Or, a fragment of my dissertation...
“Maggie didn’t know Tom was looking at her: she was seesawing on the elder bough, lost to almost everything but a vague sense of jam and idleness...” --George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
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| Image courtesy of www101cookbooks.com |
...We might also think here of the scene in Volume 1, Chapter 6, of George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860), in
which Tom carefully divides a jam-puff to be shared with Maggie, and becomes
righteously affronted when she eats the “jammier” piece. Tom’s calculating
approach to his task—“It was a difficult problem to divide that very irregular
polygon into two equal parts” (49)—is a key signifier of his bourgeois
characterization. His urge to mathematically process and regulate things that
by their very nature—irregular, organic, messy, and contradictory (much like
Maggie)—cannot easily be counted, categorized, schematized and divided; as well
as his practical materialism, his ability to delay gratification, and his
eventual development into an exemplar of capitalistic self-determination, mark
him as a truly Smilesean Victorian.[1] Unlike his father, a
representative of the old, preindustrial England, whose misguided litigiousness
leads to vast outlays of capital, Tom is an ideal capitalist: he finds a
clerical position to pay off his father’s debts; he conserves, rather than
spending incontinently. Here, he attempts to turn a gypsy’s meal—sticky, messy,
unformed—into a bourgeois meal; he attempts to “carve” the pastry the way he
has seen his mother carve the roast joint to serve at the respectably
formalized Dodson dinners. In other words, he attempts to impose a bourgeois
ethos of consumption onto a foodstuff—a jam-puff—that is conspicuously
childlike, associated with indulgence and pleasure, and therefore the exact
opposite of Mrs Glegg’s “plain pudding without spice”. He wishes to quantify,
rationalize, and ration pleasure, while Maggie simply loses herself in temporal
immanentism: “Maggie didn’t know Tom was looking at her: she was seesawing on
the elder bough, lost to almost everything but a vague sense of jam and
idleness” (50). The language clearly foreshadows the crucial scene in which
Maggie and Stephen drift down the Floss, lost to the imminent pleasure of their
temporary escape from societal convention. And not coincidentally, it is
arguably Tom’s emotional retribution for this most insignificant of crimes—her
unthinking, “unfair” consumption—that sets Maggie on her self-punishing course
of renunciation and asceticism. The scene effectively illustrates the
differences between Tom and Maggie and their characterization as exempla of
prototypic capitalists, and Bourdieu’s types of consumption. It
also offers an early, literalized instance of Maggie’s oft-mentioned “hunger of
the heart”, or what Nina Auerbach has referred to as her “rapacity”, noting,
“The language of hunger and thirst is used to define her as frequently as the
nearly ubiquitous water imagery is” (170).
[1]
It is perhaps worth noting here
that food historians have had much to say about the unprecedented and
far-reaching standardization of meals and mealtimes that took place in the
nineteenth century. For example, Sally Mitchell notes in her preface to Andrea
Broomfield’s Food and Cooking in
Victorian England: A History (2007), “It is perhaps not an exaggeration to
say that foods and cooking were altered more than any other aspect of ordinary
daily life during the period between 1830 and 1900” (ix). Kathryn Hughes notes
in her biography of Isabella Beeton that the latter’s opus Book of Household Management is very much concerned with
standardization, figuring the home as factory: “Briskly she divides the working
day into segments and allots each household member from the mistress to the
scullery maid a precise set of tasks…The labour is specialized, repetitive, and
more often than note, mechanized” (Hughes 42).
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