The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

The Revolt of Female Appetite:
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and
Women’s Literary Realism

Makiko WAKABAYASHI*

INTRODUCTION
Food, indeed, constitutes a distinctive feature of Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman’s authorship. Virginia L. Blum recognizes the delicious featureof her discourse by saying, “A Freeman story makes me hungry—her
extensive elaborations of breakfasts and dinners and suppers, counting
out the slices of bread, noting the quantity of damson sauce, rating thestrength of the tea, reproduce in me the hunger of her characters.”1
Freeman treats every dietary moment in such detail as to make every little aspect of eating a matter of gravity. What to eat, how to eat, how muchto eat, and even when to eat can be legitimate subjects for Freeman towrite about. The supper scene with Louisa Ellis in “A New England Nun”
is just such an appetizing case in point: “She had for her supper a glass
dish full of sugared currants, a plate of little cakes, and one of light whitebiscuits. Also a leaf or two of lettuce, which she cut up daintily.”2 This
spectacle of food is enough to make our mouths water, but Freeman does
not stop there. By adding one more detail about Louisa’s manner of
eating, “She ate quite heartily, though in a delicate, pecking way; itseemed almost surprising that any considerable bulk of the food should

Copyright © 2010 Makiko Wakabayashi. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University

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vanish” (NE 8), Freeman turns this small but elaborate supper into an
unexpected arena to display Louisa Ellis’s gourmandism. Her “delicate,pecking way” of handling food notwithstanding, we cannot be distracted
from her good appetite, which is actually big enough to relish each dish“quite heartily” and eat up a “considerable bulk of food.”
Certainly well-rendered descriptions of food hardly fail to delight us,
but the dexterity at staging a tasty scene does not exhaust all the ingenuity Freeman can devise with food. In fact, we can observe, more often
than not, the way in which Freeman makes use of a character’s dietary
habit as a symbolic factor in deciding its destiny. On the one hand, thosecharacters who know a savor of life, such as Louisa Ellis, Louisa Britton
in “Louisa” and many others are also gastrocentric women who understand how digestive organs work so well that they never underestimate
the importance of food. Those who are destined to taste the bitterness oflife, like Betsey Dole in “A Poetess,” are, on the other hand, anorectic
women who think they can survive with little food or even without it.
Given that Freeman loved to use food as a motif, one urgent question
to be answered will be what motivated her to do so. Biographical data
speak to the fact that Freeman herself was a gastronome who loved cooking and eating. She is reported to have ascribed her academic failure atMount Holyoke Female Seminary not only to the seminary’s “too strenuous goadings of conscience” but also to its “monotony of diet.” 3 She
was also a reputed fan of a chaﬁng dish, the latest innovation in cooking
utensils of the time.4 The cultural context of late nineteenth-century
America also invites our attention. Namely, there was in the Victorianperiod a peculiar aversion to female appetite which not only generated
numerous tragedies of young women called “fasting girls” such as Sarah
Jacobs and Mollie Francher but also gave birth to the cult of “ladylike
anorexia” in women’s literature.5 This cultural context of anorexia looks
to be a suitable enemy for Freeman to ﬁght with her appetizing discourse.
In this essay, however, I choose to look at a historical context to ﬁnd
a possible meaning behind Freeman’s food motif. Blum illustrates how
closely Freeman’s deployment of dietary metaphor was related to her
efforts to negotiate with the shifting taste in literature from sentimentalism to realism, especially with the growing tendency to privilege aesthetics over marketability in evaluating literature.6 Her analysis suggests
a strong possibility that Freeman’s experiment with the language of foodplayed a crucial role in her pursuit of professional career as a realist
writer. I investigate this possibility and demonstrate how food serves forTHE REVOLT OF FEMALE APPETITE

33

Freeman as a discursive tool to deconstruct the cult of domesticity. Bybringing dietary activity to the foreground of her text, Freeman not only
unveils the cult of domesticity’s repressive approach to food but also
gives symbolic birth to a psychological model women can use to crossthe boundary from a domestic ideology to a new territory of women’s
experience.
The nineteenth-century American domestic ideology was characteristically antagonistic to the dietary part of household activities, as my
examination of popular domestic manuals, The American Woman’s
Home speciﬁcally, will show. Under the name of health and science,advocates of domesticity made a healthy relationship between womenand food impossible and relegated the kitchen to an obscure corner ofthe American home. It is this marginalization of dietary activity from therealm of women’s experience that Freeman tries to intervene through her
dietary discourse. Freeman’s career as a practitioner of literary realism
went hand in hand with her gastronomic project to rehabilitate theAmerican palate.
I. EARLY AMERICAN COOKERY
What is genuinely American about American foodways? Such anationalistic question would have sounded strange to Americans rightafter the Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, things were quite different. As Mark McWilliams points out, asearch for what constituted American cuisine was inaugurated in the ﬁeldof literature: “As part of the emerging myth of republican simplicity,
novelists like Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine
Maria Sedgwick introduced ﬁctive representations of local food andreimagined the role of domestic labor—and, in the process, helped deﬁne
American culture by encoding food with social and moral meaning.”7 At
the hands of these writers, the “rustic abundance,” as against the “sophisticated combinations of European cuisine,” gained national currency as
the image of the American table.8
Of all the novelists who are said to have promoted the idea of abundant simplicity in the early national period, Lydia Maria Child played anespecially active role in opening the way for this culinary ideal to reach
the American kitchen. Her The American Frugal Housewife (1832), themost popular domestic manual of the time, was originally designed toteach inexperienced housewives how to live economically, but the34

