Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
59135666
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Evans, Heather Anne,1969-
Title
The New Woman's new appetite : cooking, eating and feeding in Sarah Grand's New Woman fiction.
Degree
Ph. D. -- Queen's University, 2004
Publisher
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, [2005]
Description
3 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the roles of food and appetite in the changing constructions of women at the end of the nineteenth century, as evident in the fiction of the "New Woman" author, Sarah Grand. Four novels are considered against the socio-historical backdrop of ' fin de siècle' debates about the roles of women and the nature of femininity, and a widespread fascination with food, evident in gastronomical treatises, cookery books, etiquette manuals, and food magazines. Grand's independent protagonists are distinguished from traditional models of submissive and self-sacrificing femininity, yet challenge popular representations of the New Woman as a creature of voraginous and womanly appetites. I argue that in 'Ideala' (1888), scenes of eating at railway sites reveal the New Woman to be struggling with the incompatibility between her own needs and desires, and social conventions which associated feminine appetites with fallenness. Two sets of male-female couples in 'The Heavenly Twins' (1893) demonstrate that appetites are social constructs shaped by education and experience, rather than biological attributes. 'The Beth Book' (1897) suggests that knowledge of cookery and gastronomy could empower a woman, much as could literary talents. ' Babs the Impossible' (1901) celebrates a feminine epicureanism representative of a growing acknowledgment at this time of feminine authority in culinary and gastronomical matters. Grand legitimizes feminine appetites, and encourages the modern woman to claim authority over her own appetites and relationships with food as part of the larger enterprise of emancipating women from social and legal strictures which denied them self-governance.
ISBN
061292386X
9780612923867