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Racial Indigestion
America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald

Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor

Elizabeth Young

Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits,

and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong

Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism

and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded-Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism
in the Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood
from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the
19th-Century Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Racial Indigestion
Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

Kyla Wazana Tompkins

a
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS
New York and London
www.nyupress.org

© 2012 by New York University

All rights reserved

L i b r a ry o f C o n g re s s C ata l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c at i o n Data

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana.

Racial indigestion : eating bodies in the 19th century /
Kyla Wazana Tompkins.
p. cm. — (America and the long 19th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-7002-3 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-7003-0 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-7005-4 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-8147-3837-5 (ebook)
1. Food habits—Social aspects—United States—History—19th
century. 2. Diet—Social aspects—United States—History—19th
century. 3. Cooking—Social aspects—United States—History—
19th century. 4. Human body—Social aspects—United States—
History—19th century. 5. United States—Race relations—
History—19th century. 6. Graham, Sylvester, 1794–1851. 7. Alcott,
Louisa May, 1832–1888—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Food in
literature. I. Title.
GT2853.U5T66 2012
394.1'20973—dc23
2011051505

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writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible
for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was
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Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly
My body’s too bootylicious for you. —Destiny’s Child
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Eating Bodies

in the 19th Century 1
1 Kitchen Insurrections 15
2 “She Made the Table a Snare to Them”:
Sylvester Graham’s Imperial Dietetics 53
3 “Everything ’Cept Eat Us”: The Mouth
as Political Organ in the Antebellum Novel 89
4 A Wholesome Girl: Addiction, Grahamite Dietetics,
and Louisa May Alcott’s Rose Campbell Novels 123
5 “What’s De Use Talking ’Bout Dem ’Mendments?”:
Trade Cards and Consumer Citizenship at the End
of the Nineteenth Century 145
Conclusion: Racial Indigestion 183

Notes 189
Bibliography 241
Index 259
About the Author 276
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

Though I will come quickly to the long list of people to whom I

am indebted, I hope that I will be forgiven a quick digression so that I may
acknowledge the many tables where I began to observe the politics of food
and eating. Eating and cooking—at restaurants or at home—have always
gone hand in hand with the world of ideas and art for me. I stumbled over
many of the ideas in this book either talking and eating with family or,
alternately, sitting alone in a café or bar with a cold cup of coffee, some-
thing small and delicious (and, while a student, cheap), and my laptop or
a book.
To wit, let me start with my mother, Lydia Wazana, and her restaurant
Miro—formerly La Pizzeria—which is to be found beachside in Cabarete,
the Dominican Republic. Anyone whose parent runs a restaurant knows
how lucky I have been to have Miro to retreat to. To Miro I would add
Friday-night Shabbat French fries at my great-grandmother’s; Saturday
dafinas in my grandmother Margaret Reboh’s home; breakfasts, lunches,
and dinners with my aunts Kathy and Madeleine Wazana; and my aunt
Nadine Reboh’s excellent grilled cheese sandwiches.
For intellectual nourishment I owe many thanks to the professors
and teachers who inspired and guided me along the way, including my
high school teacher John Pendergrast, who, though he may not know it,
changed everything with a few words. At York University I was lucky not
only to learn literary theory from Marie-Christine Leps and postcolonial
theory and literature from Arun Mukherjee but to be a part of a group of
activist intellectual women who congregated around what is now the Cen-
tre for Women and Trans People. Almost everything I know about teach-
ing I learned at a university where most of us were from the first genera-
tion in our family to attend a postsecondary school. During my master’s
degree at the University of Toronto I was aided along the way by Chelva
Kanaganayakam and Garry Leonard. A few words—not enough, surely—
must go to Linda Hutcheon: adored mentor, intellectual idol, and, now,

ix
x Acknowledgments

friend. I am but one of a long list of Canadian-born scholars who were

fortunate to be her student, receiving the benefits of her advice and role
modeling.
At Stanford University I was guided along by the example and gener-
ous advice of David Palumbo-Liu, Sharon Holland, Paula Moya, Harry
Elam, Michael Thompson, Oksana Bulgakowa, Jack Rakove, Akhil Gupta,
Seth Lerer, and Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano. I was lucky to be able to par-
ticipate in Sander Gilman’s “Body Matters” seminar at Cornell’s School
for Criticism and Theory: many of the ideas shared in that classroom and
over lunch and dinner in Ithaca found their way into this book. Similarly
I must thank Ann Laura Stoler, whose seminar at Stanford introduced me
to many of the key concepts I needed to work through my materials. A
special mention to Jan Hafner and Monica Moore, proxy moms to us all
in the Program in Modern Thought and Literature.
The project was conceived in Jeffrey Schnapp’s “Food and Literature”
seminar but born in Jay Fliegelman’s “Eighteen-Forties” seminar, more
specifically in his generous and brilliant feedback to my final paper for
that class. I am particularly grateful to Scott Bukatman, whose example as
a teacher and scholar showed me what it was like to live a joyful intellec-
tual life, and to Hilton Obenzinger for giving me a job and also great, and
blunt, advice when I needed it. And of course, one can never ever thank
one’s committee enough: to Arnold Rampersad for pushing me to see the
relationship between good writing and clear ideas and for his reminder
to love literature for what it is and aspires to be; to Estelle Freedman as
an example of human kindness, intellectual integrity, and fierce feminist
grace; and to Sianne Ngai for all of the above, plus the great gift of not only
believing in the project but telling me to take what was already there and
to keep going to the creative and intellectual edge. And of course, again,
to Linda, for being my external reader and long-distance sounding board.
To this list I must add the fellow students with whom I was lucky
enough to share the peaks and valleys of graduate education. Thanks
and love to Lara Doan, Daniel Kim, Tim’m West, Lisa Arellano, Richard
Benjamin, Mishuana Goeman, Shona Jackson, Gabrielle Moyer, Evelyn
Alsultany, Nirvana Tanoukhi, Ebony Coletu, Allegra Mcleod, Rachel Poli-
quin, Vida Mia Garcia, Bakirathi Mani, Teresa Delfin, Julia Carpenter,
Ericka Beckman, and Yael Ben-Zvi. I am grateful to Cindy Wu for read-
ing a version of chapter 4. In Marcia Ochoa, Martha Kelly, Nicole Fleet-
wood, Amelia Glaser, and Raul Coronado I have been blessed to find fierce
 Acknowledgments xi

interlocutors, sometime roommates, fellow voyagers, and lifelong friends:

thank you for being there and for being so fabulicious.
Along the way I was helped by those angels who walk amongst us:
librarians, archivists, and curators. I must first thank Barbara Haber,
Sarah Hutcheon, and Barbara K. Wheaton, whose patience with a very
green graduate student who was very obviously lost in the stacks of the
Julia Child collection at Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library helped yield many
parts of this book. In particular, Barbara Ketchum Wheaton sent me over
to the Baker Library at Harvard Business School to look at the trade cards
in its advertising archives—for that, and because she is one of the god-
mothers of food studies, I will always owe her. At the American Antiquar-
ian Society I was helped by Joanne Chaison and Marie Lamoureux and
most kindly encouraged by John Hench. For their swift help while I was
putting together the images and permissions for this book I must also
thank Jaclyn Penny at the AAS, Melissa Murphy at the Baker, and Ben
Crane of The Trade Card Place. I have appreciated being welcomed as a
reader to the Huntington Library by Kadin Henningsen and Sarah N. Ash
Georgi.
At the research stage I was supported by an Ontario Graduate Scholar-
ship, the Mrs. Giles A. Whiting fellowship, and a fellowship at the Center
for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. The Stanford University
School of Humanities and Sciences kindly supported me for six years and
gave me research and travel funds as well as support to travel to the School
for Criticism and Theory. Pomona College has supported this project with
generous research and travel funds, subventions, a Mellon faculty grant,
and the Dorothy M. Steele leave for pretenured faculty.
I have been blessed with great friends and colleagues at Pomona Col-
lege: in the English Department, Kevin Dettmar, superb chair, superfun
office neighbor, and champion of junior faculty, as well as Dara Regaignon,
Claudia Rankine, Valorie Thomas, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Toni Clark, Paul
Mann, Jonathan Lethem, Arden Reed, Helena Wall, and Verlyn Klinken-
borg, defender of the sentence. It has been more than fun to keep vigil in
the trenches of junior faculty life with Aaron Kunin, Sarah Raff, Colleen
Rosenfeld, and Hillary Gravendyk. Moved on to other adventures but not
forgotten are Cris Miller, Rena Fraden, Martha Andresen, and Paul Saint-
Amour. And of course, to David Foster Wallace, fellow dog lover. Thank
you for introducing me to the proper use of the word “pud.” We loved you.
You are missed.
xii Acknowledgments

