In Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c.1623-24), which I wrote about here, women are presented as their own worst enemies. At the centre of the play is the character Livia, who engineers the downfall of two young women, Bianca and Isabella, persuading them to embark on dangerous sexual relationships (Bianca’s adulterous and precipitated by a rape, Isabella’s incestuous) which bring about their downfalls and ultimate demise. In her dying breath Bianca, realising what Livia has done, laments ‘the deadly snares / That women set for women’. Continue reading “Dangerous women”
Category: 21st century fiction
Food and change
Literature is often – always? – about change: changing ideas, feelings, relationships, situations. And often such changes are brought about through a change in location. Commonly characters in novels move from one place to another in the course of the story: for example, Caithleen and Baba in Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls or Eilis in Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn. In both these examples, the characters’ physical journey from provincial Ireland to big cities (Dublin in The Country Girls, New York in Brooklyn) mirrors a personal journey from naivety to experience. Continue reading “Food and change”
Food and memory loss
On more than one occasion I’ve blogged about the role of memory in accounts of food and eating in literature. From the narrator’s memories of delicious childhood teas at his best friend’s house in Michael Frayn’s Spies, to Flora Thompson’s memories of the food practices of her native Oxfordshire in the early 20th century in her autobiography Lark Rise to Candleford, food plays a significant role in writers’ and characters’ memories of the past. Continue reading “Food and memory loss”
Food: the immigrant’s experience
A few weeks ago I blogged about Andrea Levy’s Windrush novel Small Island and the use she makes of food to signal the discomfort and alienation the Jamaican immigrant Hortense feels in post-war London as she struggles to make a typical English dish – egg and chips.
Food plays a similarly important role in the immigration experience of the protagonist of Colm Toibin’s novel Brooklyn. Winner of the 2009 Costa novel award, Brooklyn tells of the young Eilis Lacey who leaves her small provincial town in 1950s Ireland, where work is scarce, to travel to Brooklyn in New York to make a new life. Continue reading “Food: the immigrant’s experience”