Writing the Meal: Dinner in the Fiction of Early Twentieth-Century women writers

Carol A. Stos is an assistant professor of Spanish Studies at Laurentian
University.

Writing the Meal is a thoroughly researched and well-grounded study of
the purpose, significance, and particular resonance of fictional meals
in selected works of Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin,
and Virginia Woolf, among others. The author begins by establishing
“the notion of the meal as communicative text” and discussing the
links between dining and culture, and between food and language, from
anthropological and sociological perspectives.

After exploring the social rituals and trends in popular culture that
reflect a period of intense social change at the turn of the century,
McGee goes on to discuss the importance of manners and custom in
fictional meals—with a focus on Wharton—as a means of understanding
the fictional society that these customs define. Her exploration of
women as guest and hostess not only further reveals the societal change
in process but also affords an opportunity to criticize traditional
society.

In a study of the solitary diner in Mansfield’s work, McGee examines
the sense of alienation experienced as gender roles begin to shift in
the modern period, and the consequent physical, spiritual, and emotional
hunger created by social change. The traditional role women played
within the family, as studied in Mansfield and Woolf, can be either a
trap or an empowering experience, although the latter, according to
McGee, is acknowledged “not without authorial misgivings.” Her final
chapter examines the connection between the art of serving a meal and
the creation of a work of literature or art. Writing the Meal is highly
recommended for those interested in English literature, women’s
studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.