In the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies thank you to my men-

tors Deborah Burke, Peggy Waller, and Cecilia Conrad and to friends and
colleagues Pardis Mahdavi, April Mayes, Erin Runions, Zayn Kassam,
Jonathan Hall, and Chris Guzaitis. Thank you to my inspiring students at
Pomona College, including but not limited to Lauren Rosenfeld, Andrew
Ragni, Elizabeth Cobacho, Allison Feldman, Aakash Kishore, and Lindsay
Jonasson. Thank you to Mary Buchner, who typed out the bibliography.
The field of food studies, in particular the good folks of the Associa-
tion for the Study of Food and Society, heard pieces of this book early on
and believed that the study of food and eating was more than just a hobby
interest. For many great meals and conversations and for many more to
come thank you to Fabio Parasecoli, Amy Bentley, Warren Belasco, Netta
Davis, Charlotte Biltekoff, Rafia Zafar, and Carolyn de la Peña. Amy, War-
ren, and Carolyn in particular mentored and supported my project early
in my career, for which I will always be grateful.
Deepest thanks to my anonymous readers: if I got anything right,
it’s because of you. Thank you to Eric Zinner, Priscilla Wald, Elizabeth
McHenry, and Ciara Mclaughlin. To David Kazanjian, who invited me
to submit my manuscript to NYU Press: thank you for championing the
project when it was far from ready. Thank you too to anonymous readers
at Callaloo and Gastronomica, where portions of earlier versions of chap-
ters 2 and 3 were published.
This is an amazing moment in nineteenth-century studies: not only is
the field flourishing intellectually; it seems to be filled with just plain good
people. Thank you to Ivy Wilson for inviting me into conversation; Ivy,
you will never know how important that was to me. I am grateful for the
good humor and brilliance of Dana Luciano, Glenn Hendler, Jordan Stein,
Robin Bernstein, Elizabeth Freeman, Lloyd Pratt, Sarah Mesle, Chris
Looby, and Peter Coviello. Dana, Beth, and Glenn read this manuscript
closely, incisively, and generously: thank you, all three, for everything.
Next round’s on me. Thank you too to Roger Gathman, David Lobenstine,
Victoria Baker, and Andrew Katz.
I must also thank my expatriate Canadian Bay Area tribe, Sara Gilling-
ham, Sara O’Hearn, and of course my Matthew Lawrence. Thank you to
Buffy Summers and Barbra Streisand, they know why. And while I never
wrote a word there, as a space of joy, abandon, creativity, fraternity, and
sorority that could only have been born in the age of AIDS, that carried
me forward spiritually with house music and continues to do so to this
day, I am indebted to Toronto’s late, great club The Twilight Zone, where I
 Acknowledgments xiii

met and danced with my first urban tribe: Ann, Marla, Chantal, Ford, and
everyone else who remembers that in the beginning there was Jack . . . and
Jack had a groove.
To family lost along the way but who haunt these pages: my great-
grandmother Mémé Dona Ohnona, Pépé Henri Wazana, my grand-
mother Margaret Tompkins, my grandfather Walter Tompkins, and my
father, David Tompkins. Many, many, many thanks go to my mother,
Lydia Wazana, for whom the word fierce was invented. This book would
never have happened if I hadn’t been the child of a single mother who
saw nothing unusual about reading me Gertrude Stein’s Ida at bedtime or
taking me at age four, to meet Andy Warhol. How lucky I was. And last
but not least: my son, Andualem David, and my best friend and husband,
Tim. The word love just isn’t big enough to describe it. But it’ll do for a
start.
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction
Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

In 1900, the Thomas Edison Company produced a silent gag

film called The Gator and the Pickaninny, depicting a theatrical scene
in which a black child is fishing on a water shore. An alligator crawls up
behind him and eats the child up; soon after, a man runs up, cuts open
the alligator, and pulls the child out whole. Celebration ensues. On one
level, this film does not stray far from the features we can expect from the
American popular entertainment of the era, with its broad racist humor—
signaled by the very term “pickaninny”—and its vaudevillian gag and
dance routines. However, if we approach the film on another level, asking
about the eating motif around which the film turns, it presents us with a
puzzle: how does a film of a black child being eaten become legible to audi-
ences in the early twentieth century? More than solely an insight into racist
images in the period, this idea—of the edible and delicious black subject—
reveals something larger about the relationship between eating and racial
identity, between bodies inscribed with the marks of race and food.
Through readings of material culture—novels, chapbooks, poetry,
cookbooks, and visual culture—this book examines the social and sym-
bolic practices through which eating and food cultures inform the pro-
duction of racial difference and other forms of political inequality. This is
not, however, entirely a project about food. Rather, in Racial Indigestion
I contribute to the growing field of food studies by examining eating; I
uncover and analyze cultural texts and moments during which acts of eat-
ing cultivate political subjects by fusing the social with the biological, by
imaginatively shaping the matter we experience as body and self. In five
separate case studies, I examine images of mouths and bodies, of eaters
and the eaten, to produce a story about the consolidation of racist ide-
ologies in the intimate workings of the body politic as refracted through

1
2 Introduction

what I term eating culture. That is, in Racial Indigestion I look beyond food
itself to consider practices and representations of ingestion and edibility,
including literary, dietetic, and visual texts in which objects, people, and
political events are metaphorically and metonymically figured through
the symbolic process of eating.
To date, most work in this vein has focused on the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries.1 In Racial Indigestion, however, I uncover eating as
a trope and technology of racial formation during the first 130 years of the
U.S. republic. Not unlike the current foodie moment, and perhaps origi-
nal to it, eating culture in that period played a significant part in the privi-
leging of whiteness during the nineteenth century. Such anxious girding
of the boundaries of whiteness, however, could only happen where those
boundaries were threatened, and it is exactly as a site of racial anxiety that
eating is most productively read.
My goal in making this shift from food to eating—a shift to a framework
we might call critical eating studies— implicitly entails the examination of
the field of food studies’ unconscious investments in the commodity itself.
It is also a move that weds food studies to body theory, here with a par-
ticular focus on race in the context of the literary and cultural production
of the nineteenth-century United States.2 The emergence of the relatively
young field of food studies in the late eighties and early nineties coincided
with a national explosion in food culture and the growth of what has come
to be known as urban “foodie” culture, a congruence that has led some
critics to dismiss the field as “scholarship-lite.”3 Although I do not agree
with this skeptical and lazy opinion, given my decade-long involvement
in the field, I do have my own criticisms. As many food studies scholars
in the social sciences have noted, foodie culture is founded on problem-
atic racial politics in which white, bourgeois, urban subject positions are
articulated, on the one hand, through the consumption and informational
mastery of foreign, that is, non-Anglo-American food cultures and, on the
other hand, performed through romanticized and insufficiently theorized
attachments to “local” or organic foodways, attachments that at times sus-
piciously echo nativist ideological formations.4 Using the readings in this
book as a testing ground, I want to nudge food studies’ interests and meth-
ods away from an unreflective collaboration in the object-based fetishism
of the foodie world, a collaboration that has produced an unending stream
of single-commodity histories and ideologically worrisome localist poli-
tics.5 Instead, I hope to push us further toward a critique of the political
beliefs and structures that underlie eating as a social practice.6
 Introduction 3

Part of my work in this project, then, is to more closely bind food stud-
ies to feminist, queer, and gender studies, as well as to critical race theory;
in doing so I interrogate eating at various historical points in order to set
in relief the (un)imaginative limits of normative notions of bodily being.
My approach seeks to render discursive two kinds of matter toward which
so much human appetitive energy is directed: food and flesh. As we will
see, what is yielded by this new framework is a move beyond the con-
cern with skin and boundary that has dominated body studies, and thus
away from an investment in surfaces that I want to argue is the intellec-
tually limited inheritance of the epidermal ontology of race.7 By reading
orificially, critical eating studies theorizes a flexible and circular relation
between the self and the social world in order to imagine a dialogic in
which we—reader and text, self and other, animal and human—recognize
our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible—that is,
full of terror—and, at other times, politically productive.
In the context of the nineteenth-century United States, the dialogical
relations that underlie eating had particular consequences for a nation in
the process of cultural, political, and ideological formation. Eating threat-
ened the foundational fantasy of a contained autonomous self—the “free”
Liberal self—because, as a function of its basic mechanics, eating tran-
scended the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject
and object as food turned into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then pro-
vided the energy that drives them all. At the same time, images of food
in the period often pointed to the fleshliness—the biological meatiness,
even—of the body, seeming to imply a reassuring materiality of self that
exists prior to, and as the condition of, discourse. As a simultaneously cul-
tural and biological process, eating, and images thereof, were therefore
often deployed in the service of fixing bodily fictions: “Tell me what you
eat and I shall tell you what you are,” the eighteenth-century gastronome
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin most famously said, in what is now a chestnut of
food studies scholarship.8
As is so often the case, it is exactly at the moment of their most anxious
deployment that fictions of the self—the permanence and futurity of “what
you are”—prove to be their most precarious. Understood in its Western
context, by the nature of the act in which an organism yields and opens
to the outer world, eating reveals the self to be reliant upon that which is
beyond its epidermal limits. The very social and interdependent nature of
eating, then—its dependence on the “what” of Brillat-Savarin’s “what you
eat”—also lends itself to the unraveling of bodily essentialisms.9 But it is
4 Introduction

not simply the “what” of what one eats that matters. It is the “where” of
where we eat and where food comes from; the “when” of historically spe-
cific economic conditions and political pressures; the “how” of how food
is made; and the “who” of who makes and who gets to eat it. Finally, and
most important, it is the many “whys” of eating—the differing impera-
tives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest—that most
determine its meaning. In reckoning with each of these interrogatives, by
turning them into interrogatives, we can begin to get at the materialist
conditions that determine how, and why, to borrow from Judith Butler,
the matter of food comes to “matter.”10
The insight that the act of eating dissolves the boundary between self
and other, between subject and object is not mine alone,11 nor is the idea
that eating is also a social practice that confirms and delineates difference,
demarcating social barriers and affirming group formations.12 However
this paradox, as it appears across the nineteenth century, makes eating an
important case study in the production and consolidation of fictions of
national unity and racial difference in the period. If in food culture the act
of fleshly materialization is rendered visible as material culture, if, as we
will see in chapter 2, the mythical virtues of a wheat-centered diet arise in
connection to the body ideal that underlies the antebellum project of U.S.
expansion and is in turn dependent on it, then we should recognize that
the study of this problematic cannot ignore the materials and processes of
eating culture. Eating intervenes as a determining moment in what I argue
are paradoxical and historically specific attempts to regulate embodiment,
which I define as living in and through the social experience of the matter
we call flesh. Nationalist foodways—and the objects fetishized therein—in
turn become allegories through which the expanding nation and its
attendant anxieties play out. What we see in the nineteenth century—as
indeed we do today in such racialized discourses as obesity, hunger, and
diabetes—is the production of social inequality at the level of the quotid-
ian functioning of the body. What also emerges, however, are fissures and
openings in the body politic, spaces where political fictions are exposed,
messy, and only semidigested.
One such site, at the obvious center of eating culture, is the mouth. I do
not—I would not dare—offer a single model through which to understand
the mouth in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. At times the
mouth reveals vulnerability; at other times it is a sign of aggression. Some
mouths in Racial Indigestion are forced open; other mouths speak, eat,
and laugh with the energy generated by suppressed political affect. Some
 Introduction 5

