University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2015 Bringing the World Inside: British Modernism and Taste – Gustatory, Social, and Aesthetic Michael David Becker University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Becker, Michael David, "Bringing the World Inside: British Modernism and Taste – Gustatory, Social, and Aesthetic" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 312. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/312 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BRINGING THE WORLD INSIDE: BRITISH MODERNISM AND TASTE— GUSTATORY, SOCIAL, AND AESTHETIC BY MICHAEL DAVID BECKER A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF MICHAEL DAVID BECKER APPROVED: Dissertation Committee Major Professor: Jean Walton Stephen Barber Cheryl Foster Nasser Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL—URI UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 ABSTRACT As nineteenth-century scientific and industrial developments in food processing were increasingly applied on larger scales, and to a greater diversity of food items, modernity made its mark on the early twentieth-century consumer’s daily foods. In addition to industrial and scientific developments, World War I and World War II brought significant changes to food production, distribution, and consumption as populations suddenly worried about the availability, allocation, and quality of food items. Early twentieth-century novels demonstrate a preoccupation with the newly modernized and altered foods and explore how food behaviors and tastes change during the period. This project examines literary representations of food, food behaviors, and tastes through close readings of four modernist novels. I argue that the novels of E. M. Forster, Evadne Price, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys demonstrate a modernist preoccupation with, and an active critique of, modernity’s foods, changing food behaviors, and tastes. Analyzing a diversity of narrativized food behaviors, such as the selection, consumption, and preparation of food, I investigate the historicity and cultural significances behind specific foods and food behaviors by drawing on food history, sociological and historical studies of eating, culinary science, theorizations of the written recipe as a genre, postcolonial investigations into particular global dishes, and, when productive, science. When conceptualizing taste, I consider both literal tastes, as one of the five senses and related to gustatory pleasure, and figurative tastes, which extend to aesthetics, manners, and socially appropriate etiquettes including food behaviors. To address taste’s literal and figurative usages, I turn to disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies. In my first chapter I focus on the character Leonard Bast, a hungry modern autodidact attempting to balance comestible and cultural consumption, in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), arguing that Bast engages in a type of snobbery through his judgments in taste and his efforts to gain cultural capital. In my second chapter on Not So Quiet… (1930), written by Evadne Price, I explore the importance of location in literary depictions of WWI food consumption, analyzing characters that eat both at (or near) the warfront and later return to dine in the home front’s domestic and public spaces. Focusing primarily on the famous boeuf en daube scene of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and drawing upon both culinary science and the kinetic molecular theory of matter, my third chapter identifies and highlights the novel’s “liquid aesthetic” and the drawing of disparate individualized characters into community without collapsing their separate identities. My final chapter on Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight (1939) explores the behaviors of dining, performing, and exhibiting to investigate the novel’s multifaceted theorization of national identities set in the complex, interwar, and cosmopolitan restaurants of Paris. The conclusion situates my project in the larger discourses and controversies regarding the expansion of modernist studies and the new formalists’ call to return to form, illustrates how my project relates to these conversations and debates, and highlights how others might view my project as a productive model for negotiating similar conflicts within the methodologies and theories of literary studies. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to specifically thank my major professor Jean Walton for her thorough dedication to her students, attentive readings, constructive comments, and generosity with her time and patience. Professor Stephen Barber’s conversations, encouragements, insights, and contagious passions have been instrumental in shaping me for the better as well. I am also grateful for Professor Cheryl Foster, whose belief in my project carried me through from start to finish. I thank Professor Naomi Mandel and Professor Michael Honhart as well; their feedback has helped me to situate my project in a larger and more solidly informed context. I also thank Professor Sarah Eron and Professor Michael Pennell for helping me with the early stages of my work. On both personal and professional levels, I am truly grateful for the support, encouragement, and inspiration of my partner Dr. Kim Evelyn; she not only makes my life better but also has made me a better person on many levels—as a scholar, teacher, reader, writer, and cook. I appreciate the kindness and support of my closest friends and colleagues: Dr. Sara Murphy, Dr. Benjamin Hagen, Dr. Gavin Hurley, Brittany Hirth, Don Rodrigues, and Stephen Brown—collectively and individually you have all helped me through many difficulties. I have always been, and will always be, grateful for my wonderful, supportive, and understanding family, Nancy and Marcy, and my extended family—thank you all. Additionally, I would like to thank: Professor David Faflik for his support and encouragement to my research and pedagogy; Professor Kathleen Davis, Professor Jennifer Jones, Professor Carolyn Betensky, Professor Ryan Trimm, Professor Alain- Philippe Durand, and Professor Paul Armstrong for their wonderful graduate seminars; iv the chairs, panelists, seminar participants, and audience members who gave me feedback on various drafts at conferences, particularly NeMLA and MSA, but also the URI Grad Con, BCPS, and SAMLA; the students in my classes who engaged with Forster, Rhys, and Woolf, drawing my attention to new features, asking poignant questions, and offering lively discussions; Nathan Myhrvold for graciously addressing my query about boeuf en daube; and Professor Rey Chow, Professor Timothy Brennan, and Professor Jonathan Kramnick for their keynote talks and participation at URI’s annual conferences. I am appreciative of those who helped provide me with financial support while undertaking this project: the URI Graduate School and Department of English (for my Teaching Assistantships), the Department of English and the Department of Writing and Rhetoric (for hiring me as an adjunct instructor), the College of Arts & Sciences (for the Richard Beaupre Hope & Heritage Awards), and the University of Rhode Island Graduate Student Association (for the Conference Reimbursement Awards). I thank all those who provided me with material support, particularly the staff at the URI library (specifically Emily Greene in Interlibrary Loans), Brown University’s library, The Keep (Monks House Papers), the British National Archives, and the British Library. I thank those who nurtured my passion for reading and literature: Jack Moninger, Professor Jane Garrity, Professor Alistair Davies, Professor Elena Gualtieri, Professor Vincent Quinn, and my immediate and extended family. I would also like to thank Adriane, John, and Andrea Genette and their families. I am also grateful for my cohorts and colleagues here at URI, from all fields and disciplines, and my friends and colleagues from Brown University, Sussex, and CU Boulder as well. v DEDICATION I dedicate this to Nancy and Marcy, and in memory of David. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………….…………..ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………………iv DEDICATION……………………………………………………...……...…………vi TABLE OF CONTENTS……………….………………………...………...………vii INTRODUCTION Modernity, Modernism, Food Behaviors, and Taste: Forster, Price, Woolf, and Rhys………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER 1 “Always Craving Better Food:” The Mind and Body of Leonard Bast in E. M. Forster’s Howards End...........13 CHAPTER 2 Eating the Foods of WWI: Evadne Price’s Not So Quiet… and the Contexts of Consumption...…………55 vii CHAPTER 3 A Taste for the Liquid: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse…………………………………………......101 CHAPTER 4 Passports, Restaurants, and International Expositions: Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight……………………….……………...163 CONCLUSION Reading for Food Behavior in Unstable Times: A Tasteful Ending……………………………...…………………………....225 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………….235 viii INTRODUCTION Modernity, Modernism, Food Behaviors, and Taste: Forster, Price, Woolf, and Rhys The modernization of food and the food chain has at least a two hundred year history—a path defined by the accelerating processes of hybridization,