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: The Novel
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”
Food and memory
As I’ve already discussed in previous posts, food and memory are inextricably bound up together.
In Lark Rise to Candleford (1945), her autobiographical account of her Oxfordshire childhood, Flora Thompson’s food memories evoke the old custom and habits of a world that has long since disappeared and the delight of being a child at this time. Continue reading “Food and memory”
Food and alienation
I said, ‘Excuse me. I will ask you something if I may. Can you perchance tell me…’ I raised my head to look upon her in the eye and asked, ‘How do you make a chip?’ (Andrea Levy, Small Island) Continue reading “Food and alienation”