mouths—the mouth of the reader or viewer in particular—are never visi-

ble in text or image but rather are assumed to exist, invited to engage with
the page through various tropes of desire, disgust, laughter, and enjoy-
ment. In Racial Indigestion the mouth is understood as a site to which and
within which various political values unevenly adhere and through which
food as mediated experience imperfectly bonds with the political to form
the fictions that are too often understood within everyday life as racial
truths.
The mouth is also a space with a cultural and erotic history of its own,
one that, particularly in the overlapping of dietetic and sexual reform in
the antebellum period, offers glimpses of a presexological mapping of
desire, appetite, and vice. In many of the texts I investigate in this book,
eating functions as a metalanguage for genital pleasure and sexual desire.
But eating is often a site of erotic pleasure itself, what I call, as a means of
signaling the alignment between oral pleasure and other forms of nonnor-
mative desire, queer alimentarity.
At the end of the nineteenth century Freud theorized the “erotogenic
significance of the labial region”—the mouth—as the second stage in the
development of infantile sexuality, an autoerotic moment which, in “nor-
mal” sexual development, would later be surpassed by genital orientation
toward the opposite sex.13 The mouth certainly does surface as a site of
autoerotic pleasure in the antimasturbation and dietetic reform tracts I
read in this book. However, in the map of the nervous system that was
promulgated by Sylvester Graham and William Alcott, which I discuss in
chapter 2, and then reinterpreted by various of their cultural inheritors,
including Louisa May Alcott, whom I discuss in chapter 4, the mouth and
the genitals function as coeval sites of erotic intensity in adults as well as
in children. In Graham’s writing both can be overstimulated, and indeed
sensual indulgence at one of those sites inevitably drives the appetitive
needs of the other.14
This presexological mapping of erotic and alimentary pleasure in the
antebellum period had its corollary in the literal, that is, geographic,
mapping of the nation, and it was at the overlap between the two that the
mouth, as a doorway into the consuming body, first became a site of biopo-
litical intensity in the United States. Biopolitics is understood in this book
not as the project of state intervention into the well-being of its population
in the classic Foucauldian sense.15 Rather, I resituate biopolitics in the con-
text of the United States as a collective ideological effort driven by various
reform movements in the antebellum United States via a series of uneven,
6 Introduction

asynchronous, and local campaigns, each of them reworking republican-

ism to construe the ideal citizen as self-policing, temperate, and moral. In
the context of reform dietetics, which was closely allied with the temper-
ance movement and antimasturbation campaigns, the ideal citizen was to
be made and remade via the quotidian practices of correct consumption,
self-care, and sexual hygiene.
To be “correct” within these discourses, or, more precisely, to be “vir-
tuous,” meant to be identified with the nation-building project, both with
and against the British past. The girding of these bodily ideologies became
even more overdetermined as, over the course of a half century, the rapidly
expanding national borders came to encompass the formerly French South
and the formerly Spanish Southwest, as well as waves of new European
immigration. Across that same period, the United States also propelled its
borders over and decimated Native American cultures and peoples, recon-
stituting and relocating those First Nations, all the while grappling with
the possibility of slave emancipation and black men’s enfranchisement. In
that context, the construction and defense of whiteness as a majoritarian
demographic seemed all the more pressing to those unwilling to remake
their nation in the image of its actual inhabitants. The particular contri-
bution of the reform movement was to stitch nationalism to the individ-
ual white body, a shift that made the project of defending the white body
against various (racializing) vices dependent on a citizenry that construed
politics to be an individual matter.16 Eating culture, tied as it was to eco-
nomic and political matters of trade and expansion and thus commodity
consumption, became one site of intimate political intensity, where “eating
American,” that is, eating foodstuffs tied to the transplanted ecological his-
tory and foodways of the Euro-American majority—what we might think
of as an early and paradoxical iteration of the “local” foods idea—was one
way to produce a moral body, unswayed by dangerous appetites for exotic
and overstimulating, that is, “foreign,” foods.
Within these local, national, and transnational discourses, the mouth
became the focus of a disciplinary project within which the correct
embodiment of the individual was understood to be of deep importance
to the burgeoning nation. Such disciplinary models changed across the
century, to be sure, as different cultural and political anxieties, as well
as various transnational relations, occupied the cultural imagination.
Each of these moments, further, took on its own allegorical relation-
ship to both the individual body and the body politic; at each of the five
moments that I discuss in this book eating played an important role,
 Introduction 7

as a practice or representation. Following the evolution of eating cul-

ture across this period opens up new areas of inquiry into the alignment
between bodies and bodies politic, revealing different forms of racial
embodiment as they shifted with the political and economic contingen-
cies of the period.
A central argument of this book, then, is that eating is central to the
performative production of raced and gendered bodies in the nineteenth
century. Consider for instance the following passage, written by Oliver
Wendell Holmes and quoted by Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher
Stowe in the nutrition chapter of the 1869 edition of The American Wom-
an’s Home:

Every organized being always lives immersed in a strong solution of its

own elements. . . . We are all chameleons in our diet, as we are all sala-
manders in our habitat, inasmuch as we live always in the fire of our own
smoldering combustion. . . . We are perishing and being born again at
every instant. . . . We do literally enter over and over again into the womb
of that great mother from whom we get our bones and flesh, and blood, and
marrow.17

Holmes’s allegory of constant death and rebirth intersects directly with

Butler’s understanding of performativity as “ritualized repetition”—
biological processes are here given a circular, iterative temporality linked
to death and rebirth, making and unmaking.18 But this sense of dietary
immersion in one’s own elements, of burning from within, of the self
indistinguishable from the “strong solution” of its surroundings hints that
from within the study of eating in the nineteenth century the production
of bodily materiality looks a little different than it does within the bour-
geois norms of the twenty-first century. This passage in fact points us to a
messier idea of materialization, one in which, as William Ian Miller has
written, we are soaking in “life soup, the roiling stuff of eating, defecation,
fornication, generation, death, rot, and regeneration.”19
Holmes’s “womb of that great mother” entails an orifice out of which
“our bones and flesh, and blood, and marrow” are delivered. Impor-
tantly, Holmes never specifies what orifice he means that we enter and
exit, and indeed it is at the point—or perhaps more precisely from within
the gorge—of the orifice that I wish to make my intervention. Reading
fictions of bodily essence and materiality through the mouth points to
the ways that food and eating culture provide a metalanguage through
8 Introduction

which we tell stories about the materials that constitute both object and
subject, food and flesh.20 More than that, examining these fictions offers
new insights into the intersection of racial hierarchy with various forms of
political citizenship across the period.
Because of the close link between eating, racial formation, and politi-
cal culture in the period, the history of whiteness is at the center of this
book. However, in Racial Indigestion eating culture is also understood as a
privileged site for the representation of, and fascination with, those bodies
that carry the burdens of difference and materiality, that are understood
as less social, less intellectual, and, at times, less sentient: racially minori-
tized subjects, children, women, and, at times, animals. Often referred
to as “hyperembodied” in this book, racially minoritized—mostly black
and sometimes Asian—subjects are at times closely aligned with what we
might think of as the bottom of the food chain.21
As the following five chapters attest, there are the eaters, and then there
are the eaten; similarly, there are the eaters, and then there are the hungry.
The image of the black body as an edible object is a strong and consistent
trope in this book, and it is an image that carries the weight of many cen-
turies of forced labor, of coercive and violent sexual desire, and of ongoing
political struggle. As we will see, however, the fantasy of a body’s edibil-
ity does not mean that body will always go down smoothly. Rather, the
title of my book, Racial Indigestion, points to the idea that the constitu-
tion of whiteness via the most racist images and practices of eating cul-
ture is neither seamless nor easy. Although I trace the image of the black
body as an edible object across the last half of the nineteenth century, at
no point does my analysis understand the black body and therefore black
subjects to be without agency. For as these images and the cultural logics
that flow through them show, across the nineteenth century black bodies
and subjects stick in the throat of the (white) body politic, refusing to be
consumed as part of the capitalist logic of racism and slavery as well as the
cultural and literary matter that they produced.
Whether impeding absorption—getting stuck in the craw or produc-
ing colicky white bodies and thereby disturbing the easy internalization
of blackness—or whether testifying from the space of imminent death
and expulsion from the bowels of a slave-dependent nation, black bod-
ies and subjects in these encounters fight back, and bite back, both in the
white imaginary and in domestic manuals and novels produced by black
authors. Although excluded from the biopolitical, nation-building imper-
atives of a mostly white reform movement that nonetheless often aligned
 Introduction 9

itself with abolition, black authors and citizens insisted on their relevance
and centrality to national narratives of bodily belonging.
As we will see, particularly in chapters 3 and 5, black subjects often
resist through the trope of excess—of affect, of aesthetic intensity, or,
as the cook Chloe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin tells us, through sheer “sauci-
ness.” In other words, black subjects resist via the aesthetic strategy that
Daphne Brooks has termed opacity—by refusing to be reduced to a func-
tion of white well-being.22 In refusing white instrumentalization black
subjects in these texts interrupt the easy flow of white desire and entitle-
ment, which appears in the desire to consume the black subject, a dialectic
that, given the emphasis on texts directed at white women and children
in this book, I read as the feminized inversion of the more common trope
of nineteenth-century racism in which white men inhabit and imperson-
ate blackness. What the texts examined in Racial Indigestion point to is
that in many of those moments when racism appears to produce its most
abject representations—through comic debasement, for instance—black
characters and subjects inhabit the limits of language and aesthetic form,
performing moments of spectacular visibility, at times despite and beyond
the creator’s intentions.
From within these images, it is not simply the white mouth that is of
interest, in its voracious and cannibalistic desire to experience, enjoy, and
destroy the other, what bell hooks called, in her foundational formulation
of the phrase, “Eating the Other.”23 As I show, the black mouth is a site of
political intensity itself, as it consistently occupies and preempts the dom-
ination of white desire, from the kitchen, from the back of the house and
below the stairs, and then ultimately in the sphere of urban commodity
culture. In Racial Indigestion, the black mouth speaks, laughs, and eats in
the face of the violent desires of white supremacy; in fact, speech, laughter,
and eating are conjoined as tropes of black cultural presence and resis-
tance. Across this book eating is an act that is also symbolic of access to
the sphere of public politics and citizenship and thus metonymic of the
struggle for political agency.
As a foundation for this investigation of the conjoined tropes of
laughter, politics, and eating, in chapter 1 I develop a literary history of
eating culture via the intertwined histories of the colonial hearth and
the kitchen in the United States. Developed out of many years of teach-
ing Rabelais and Bakhtin in my “Eating the Other” course, Racial Indi-
gestion also contains an argument about the association of comedy and
vernacular speech—another form of orality, or voice, that exceeds or
10 Introduction

