in a warm Room, on a great Fire, the Juices forced out at the End of short Billets of Wood by the Heat of the Flame on which they were laid yett froze into Ice at their coming out.”9
Such was the importance of developing fireplace and domestic heating technology that Benjamin Franklin himself turned his considerable talent to this issue, writing a pamphlet in 1744 that proposed a new technology for stoves based on Dutch and German stoves.10 Franklin criticized then-current heating technologies, arguing that “the large open Fire-places used in the Days of our Fathers, and still generally in the Country, and in Kitchens” kept very little warm and, further, polluted the room with smoke unless a door to the outside was kept open:11
[It has] generally the conveniency of two warm seats, one in each corner, but they are sometimes too hot to abide in, and at other times incommoded with the Smoke; there is likewise good Room for the Cook to move, to hang pots, &c—. . . [But] the cold Air so nips the Backs and Heels of those that sit before the Fire, that they have no comfort ’till either Screens or Settles are provided.12
Although Franklin proposed his “Pennsylvania Stove” in 1744, due to the poor but still-costly state of iron-forging technology, stoves were generally slow to catch on for domestic use. The unsightliness of iron stove vents and longstanding ideas about the unhealthiness of closed rooms and warm air also contributed to the general resistance to stoves. Additionally, not all stoves, even those built into fireplaces, necessarily improved cooking technology.
I will return to the stove later on in this chapter, but what I want to make clear here is that the fireplace remained not only at the literal center of the colonial northeastern house but at the symbolic center of domestic life for the strongest of material reasons. And since it was the central source of evening light...

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