Eat and be eaten: The aesthetic pleasures of M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David

This study examines the aesthetics of pleasure of the American memoirist M. F. K. Fisher (1908–1992) and the British cookbook author Elizabeth David (1913–1992) to show how each woman's celebratory rapport with food transforms the American and British food writing traditions. While nineteenth- and twentieth-century women food writers in the United States and England helped to define the changing role women were expected to perform within the domestic space, Fisher and David worked to dissolve the parameters that kept their predecessors bound to the home kitchen. They did so by voicing an erotic pleasure in food that was nourished, in large part, by their travels. By celebrating their undomesticated pleasures and fashioning them into an aesthetic form, Fisher and David expanded the British and American food writing tradition to include a space for female desire.; While Fisher and David lived extensively in countries that cultivated the pleasures of the table and the social bonds these pleasures create, they grew up in cultures that constrained female appetite. Thus, this project begins by examining this repression along with its impact on each author's trajectory as a writer. Next, it explores the idiosyncratic relationship that each author develops with food to show how this relationship both engenders the content and shapes the style of her writing. Fisher and David remark repeatedly in their work on how disparate the attitudes toward food are between those cultures they eagerly imbibed and those in which they were born. Thus, this project also examines how these authors absorb Mediterranean culinary habits and attitudes into their lives and, in turn, into their writing.; Through their celebration of female pleasure, each author educated her compatriots about the power of food as a means of self-expression, helping to release the enjoyment of food so long stifled at their national tables. While countless contemporary authors extend the celebration of female appetite begun by Fisher and David, this project closes with an examination of three in particular, Isabel Allende, Nigella Lawson, and Ruth Reichl. Toward this end, it explores how each woman nourishes her creativity through eating pleasures, thus expanding her predecessors' legacy in a unique direction.