counters intextuation, in de Certeau’s terminology—with the politically

devalued and thus often hyperembodied populations that appear with
food and in food spaces: immigrants, blacks, servants, and, in particu-
lar, cooks.24
Specifically, I put these discourses into conversation with theater his-
tory and performance studies to understand literary representations of
hearths and kitchens and the subaltern bodies that work there as drawn
from colonial, transatlantic, and early-American theater culture, in which
travesty, cross-dressing, and racial and species inversion were mutually
intertwined as carnivalesque traditions. In Racial Indigestion, I see the
kitchen as a space whose politics and representations must be analyzed in
terms of abjection and inversion. The kitchen in this formulation is a space
of blood and guts, plucked chickens and cooked tongue, rancid and sweet
butter, rising bread and fermenting beers, and other items only semi-
formed on their way to the site of ingestion, be it dining room or kitchen
table. Feminist critics have long viewed the kitchen as the space within the
house where the politics of both the public sphere and the home are most
contentious and visible. In Racial Indigestion, I read that clash in the vio-
lent confrontations between mistress and servant or slave, in the unavoid-
able economics of what is available and affordable, in the cultural politics
of who eats what and when.
My move to consider literature from the back of the house is thus a
move to think specifically about how food and kitchen imagery begins
to account for the viscerality of regimes of inequity organized around
mythologies of difference, as well as the ways that food metaphorizes
fleshly experience as a “natural” limit of social, linguistic, and literary
expression. Kitchens in Racial Indigestion are not only sites of utopic pos-
sibility, of the possible inversion of classes of people, and of the worlding
dreams of early feminism, although they are all that: they are also dys-
topic spaces whose abjection in the internal economy of the home allows
the repressed to be represented in the visceral commonplaces of kitchen
work—cutting, scraping, peeling, and boiling.
Chapter 2 shifts to an examination of the queer racial erotics of Sylvester
Graham’s intimate and imperialist dietetic project, focusing specifically on
the consolidation of whiteness as the racial formation at the heart of repub-
lican citizenship. In particular, I look at the politics of bread and wheat in
the antebellum period, examining the transnational and imperial conse-
quences of Sylvester Graham’s “farinaceous” diet to reveal the homology
between these prescriptive cures and an imperial politics of U.S. expansion.
 Introduction 11

In some ways, my work on Graham seems to belie one of the central

ideas behind this book: to shift food studies attention away from the what
of food to the how of eating. But in reading these antebellum reformer
texts, I hope to point to the fact that the what of food was in part deter-
mined by the material and symbolic processes that brought food into
contact with the mouth and the digestive system. Additionally, this chap-
ter begins to lay the claim that the commodity citizen of the late twen-
tieth and early twenty-first centuries is a direct descendant of Graham
and other food reformers’ ideal eaters. Much like today’s locavores and
food reformers, reform dietetics invited consumers to direct their desire
toward virtuous objects, to substitute a hypervigilant digestive life for
critical engagement with political and economic processes. Thus, while on
the surface this chapter is interested in bread as a foodstuff, it is ultimately
focused on reform dietetics as an early iteration and case study in the pro-
duction of the consumer-citizen as a racially specific and politically lim-
ited eater-activist.
Chapter 3 looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and
Harriet Wilson’s deployment of the trope of the black body as edible object
during the 1850s. I use this deeply disturbing and at the same time perva-
sive image, written about so casually in this period, to further develop my
theory of eating as a racially performative act, one through which we can
unveil and ideally destabilize politically limited ideas of racial embodiment.
Reversing the trope of blackface, in which blackness is put on, in these texts
whiteness is consolidated through the metaphor of ingestion: blackness is
put in. I begin by uncovering the allegorical effect of the edible black body
as a Jim Crow cookie in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s House of Seven Gables and
then trace variations on the edible black body in two abolitionist and antira-
cist writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Wilson, as they seek to work
out the place of the black subject in the white body politic.
What I hope to make clear in this chapter, however, is that those sub-
jects pictured as edible hardly concede to that relationship. Even in Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and The House of the Seven Gables, two texts with problem-
atic, racist representations, the consumable black body will not go down
easily but rather pushes back against the body that seeks to consume and
thereby obliterate it. In Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, Frado refuses consump-
tion entirely, demanding a place at the table and documenting the middle-
class kitchen and its visceral terrors as experiences at the edge of what
may be represented and spoken. The black literary body here is put in ser-
vice of the black subject and the black public sphere.
12 Introduction

Chapter 4 returns to the reform movement’s nutritional and erotic the-

matics via Louisa May Alcott’s postbellum adoption of reform dietetics
and antiaddiction discourse in two of her lesser-known novels, which are
staged during the heart of the antebellum China trade. As the niece of
William Alcott, and as Bronson Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May Alcott was
subject, when young, to the enthusiastic application of Grahamite princi-
ples at her own table and could observe their effects on her mother as well,
who was ultimately the organizer and producer of the family meal. Louisa
May Alcott, with her family connection to reformist politics, modifies and
invests themes from it in her postbellum novels. In as much as these nov-
els are explicitly didactic, they promote the reformist ideal of white femi-
ninity, even as they mitigate the harsher, republican virtue ethic with a
more accepting view of consumer citizenship. Alcott produces an image
of a progressive shopping subject—the consumer activist—who buys or
refuses to buy in service of her political ideals, who seeks to reduce her
dependence on commodity culture but succeeds only, in fact, in suppress-
ing or redirecting it toward other objects. At the same time, the concret-
izing of racial hierarchy in Alcott’s texts seems to work in tandem with the
much-documented queer subtexts of her work.
I conclude the book with a discussion of race, eating, and representa-
tion in chromolithographic trade cards, an underexamined advertising
medium of the late nineteenth century that, as I will argue, borrowed
heavily from the theatrical model of racial impersonation in order to
incite consumer desire and imagine new consuming publics. Flipping
the image of the edible black body around, in chapter 5 trade cards depict
people of color—African Americans and Asians—consuming commodi-
ties. Following Harriet Wilson’s work in tracing the black subject com-
ing into being, I argue that these images stand in for what we might call
having a place at the political table. Eating in these advertisements is a
replacement for (and thus, logically, analogous to) political power: I read
these images as a sign of the presence and importance of nonwhite post-
bellum U.S. consumers and the booming transnational market economy.
This chapter also puts the past two decades of scholarly work on black-
face into conversation with my larger argument about eating. Images of
eating here illuminate the connection between desire and embodiment as
it was imagined by advertisers in the period, when advertising was a dis-
parate and ad hoc sector, not yet institutionally congealed into specialized
“agencies.” In a sense, at this time advertising was much nearer popular
culture, which is to say that it was articulated in the heart of everyday life,
 Introduction 13

by printers and owners of stores and the like rather than by advertising
professionals. This gives the trading cards I examine an interesting sta-
tus as products that have not yet been captured by any particular institu-
tion or business and that reflect the obsessions of everyday life. Often, they
show a mode of looking that I will argue was borrowed from the theater,
at that time one of the great venues of popular entertainment.
Ultimately, these cards stage encounters that show nineteenth-century
commodity culture to have been an important sphere of racialization that
was on the one hand mediated through the senses and on the other hand
seen as always and already a theatrical space. As we will see, in the sphere
of commodity consumption, the production of race ultimately undoes its
own logic: for just as the cards often attach extreme commodity pleasure
to nonwhite bodies, the consistent trope of interracial and intercultural
encounter in the cards points to the existence of a shared eating culture
that mediated between disparate and radically unequal demographics.
This page intentionally left blank
 1

Kitchen Insurrections

We begin at the hearth. Here, at the mouth of the fireplace, at

the bottom of the chimney’s throat, lies the ground for what follows in
chapters 2 through 5, a conversation about the literature and visual texts
that flowed from nineteenth-century eating culture. Across this conversa-
tion the hearth—and its descendant, the kitchen—will become less and
less the primary location of U.S. food culture, and a more public eating
culture will emerge, shaped by the ideology, literature, and architecture of
domesticity in the early republic but rooted, as the material in this chap-
ter argues, in early modern feast and banquet literature and transatlantic
pantomime theater. Out of this olla podrida of environmental, cultural,
and political forces will emerge a charged eating culture, in which racially
marked and working-class bodies are as closely bound to food imagery as
they are infused with a suppressed political affect barely contained by eat-
ing spaces and the literary forms they produce.
By focusing on the hearth and then the kitchen not simply as ahistorical
spaces but as work sites whose symbolic function changed radically across
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, even when actual architectural
changes may have lagged quite far behind, I join in a long line of feminist
critics who have investigated the central role of cooking spaces in orga-
nizing and defining the value of female labor and the valence of women’s
political and cultural citizenship across the nineteenth century.1 My inter-
est in the hearth and kitchen as the literary and architectural sites from
which the United States’ eating culture emerges is an attempt to invest
feminist, literary, and cultural criticism with a more nuanced idea of the
links between food and literature across the nineteenth century, in part
by connecting images of the hearth to the early modern and transatlantic
cultural flows that consistently linked food and eating imagery to class and
bodily inversion.2 In this chapter, then, I build on these feminist critics’
work to argue that the hearth and kitchen have a specific literary history
of their own, which produced effects on nineteenth-century literature and

