Carnal desires, both sexual and alimentary

Reading the chapter from Tompkins’s book – Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century – made me strangely hungry. I also couldn’t help but think of Hsuan Hsu’s lecture the other week on paleofiction and race. If wheat, as followers of Grahamite thought proclaim, makes people moral and balanced, what would they say about those who follow paleo diets or are gluten free today??? Are they simply masturbating ALL THE TIME?

But back to Thompkins, teaching, and Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure.

A satirical brothel scene from 1784 via the British Museum. More party, boobs, and booze, less food.

I’d want to dig into the imperialism that Tompkins connects with food, the connections of “diet and racial supremacy,” as well as issues of gender and control (54). The role of women connected to food ties into my previous post about capitalism and prostitutes. Here, though, Tompkins explains Graham’s concerns with food and women, specifically the role of matron as producer of bread and thus sustainer of the domestic order (71). This matron figure contrasts with the girl whose “excessive lasciviousness” Graham describes just a bit strangely (79). She doesn’t eat right, so no amount of moral instruction could prevent her from “self-pollution” and trying to get with the dudes. In other words, excessive sexuality is a threat to this moral code.

Let’s say we’re still in my upper division undergrad course on erotic literature from the 1600s to today. Since the class would be looking at texts from the 19th-century, just as Tompkins does, I’d use her ideas to influence a class devoted to food and erotica. In preparation for class I’d ask students to find one or two instances of food in the text and how they see it being used. They could pick from Memoirs or one of the other books we would have read by then.

I’d then put students in pairs or groups of 3 (depending on class size) and have them share what they came in with to each other. We’d then attempt to classify the different usages of food in the texts and see if there was any pattern in terms of time or space. Since I don’t have that syllabus written (yet), here are some examples from Memoirs:

• PLOT DEVICE: When Fanny sees Charles, the love of her life, for the first time, he’s sleeping off a night of drinking in the brothel’s parlor. Next to him “still remain’d the punch-bowl and glasses, strow’d about in their usual disorder after a drunken revel” (34). Here drink equals negative excess/decadence, but is also the means through which Fanny meets the man she will eventually marry. And it allows her to escape Mrs. Brown’s awful brothel.
• METAPHORIC: Fanny talks about “that store bag of nature’s prime sweets” when feeling up one of her many lovers as well as the “balsamic sweets” of ejaculate during sex with Charles (83, 42). The dizzying round of sex Fanny and Charles have their first day together is also described as a “feast” (43).

There are also lots of dinners in the text, though they are served by others and never made by Fanny. She is not a bread-maker or baker. Breakfast, if mentioned, is chocolate. Clearly she is a lady of excess whose passions are inflamed, perhaps in part by the exotic foods she eats.

After looking at these usages in the texts themselves, class would conclude with a broader discussion of the relationship between food, sex, and power, connecting the texts we’d read through this lens of eating.

I don’t think I would necessarily have the students read this selection, but would pull out some of Tompkins examples to share with them. If it was a grad seminar, they’d get the chapter paired with a 19th-century text. If I was feeling clever, I'd make sure people had brought food to share so that we weren't all starving by end of class.