Virginia Woolf eats two big meals in the first chapter A Room of One’s Own (1929). The first is just big. The second is big in its impact. Its comparative meagerness has disproportionate impact on that “train of thought” which Woolf sets out “to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can” over the meandering course of the long essay (40).
Woolf recreates the first meal, a luncheon at an Oxbridge men’s college, in scrumptious, finger-licking prose. If the word “partridges” calls to your mind “a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate, you are mistaken.” The men’s partridges are regal fare, and they “came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins, but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent” (10-11).
Transcribing that sentence, I feel a familiar prick of critical conscience: isn’t it disingenuous to extract from stream-of-consciousness narration? But here the familiar prick has a distinct flavor. Woolf’s description is so luscious that even this vegetarian wants to copy it all out, right from the fowl through the “confection which rose all sugar from the waves” and the wine glasses that “flushed yellow and flushed crimson” throughout the meal. Woolf is at once ironic and wistful about the expansive conversational mood into which this meal puts the scholars. Food and drink induce a “more profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse. No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself” (11). You don’t imagine these students and dons rushing off to tutorials or offices; you don’t imagine them getting back to brain work. Food for the Oxbridge men is luxurious. It is the opposite of work, not the recognized result of it.
Woolf prepares you for the sumptuousness of her prose as she describes the men’s standard menu, noting that although novelists don’t usually say a thing about “what was eaten” (10) at momentous meal-events in their novels, she’s going to indulge. Everything about the men’s meal can be read allegorically, as representing privilege or taste or culture in the outdated sense or sex or, naturally, the writing of experimental fiction. But it’s also what it is: a menu that is insistently “theirs.”
Half a dozen pages later, Woolf is sitting down to dinner in the hall at Fernham, a fictional women’s college. Good thing lunch was so filling. Woolf’s sentences shrink with her portions: “Here was my soup. … Dinner was ready. Here was the soup. It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that.” As she digests the scrappy, wilted meal, Woolf arrives at one of those literary sentences that now—pangs of conscience be damned, evidently—graces cookbook covers and epicurean slogan t-shirts: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well” (17-18).
True enough. But if ever there were an instance of Woolf’s royal “One” obscuring too much, it is this sentence taken out of context. These women students cannot think well on their diet. (A.S. Byatt’s juicy recent novel of bohemian family life over the turn of the last century in England, The Children’s Book (2009), evokes what it meant for women early in the twentieth century to have thinking, intellectual life, as their clear intention. One of the most gripping plotlines of a novel replete with compelling characters and doings centers on smart young women whose clear intentions point to no clear, livable social outcome.)
Already during the dinner at Fernham, Woolf anticipates two important possible reactions to her dissatisfaction with the women’s food. Midway through the menu, she envisions working women bargaining for provisions, haggling with market vendors as they carry their “string bags on Monday morning.” The very next sentence tries to correct this imperious vision and force its thinker to keep eating in the same stroke: “There was no reason to complain of human nature’s daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less.” This is a moment of free indirect admonishment: Woolf sounds like a governess talking to a child who doesn’t want to eat her vegetables. Only she is also the child (17).
As Woolf’s description of the women’s dinner recapitulates her description of the men’s lunch by inverting it almost point by point, “one” realizes that though these women might not be fed well enough to think well, it is only in their dining hall that the writer can think at all about the work that goes into making her food. It is only at dinner that she can—must—think about “daily food” as what sustains “human nature.”
I mean neither to impugn nor to exonerate Woolf for her position vis a vis colleges or kitchens, dining or cooking. Instead, as I prepare for the upcoming Food Justice conference at the University of Oregon that Arcade blogger Allison Carruth is convening, I’ve been thinking about how these opening meals become the model for the material and economic “trains of thought” that Woolf follows throughout A Room of One’s Own. How those meals—as much as and perhaps more subtly than the famous, off-limits lawns and libraries—land at the alter-ego Mary Beton’s “conclusion—the prosaic conclusion—that it is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” if a woman is to write fiction (105). Woolf makes no bones—to use a cooking-derived cliché—about A Room of One’s Own being about money, who has it and who controls it and what it buys—art, from the making to the selling, included. In her Room, food is symbolic, even metonymic. And food is also just food. For thought.
(Page numbers in parentheses refer to Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own. 1929. New York: Harvest, 1989.)
I love this post, Claire, and I think you're registering something in Woolf's writing that Allison also registers in her work (though she does so in a postmodern register): food is both figural and real, as is true of anything turned into the vehicle of a metaphor, but the concrete reality of food seems somehow to spill more emphatically into its figural uses, as though food metaphors were a spongy bread that sopped up the sauce of the Real--as though food metaphors wanted to aspire to the condition of the tenor. And yet this powerful absorbency can be, and often is, neatly refigured to stand in for the hold the Real has over our attempts at art and poetry. (One might immediately be too clever and say, "What, after all, does poetry mean to a hungry man or woman?") It is as though the figure of food were divided within itself in a way that especially poignantly breaks metaphor into its core ingredients or blends them together via some sort of cognitive Cuisinart.
Brilliant post, Claire: I especially like the idea that Woolf's prose gets starved when she does, and vice versa. But there's so much to think about here.