15
16 Kitchen Insurrections

its bodies through a persistent connection to orality, construed broadly

as vernacular language, as eating and ingestion, and finally as a series of
sensual and erotic intensifications centered on the mouth. Finding their
literary heritage in the European and colonial hearth, the hearth and
kitchen discourses I will examine adhere—“stick” in Sara Ahmed’s useful
term—to those subjects who labored with or close to food.3 As the United
States’ hyperembodied notions of class, race, and gender were expressed
in terms of food—the central matter of the kitchen—so the bodies that
labored in kitchens came to be represented, in the unconscious of popular
culture, as food. Materialization, and the material conditions that make
possible the exemplary act of consumption, are thus central concerns of
this chapter.
If the seeds of the images that became the late nineteenth century’s
obsessive kitchen and food comedies about race lie in the hearth and
kitchen literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
those images, as I will show, germinate in earlier representations of class
difference and inversion. Class must be at the center of this chapter if we
are to understand, first, the series of transformations by which the fire-
place- and hearth-centered kitchen became the modern kitchen and, sec-
ond, the articulation of the kitchen as a separate room from the rest of
the house, a change that paralleled the articulation of class difference in
the antebellum United States. It is in literature of the hearth—sometimes
represented as the fireplace or chimney—that I trace the legacy of a dis-
course that came from Europe to the New World and linked the hearth to
storytelling, ingestion, and moments of theatrical and carnivalesque class,
gender, and (at times) species inversion.
The hearth lingers in the memory of antebellum U.S. writers, suturing
food and eating to literary culture. As it disappears as a practical space,
the hearth reemerges as a specter that haunts later overdetermined rep-
resentations of the kitchen and the racially burdened bodies that labored
there. In other words, what began as early modern and colonial-era class
discourse was exploited to provide the protocols for later mid- and late
nineteenth-century narratives of racial difference and consolidation. The
hearth, with its link to dirt, the pleasurable possibilities of transforma-
tion, inversion, and bodily fluidity, repeatedly returns to haunt the com-
plex public food cultures that descended from it and in particular the
hegemonic project of white middle-class embodiment.
As we understand the political economy of domestic space through
discourse, so should we understand the cook. The kitchen is not only
 Kitchen Insurrections 17

where the cook performs her designated labor; it is the space from which
the cook, that servant-figure so broadly stereotyped over the past two
centuries, threatens to speak. In so doing she threatens to infuse the
food she produces—that her employers will eat—with the stifled political
affect that the walls of the kitchen are supposed to contain. Thus, not only
does the kitchen come to be associated with the mouth, more specifically,
with the mouth that will not close (and thus the mouth that laughs, eats,
speaks, and screams); it becomes the central space where the threatening
porosity between bodies—most specifically between ruling-class and sub-
altern bodies—is most apparent. As a practice, the intimacy of everyday
nineteenth-century middle-class life necessarily took place across catego-
ries and spaces of social difference within the home. The cook who knew
the tastes of the master, the mistress, and the children knew an intimate
detail about them, a secret, something beyond her subordinate function.
The cook inhabited the mouths of her “superiors” at the same time as she
functioned as a proxy for their mouths in the cooking spaces of the home.
Like the hearth, the cook’s mouth lay at the center of domestic well-being;
the food that passed from the hands and body of the kitchen servant to
the dining room figuratively passed through her mouth to the mouths of
the master’s or mistress’s family; it was therefore fraught with the possibil-
ity of poison, pollution, and race and class contamination.
Beyond the lines of class and race, other boundaries are upset in relation
to eating and cooking in the kitchen’s unconscious, boundaries that also
parallel the evolution of the United States’ scientific and juridical racisms.
The line between human and animal seems to disappear in stories that
revolve around the hearth, but so does the line between person and thing,
an image that becomes more important in pre–Civil War literature such
as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Food thus becomes a meta-
language for multiple forms of difference in these passages, as animals
exhibit human consciousness and human bodies are presented as food
objects, often as meat. The kitchen, in turn, is increasingly the space into
which disorder, garbage, contagion, dirt, noise, and other abject sensory
experiences are projected. Those projections, all associated with the ideo-
logical work of disgust and therefore constituted by disgust’s other, desire,
stick to the kitchen’s residents, the hyperembodied subjects—disruptive,
forbidden, marginally social, and therefore deliciously attractive—who
come to be associated with its labor and products.
18 Kitchen Insurrections

Hearth, Fireplace, and Chimney

Cooking was one of the central activities of colonial and early U.S. homes
in the Northeast; it was generally performed around fireplace-hearths.
Indeed, through the mid-nineteenth century, for most people in the
mostly rural United States, the fireplace continued to be the central space
around which members of the household met and socialized. The size of
the traditional hearth is an indicator of this centrally unifying function.
In the seventeenth century many New England houses were built around
massive stone chimneys, as were most houses in Plymouth Colony and
Rhode Island. In order to keep new rooms warm houses often expanded
through add-ons to the main house, usually on the side of the house where
the chimney was located. This house arrangement was slightly different in
the Chesapeake area, where houses, particularly those of the genteel class,
tended to be framed by chimneys on opposite ends of the house.4
Not surprisingly, most of the original homes in British North America
followed on the vernacular architectural designs of their early modern
counterparts in England. As historian John Crowley has written, “The
plans, amenities, and finish of the houses in which most Americans still
lived at the end of the eighteenth century—room-and-loft house plans,
wood and clay chimneys, few and small windows, and construction from
local raw materials—would have earned them the derogatory designation
‘cottages’ in England.”5 In early New England homes often resembled the
two-room buildings of southeastern England, with one room designated
for sleeping and storage, another for cooking, sleeping, and eating. The
division between these spaces was marked by the central fireplace.
For most colonists what constituted home improvement was not
expanding the size of the house structure but rather adding then-
expensive windows and window panes, which allowed more natural light
into the home and moved reading, writing, and household duties away
from the light afforded by the central fireplace. Artificial lighting using
candles, whale oil lanterns, and tallow was expensive. As Jane Nylander
points out, making candles was part of the regular regimen of domestic
duties, and the household manufacture of candles for home use persisted
in rural areas until the advent of cheap kerosene in the late 1860s.6 The
expense of glass windows was due partly to the cost of transport. Fran-
cis Higginson, writing to advise his friends in England about coming to
America and New England’s plantation, reminds them that “here are yet
neither markets nor fayres to buy what you want.” Thus, one must bring
 Kitchen Insurrections 19

a number of goods not only to furnish but to build the household, among
which are “glasse for windowes and many other things which were better
for you to think of them than to want them here.”7 Oiled paper was com-
monly resorted to instead of glass. Still, the best and cheapest source of
illumination was, by process of elimination, the central fireplace, which
could be used for indoor entertainment and domestic activity on cold
days and evenings, as well as for cooking.
Because the colonial house had not yet developed the kind of special-
ized spaces and furnishings that are allowed in a society that has developed
“fayres” and markets and manufacturing, the technological issues relat-
ing to cooking and domestic labors pertaining to food were inseparable
from those related to heating and light. Faced with cold temperatures they
could never have imagined before colonizing the northern Americas, heat
was a central concern for colonists and their descendants. This was partly
because fireplace technology was so poor: in fact, such was the inefficiency
of fireplace construction that by 1637 colonists had cleared most of the old-
growth forest from Massachusetts Bay to warm themselves. Within these
homes, fireplace chimneys sent a great deal of heat up and outside, and lack
of insulation—cracks in the house’s wooden frame, for instance—made
retaining heat in the room difficult. To produce a minimal level of com-
fort, then, a prodigious amount of wood had to be used, which exacerbated
another problem, because if heat leaked out, smoke often stayed in.8
In fact the colonists transplanted fireplace models from England and
continental Europe that were outsized, considering the “cottage” size of
their houses. They were often so big that one might consider the fireplace a
room of its own: at times dominating an entire wall, the hearth was often
topped with an enormous low-hanging hood that cooks and others had to
stoop under to stir up the fire. On cold days the prized seat of the house
was in fact inside the fireplace and next to the fire. More than a few feet
away it might still be cold enough for water to freeze; too close and one got
burned. Cotton Mather complained in his diary entry for January 23, 1697,
that “in a warm Room, on a great Fire, the Juices forced out at the End of
short Billets of Wood by the Heat of the Flame on which they were laid
yett froze into Ice at their coming out.”9
Such was the importance of developing fireplace and domestic heating
technology that Benjamin Franklin himself turned his considerable talent
to this issue, writing a pamphlet in 1744 that proposed a new technology
for stoves based on Dutch and German stoves.10 Franklin criticized then-
current heating technologies, arguing that “the large open Fire-places
20 Kitchen Insurrections

used in the Days of our Fathers, and still generally in the Country, and
in Kitchens” kept very little warm and, further, polluted the room with
smoke unless a door to the outside was kept open:11

[It has] generally the conveniency of two warm seats, one in each corner,
but they are sometimes too hot to abide in, and at other times incommoded
with the Smoke; there is likewise good Room for the Cook to move, to hang
pots, &c— . . . [But] the cold Air so nips the Backs and Heels of those that
sit before the Fire, that they have no comfort ’till either Screens or Settles
are provided.12

Although Franklin proposed his “Pennsylvania Stove” in 1744, due to the

poor but still-costly state of iron-forging technology, stoves were gener-
ally slow to catch on for domestic use. The unsightliness of iron stove
vents and longstanding ideas about the unhealthiness of closed rooms and
warm air also contributed to the general resistance to stoves. Additionally,
not all stoves, even those built into fireplaces, necessarily improved cook-
ing technology.
I will return to the stove later on in this chapter, but what I want to
make clear here is that the fireplace remained not only at the literal center
of the colonial northeastern house but at the symbolic center of domes-
tic life for the strongest of material reasons. And since it was the central
source of evening light across all regions of the colonies and early repub-
lic, it was the central source by which to read and write as well as to cook,
converse, or simply sit. It is no surprise then that the connection between
literature and the hearth has a solid lineage in the United States: as I will
show in the next section, in early nineteenth-century literature the hearth
recurs as a space within and around which discourses of social inversion
might take place. Drawing on early modern discourses of food and eating,
as well as images lifted from transatlantic theater, hearth-place literature
collapsed boundaries between classes of humans and species, drawing on
the imagery of food for its focus on transformation and metamorphosis.

