Oh! It’s Delicious: The Symbolic Functions of Food, Eating and Hunger

The meaning of the word table can be used traced to Latin tabula intended for a reception of inscription or account. The word tableau in Old French too has similar narrative connotations: it means “a striking scene, a picturesque representation, produced unexpectedly and dramatically”1. There is thus an implicit connection between tale and table, food and narration. The aim of this paper is to make explicit precisely this connection between eating and storytelling. I discuss two very different texts- Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Bankim Chandra Chaterjee’s Indira: both from the nineteenth century, both written in the realist mode, both about the fortunes of its eponymous heroine. I use food as a locus to discuss various aspects of culture, class, caste and gender that get displayed in the process. Being a literature student, I wish to offer a nuanced portrayal of how the Victorian conceptualization of female appetites, her health and well-being and anorexic body were infused with contemporary notions of sexuality and gender; also, in what ways women's relationship to food was gendered