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| Scarlett's refusal to be a lady at all times means she gets to eat all kinds of yummy things while her peers go hungry. |
There’s an awful lot of talk about food in Gone with the Wind. The food in the
novel is resolutely Southern – ham, biscuits and gravy, barbecue – a part of
the characters’ cultural identity. Slaves, of course, have different food from
white people, eating their chitterlings and yams. Men drink bourbon, and
holding one’s liquor is a mark of a Southern gent, but alcohol is completely
off-limits to women (except for Aunt Pitty’s ‘swoon bottle’ of brandy, from
which she takes nips whenever she feels faint – I have one of them myself, of
course. Funny how often I feel faint on a Friday night.) Constant references to
food also contrast the land of plenty that these (white, well-off) people lived
in and their near-starvation during and after the war: food is in abundance
everywhere at the beginning of the book, more than anyone could possibly want
or eat. Yams are ‘dripping with butter’. During the war, Yankee soldiers, who
have passed through Tara and taken all the food and everything of value, do not
know what yams are and leave them in the ground, so the family do not starve: a
case of Southern culinary know-how stealing a march on the dirty Yankees.
The heroine, Scarlett,
who is gutsy and ambitious and has a healthy appetite, is constantly swinging
in the novel between her desire to be a lady, what she has been brought up to
be, and her desires to eat and be able to feed her family; to express her
opinions; to work; and to make her own decisions. Ladies aren’t supposed to
eat. Scarlett O’Hara, as a young girl, is stuffed with a tray of food before going
out to a party so she can ‘eat like a bird’ in order to catch a husband;
ladies, in this Southern culture, are not supposed to eat, drink, be able to
cope with coarse language, or pretty much anything else.
The
point of being a lady seems to be surrounded by every single thing one could
possibly want, all the time, and to reject it (an interesting parallel with
today’s morality of appetite, where the people we are supposed to look up to
are extremely thin despite living in a society where food is cheap and readily
available; the thin take the moral high ground while the fat are considered
lacking in moral fibre). Given that there are no actual hardships for the rich women
of the antebellum South, since slaves pander to their every whim and they have to
do absolutely nothing for themselves, women in the society of the novel invent
their own privations by forcing themselves to become even weaker and more
cossetted than they are already. Older characters occasionally point out the
differences between the overly refined women of today and the gutsier, more
active women of their own generation. Later on, of course, the war means that
ladies can’t eat anyway, even if they wanted to: there’s not enough food. So
this way of asserting their moral superiority is taken away from them, though
as they become physically frail through hunger rather than choice, they begin
to show their real strength through genuinely moral choices.
What the
characters eat and do not eat sends strong messages about who they are and how
they define themselves. The fabulously selfish and outspoken Scarlett, of
course, loves to eat, especially once she has experienced hunger. She fails to conform
to the polite fiction about females in which the whole society is colluding:
that they have no appetites. In her decadent years of running with
Carpetbaggers and scoundrels, when old Southern society gives her up as not
being a lady, she publicly eats oysters, rich gumbos, pastries stuffed with
meringue – as a real lady never would.
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