Hearth and Literature

An early children’s book titled Dame Trot and Her Comical Cat nicely dem-
onstrates that cooking and the hearth fire were intertwined with literature
and social intercourse.13 Published in 1809 in Philadelphia, this small lyrical
 Kitchen Insurrections 21

pamphlet with its sing-song meter was clearly designed to be read aloud.14
The poem itself had been well-known as a nursery rhyme in oral repertory
of England for over a century; the Dame Trot character, usually played by a
man, was a regular character in gender-bending pantomime performance.15
Accompanied, as the title page says, by “sixteen elegant engravings,”
the chapbook narrates (and images, in woodcuts) the anthropomorphic
antics of Dame Trot’s cat (fig. 1). In this story, the hearth and the fireside
are represented—both in narrative and in the engravings that accompany
the text—as the household’s normal and central literary space and as a
site of comic inversion and transformation, with cooking functioning as a
comic device. The story opens,

Here you behold Dame Trot, and here

Her comic Cat you see;
Each seated in an elbow chair
As snug as they can be.
Dame Trot came home one wintry night,
A shiv’ring, starving soul
But Puss had made a blazing Fire
And nicely truss’d a Fowl.16

While the humor of the scene into which Dame Trot enters rests on the
idea that her cat has made a fire and a meal, the normalcy of the back-
ground against which is set the cat’s defiance of the norms of catlike
behavior is almost always the hearth—out of sixteen in total, there are
eleven woodcuts set in front of the hearth—thus giving the hearth a cen-
tral role in the narrative. Beyond the delightful insights into eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century cooking—in one illustration the poultry
hangs on a string in front of the fire, a traditional method for roasting
meat wherein the spinning string hypothetically allowed the meat to
cook all around and through—the poem and the accompanying images
designate the fireplace-hearth as a space of playful boundary confusion
(fig. 2).
The poem proceeds as a series of domestic vignettes largely without
narrative, as the cat prepares breakfast for Dame Trot, rides on the dog’s
back, and then shaves the dog and dresses up as a “lass”:

The Dame was pleas’d, the Fowl was dress’d,

The table set in place,
22 Kitchen Insurrections

Figure 1. “Dame Trot and Her Comical Figure 2. “Dame Trot came home one
Cat,” from Dame Trot and Her Comical wintry night,” from Dame Trot and
Cat (Courtesy American Antiquarian Her Comical Cat (Courtesy American
Society) Antiquarian Society)

The wond’rous Cat began to carve,

And Goody said her grace.
The cloth withdrawn old Goody cries
“I wish we’d liquor too”;
Up jump’d Frimalkin for some wine,
And soon a cork she drew.17

In the accompanying woodcuts the hearth literally frames the space

within which the absurdity of the idea that a cat might cook, drink, or
dance can make sense, thus shaping the comedy of the book:

Next morning Puss got up betimes,

The breakfast cloth she laid;
And ere the village clock struck eight,
The tea and toast she made.
Goody awoke and rubb’d her eyes,
And drank her cup of tea,
Amaz’d to see her Cat behave
With such propriety.18
 Kitchen Insurrections 23

Figure 3. “The Dame was pleas’d, the Fowl

was dress’d,” from Dame Trot and Her
Comical Cat (Courtesy American Anti-
quarian Society)

The reference to propriety proposes the idea of animal sociality,

even in a story in which other animals are consumed. Above all, the
cat is continually working—making a fire, trussing a fowl, finding
and uncorking wine, acting out, in all ways, the labor of a maid—or
wife—to the end of pleasing a single, aged woman, always a liminally
social figure (fig. 3). Dame Trot is thus transposed, to her own amaze-
ment, into an upside-down world within which animals can perform
human functions in setting up one of the most regimented of social
activities, the meal.
Aristotle, in the Poetics, considers that the socially low and the ugly
define the comic, as the socially high and the beautiful define the more
serious genres.19 It is perhaps because of the many social rules attached
to bodily functions such as eating, which can be so easily located in the
social space of the low and the ugly, that food culture has long been con-
nected to comedy. Discussing the history of banquet literature, Michel
Jeanneret writes,

Food and drink belong to the generic and stylistic registers that are tradi-
tionally vulgar: to associate them with serious and noble themes is to upset
the accepted hierarchy, to join orders which are conventionally separate
24 Kitchen Insurrections

and to confuse the normal relations between form and content. This incon-
gruity produces a crack in the system and generates comedy; furthermore
it gives received vocabulary and discourse a shock which gets rid of the
cobwebs and revitalizes them.20

Jeanneret’s important work traces the connection between food, eating,

and literature from the classical through to the early modern period.
As he shows, the history of vernacular European literature, of local lan-
guages, and in particular of nonsense poetry and language is tied to
food and eating. Attacking humanism and classical thought, the food
literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveled in polyph-
ony, lower-body humor, and vulgar pig Latin jokes, many of them found
in stories of outrageous meals and grotesque banquets.21
This pre-Enlightenment history would perhaps be irrelevant to this
project if European culture stopped at the shore; but as scholars of trans-
atlantic culture have also documented, early modern European influence
is ever present in colonial and early U.S. literature and, via eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century pantomime, in theater as well. In that literature
we can still discern clear traces of the European discourse of vulgarity and
grotesquerie best captured by Bakhtin:

The grotesque mode of representing the body and bodily life prevailed in
art and creative forms of speech over thousands of years. From the point
of view of extensive use, this mode of representation still exists today:
grotesque forms of the body not only predominate in the art of European
peoples but also in their folklore, especially in the comic genre. . . . It is
the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born,
devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying. Whenever
men laugh and curse, particularly in a familiar environment, their speech
is filled with bodily images. This boundless ocean of grotesque bodily
imagery within time and space extends to all languages, all literatures, and
the entire system of gesticulation.22

In this system of humor, food imagery is exploited for its references

to the otherwise suppressed or masked physiological functioning of
the body and in so doing gestures to the temporary inversion of social
hierarchies that accompanied the classic feast and festival: “The gro-
tesque . . . does not have to respect hierarchical distinctions: it freely
 Kitchen Insurrections 25

Figure 4. “The cloth withdrawn, Old

Goody cries,” from Dame Trot and Her
Comical Cat (Courtesy American Anti-
quarian Society)

blends the profane and the sacred, the lower and the higher, the spiri-
tual and the material. There are no mesalliances in its case.”23 While
the Dame Trot story does not quite explore the life of the lower body to
Rabelaisian extremes, perhaps because the hearth keeps the narrative
at the site of ingestion and not excretion, the poem does make a quiet
revolution out of upending the relationship between human and ani-
mal in a space and time defined by eating, cooking, and drinking. The
comic meal provides the stage for this interspecies meeting, as both
participants open their mouths together—toward each other—to eat,
drink, dance, and laugh (see fig. 4).
Dame Trot herself was, as I mentioned, a pantomime figure, one per-
formed en travesti. We should expect that a chapbook about her would
be intertextually associated with the transatlantic culture of pantomime
theater, in which nursery stories and fairy tales were performed. Daphne
Brooks writes that “the [antebellum] culture of performance responded
to the uncertainty of corporeal autonomy [in modernity] by producing
a range of liminal and embattled types and icons. These figures prowled
the colorful world of nineteenth-century transatlantic theatre and perfor-
mance, a universe that trafficked in panoply of phantasmagoric bodies.”24
In fact, the cat as a servant, or maid, is taking on a role that, in Dame
26 Kitchen Insurrections

Trot’s world, was performed often, if not most often, by African Ameri-
cans. Racial categories and norms seem to lie just outside this particular
chapbook, although an audience familiar with transatlantic pantomime
culture might well have made the association between animal bodies and
minoritarian bodies. Still, in one way the household of our stereotypi-
cally cross-dressed figure has indeed elevated the animal to the human
place—although the carnivalesque logic is incomplete, inasmuch as Dame
Trot is not downgraded. Instead, her wishes are fulfilled—she is served
by a drinking cat and a dancing dog, who both then join her at her table,
providing her with service and company. The fine line between genders
and species as it appears here presages the later depictions of encounters
between classes of people as they will continue to take place in the spaces
devoted to eating.25
These inversion themes also appear in another children’s tale, titled
Think Before You Speak; or, The Three Wishes.26 Published in England in
1809 and in Philadelphia in 1810, Three Wishes has an explicitly class-
based cautionary message derived from magical happenings that take
place around the hearth. The story tells of a poor man, “Homespun,” and
his wife, Susan, who are “honest folks in humble life / Who liv’d contented
with their lot / And lov’d the comforts of their cot.”27 One night they are
sitting at the hearth talking (“And o’er the fire the parents sat / Engaged in
sober, social chat”) when a fairy—whom Homespun had previously saved
from being hunted when she was disguised as a hare—appears to grant
them three wishes.
After debating whether they wish to be rich farmers, merchants, or
lords and ladies, they retire to sleep. Before doing so, however, Susan acci-
dentally spends the first wish:

Our choice requires the coolest head;

So rake the fire, and we’ll to bed.
Susan, the happiest wife on earth,
Set all to rights, and brush’d her hearth;
And said, These embers burn so clear,
I wish we had a pudding here!
Methinks ’twould broil so clean and nice;
I’d make it ready in a trice:
She spoke—and in the chimney rumbled
A noise—and down a pudding tumbled!28
 Kitchen Insurrections 27

As shown in the third engraving, Homespun rants over the pudding as his
wife shrinks away:29

Her tongue itself forgot its use,—

Tongue once so ready at excuse!
Mean time the husband storm’d and rated,
Swearing no man was e’er so mated;
And call’d his spouse—like savage shameless
By ugly words that must be nameless,
To throw our fortune thus away!
Are’nt you a stupid idiot—hey?
Such want of thought your folly shows,
I wish the pudding on your nose!
The words escap’d, he gain’d his wish.
The pudding, rising from its dish,
On Goody Homespun’s nose was stuck
So fast, no power on earth could pluck.30

Again, the hearth becomes a space of inversion and change: it is there that
the fairy—who appears earlier as a hare but is saved by Homespun’s empa-
thy for her across species lines—transmogrifies and reappears to offer the
three wishes that will transform the Homespuns’ class status; it is also there
that Goody Homespun’s body transforms into food. The whole is framed,
as in Dame Trot and Her Comical Cat, by a backgrounding hearth, both in
the lyrics themselves and in the illustrations—and, no doubt, in the way
that the lyrics were read, out loud, in the home, near a hearth.
More radically, speech in Three Wishes has embodied consequences,
for, empowered by the fairy’s gift of three wishes, the Homespuns’ idle
talk becomes speech act: what they enunciate becomes reality. The narra-
tive ultimately curbs the potential of that (albeit magical) power, and the
book wraps up when Homespun spends the third wish to get the pudding
off his wife’s nose:

And to relieve thee from this evil

I wish the pudding at the devil!
Obedient to this prudent wish,
The pudding fell, and in its dish
Flew up the chimney as it came,
And thus restored the suffering dame.31
28 Kitchen Insurrections

By the end of the poem the Homespuns have learned their place, to “Tem-
per our hopes with moderations / And suit our wishes to our station.”32
But for a brief moment, around the hearth and in fact through the hearth,
their power of imaginative speech is unlimited, even if it escapes their
control.
More specifically, the performative potential of the peasant body—
specifically the woman’s body—is anchored and limited by its bodily
proximity to food when the pudding, which Susan first imagines and
then wishes for, finally becomes stuck to Susan’s face (“Sad Susan wav’d
her head in woe / The pudding too wav’d to and fro”).33 In The Poetics
and Politics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White argue that the fluid
hyperphysicality of the working-class body was a central projection of the
emerging bourgeoisie of the Industrial Revolution.34 While Goody Home-
spun’s body becomes stuck to the pudding, the pudding can also be read as
a metonym for the nonbourgeois body: a package made up of pretty much
anything and sewn up and cooked in a soft bag of skin.35 In this poem the
hearth, as a space that deals with food, is an important site of liminal-
ity: for in the image of the housewife’s body joined to the food object we
see that the body (and in particular the working-class body) threatens to
escape the limits of sociality and become fleshy foodstuff, to become at
least partially indistinguishable from those other animals we choose to
turn into food. The boundary between the genders is in question here as
well, when we consider that pudding is also a slang term for the penis:
the image that accompanies this passage shows a long penislike protru-
sion dangling from Goody Homespun’s face into her lap, as her husband
comforts her in front of the fire.36 And finally, the line that demarcates the
inner body from the outer world is also reversed, when the association of
pudding with guts and viscera turns the body inside out, putting intesti-
nal membranes on the outside of Goody Homespun’s body, just as a pud-
ding is encased in its skin.
This is the comic logic of a world in which animals take on the role
of humans and speech acts bring about physical events: it is a world of
transformations linked to the world of food, itself a metamorphic referent,
standing in for the steps through which dead flesh and organic matter are
processed, changed, and then ingested to become living matter. The theme
of inversion also promises the opposite: any person has the possibility—as
an organism—of being metamorphosed into food and devoured. In rais-
ing the question of who gets to eat and who gets eaten or, alternatively,
who is a “who” and who is a “what,” the literature of the hearth-space
 Kitchen Insurrections 29

both fixes and destabilizes social hierarchy—the Great Chain of Being—

through the transformative metaphor offered by cooking, itself captured
in literature which then might be read, out loud, at a cooking site.
Thus, the hearth, which is the “center” of the house, can also be the
space at which numerous decenterings play off each other, around and
within which hierarchically related entities are reconfigured. In these
texts the lines between human and animal, like those between the human
body and food, are defined in terms of a naturalized social hierarchy,
in which the human is not an animal and the human body is not food.
This theme repeats in The World Turned Upside Down; or, The Comical
Metamorphoses, a chapbook published first in London by the prominent
printing house Dicey and Marshall and then republished during the 1780s
and 1790s in the United States.37 The chapbook contains a series of poems
of seven stanzas, each with a concluding poetic moral of four lines. Each
poem is accompanied by an engraved illustration. In each of these poems
some relationship in the social hierarchy is inverted in order to punish
an individual who abuses or fails to properly administer his power: thus,
a butcher who tortures animals is butchered by them, a deer shoots a
gamekeeper, and a hare roasts a cook over an open flame. The last poem
is accompanied by a striking depiction of the cook being basted on the
hearth by a rooster, or cock. Basting here signifies both to its strictly culi-
nary meaning and also to its slang meaning as a beating or whipping: food
comes to signify the body at its extremes of sensation, at its barest animal
form:38

If fortune smile, her favours prize

Nor let your wealth be wasted;
Or like the cook, before your eyes,
You’ll by the world be basted.39

One can well imagine how these texts, which also gleefully depict anti-
aristocratic violence and other forms of insurrection, would have been
received in the first quarter century after the revolution.40 In fact, the
American edition of this chapbook was reprinted with far more elaborate
illustrations than the original English version contained, indicating that
“I. Norman,” the publisher, thought the book was worthy of some finan-
cial investment.41 Of the thirty poems in this chapbook, fourteen involve
animals rising against humans, and six in particular involve animals
hunting, fishing, or butchering men. Another poem tells of an abused
30 Kitchen Insurrections

maid who switches places with her mistress. In this poem the illustration
depicts her ordering her mistress about in a kitchen in which the hearth
takes up the entire right-hand wall of the picture:

The woman drudging in that place;

(Observe the print beside)
Was one of those that catch disgrace,
And bait the hook with pride.
The maid who us’d to watch her call
And at her back was ready,
By her impudence, and downfall,
Is now become her lady.
MORAL:
Ye fair-ones ne’er be arrogant;
Be of this tale observant;
Misfortune may your bliss transplant,
And each become a servant.42

In these chapbooks, marvels and revolutions may be recounted, but the

function of the hearth does not change. In the illustrations and the poems,
the hearth is, as always, the normal site that links cooking spaces and eat-
ing. It is in relation to the hearth that the literature could tie its themes of
class fluidity and bodily transformation, in which the differences defin-
ing social hierarchies were overturned. The hearth space represents a site
where classes—of people and of things—met and where the normal order
of transformations took place; it is also the space in which the order of
transformations might be inverted, even if only temporarily. Further, as
performed in The World Turned Upside Down, it was also a space where
social bodies could be reduced—debased—into animal fleshliness.
What I also want to point to in these poems is the importance of food
as a metalanguage for the strangeness of the body and, thus, I wish to
argue, for the thingness, the quiddity even, of the body. The food that
tends to be represented in these stories is meat, which, while derived from
the animal, is recognizably in the same category as human flesh. It is, as
animal studies scholars and animal rights activists have noted, permis-
sible to eat meat because animals represent a lower social order than
humans, and even then this is not true for all animals: Pets such as Dame
Trot’s cat and dog are in a separate category.43 Those that are eaten are not
persons but things, and their thingness is the result of a system of social
 Kitchen Insurrections 31

degradation. For a human to take the place of an animal means becoming

the object of a similar social degradation. To be socially degraded, then, to
be completely other with relation to the human, is one of the conditions
of being edible. At the many points in these stories in which the human
body becomes food we see that what defines the social boundaries that
govern the edible and the tabooed is the degree to which particular bod-
ies are made marginal within the social world, or how they become other
to some image of the human in the domestic space where food is cooked.
And yet these stories of transformation and inversion are also obses-
sively occupied with similarity: between cook and hare, between nose
and pudding, between body and flesh. Human flesh, over which the social
exerts its control, naturally resembles the flesh of other animals. Visibly,
humans are isomorphic to other animals, sharing eyes, limbs, internal
organs, and the like. In order to cook and eat animals in good conscience,
humans must negate that likeness. And, on the human side, this com-
munity of negation grounds the transcendentally human in a process by
which is produced both the modern subject and its human and animal
others. In these chapbooks human bodies are both defined and haunted by
the uncanny resemblance between their own bodies and those devalued
beings we kill to make meat. Food, which is the result of the convergence
of a physical and a symbolic process, recurs as a trope through which this
resemblance can be explored; in these texts the fireplace-hearth is clearly
the literary site most often associated with the possibilities, and threat, of
that resemblance.

Orality and Abjection in the Kitchen

Although it is one of the arguments of this chapter that the early mod-
ern and early U.S. discourses of inversion as they appeared in relation to
the food and hearth continued to lie beneath images of food and eating
across the rest of the century, it is important to remember that the proc-
esses by which food and the human are coded are local and historically
specific. The kind of proximity to cooking and eating that colonists and
early nineteenth-century Americans experienced would shift in tandem
with regional changes in kitchen technology and domestic architecture
across the nineteenth century. In the first thirty years of the nineteenth
century, more homes were built with kitchens; at the same time, stoves
began to replace fireplaces both in the kitchen and in other rooms. As
32 Kitchen Insurrections

stoves replaced fireplaces, American writers of this generation, who had

grown up with hearths and most probably learned to read and write by
firelight (as well as by daylight, of course) became nostalgic for the open
fire. Priscilla Brewer’s work on the development of cooking technol-
ogy in the United States demonstrates that from the 1820s through the
1850s, when the days of the hearth started to recede from living memory,
a number of authors lamented its loss, the fireside poets being perhaps
the best known of them.44 Nathaniel Hawthorne joined his voice to the
general dislike for stoves when he wrote his plaintive 1843 short essay
“Fire Worship.”45 He writes, “It is a great revolution in social and domestic
life, and no less so in the life of a secluded student, this almost universal
exchange of the open fireplace for the cheerless and ungenial stove. On
such a morning as now lowers around our old gray parsonage, I miss the
bright face of my ancient friend, who was wont to dance upon the hearth
and play the part of more familiar sunshine.”46 More than a simple aes-
thetic loss, for the narrator the end of the fireplace signals the beginning
of modernity, a beginning that blots the “picturesque, the poetic and the
beautiful out of human life.”47 By taking classical “Promethean” fire and
forcing it to labor on “a half dozen sticks of wood,” the stove has upset
the fundamental economy of the house. Hawthorne balances this loss of
an interior picturesqueness against a former age in which “sixty cords
of wood” were consumed by the hearth—“almost an annual forest.” For
the narrator, the passing of the fireplace marks the end of an era of social
communion, marked in particular as the end of communal storytelling
and talking:

It is my belief that social intercourse cannot long continue what it has been,
now that we have subtracted from it so important and vivifying an ele-
ment as firelight. . . . There will be nothing to attract these poor children
to one centre. They will never behold one another through that peculiar
medium of vision the ruddy gleam of blazing wood or bituminous coal—
which gives the human spirit so deep an insight into its fellows and melts
all humanity into one cordial heart of hearts.48

