After-Taste

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the symbolic uses of food in twentieth-century America using, as case studies, major works by Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison, W.H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. By incorporating different literary genres - poetry, the novel, and expository prose - by authors from distinct geographic locations, classes, genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnic backgrounds, and eras, my principles of selection offer a broad and significant representation for analysis that serves two related ends: to understand the different ways food functions in literature and thereby to establish the importance of food to literary study. After-Taste argues that food and eating in the novel, in canonical twentieth-century American literature, have been used predominantly for social critique rather than made an integral part of individual psychopathological investigation. In poetry, however, the reverse holds true: Auden and Stevens, two very different poets, shared a common goal - reconciliation of the self with world, rather than social critique, imagined through food and eating. While literary critics have made significant contributions to the discourse surrounding food as a field of study, their works are primarily historical, political, anthropological, and cultural in scope, rather than literary. After-Taste revises Brillat Savarin's fourth aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are[,]" into an injunction to the literary critic: 'Tell us what, how, when, where, and why the author deploys food in her literature, and we shall learn new meanings that have been obscure to us.' This study asks, and seeks to answer, the following questions: What narrative possibilities does food enable in the novel and in poetry? Is the usage of food symbolic only, or is it in some cases part of a deeper narrative logic? What social and individual meanings can food carry that other material objects cannot? Not all authors utilize food in their writing, but those who do have made a decision with narrative, theoretical, literary, and ontological consequences. My pages attempt to explain why food has such a powerful appeal for specific writers, those whose works would be aesthetically and rhetorically incomplete had they not employed a logic of food in their writing.