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recipes Child introduced for frugal living do not seem frugal at all. The
stock-in-trade foodstuffs that constituted the traditional New Englandtable are all found intact in her book: meat, whose variety was particularly counted as the symbol of American plenty (beef, mutton, lamb,pork, chicken, goose, duck, turkey, and pigeon); ﬁsh (cod, haddock,mackerel, halibut, clams, oysters, and lobster); and vegetables (beans,peas, potatoes, onions, parsnips, squash, asparagus, beets, tomatoes, celery, and lettuce). There are also in this manual of frugal living surprisingnumbers of recipes for pies and cakes: mince pie, pumpkin and squash
pie, carrot pie, cherry pie, whortleberry pie, apple pie, custard pie, cranberry pie, gingerbread, cup cakes, tea cake, cider cake, election cake,sponge cake, wedding cake, loaf cake, caraway cake, dough-nuts, pancakes, fritters, short cake, and Indian cake. What a spectacle! Child’srecipes, indeed, exemplify this characteristic belief of hers “that neatness, good taste, and gentility, are attainable without great expense.”9 It
is, therefore, no wonder that as a domestic manual that proposed an inexpensive method to obtain a plentiful diet, The American Frugal Housewife was so cherished in antebellum America.
The same kind of respect for American “rustic abundance” characterizes Sarah Josepha Hale’s The Good Housekeeper (1839). In it Haleemphasizes a consideration for good health, the knowledge of “how tolive well, and to be well while we live,”10 as the innovative aspect of her
domestic system. Accordingly, she starts her cooking instructions bygiving a general idea of good dietary habit under these headings: “Timesof Taking Food,” “Proper Quantity of Food,” “What is the Proper Foodof Man?” and “What Shall We Drink?” She certainly cautions against
overeating, but her tips for a healthy diet by no means include dietary
inhibition: “In truth, there are few articles of diet which a person in
health, and leading a very active life, may not eat without feeling muchinconvenience; still a preference should be given, as far as possible, tosuch kinds of food as are most in accordance with the natural constitution.”11 Her words almost sound as if it is health that is important forgood eating, rather than diet being important for good health. Such an
impression is, indeed, not necessarily beside the point as far as Hale’s
cooking instruction is concerned.
In fact, Hale’s recipes are pronounced in their focus on animal foods.
Her defense of animal foods against the prevailing advocacy of vegetablediet system is notable: “[W]e know that now in every country, where amixed diet [of vegetable and meat] is habitually used, as in the temperateTHE REVOLT OF FEMALE APPETITE

35

climates, there the greatest improvement of the race is to be found, andthe greatest energy of character. It is that portion of the human family,
who have the means of obtaining this food at least once a day, who now
hold dominion over the earth.”12 To make her point clearer, she ventures
to add: “Forty thousand of the beef-fed British govern and control ninety
millions of the rice-eating natives of India.”13 With this meat-loving
spirit and the faith that “physical health, vigor of mind, and comfort ofbodily feeling, depend, in a very great degree, on the manner in whichanimal food is used,”14 Hale gives instructions on how to garnish meat
dishes along with the basics of meat cooking. For boiled beef, she recommends to “garnish the dish with carrots and turnips. Boiled potatoes,
carrots, turnips and greens, on separate plates, are good accompaniments,”15 and for roasted pork, her recommendation is applesauce:“Apple-sauce is always proper to accompany roasted pork—this, withpotatoes, mashed or plain, mashed turnips, and pickles, is good.”16 Haleeven includes recipes for twenty kinds of gravy to make meat even more
tasty.17
It would be wrong, however, to take these early promoters of domestic ideology to have been indifferent to the mischief food might inﬂict
on a person’s health, as well as morals. Not only did they share their concerns about overeating, they also expressed the need for early training
in regulating appetite.18 But even in their instructions regarding appropriate eating habits, they never used such intimidating expressions as“must not,” “should not,” or “ought not.” The harshest words that I havefound are Hale’s warning to mothers on how to regulate children’s appetites: “But never tempt their appetites by delicacies, when plain foodis not relished.”19 They knew that health and morals were an importantpart of diet, but they did not use such knowledge to deprive Americansof the pleasure of eating, nor did they do anything to destroy the culinary icon of “rustic abundance.”II.

THE BATTLE AGAINST “A MORBID APPETITE”

We know that during the period of industrialization, domesticity crystallized its ideological identity by taking on the spiritual aspect of humanlife as against the materialism of the market economy. We are, however,comparatively unfamiliar with the impact the spiritualization of thehome exerted on the dietary part of domestic activity. Among these staple items of domestic services—food, clothing, and shelter—food with

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its innate afﬁliation with the animal instinct for eating betrays the mostrecalcitrant materiality, which, indeed, threatens the spiritual purity of
the hearth in this harsh world. It was, therefore, necessary for domesticity’s ideological maturity to scrutinize and rewrite the paradigm ofAmerican foodways promoted under the name of “rustic abundance.”
The cult of domesticity is by no means an indiscriminate idealization ofdomestic work. On the way to its ideological maturity, domesticity persistently condemned the act of eating altogether and relegated the kitchen
to an obscure corner of the American home.
As the bible of the cult of domesticity, The American Woman’s Home
(1869) affords us a fresh insight into the anorectic psychology of American
domesticity. The American Woman’s Home includes three food-related
chapters: “Healthful Food” and “Healthful Drinks” by Catharine
Beecher, and “Good Cooking” by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Throughout
these chapters, we can sense a vehement antagonism, or a phobic aversion, toward “a morbid appetite.”20 Catharine Beecher writes:
If mankind had only one article of food, and only water to drink . . . theywould never be tempted to put any more into the stomach than the calls ofhunger require. But the customs of society, which present an incessantchange, and a great variety of food, with those various condiments which
stimulate appetite, lead almost every person very frequently to eat merely togratify the palate, after the stomach has been abundantly supplied, so that
hunger has ceased. (AWH 127)

Appetite functions artiﬁcially with such external stimulants as “a great
variety of food” and “various condiments,” whereas hunger works according to nature. It is appetite that tempts an individual to overeating,a habit of eating merely to gratify the palate. In order to give an explicit
idea of just how dangerous appetite can be, Catharine Beecher elaborates on a medical view of overeating as “one of the most fruitful of allcauses of disease and death” (AWH 119) by writing, “Very often, intemperance in eating produces immediate results, such as colic, headaches,
pains of indigestion, and vertigo. But the most general result is a gradual undermining of all parts of the human frame; thus imperceptibly
shortening life” (AWH 127). The earlier generations of promoters ofdomesticity such as Child and Hale considered overeating to be a personal problem about self-control, but such an understanding is madeobsolete by Beecher’s science-oriented view. With her, overeating has

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become a pathology of appetite, the symptom of a diseased craving forfood.
Beecher’s warning against appetite is, however, intended not just for
medical purposes. Rather, her demonization of appetite disguises her
desire to marginalize the kitchen from the legitimate sphere of domesticity. As we have already observed her criticizing cooking various foods
or using spices to stimulate appetite, Beecher sees women’s involvementwith food behind the problem of overeating. In the background of her
condemnation of appetite, there lurks her desire to devalue culinary activity. There is, in fact, a moment in which Beecher’s discourse on appetite actually slips into a condemnation, not of dietary habits, but of thehabit of cooking altogether: “How often is it the case, that persons, by
the appearance of a favorite article, are tempted to eat merely to gratify
the palate, when the stomach is already adequately supplied” (AWH 128).
In Beecher’s eyes, moreover, cooked food more than uncooked food carries strong potential to do much damage to the human body: “The mostunhealthful kinds of food are those which are made so by bad cooking;such as sour and heavy bread, cakes, pie-crust, and other dishes consisting of fat mixed and cooked with ﬂour. Rancid butter and high-seasoned
food are equally unwholesome. The fewer mixtures there are in cooking, the more healthful is the food likely to be” (AWH 133). In the courseof her argument, Beecher deliberately switches the problem of overeating to the matter of overfeeding. Now that cooking itself is found guilty
as a fundamental cause of overeating, women have to refrain from dealing with food as much as possible. While the culinary ideal of “rustic
abundance” encouraged women to exhibit their ingenuity in making fulluse of nature’s produce, Beecher changes the direction of women’s culinary mission one hundred eighty degrees in the direction of fending off
the great varieties of food invading the American table. She clearly states“that it becomes the duty of every woman who has the responsibility ofproviding food for a family, to avoid a variety of tempting dishes. It is amuch safer rule, to have only one kind of healthful food, for each meal,
than the too abundant variety which is often met at the tables of almost
all classes in this country” (AWH 127–28).
The American Woman’s Home demolishes the icon of “rustic abundance.” The paradigm of early American cookery is overwhelmed by theanorectic psychology of the cult of domesticity. Taking over her sister’sargument, Harriet Beecher Stowe in chapter 13, “Good Cooking,” ﬁnalizes the dismantlement of the myth of American plenitude by directing

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a vigorous attack on traditional American cookery: “The abundance of
splendid material we have in America is in great contrast with the styleof cooking most prevalent in our country. How often, in journeys, do we
sit down to tables loaded with material, originally of the very best kind,which has been so spoiled in the treatment that there is really nothing toeat!” (AWH 167). Stowe understood that the abundance of food was a
blessing peculiar to America, but the way it was treated in the American
kitchen seemed sinfully wrong to her eyes. Once they pass through the
kitchen, foodstuffs are inevitably spoiled. There is nothing proper about
the traditional way of cooking in her view, as she goes on to portray the
deplorable condition of the American table by the use of every possible
image of inedible food: “Green biscuits with acrid spots of alkali, sour
yeast-bread; meat slowly simmered in fat till it seemed like grease itself,and slowly congealing in cold grease; and above all, that unpardonable
enormity, strong butter!” (AWH 167).
Not only the manner of food preparation, but also the taste of American
cuisine come under Stowe’s attack in this chapter:
The recipes of our cookery-books are most of them of English origin, coming down from the times of our phlegmatic ancestors, when the solid, burly,
beefy growth of the foggy island required the heat of ﬁery condiments, andcould digest heavy sweets. . . . But in America, owing to our brighter skies
and more fervid climate, we have developed an acute, nervous delicacy oftemperament far more akin to that of France than of England. (AWH 190)

It was only a generation earlier that the “rustic abundance” was promoted
as the virtue of distinctly American cuisine as against artiﬁcially sophisticated European cookery, but here by Stowe’s standard of good cooking,the same ideal degenerates into a sign of American immaturity, the signof American dependence on England. Dismissing such recipes as “meremurder” (AWH 190) to Americans, Stowe urges women to look for alternative way of cooking which should allow every family of America tosit down all at once to such a carnival! to such ripe, juicy tomatoes, raw or
cooked; cucumbers in brittle slices, rich, yellow sweet-potatoes; broad limabeans, and beans of other and various names; tempting ears of Indian-corn
steaming in enormous piles; great smoking tureens of the savory succotash,
an Indian gift to the table for which civilization need not blush; sliced eggplant in delicate fritters; and marrow-squashes, of creamy pulp and sweetness; a rich variety, embarrassing to the appetite, and perplexing to the choice.
(AWH 168)THE REVOLT OF FEMALE APPETITE

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Besides the great variety of vegetables, simplicity of culinary style characterizes this table. Except for “succotash” and “fritters,” basic food material, rather than the idea of cookery, dominates the image of this table.
Also the presentation of each material such as “brittle slices,” “enormous
piles,” “great smoking tureens,” and “creamy pulp” foregrounds the
picture, rather than the taste or the ﬂavor of each dish. This table reveals
that, like her sister, Stowe was trying not only to simplify the process of
cooking, but also to take ﬂavor out of American cuisine. Naturally
enough, she does not mention anything about seasoning or ﬂavoring at
all to advance her view that “a table where the butter is always fresh, thetea and coffee of the best kinds and well made, and the meats properly
kept, dressed, and served, is the one table of a hundred, the fabulous
enchanted island” (AWH 170). The absence of recipes constitutes one of
the conspicuous characteristics of The American Woman’s Home, but
Stowe did not need them. How to make good yeast, what the proper
method of broiling or boiling meat is, and how to prepare palatable potatoes are all we need to know to make genuinely American food according to Stowe in this manual. Laura Shapiro identiﬁes Catherine Beecher
as the pioneering domestic scientist who transformed the American
kitchen into a laboratory for women to engineer “lifeless palates.”21 As
far as The American Woman’s Home is concerned, however, her sister
Harriet Beecher Stowe shows herself as a no less vigorous engineer ofthe senseless tongue.
III.

FREEMAN’S ANORECTIC ARTIST

The discovery of “a morbid appetite” in The American Woman’s
Home mobilized the whole signiﬁcance of women’s role in the kitchen.
While Lydia Maria Child and Sarah Josepha Hale taught women thatcooking meant the art of making full use of food, the two Beecher sisters unanimously preached that cooking, not food per se, was the catalyst of most diet-related diseases. Cooking was no longer regarded as an
innocent sort of domestic activity. The cult of domesticity turns out tobe an ideology that inspires women with the idea that the less time andeffort women spend in the kitchen, the better American health will be.
If we compare the strength of emphasis on food-related subjects between
The American Woman’s Home and those earlier domestic manuals byChild and Hale, we are sure to be surprised to ﬁnd how little attention
the bible of the cult of domesticity pays to dietary topics. For culinary
instructions including recipes, Child allots 40 pages out of 122 in total

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and Hale 122 pages out of 144. But Beecher and Stowe spend only 55
pages on it in their 500-page book. The word order of the saying, “food,clothing, and shelter,” is literally inverted in their evaluation of domestic activity, that is to say, shelter is given the ﬁrst priority, clothing thesecond, and food the last. In the cult of domesticity, in the architectureof the American home, there is not enough space for eating and cooking.
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is always good at unveiling some unsoundaspect of housekeeping. In just the same way as she skillfully rewrites
New England women’s industry in household jobs as “a case of morbid
conscientiousness,”22 she reveals the anorectic tendency of domestic
ideology, and for this particular purpose she uses a dietary motif. For
example, “An Innocent Gamester,” a story in which Lucinda Moss’s
preference for rich food wins over her niece Charlotte’s ascetic regimenof bread, butter, and milk, gives expression to Freeman’s criticism of thesort of health-oriented diet The American Woman’s Home promoted andher desire to replace it with gastronomic abundance. In the course of thestory, Freeman has Charlotte’s “hygienic food” appear “rather poor” (NE261) and also elicits a confession from her of regret for what she has been
doing to her aunt: “I haven’t let her have tea when she wanted it, norcake, nor cold pork and potatoes for supper, nor anything between
meals. . . . I’ve been setting myself up, because I thought I knew more;and I knew the things weren’t good for her perhaps, but they were all her
little comforts, all she had, and nobody ought to have taken them away,
but God” (NE 262–63). Through Charlotte, Freeman makes her pointthat appetite is of a God-given nature, not a social construct as Beecher
has it, and a vehicle of comfort rather than a seedbed of hideous diseases
and sufferings. There is nothing wrong or shameful about indulging in
the appetite for good food. Freeman has Charlotte continue her confession, “Oh, I’ve been doing a dreadful thing! I’ve been stealing from her.
And I’ve done more than that. Oh, I have! I have! I’ve been stealing her.
I’ve been taking the self out of her” (NE 263). To suppress a person’s
desire for chosen foods is criminal, as such expressions as “stealing her”
or “taking the self out of her” suggest. Condemning Charlotte’s way of“tyrannizing over goodness” (NE 256), “An Innocent Gamester” thus
reﬂects Freeman’s view that appetite has to go back to its rightful placeas part of one’s self.
Attention to Freeman’s dietary motif leads us also to a new reading of“A Poetess” as an allegorical story about the tragedy of domestic women’sTHE REVOLT OF FEMALE APPETITE

41

anorexia, rather than a tragedy about a female artist. Betsey Dole is anamateur poet. As Freeman writes, “She ate scarcely more than her
canary-bird, and sang as assiduously” (NE 106), Betsey’s devotion to
her poetry makes her anorectic. She depends on her own small garden
for her scanty but whole supply of food, but she knows no better than toplant ﬂowering beans much more than edible kinds. Once she starts
working on poems, she apparently starts neglecting to eat. After she getsto work on obituary poems for Mrs. Caxton’s son, in fact, she gives up
cooking a pan of beans fresh from her little garden and forgets eating at
noon, when she originally planned to have “dinner-supper” (NE 103).
Betsey is brought to make the choice between art and food many times
in this short story. But only once out of these many chances, does she letfood take precedence over work: “She had been obliged to stop work andcook the beans for dinner, although she begrudged the time” (NE 104).
Blum takes this way of Betsey’s putting poetry before eating as aground to identify Betsey with the ﬁgure of the female writer who aspires
to the aesthetic goal of realism, the “art for art’s sake,”23 but the combination of her dietary asceticism and her identiﬁcation as an artist, somehow, recalls another literary ﬁgure of a domestic woman. Betsey Dole,
that is to say, looks unexpectedly like Eva Henderson in Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s Harry Henderson series, My Wife and I (1871) and We and Our
Neighbors (1875). Eva Henderson, like Rachel Halliday in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, is a favorite domestic character of Stowe’s.24 Not only does shecall Eva by such artist-related names as “a little poet,”25 “the Artist of
the Beautiful” (with its direct allusion to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shortstory),26 “the home artist,”27 and “domestic artists,”28 Stowe also infuses
her with a poetic mind as she has her heroine declare, “To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of sight the hard, dry, prosaic side, and keep
up the poetry—that is my idea of our ‘mission.’ ”29 On another occasion,
Stowe emphasizes a poetic side of Eva’s domesticity:
There are artists who work in clay and marble, there are artists in water-colors, and artists in oils, whose works are on exhibition through galleries andmuseums: but there are also, in thousands of obscure homes, domestic artists,
who contrive out of the humblest material to produce in daily life the senseof the beautiful; to cast a veil over its prosaic details and give it somethingof the charm of poem. Eva was one of these.30

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MAKIKO WAKABAYASHIIn her characterization of the New England amateur poetess, Freeman
seems to have recycled many of Eva’s character properties. Just as Eva
Henderson is an unpublished artist of domesticity who works at homeon an obscure street in Manhattan, Betsey Dole is an unpublished amateur poet working at home in a nameless (therefore, obscure) rural New
England town. Like Eva who tries to mask the “prosaic” side of domestic activities, Betsey also plays down the prosaic aspect of her home byher psychological orientation toward the beautiful and the ornamental.
Eva’s poetic housekeeping consists almost solely of home decoration,
as Stow especially celebrates women’s decorative skill:
Is not this a species of high art, by which a house in itself cold and barren,
becomes in every part warm and inviting, glowing with suggestion alive withhuman tastes and personalities? Wall-paper, paint, furniture, pictures, in thehands of the home artist, are like the tubes of paint out of which arises, as byinspiration, a picture. It is the woman who combines them into the wonderful creation which we call home.31

Such an enthusiasm for interior decoration is also revealed in Betsey’sroom:
The light in the room was dim and green like the light in an arbor, from thetall hedge before the windows. Great plumy bunches of asparagus waved
over the tops of the looking-glass; a framed sampler, a steel engraving of afemale head taken from some old magazine, and sheaves of dried grasses
hung on or were fastened to the walls; vases and tumblers of ﬂowers stoodon the shelf and table. (NE 103)

There is, indeed, something about Betsey’s house, especially its association with “an arbor,” that reminds us of the use of greenery in homedecoration recommended in The American Woman’s Home.
Betsey Dole’s anorexia is a pathological expression of dietary inhibition that Stowe’s “domestic artist” develops without knowing it. The
Harry Henderson series focuses on Eva’s home making as interior decoration so much that there is only one scene of eating throughout theentire series.32 Betsey’s death portrayed without consolation or pathos
is, therefore, Freeman’s rebellion against the subjectivity in which thenineteenth-century domestic ideology held American women captive. In
the literal sense of the story, Betsey dies a tragic death because the minister Mr. Lang’s insult to her poetic talent traumatizes her so deeply thatTHE REVOLT OF FEMALE APPETITE

43

the shock aggravates her consumptive constitution. A closer reading of
the ending of the story, however, conﬁrms Blum’s speculation that “shedies of what appears to be self-starvation,”33 since immediately after she
was informed of the minister’s harsh criticism, Betsey not only actuallyskips supper by saying, “I guess I don’t want any supper to-night” (NE109) but also becomes insensible to all physical sensations except for her
desire to see the very minister who insulted her: “Betsey had talked very
little all her life; she talked less now. . . . Betsey never complained; but
she kept asking if the minister had got home” (NE 109). If the shock, as
the story informs us, aggravates her “old-fashioned consumption” (NE109), the meaning of this “consumption” should be twofold, one is tuberculosis from which Betsey has suffered for a long time, and the other is
her habitual anorectic way of not eating. A story that problematizes thestatus of the female writer in late nineteenth-century American culture,“A Poetess,” reveals itself to be a tragedy of domestic women subjected
to domesticity’s kitchen politics. Freeman’s amateur poetess dies a martyr to the regimen of domestic ideology.
IV.

THE REVOLT OF APPETITEIn the world of Freeman’s dietary discourse, those who conform to an
abstemious diet like Betsey Dole are destined to live out unfortunate
lives. But it is true that she reserves a very different kind of life for those
who can get along well with appetite. In “An Honest Soul,” for example, Martha Patch obtains the long-wished-for front window for herhouse after she overcomes her dietary inhibitions and gives herself up to
her appetite for the ﬁrst time in her life of seventy years: “Pretty soon
Martha was drinking her cup of tea and eating her toast and a dropped
egg. She had taken the food with some reluctance, half starved as she
was. Finally she gave in—the sight of it was too much for her” (SS 24).
Similarly, Rebecca Reddy in “The Horn of Plenty” realizes a happy married life after she awakens to her long-repressed attraction to Thomas
Dean through the spectacle of the food he brings on Thanksgiving Day.
“Chickens and turkeys, and roasts of pork and hams were lying all
around,” Freeman writes in a long catalogue of food:
And there were bunches of celery everywhere and stacks of pies and cakes
and puddings, and nice little glass dishes of jelly, and bowls full of nuts andraisins, and vegetables. There were bushels of onions and turnips and pota-

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toes and beets. There were hubbard squashes and pumpkins. There were baskets of apples and oranges and eggs, and paper bags full of goodness knew
what.34

These stories illuminate Freeman’s creative deployment of food as a catalyst of women’s self-realization. We cannot help feeling that, even after
their wishes are fulﬁlled, Martha Patch and Rebecca Reddy are tamed
within the conﬁnes of conventional domesticity with the prospect forhappier housekeeping for Martha and marriage for Rebecca. But there
are female characters who develop gastrocentric psychology and go
beyond conventional domesticity successfully. To elaborate on thispoint, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ” is worth extensive attention.
“The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ” is about Sarah Penn’s rebellion against her
husband Adoniram’s long negligence in keeping his promise to build
them a new house, a promise that was actually made at their marriage
forty years earlier. Sarah obtains a new house during her husband’s
absence by literally usurping the barn he has just started building. On
returning from his business trip, Adoniram Penn ﬁrst is puzzled as towhat Sarah is really intending by such a strange move. Finally, however,
Adoniram realizes how he has been unjust to Sarah and complies withher request to make the barn habitable for the family. While this story
celebrates Sarah Penn’s courage in challenging patriarchal authority,
Freeman invites us to see that Sarah Penn’s victory is actually earned
through her culinary skill, that is, her control over her husband’s appetite.
Sarah is in the habit of baking mince pies twice a week because herhusband loves them so much, but after she usurps the barn, she astutely
prepares for her husband’s return by ﬁxing a supper of his favorite dishes:“Sarah Penn had supper all ready. There were brown-bread and bakedbeans and a custard pie; it was the supper that Adoniram loved on a
Saturday night” (NE 322). Because these dishes are her husband’sfavorites, Sarah is able to secure her desired end. Adoniram had been ahusband who turned a deaf ear to whatever his wife said, just as he wascompletely impervious to Sarah’s verbal accusations concerning thebarn issue, dismissing her harsh words by reiterating the phrase “I ain’t
got nothin’ to say about it.” But Sarah’s choice supper brings about his
conversion admirably: “All through the meal he stopped eating at intervals, and stared furtively at his wife; but he ate well. The home foodtasted good to him, and his old frame was too sturdily healthy to beaffected by his mind” (NE 324). His ﬁnal acquiescence to Sarah’s
demand for a new house comes right after this meal scene. It is as if

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45

Adoniram’s egoism to put his own desire for a new barn before Sarah’s
longing for a new house and his misgivings about Sarah’s extreme conduct were both digested along with the food. If Adoniram is likened to“a fortress whose walls had no active resistance, and went down the
instant the right besieging tools were used” (NE 324), the story tells usthat Sarah’s supper is the best among “the right besieging tools.”“The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ” is, in this sense, a story that exempliﬁes thepower of diet. Though Freeman playfully describes Sarah’s handling offood as in “She handles the peas as if they were bullet” (NE 321), Sarah’s
revolt literalizes such description. For Freeman, then, it is this ability toturn seemingly innocent food into a powerful weapon that leads women
to a territory of new experience. Freeman describes the minister Mr.
Hersey’s perplexity over Sarah’s usurpation of the barn: “He could
expound the intricacies of every character study in the Scriptures, he wascompetent to grasp the Pilgrim Fathers and all historical innovators, but
Sarah Penn was beyond him” (NE 322). This reaction by the ministershows that Sarah’s culinary manner of triumphing over her husband
brings her to see a new horizon of personal possibility, not just as awoman, but as a human being. Her familiarity with food has enabled her
to unfold herself in a radically unparalleled individuality. Or, to put it
another way, by virtue of her culinary skill, Sarah Penn becomes entitled to be “the Mother” who has the unheard-of authority to turn a common noun into a proper noun.
CONCLUSION: TOWARD A DIETARY UNDERSTANDING OF WOMEN’S
LITERARY REALISM
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman overcame the domestic tradition of sentimental literature and moved forward to devise a method to give realistic expression to women’s lives by exploring women’s relationship withfood. As is demonstrated in the character of Sarah Penn, Freeman’s
memorable heroines regenerate themselves into new identities throughtheir positive attitudes toward food. Louisa Ellis in “A New EnglandNun” obtains her new identity as “an uncloistered nun” (NE 17), which
images a solitary but liberated state of being, on condition that she is nota woman who regrets exchanging her birthright for a cup of pottage like
Esau: “If Louisa Ellis had sold her birthright she did not know it, thetaste of the pottage was so delicious, and had been her sole satisfaction
for so long” (NE 17). Through her relationship with food, in other words,
Louisa has learned that it is far more important for her to retain her own

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tastes in life than to have the right to marry Joe Dagget.35 In the story“Louisa,” Louisa Britton is permitted by Freeman to continue to dream“her sweet, mysteries, girlish dreams” (NE 281), instead of engaging inmarriage, because she is able to have an unconventional approach to food
like “a European peasant woman, sacriﬁcing her New England dignity”(NE 273).
We may understand Freeman’s dietary discourse in association, forinstance, with Louisa May Alcott’s effort in her anonymously publishedthrillers to deconstruct domestic ideology by unveiling the ﬁctitiousnessof true womanhood. It is, however, more suggestive to know that Freeman’s investment in dietary motif was by no means an isolated gesturefor women’s realism in late nineteenth-century America.
Kate Chopin in The Awakening (1899) also employs a dietary metaphor to describe Edna Pontellier’s individuation. During her one-day trip
to the island Chênière Caminada with Robert Lebrun, which stages
Edna’s ﬁrst awakening into her desire for him, Chopin makes Edna feel
hungry: “She was very hungry. . . . Edna bit a piece from the brown loaf,
tearing it with her strong, white teeth. She poured some of the wine into
the glass and drank it down.”36 She also sets Edna’s ﬁrst rebellion against
her husband, Léonce Pontellier, at a dinner table (AW 51-52). Even on
the ﬁnal occasion, she has Edna stop by the Lebrun cottage and ask thedinner time before conducting Edna to her suicidal swim: “ ‘What time
will you have dinner?’ asked Edna, ‘I’m very hungry; but don’t get anything extra’ ” (AW 112). Like Freeman, Chopin not only characterizes
her heroine as a hungry woman but also puts crucial moments of her
heroine’s subjective growth in dietary settings. In the case of Chopin,
particularly, such use of dietary motif could be considered a conventionof naturalism. Suggestively enough, however, Freeman and Chopinshared a cultural context in which “the fact that eating is something morethan animal indulgence, and that cooking has a nobler purpose than thegratiﬁcation of appetite and the sense of taste” gained national currency.37 In such a cultural atmosphere, it is not utterly improbable that
their everyday life that was permeated by bland food drove them toplunge their characters into a ﬁctional world of delicious experiences andﬁnd vicarious satisfaction for their own palates that has been abused inreal life. What these hungry women of late nineteenth-century America
suggest is, in short, a possibility that women’s realism in literature was,in a certain sense, the revolt of female appetite against the sentimental
tradition of domesticity.

