Food as the Representation of Idyllic Landscape of Victorian World in the Novels by Thomas Hardy

• Authors: Agata Buda
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The aim of the paper is to analyse the idea of cooking/eating in two novels by Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure and Tess d’Urbervilles. Both works present the idea of food as one of the major points of reference in human relationships. One of the aspects worth analysing is eating as one of the most crucial primary needs. Another one is family eating. The meetings are preceded by careful preparation of meals (e.g. Sunday preparations in Arabella’s house or cooking in the house of the Crick family). The food often becomes the major topic during these meetings, showing in this way the idyllic character of family eating: the looks of dining rooms and kitchens are essential as well as the possibility of talking to each other while eating. This idyllic space of collective eating (according to M. Bakhtin) can be frequently destroyed by social conventions; when Tess was rejected by society, she used to eat alone and did not take care of what she eats. Both novels explore the idea of food making it important for the creation of an idyll.

Keywords

EN

Victorian England; idyll; space; family eating

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: CLEaR
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 3
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 47-51

Dates

published

2016-03-01

online

2016-05-18

Contributors

author

Agata Buda

• University of Technology and Humanities in Radom, Poland

References

• Bachtin, Mikhail. Problemy literatury i estetyki. Translated by Wincenty Grajewski. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1982. Print.
• Buda, Agata. “Food as the Representation of Social Conventions in Victorian Female Novel.” Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 2 (3). 2014: 225-232. Print.
• Draznin, Yaffa. Victorian London’s Middle-Class Housewife. What She Did All Day. London: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001. Print.
• Gottwald Franz. T., and Lothar Kolmer. Jedzenie, rytuały i magia. Translated by Elżbieta Ptaszyńska- Sadowska. Warszawa: Warszawskie Wydawnictwo Literackie MUZA SA, 2009. Print.
• Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. New York: Signet Classics, 2009. Print.
• Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2000. Print.
• Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987. Print.
• Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England. London: Greenwood Press, 2009. Print.
• Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. USA: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Print.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/clear-2016-0005