From Chapter 12, part of the hypochondria theme, where Emma’s father tries to bully everyone into eating gruel before bed.
“You and I will have a nice basin of gruel together. My dear Emma, suppose we all have a little gruel.”
Emma could not suppose any such thing…
There is a surprising amount of gruel in Emma, but also more appetizing food, almost all of it attached to her father and his attempts to deny the pleasure of others.
“An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than any body. I would not recommend an egg boiled by any body else – but you need not be afraid – they are very small, you see – one of our small eggs will not hurt you.” (Ch. 3)
Ah, this is the passage where Mr. Woodhouse says “’I do not advise the custard’” – this is the custard served at his own house, at his own table.
Later discussions involve pork loins eaten with “’a boiled turnip, and a little carrot or parsnip,’” and sweetbreads with asparagus. Emma has the latter prepared for a guest who particularly savors it, even though she fears her father will ruin the pleasure in it (which he does).
Almost every previous fiction writer, and all too many subsequent ones, would not bother to specify the dish. “Emma had a special dish prepared for her” or something like that would be sufficient. Similarly with the level of detail about the gruel or pork or baked apples. Why include anything so ordinary and boring? Or the scene where Emma and Harriet are fabric shopping, how can that be interesting?
Samuel Richardson, Austen’s favorite novelist, would never have included any of this. In his hands, it would have been so tedious. In hers, the passages are full of jokes and insights into characters. It was Austen who taught me to pay attention to the kind of transportation under discussion, that chaise and barouche-landau are not just types of carriages but contain a lot of meaning, particularly about class and status.
Walter Scott was at the same time working through some of the same issues. He realized that the materiality of his fictional world made up a good deal of the difference between the past and the present, and between Scotland and England, so he began packing more stuff into his books. Austen was doing something trickier. What reader, even the Prince of Wales, needed to read about boiled eggs?
I do not want to argue that Austen and Scott represent progress, exactly. They had all read Robinson Crusoe (1719). Talk about a material novel.
Maybe next time I read Emma I will collect more of her jokes. Everyday comedy, aphorisms (“Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of,” Ch. 22), jokes of character:
Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton’s beginning to talk to him. (Ch. 36)
I know it is not everyone’s Austen, but mine is the one with a sting.
Thanks to Dolce Bellezza for getting a readalong moving.
Austen painted Mr. Woodhouse so very clearly with his great affection for gruel. And, disaffection for so much else. Despite his pickiness I rather liked him. He reminds me of a few eaters in my mother's side. What we eat is so indicative of who we are, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI like to think that my affection for butter is a positive reflection of my personality. ;)
p.s. Thank you for joining in the read-along. Where would we be without your insights? Looking at a very thin gruel, I'd say.
DeleteAn affection for butter! Austen's unfinished Sanditon has one of literature's great butter passages, rivaling the one in Cranford.
ReplyDeleteThe likeableness of Mr. Woodhouse is a feat, a testament to the trust we give to Emma and Knightley. The reader who does not trust them will have a different reaction.
Trust you to know a passage which pertains to butter.
ReplyDeleteThe butter passage is part of a return to the hypochondria theme. The novel takes place at a seaside resort, so it has all sorts of neurotics in bad health. Oh, what a shame Austen could not finish it.
ReplyDeleteThere are so many more pies in Dickens. The scene in Our Mutual Friend where two crooks share a pie and chase the down little globs of gravy with their knives. Sam Weller's weal pie in Pickwick:
ReplyDelete"Wery good thing is weal pie, when you know the lady as made it, and is quite sure it ain't kittens; and arter all though, where's the odds, when they're so like weal that the wery piemen themselves don't know the difference?"
Terrific post, as usual. I just finished the first volume and I was wondering about the gruel, too. What is that, anyway? Something like porridge? 43 years old and I don't even know what non-metaphorical gruel is!
ReplyDeletePorridge, but likely even more liquid. Hospital food.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's right. Since Dickens came up, I should have called gruel "orphanage food" - "three meals of thin gruel a-day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays" (Oliver Twist, Ch. 2).
ReplyDeleteBoy there's a lot of horrifying victuals in Dickens.
One of the great food descriptions in nineteenth century literature is Chapter III of Richard Jefferies' Amayllis at the Fair . One paragraph:
ReplyDeleteFirst he ate a piece of the dark brown mutton, this was immediately followed by a portion of floury potato, next by a portion of swede tops, and then, lest a too savoury taste should remain in the mouth, he took a fragment of bread, as it were to sweeten and cleanse his teeth. Finally came a draught of strong ale, and after a brief moment the same ingredients were mixed in the same order as before. His dinner was thus eaten in a certain order, and with a kind of rhythm, duly exciting each particular flavour like a rhyme in its proper position, and duly putting it out with its correct successor. Always the savour of meat and gravy and vegetables had to be toned down by the ultimate bread, a vast piece of which he kept beside him. He was a great bread eater—it was always bread after everything, and if there were two courses then bread between to prepare the palate, and to prevent the sweets from quarrelling with the acids. Organization was the chief characteristic of his mind—his very dinner was organized and well planned, and any break or disturbance was not so much an annoyance in itself as destructive of a clever design, like a stick thrust through the web of a geometrical spider.
Yeah, that's really good, thanks. "Bread after everything."
ReplyDeleteI got the feeling when reading it recently that "Emma" is the most affectionate of Austen's novels: all those details - of the food, the fabrics, the description of the village when they go fabric shopping - are imbued with an affection for life in a small provincial town. How different this provincial town is from those hell-holes that provincial towns inevitably are in Russian novels!
ReplyDeleteThat was the amusing contrast with Giovanni Verga, too. Sicilian towns are apparently horrors.
ReplyDelete"Most affectionate" is a good description.
There's a book called Balzac's Omelette: A Delicious Tour of French Food and Culture with Honoré de Balzac by Anka Muhlstein.
ReplyDeleteThe title speaks for itself. I haven't read it but I've heard it's good.
All this food sounds terribly bland. But I won't make any French joke about English cuisine. :-)
ReplyDeleteThat was a great series of posts about Emma, thanks. It's one of my favourite novels by Austen.
I just read Anka Muhlstein's little book on Proust and had a great time with it. The Balzac book sounds even better.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading the posts - they were a pleasure to write.