'Dinner is served'. Food, etiquette, and gender in American fiction by women

My project focuses on the fictional meals of American women writers. I argue that, because of the gendering of food, alcohol, and table manners in culture, their dining scenes reflect the evolution, from the mid-nineteenth through the late twentieth centuries, not only of American social ritual, but of conventional definitions of womanhood. Early chapters examine the relationship between the nationalization of Thanksgiving immediately after the Civil War and portrayals of holiday feasts as signs of the nurturing power of the domestic in the novels of Sarah Josepha Hale, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott; between the decline of the tea in the 1880's and depictions of that decline as the loss of feminine community in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman; and between the rise of the 1890's formal dinner and critiques of the marriage market in the novels of Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin. Chapter Four describes the popularization of the cocktail party as an American institution in the 1920's and argues that its fictional representations in Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, "Big Blonde" by Dorothy Parker and Nightwood by Djuna Barnes are tropes for feminine entrapment. The final chapter deals with the role that etiquette books and their association of manners with feminine refinement played in the assimilation of African Americans and immigrants from 1920 to 1980, and critiques of that process by Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Anzia Yesierska, and Bharati Mukherjee. In my conclusion, I observe what seems to be a preoccupation with food, etiquette, and gender in the fiction of the writers I have surveyed and argue that this preoccupation represents an acute and conscious awareness of the power of social ritual over the formation of feminine identity. Finally, I suggest that, if like Elaine Showalter, we seek to define "a literature of their own," this preoccupation with food and dining etiquette constitutes a narrative strategy that unites these women in a feminine literary tradition.