For me the comparison that pops into mind is the Proustian meal. Not the all-too-familiar petit gâteau whose name begins with M but the masterpiece meals that Françoise creates for the narrator's family. Proust is very interested indeed in the labor that goes into making those meals (sometimes brutal, as when, in "Combray," Proust sees Françoise slaughtering chickens—or when he learns about the kitchen-maid's allergy to asparagus). But he is also interested in the meal as an aesthetic experience—not food for thought, exactly, but food for a more-than-elemental pleasure. Françoise's boeuf à la gelée (A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs), for example, becomes a symbol for the Proustian narrative method: something whose appeal comes from all the work that has been done on it, bodily exhausting work of selection, composition, refinement. A kind of woman's work which makes both an appealing parallel and a threatening shadow for male authorship.
But the experience, and not just the nutrition, is the thing. Dining "well" is, in Proust as in Woolf, not just dining amply. It's dining the right way. As Bourdieu shows about French eating habits in Distinction, there's a lot of snobbery around mere abundance of food—as opposed to an almost-aesthetic appreciation of smaller quantities of beautiful ingredients in beautiful preparations. (This snobbery might even be operating in Woolf's distaste for the postprandial sleepiness of the High Table men.) So at the same time that Woolf recognizes food as a material support for intellectual work, it's also a particularly challenging nexus for thinking about artistic work and aesthetic experience. As you have already been saying so much better and more rigorously.
Thanks so much for these comments, Lee and Andrew. I don't think your parenthetical question is too clever, Lee: in fact I think it's a version of what Woolf says to herself over dinner. But the point is hunger and need only enter her "cognitive Cuisinart" (!) as "ingredients" at all, real or figurative, when she's sitting at table with the scholarly women. Andrew, your note about "dining the right way"--or "dining" as opposed to "eating"--sharpens, at least for me, something about the tone Woolf assumes in the first chapter of "A Room of One's Own" and then plays with throughout the essay. There's this peculiar mix of incredulity and naivete, so that a kind of academic country bumpkin alterego goes around remarking everything as so odd! or so surprising! or so unusual! or so wondrous! It wouldn't be totally out of keeping with this persona, I don't think, to have her wonder, a la Julia Roberts in "Pretty Woman," which fork to use when.
Great post! What would you say about the famous boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse? I've always wondered about Mrs. Ramsay's dining-table masterpiece, in the center of the first part of the novel, as compared to Lily's out-of-doors painting, in the center of the last (as well wondering about Mrs. Ramsay's beef in comparison to other things, particularly the skull?). As Andrew intimates, and as you suggest, of course, the question of food in Woolf and beyond Woolf is not just about who is provided with what sort of food but about who is doing the providing, and with what resources, and under what compunction. It might also be relevant here to mention Woolf's own difficulties with servants, whom she would have to direct in meal preparation, and her reactions to rationing. I've written a bit about the way today's food movements can ignore the problems of feminism and class (and the particular interweaving of feminism and class in the domestic arena). Woolf, and your thoughts about Woolf, are exemplary for bringing up the tough questions.
Eric Griffiths had an amazing piece -- that's the title up there -- on food and cooking and Hegel in the TLS in 1996. It's behind a paywall, and Brandeis doesn't subscribe, but it's worth hunting up.
Thanks for this post, Claire. The distinction you're pointing out is one between economies of desire and of need. Eating can famously fill both a desire and a need; we must eat to live, but eating also powerfully figures all other desires. If we want something badly we are voracious.
A Room of One's Own is full of women who must write, and often suffer for it, Shakespeare's sister being the famous example. They still operate on the basis of need; the need to write, with them, is stronger even than the need to live. But to write freely and well, Woolf argues, is a matter of desire--specifically, being materially permitted to have it.
Thus the moment so often cited as if it were about the pleasures of the table is less, I think, about an Epicurean enjoyment than about the economy of desire that material security makes possible. As soon as a woman begins to desire, somebody blames her ("Who blames me? Many, no doubt, and I shall be called discontented...."), and she writes an awkward transition, as in the passage from Jane Eyre that Woolf reads as evidence of Brontë's "indignation" and "rage." "She will write of herself where she should write of her characters," Woolf admonishes. To use a dinner metaphor: her prose is raw, not cooked. Uncivilized. Desire is out of the question; the woman who writes will be punished even if she does so out of need.
To bring this back to a recent topic of conversation, we tend to think of writing communities as being structured around voluntariness: one "contributes" (borrowing the language of philanthropy, of plenitude) to Wikipedia, Arcade, even The Atlantic. People can "contribute" if they want to; if not, then not. As Tina Fey's Sarah Palin puts it in the classic SNL sketch, "You just have to want it."
If only it were so easy; if only everyone were allowed to desire in the same way. Woolf's two dinners show just how gendered wanting can be: at lunch you want another glass of wine; at dinner you go wanting. Men dining, women eating, as Claire puts it. The female blogger may want to "contribute" as much as or more than do her male colleagues, but writing may not be, for her, a matter of wanting. Material conditions subordinate desire to the economy of need in which the woman writer must still so often operate.
Reading your comment, I remembered a passage in The Psychoanalysis of Fire.
It is about childhood memories of kitchen, kitchen fire and food cooked on it. On the one hand, there was "a soup of bread and butter boiled to a pulp" that Bachelard as a child was "condemned" to eat. He hated it so much that, as he recalls, one day he had to throw "whole spoonfuls" of it "into the teeth of the chimney hook saying, "Eat, chimney hook, eat!"." On the other hand, there were waffles given to him as treats.
For some reason I used to love this passage dearly.
Anyway, to this memory, Bachelard adds: "As far back in time as we can go, the gastronomic value has always been more highly prized than the nutritive value, and it is in joy and not in sorrow that man discovered his intellect. The conquest of the superfluous gives us a greater spiritual excitement than the conquest of the necessary. Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need" (16).