In our own culture, children are taught how to eat at an exceedingly culture-specific table. The dining table is not only the setting they will surely encounter, and need to have mastered, in life away from home; it is also a constraining and controlling device, a place where children eat under the surveillance of adults. In families which are too poor, or who live in a space too confined, to possess a table where everyone can sit down together, mothers complain that it is impossible to control their children during meals. A typical scenario, reported by Charles and Kerr, is Mother battling to keep the children eating “properly” in the kitchen, while Father is watching TV next door. Where everyone’s eating is done before the television set—that is, side by side and with the scrutiny of grown-ups concentrated elsewhere—children might never learn how to cut and chew neatly, how to notice what it is that other people need or are saying, or any of the other marks of being “well brought up.” English people can be surprisingly adamant about “Sunday lunch,” deliberately staging weekly, full-dress “proper” meals, with courses and tablecloths, where children can learn how to behave when out. One of the hallmarks of a “proper” meal has come to be “having the radio and TV turned off.”
People commonly complain—with some justification—that it is difficult to teach children any manners in the fragmented, frenetic modern world with its overworked parents, its rudimentary skills in group behaviour, and its apparent devotion to doing away with the formalities. But we do in fact have standards, which are invisible to us most of the time, but which become more obvious when we hear how people behave who have different ideas, and expectations other than our own. In the mid-nineteenth century, Osgood Mackenzie and his mother visited Harris in the Outer Hebrides, off the north-west coast of Scotland. Mackenzie described, in A Hundred Years in the Highlands, his reception at a low, damp Harris house with walls six feet thick. His hostess, he begins by saying, “had most charming manners,” like all Harris people. “She was busy preparing the breakfast, and bade us sit down on little low stools at the fire, and wait till she could milk the cow.” The cattle in the Harris long house lived under the same roof as the family. “The wife took an armful of … heather, and deposited it at the feet of the nearest cow, which was tied up within two or three yards of the fire, to form a drainer. Then, lifting the pot off the fire, she emptied it on the heather; the hot water disappeared and ran away among the cow’s legs, but the contents, consisting of potatoes and fish, remained on top of the heather. Then, from a very black-looking bed, three stark-naked boys arose, one by one, aged, I should say, from six to ten years, and made for the fish and potatoes, each youngster carrying off as much as both his hands could contain. Back they went to their bed, and started devouring their breakfast with apparently great appetite under the blankets.”
INHIBITIONS
Because table manners are drummed into us so early and so insistently, the rules upon which they are based rarely need to be remembered once we have grown up; we have made them part of the way in which we habitually act and expect the world to operate. But for this very reason, we love hearing about people who are other than ourselves—who often seem to have no idea how to “behave” at all. Their actions remind us that manners are not nature but—at most—second nature; we are forced to wonder whether, if we lived elsewhere, in different conditions, our presuppositions and therefore our behaviour might have been different.
This ancient pleasure, in contemplating other people’s odd behaviour (nearly always, it should be noted, with at least some contempt and complacency), is gradually being withdrawn from us. The world, for many complex reasons but chiefly because of increased communications and machine-driven standardization, is becoming more and more homogeneous. We have to look hard for manners that will shock us these days, not only because we have seen or heard of most of them already, but because there are fewer and fewer varieties to view. Those so disposed are prepared, however, to derive shock value from details, and stare in disbelief if a foreign group leaves teaspoons standing up in cups or enthusiastically toasts the hostess before eating.
But there is one direction in which we can always turn to find deliciously “other” behaviour—and that is to the past. It is not so much travellers these days as historians who can satisfy our thirst for revelations of oddity and difference. The danger with travellers’ tales was always ethnocentricity, and perhaps the condescension which can easily arise from a mixture of ignorance and racial prejudice. The same kind of risk occurs when the enterprise is historical research. History answers only the questions we put to it, and the past has even less chance than a modern foreign tribe has of ensuring that we have sufficient data to make informed judgements, of not falling victim to the time-bound prejudices of the researcher, or of answering back. There is always a possibility that what we see of the past could merely be a reflection of our own beliefs and fears. If the past ever becomes our only “other,” we shall be in dangerous straits indeed.
