Eating the American dream: food, ethnicity, and assimilation in American literary realism【翻译】

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my mentors, Harry Stecopoulos and Doris Witt,
without whom this project would not exist. Both of you have provided intellectually rigorous
feedback and continuous encouragement throughout the entire writing process, and have shaped
me into the scholar I am today. I also extend my deepest thanks to Loren Glass, Bluford Adams,
and Miriam Thaggert for contributing their valuable time and energy to this project.
I am incredibly lucky to have so many wonderful women in my life—too many to name.
I would like to thank Katlyn Williams, Angela Toscano, Lauren Rosales, Annemarie Pearson,
Danielle Kennedy, and Annmarie Steffes—my allies in all things intellectual and ludicrous. I
would also like to thank Victoria Muchnik, with whom my life is forever intertwined. Your daily
comradery keeps me afloat.
It is with my deepest gratitude that I also thank my partner, Jeff Shuter. We first met
during our initial year in our respective doctoral programs, and here we are, together in our last. I
would not have been able to do this kind of demanding work without your intellectual spirit,
your positivity, and your kindness. You have, more than anyone, created a space—and a home—
for me to thrive in my work and life.
Finally, as anyone who has ever been part of an immigrant Russian Jewish family knows,
frequently calling home is a requirement. I have undoubtedly spent more time on the phone with
my family than on pages I’ve written, classes I’ve taught, and books I’ve read. I cannot begin to
return what I owe to my mother, Alla, who has grown to be one of my closest confidants, and to
my babushka—my fiery grandmother, who in her 80s, sat night after night with a Russian-
English dictionary to read and understand my scholarly work, perhaps better than anyone. This
dissertation is for you.
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ABSTRACT
This project examines how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers used food
imagery and scenes of consumption to characterize immigrants in works of American literary
realism. I argue that William Dean Howells’s construction of realism—supported by the
publishing industry’s elitism—reinforced existing cultural and class hierarchies by perpetuating
divisions between narrator and subject, native and immigrant. Tacitly responding to the
ideologies of Howellsian realism, writers Stephen Crane, Sarah Orne Jewett, James Weldon
Johnson, and Willa Cather used food scenes to promote cultural pluralism, or alternately, to
replicate the hierarchal narrative structures underpinning the genre. At the same time, these
writers responded to traditional formulations of the relationship between identity and
consumption as enforced by a long-standing hierarchy of the senses, women’s domestic reform
movements, and the industrialization and corporatization of the food industry at the century’s
turn.
The chapters of this project examine different facets of realism: naturalism, regionalism,
the passing narrative, and the turn toward modernism, respectively. Each chapter also explores
different aspects of American culinary history, including debates about the sensory body, the rise
of domestic science and early home economics, and the mass production of food—all important
developments that shaped the way Americans understood the role of food and eating in their
lives. By focusing on the parallel ideological imperatives of consumption and narration within
American literary realism, this study provides a more comprehensive view of how power was
constituted at the century’s turn based on ideas about how individuals should consume the world
around them, and furthermore, how one’s approaches to consumption could be a means of
obtaining—or forfeiting—claims to national citizenship.
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PUBLIC ABSTRACT
American realism, a literary genre spanning from the end of the Civil War to the
beginning of World War I, was invested in “realistically” depicting the lives of ordinary people
through literature. However, many practitioners of realism and its advocates were typically part
of the middle to upper classes, thereby already ensuring that their depiction of “reality” was often
inherently flawed. This project examines how four writers of the period responded to realism’s
ideological constraints by using food scenes to depict immigrant characters, in the process either
reinforcing or undermining the social hierarchies perpetuated by the genre. In turn, these writers
also used food in their works to comment on dominant ideas about consumption popularized by
dietetic reform movements and transformations in the culinary landscape at large, which shaped
notions about how, what, and how much Americans should eat.
Food studies scholars have only begun to examine how food and scenes of eating
function in literary texts, thereby making this study’s readings crucial to a deeper understanding
of the role of food, eating, and consumption in literature more broadly. Furthermore, although
scholarly discussions of realism are numerous, no project yet exists that examines, at length, how
food operates within works associated with realism. Tracing culinary and narrative ideologies as
parallel histories, this project illustrates how together, they shaped ideas about nationality,
citizenship, and what constitutes the “ideal” American at the turn of the twentieth century.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE MELTING POT REVISITED: THE HEIGHT OF REALISM,
MASS IMMIGRATION, AND CULINARY TRANSFORMATION.………..………………….1
CHAPTER ONE: INSIDE MARY JOHNSON’S MOUTH: SENSING THE SLUMS
IN STEPHEN CRANE’S MAGGIE: A GIRL OF THE STREETS…...…………………...……..26
CHAPTER TWO: MRS. TOLLAND’S HERBS AND NARRATIVE SUBVERSION
IN SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “THE FOREIGNER” AND THE COUNTRY OF THE
POINTED FIRS………………………………………...…...………………………………...…73
CHAPTER THREE: (IN)ASSIMILABLE TASTES: SOUTHERN CUISINE AND
CHOP SUEY IN JAMES WELDON JOHNSON’S THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF AN EX-COLORED MAN…………..…………………………………………………….…114
CHAPTER FOUR: ON MUSHROOMS AND MELONS: WILLA CATHER’S
MY ÁNTONIA, FETISHIZING FOREIGNNESS, AND THE DOMESTIC SCIENCE
MOVEMENT…………………………………………………………………………………..160
BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………..………..…………………………..………..…202

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