Healing and Self-Expression Through Food: Food, Eating, and Cooking in Leonora Carrington's Literary and Artistic Work

Abstract

With a profuse amount of food and actions around food appearing in her literary work, artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) also exhibited dissociative behaviors around food as coping mechanisms in times of anxiety and trauma. This thesis analyzes Carrington’s magical realist food symbolism and actions/inactions around food through interdisciplinary lenses such as structural anthropology, (auto)biography, feminism, history, and psychology. Though many scholars argue for her proponent stance on limitless sensualism and indulgence, this thesis argues against it: Carrington views excessive indulgence as immoral but restrained, controlled indulgence as moral. In fact, moderate indulgence becomes an art form and mode of spiritual elevation (control as represented by an ascetic, vegetarian diet and a less immoral, though nearly amoral, raw, natural, and survival-based “flesh-eater” or Nature’s Diet, and the most virtuous diet of the scavenger, differentiated from the over-indulgence of the complex, cooked, and ambiguously omnivorous diet of the antagonists). Moral hierarchies that Carrington attributes to different types of diets are analyzed with their corresponding character types and the messages she conveys from these diets and foods. I also explore Carrington’s symbolic and feminist use of food, cooking, and art-making with alchemy and her use of it in narrative therapy. This thesis aims to shine a light towards a non-pathologizing, compassionate, and collaborative understanding and treatment of traumatic experience through magical realist narrative therapy using food, cooking, eating, and fasting/purging symbolism.