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NOTES
1
Virginia L. Blum, “Mary Wilkins Freeman and the Taste of Necessity,” American
Literature 65, no. 1 (March 1993): 88.
2
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, A New England Nun and Other Stories (La Vergne, TN:
Aegypan Press, 2006), 8. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be cited intext in parenthesis as NE with a page number.
3
Brent L. Kendrick, ed., The Infant Sphinx: Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins
Freeman (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1985), 324, quoted in Leah Blatt Glasser, “Lagacy
Proﬁle: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930),” Legacy 4, no. 1 (Spring 1987):38.
4
On Freeman’s enthusiasm for the chaﬁng dish, see Blum, “Taste of Necessity,” 85;
Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 221.
5
Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women’s Bodies (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987), 20. For an extensive analysis of anorexia, see
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia as a Modern Disease(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Yoshiko Uzawa ﬁnds another nineteenthcentury context in which fasting was actually recommended as a “healthy,” “masculine,” and “intellectual” practice. See her “Tabenai gihou: Shinshi to chishikijin to
Samuson no tameno shokujihou” [Diet as fasting: Proper diet for gentlemen, intellectuals, and Samson] in Shokuji no gihou [Ways of diet], ed. Suzuki Akihito and Ishizuka
Hisao (Tokyo: Keio Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2005), 67–86.
6Blum, “Taste of Necessity,” 69–94.
7Mark McWilliams, “Distant Tables: Food and the Novel in Early America,” Early
American Literature 38, no. 3 (2003): 365.
8
Ibid., 378.
9
Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (New York: Dover, 1999), 6.
10
Sarah Josepha Hale, Early American Cookery:“The Good Housekeeper,” 1841
(New York: Dover, 1996), 11.
11
Ibid., 15.
12
Ibid., 21.
13
Ibid., 21.
14
Ibid., 33.
15
Ibid., 40.
16
Ibid., 43.
17
See ibid., 62–63.
18
See, for example, ibid., 14–15 and 144; Lydia Maria Child, The Family Nurse: Or
Companion of the American Frugal Housewife (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books,
1997), 5 and 42. Especially for Child, moral harm comes more from reading than fromeating. She, in fact, uses the imagery of overeating to talk not about dietary habits but
about reading: “They [the best of novels] are a sort of literary confectionary; and, though
they may be very perfect and beautiful, if eaten too plentifully, they do tend to destroy
our appetite for more solid and nourishing food.” See Child, The Mother’s Book
(Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1992), 87.
19Hale, Early American Cookery, 14.
20
Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home
(Hartford, CT: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1994), 128. All subsequent quotations from thisedition will be cited in text in parenthesis as AWH with a page number.
21
Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 6.

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22
Marjorie Pryse, ed., Selected Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (New York:
Norton, 1983), 21. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be cited in text inparenthesis as SS with a page number.
23Blum, “Taste of Necessity,” 72.
24
Identifying Rachel Halliday’s Quaker kitchen as the sanctuary of the cult ofdomesticity, Gillian Brown promotes viewing Rachel Halliday as Stowe’s ideal domestic woman. See the chapter 1, “Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” of Gillian
Brown’s Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America(Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 13–38.
25
Harriet Beecher Stowe, My Wife and I (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 448.
26
Ibid., 448.
27
Ibid., 479.
28
Harriet Beecher Stowe, We and Our Neighbors (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 45.
29
Stowe, My Wife and I, 448.
30
Stowe, We and Our Neighbors, 45.
31
Stowe, My Wife and I, 479.
32
This one exceptional scene of eating happens on the day Harry and Eva move in.
Meaningfully, moreover, Stowe puts this sole dietary moment in one sentence: “Whenwe all gathered about Mary’s cooking-stove, in the kitchen, eating roast oysters andbread and butter, without troubling ourselves about table equipage, we seemed to comecloser to each other than we could in months of orderly housekeeping.” See Stowe, My
Wife and I, 474.
33
Blum, “Taste of Necessity,” 81.
34
Mary R. Reichardt, ed., The Uncollected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 142.
35
For a more extensive argument on Freeman’s allusion to Genesis, see Michael Tritt,“Selling a Birthright for Pottage: Mary Freeman’s Allusion to Genesis in ‘A New
England Nun,’ ” ANQ 19, no.4 (Fall 2006): 34–41.
36
Kate Chopin, The Awakening (New York: Norton, 1976), 38. All subsequent quotations from this edition will be cited in text in parenthesis as AW with a page number.
37
Shapiro, Perfection Salad, 67.