Food and Social Status

 

 

From the groaning tables of King Arthur's court in the fourteenth century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/festivities-at-medieval-court.html) through to Mrs Portman’s pea soup in Thackeray’s short story, “A Little Dinner at Timmins” (http://pagetoplate.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/pea-soup.html) , food has been used by writers as an indicator of wealth and social status. 

Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel, Pamela, first published in 1740, is greatly concerned with social status and the possibilities of social mobility.  Pamela Andrews, the novel's 15 year-old protagonist, is a maidservant in a country house in which she has worked since the age of 12.  When the novel opens, Pamela's mistress has just died, leaving her in the service of Mr B____ (his full surname is never given), her former mistress's son.   Mr B___________ is attracted to Pamela but since she is not his social equal, instead of proposing marriage to her, he does everything in his power to seduce her.  He offers her money, hides in her closet, abducts and imprisons her and threatens her when she refuses his offer to become his mistress. 

 

Mr B____ finds Pamela Writing by Joseph Highmore (1743-4)

Despite Mr B________’s attempts, Pamela is determined to keep her virtue.  Whilst Richardson’s emphasis on Pamela’s sexual purity may seem rather old-fashioned and priggish nowadays, his giving a voice to a servant girl and making her the protagonist of his novel was a radical move.  At a time when servants would have been considered almost the property of their masters, and expected to obey their every wish, Pamela’s insistence on her right to do as she likes with her body and her refusal to succumb to his desires or accept his money marks her out as extremely brave.  As she says to Mr B____, when he reprimands her for speaking so bluntly to him and forgetting her place, “Well may I forget that I am your servant, when you forget what belongs to a master.”  She also challenges the prevailing belief that her low social status makes her an acceptable object for his depravity, “O Sir! My soul is of equal importance with the soul of a princess; though my quality is inferior to that of the meanest slave.”  

Bread

It seems strange that it's taken me a year of blogging - and 800 years or so of English literature - to write about bread when it is such a staple food. In the Bible story of Adam and Eve, the first human beings, God punishes Adam with hard work, saying, "By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground" (Genesis 3: 19). Bread, the most basic of foodstuffs, will only be earned through back-breaking labour.

In English literature, an early reference to bread occurs in an Anglo-Saxon riddle (one of the more than 90 included in the Exeter Book, a 10th century anthology of Old English poetry). Whilst the answer to the riddle is bread, this riddle, like many of the period, is intentionally ambiguous with a sexual subtext. Scholars have estimated that approximately one third of the riddles - all composed by monks - could be solved as penis (whilst also having a more mundane solution). The riddle reads: