ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how food functions to negotiate and reimagine domestic duty and female desire in novels by three British women writers publishing in, and about, the 1960s: Margaret Drabble, Penelope Mortimer, and Doris Lessing. Scholarship on representations of food in post-war women’s literature has focused primarily on key experimental writers, such as Angela Carter (Parker 2000; Sceats 2004; Adolph 2009), or writers who very explicitly discuss food, consumption, and eating disorders in their works, such as Sylvia Plath (Dowbnia 2014; Smith 2010) and Margaret Atwood (Bender 1986; Sceats 2004). This chapter takes a different focus: women’s novels that explore day-to-day female experience in the domestic sphere using the Realist mode. Lessing’s post-war work, which often couples a Realist narrative with sections of more experimental formal and generic approaches, has received some critical attention in relation to food in Sarah Sceats’ Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (2004), but generally British women’s Realist writing during the post-war period has not been addressed through a food studies lens. This might be because the novels are not about food; they are principally novels about the home, marriage, sex, adultery, reproduction, mothering, illness, and neurosis. Mostly, they are exemplary novels but novels about women and set in the domestic sphere are inevitably novels that feature food – women buying food, women cooking food, or women serving food. Representations of such food-related acts are of particular interest in relation to this moment in British history because of the ways they relate to both expectant shifts in the gendering of the roles of ‘breadwinner’ and ‘breadmaker’ and the rise of consumer culture and food consumption as a signifier of both economic and cultural capital. Drabble’s The Garrick Year (1964) and The Waterfall (1969), Mortimer’s The Pumpkin Eater (1962), and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969) all examine contemporary female experience in the domestic space and use the Realist form; as such they offer an insight into changing attitudes towards, and practices around, food preparation and consumption in connection with the often contradictory experiences and expectations of women during this period.