Fire here is in the first place a source of the visual, shaping the ways that
children see each other—and thus perhaps shaping the first experiences
of vision as a social sense. For Hawthorne it also lays the foundation of
sociality in the connection between fireplaces and speech: “[Without
fire] domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate
 Kitchen Insurrections 33

corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry
yet unambitious Jest; the life-like, practical discussion of real matters in
a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple
fireside word,—will disappear from earth.”49 For the narrator, to get rid of
the fireplace is to undermine the very definition of the domesticity. This
descent into modernity is a fall away from orality and simplicity—from
the “simple fireside word”—and into specialization and noncommunica-
tion, as families seek the four corners of the home, facing away from each
other and aborting all traditional forms of speech. If the hearth and fire-
place were the center of domestic orality, it is unsurprising that the chim-
ney flue was often referred to as the “throat”; the fireplace, it might be said,
was the mouth of the house.50
Melville reworked Hawthorne’s lament in his quirky short story “I and
My Chimney,” which some critics have seen as a direct response to “Fire
Worship”:51

It need hardly be said, that the walls of my house are entirely free from fire-
places. These all congregate in the middle—in the one grand central chim-
ney, upon all four sides of which are hearths—two tiers of hearths—so that
when, in the various chambers, my family and guests are warming them-
selves of a cold winter’s night, just before retiring, then, though the time
they may not be thinking so, all their faces mutually look towards each
other, yea, all their feet point to one centre; and when they go to sleep in
their beds, they all sleep round one warm chimney, like so many Iroquois
Indians, in the woods, round their one heap of embers.52

As feminist cultural studies has turned to the study of the interior space
of the household, “I and My Chimney” has come under new critical scru-
tiny. Millette Shamir, for instance, sees “I and My Chimney” as Melville’s
defense of an older model of patriarchal domesticity, antedating that of
the post-Revolutionary era, in which the gendered division of labor in
the household was reflected in the house plan.53 Shamir argues that the
chimney, closely tied to the narrator’s sense of self, represents a mascu-
line, phallic selfhood that resists being accessed by public discourses of
domestic (read: feminine) respectability or even by women at all. Other
critics, notably Bertolini and Wilson, have seen in “I and My Chimney”
a crucial literary expression of the production of different masculinities
within the order of antebellum domesticity, expressed through Melville’s
use of architectural form.54
34 Kitchen Insurrections

While these critics have persuasively illuminated both the phallic

(“‘Your chimney, sir, you regard as too small, I suppose, needing further
development, especially at the top?’ ‘Sir!’ said, I . . . ‘do not be personal.’”)55
and anal (“Yes I dare say there is a secret ash-hole in the chimney; for
where do all the ashes go to that we drop down the queer hole yonder?”)56
symbolism of the chimney, it is important to acknowledge the moments
when Melville’s chimney symbolism gestures to the mouth. For instance,
the narrator insistently draws attention to his own mouth, specifically
the bodily parallels between his own pipe smoking and the smoke that
emerges from the “huge, corpulent old Harry VII. of a chimney.”57 But
the mouth is not only the site of drawing in and breathing out smoke—a
product on the border line between the edible and the nonedible, the clean
and the dirty (or “sooty”) thing. It is also the site of the verbal. Signif-
icantly, the written word, in the story, is aligned with the architect Mr.
Scribe—a name denoting the architect’s connection with textuality—and
the narrator’s wife, against whose machinations the narrator protects the
chimney—while supplementing the oral word by letter, the form in which
he communicates with the architect.

The truth is, my wife, like all the rest of the world, cares not a fig for my
philosophical jabber. In dearth of other philosophical companionship, I
and my chimney have to smoke and philosophize together. And sitting up so
late as we do at it, a mighty smoke it is that we two smoky old philosophers
make.
But my spouse, who likes the smoke of my tobacco as little as she does
that of the soot, carries on her war against both. I live in continual dread
lest, like the golden bowl, the pipes of me and my chimney shall yet be
broken.58

While the hearth place is a place of masculine reverie, as Vincent Berto-

lini has argued, it is also, Melville reminds us, a site associated with comic
orality: “philosophical jabber” even. If we reconsider the story through the
lens of the spoken word, we see that the narrator’s hostility to his wife’s
temporality is about a hostility to a futurity that he sees as tied to print
culture: “While spicily impatient of present and past, like a glass of ginger-
beer [my wife] overflows with her schemes; and with like energy as she
puts down her foot, puts down her preserves and pickles, and lives with
them in a continual future; or ever full of expectations both from time
and space, is ever restless for newspapers, and ravenous for letters.”59 In
 Kitchen Insurrections 35

“I and My Chimney” the chimney is definitively not connected with eat-

ing and food as it is in the other stories I discuss here, perhaps because
the masculinist terms of the story demand that cooking and food be con-
nected to femininity, as in the passage just quoted. Instead, the chimney
is the site of a kind of physical and social abjection as the narrator (whose
words are “jabbering” to his wife), “philosophizes” to his chimney, which
comes to stand in variously for his mouth, his anus, and his penis, sitting
alongside it happily covered in soot and resisting the attempts at domesti-
cating and modernizing the house made by his wife.
In his stubborn commitment to this hyperembodied existence, the
delightfully perverse, if misogynist, narrator of “I and My Chimney”
attempts to resist what Michel de Certeau called “intextuation,” the shap-
ing of the flesh by textual, or disciplinary, pressures. De Certeau writes,
“The intextuation of the body corresponds to the incarnation of the law;
it supports it, it even seems to establish it, and in any case it serves it. For
the law plays on it: ‘Give me your body and I will give you meaning, I will
make you a name and a word in my discourse.’ . . . The only force oppos-
ing this passion to be a sign is the cry, a deviation or an ecstasy, a revolt or
flight of that which, within the body, escapes the law of the named.”60 Even
as the narrator is, paradoxically, entirely a creature of Melville’s text as
well as a response to Hawthorne’s text, his hyperembodiment as object—
his thingness—resists legibility within the wife’s domestic scheme. As de
Certeau indicates, the narrator’s resistance to intextuation takes place
through recourse to his body but also to the oral—the “cry.” Thus, when
the narrator comes to writing a letter to Scribe the architect, the only
instance of his writing inside the text, he has no implements to write with
and must leave the house to find and fashion a quill. He closes the letter,

“We shall remain,

“Very faithfully,
“The same,
“I and my Chimney.”61

This desire to remain the same, to resist a modernity that is leaving the
revolutionary epoch behind and advancing into a different regime of
domesticity, characterized, as Shamir argues, by the power of the feminine
over interior household arrangements, can be seen as more than simply a
desire to cling to the past; it is also a desire to cling to an embodied, orally
authentic present. The story is narrated in the past tense, as a memory,
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now are quiet, orderly villages, each with its preacher and teacher,
chapel and school. Rubbish and filth that they never saw while in
paganism, have been cleared away. Faces are brighter, bodies better
clothed, rice-bins better filled. Many of the boys and girls are away
in the town school for better training than the village school can
provide. Here and there, on the elevated bamboo verandas may be
seen young wives who have had this better training, evidenced by
their absence of fear that a clean skirt will bring upon them the eyes
of the entire village. These are a few of the many changes forecast
in the promise—"I will say unto them that were not My people, Thou
art My people; and they shall say, Thou art my God."
About eight hundred Protestant churches, with as many pastors and
evangelists, are among the more tangible results.
A Christian college for all races, theological seminaries for Karens
and Burmans, the latter open to Burmese speaking candidates from
other races; and a Bible training school for the young women are
preparing pastors, evangelists, teachers and Bible women, to meet
the ever increasing demand. Already native missionaries have gone
out to work among the Shans, Chins and Kachins. And still the finger
of God is pointing onward,—to western China, and the region around
Tibet, sources from which the races of Burma came, and where
kindred races still exist.
Without dealing in uninteresting statistics, I have tried to indicate
some of the conditions amid which missionary work in Burma has
been, and still is being conducted, and some of the results of the
work.
In spite of separations, privations, distractions, effects of climate,
and other trying experiences, missionary life has its compensations.
Chief among them is the satisfaction of seeing the image of God
reappearing in human faces, hearts, and lives, and the privilege of
helping to win a nation to Christ. This it is that keeps the missionary
at his post, or hurries him back to his field from a half-rest in the
home-land; while first, last, and all the time there is ringing in his
ears the Master's parting message—"Go, preach the gospel to the
whole creation,"—every word of which, as Dr. Ellis once said, "is a
heart-beat of the Holy Ghost." In the Great Commission, and the
great need he finds ample justification and obligation for vigorous
and unceasing missionary effort.
After the battle of Lookout Mountain a dying soldier, roused by a
sound of shouting, said to a comrade who was supporting him
—"What was that?" "Why—that's our boys! they have carried the
heights, and planted the flag upon them!" With a smile the dying
soldier said, "I helped put it there."
All along the mission-front the great struggle with paganism is still
going on. But by and by the battles will have been fought, the
victory won, and you and I will be standing with that great company
which John saw at Patmos,—for it is yet future. Burmans and
Karens, and people of India and China, and Africa will be there, just
as it reads:
"Out of every nation, and of all tribes and peoples and tongues."
And as we stand there in the presence of our Saviour,—the Lord of
the Harvest,—it will be a happy day for you and me,—if we can say
like the dying soldier—"I helped put them there."

Transcriber's Notes

Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected.

Illustrations have been relocated to paragraph breaks.

Page 79: "seige" may be a typo for "siege."

(Orig: immense army, laid seige to Syriam,)

Page 80: Changed "Guatama" to "Gautama."

(Orig: pagoda was built, and a costly image of Guatama cast)

Page 87: Changed "issed" to "issued."

(Orig: Oriental monarch would have issed such decrees)
Page 109: Changed "guaged" to "gauged."
(Orig: Hospitality is guaged by the number of cups)

Page 124: "thalt" may be a typo for "shalt."

(Orig: commandment, "Thou thalt speak no false word," gives this definition)

Page 131: Changed "Guatama" to "Gautama."

(Orig: relics of four Buddhas, including eight hairs of Guatama.)

Page 149: Changed "it" to "its."

(Orig: Each community has it head-man, who makes the bargain)

Page 204: Changed "beople" to "people."

(Orig: stepping-stones heavenward for these benighted beople.)
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AMONG THE
BURMANS: A RECORD OF FIFTEEN YEARS OF WORK AND ITS
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