Most of my posts before have been about celebrating a child’s
birthday with scrumptious food; however the Victorians had a different way of
looking at food in association with childhood and I'm afraid it's not as light hearted and fun as in some of contemporary books I have looked at! Prepare yourself to see childhood in a not so innocent way...
Victorian children's literature was very overtly didactic compared to what we see these days and they saw childhood in a completely different light - some Mum's would be horrified to discover the meanings behind the innocent looking tales the Victorians presented to their children! Children's literature was seen as a means of social regulation and so if children’s reading was kept under strict control it would ensure their impressionable young minds would not be corrupted. This was especially relevant for girls who were thought of in the ‘traditional’ view of women who were passive and occupied the domestic sphere of the home. Carolyn Daniel states that the ideal Victorian woman was “a creature
of disinterested love and nurture and the moral center of both home and
society. To conform to this ideal, women and girls had to downplay every aspect
of their physicality, including desire and appetite” (Daniel, 39). Thus, the
significance of food and girls’ appetites used in children’s literature at the
time had the implication of girls’ eating representing a sign of sexual desire. (In my mind I can see this fitting into our modern world where you get the chocolate bar adverts with the woman seductively eating a chocolate bar... making chocolate sexy and desirable!) Anyway, in the Victorian era openly didactic literature was used as a way to
enforce social gender roles on girls and control the female appetite and desires.
The Victorians also linked food to a child’s morality for
both boys and girls. They feared that food and fiction “considered to be bad
for them in terms of being too rich for the physical body, or in poor taste in
terms of being too fantastic for the rational mind,” (Daniel, 42) would cause excitement
leading to “immorality and irrationality” (Daniel, 42). Thus, their food and fiction
was closely monitored. (You could say we still monitor children's food today but for much less sinister purposes such as health reasons!)
An example of a text that shows the Victorian attitudes to childhood
and food is Speaking Likenesses by Christina Rossetti which consists of three interwoven tales.
The first is "Flora’s Story" about her birthday party. At the beginning she is depicted
as the perfect, angelic child as she sleeps on the morning of her birthday: “her
cheeks were plump and, her light hair was all tumbled, her little red lips were
held together as if to kiss someone.” However, this all changes when the party comes around. The
party is a disaster after the children quarrel over a “sugar-plum box,” turn
their noses up at the party food, have a boisterous game of blindman’s buff,
make each other cry and end up grumbling at each other. Flora also acts ‘superior’ as the birthday girl
showing off her new doll and ends up “cross and miserable”.
Eventually Flora wanders off and enters a dream sequence
where a birthday feast is taking place. However, she is not allowed to eat any of
the food as the “birthday Queen” refuses to let her as she states “it’s my birthday, and
everything is mine.” Despite this, all the other guests eat “greedily”. Flora
notices that the children have odd appearances, one boy has “prickly quills
like a porcupine,” another is covered in “hooks like fishhooks” and one girl “exuded
a sticky fluid” whilst another was “slimy”. These monstrous appearances
could be seen as allegories for the bad behaviour of the children at Flora’s
party. The monstrosity of the children is furthered by their consumption
of the food where they stuff “with no limit”:
“Cold turkey,
lobster salad, stewed mushrooms, raspberry tart, cream cheese, a bumper of
champagne, a meringue, a strawberry ice, sugared pine apples, some greengages”
The food is
described as appetising and appealing yet Flora does “not take so much as a
fork,” showing how she epitomises the good child of the Victorian era who shows
control and good manners. In contrast to her, the birthday Queen is shown as the
girl with an uncontrolled appetite as she,
“consumed with her own mouth and of
sweet alone one quart of strawberry ice, three pine apples, two melons, a score
of meringues, and about four dozen sticks of angelica.”
This excess of
eating shown through the listing, counting and size of the portions suggests she has a voracious appetite and emphasises the size of her mouth which
has sexual connotations linking to Victorian concerns of female appetite
being associated with sexual desire. Flora does not participate in the feasting
showing that although desire to eat all the appetising food is created, she does
not succumb to this as it is seen as immoral behaviour. So by the end of the
story Flora has learnt a lesson that gluttony is a sin and that the female appetite must be controlled as suggested by the narrator:
“And I think if
she lives to be nine years old and give another birthday party, she is likely
on that occasion to be even less like the birthday Queen of her troubled dream
than was the Flora of eight years old: who, with dear friends and playmates and
pretty presents, yet scarcely knew how to bear a few trifling disappointments,
or how to be obliging and good-humoured under slight annoyances.”
Overall, "Flora’s Story" shows how a birthday party was used in children's literature of the Victorian era to present attitudes
of the time and enforce these on children through the narrative as children were seen as creatures vulnerable to corruption. So count yourself lucky that you didn't grow up in the Victorian age and can eat as much as you like on your birthday without it making you corrupt!
Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature. London: Routledge, 2006.
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