It is common knowledge (and a flattering social myth for us) that our own ancestors used to have very different—and much cruder—table manners from those we practise today. We have “come on,” in other words; we have “progressed.” The simplest historical novel or movie can make an exotic effect by presenting a scene in which dinner guests gnaw meat straight off bones gripped in their greasy fists, then hurl the remains into the corners of the room. These, the audience accepts without difficulty, were the manners of the past, before we became modern and civilized. (This sense of superiority does not prevent us from feeling proud, at the same time, of modern simplicity and lack of pomp. We are as capable of despising our ancestors for their tradition-bound complexity as for their rudimentary standards of propriety.)
Manners have indeed changed. They were not invented on the spot, but developed into the system to which we now conform. Since manners are rituals and therefore conservative—part of their purpose is always conservation—they change slowly if at all, and usually in the face of long and widespread unwillingness. Even when a new way of doing things has been adopted by a powerful elite group—using forks instead of fingers, for example—it may take decades, even centuries, for people generally to decide to follow suit. Forks had not only to be seen in use and their advantages successfully argued; they had also to be made and sold, then produced in versions which more and more people could afford, as they slowly ceased being merely unnecessary and became the mark of civilized behaviour. After the eleventh-century date of the first extant document describing (with wonder) the sight of someone using one, the fork took eight centuries to become a utensil employed universally in the West.
Naturally enough, historians interest themselves in why such a change—from eating with our hands to using a metal mediating instrument instead—took place at all. In our more thoughtful moments, we no longer allow ourselves to feel, simply and happily, that what has happened is “progress,” that the eight centuries were an apprenticeship, a preparation for the attainment of our present enlightened state. Forks have placed us in a singularly distant relationship vis-à-vis our food, and, more importantly, they both express and influence our self-enclosed, fastidious attitude towards the people with whom we eat. The universalizing of the use of forks is among other things a sign of the spreading of a social attitude.
Our own culture, as it happens, provides us with a means of tracing this development, through the survival of books on etiquette that have appeared through the ages. These humble, mostly dully written little pamphlets can be studied and compared, so as to document shifts in table manners and etiquette in general. Manners books have supplied the sociologist Norbert Elias with data upon which he has built a coherent theory of the development of Western inhibitions since the Renaissance. Elias claims that at that point—specifically from 1530, the date at which Erasmus published his short treatise on manners, which he called de civilitate morum puerilium (On the Civility of the Behaviour of Boys)—momentous changes began in our history. The medieval concept of man
ners, called “courtesy” because it was practised by noblemen at court, begins to be called “civility,” a term for a wholly new system of bodily propriety, which is henceforth applicable to all citizens, not merely the elite. “Civility” governs far more behaviour than table manners. The seven chapters of Erasmus’s treatise concern body posture and facial expression, dress, behaviour in church, table manners, conversation, and comportment at play and in the bedroom.
From this point onwards, Elias claims, bodily functions came to be displayed in public less and less. People began to refrain in company from belching, farting, excretion, and spitting. Eventually, even speaking and writing about these things (Erasmus had been quite unembarrassed about mentioning them) was to be banned in polite society. As Elias puts it, “walls” of restraint and embarrassment grew up between people; where once dinner was handled by the whole group, and cutlery, dishes, and goblets passed about for all to use, now each person had his or her own implements. As time went on it was insisted that no one touch even his own food with his hands except in certain specific cases, and postures were devised which would make even brushing against another person at table as unlikely as possible.
The most interesting part of all this was that people increasingly obeyed these rules (there were fluctuations and differences among groups, and the changes came about in the course of three centuries), not primarily because they were conscious of constraint, but because they were genuinely convinced that no other ways of eating would “do.” Civilized people behaved like this: those guilty of infractions were merely showing how uncivilized they were. The new standards, which began to be introduced in the Renaissance, became gradually internalized, which means that, once learned in childhood, people took the rules for granted; they never thought about them—unless they were suddenly confronted with an action that was “unmannerly.” Then their reaction was likely to be one of disgust and revulsion, shock or laughter.
During the seventeenth century, in France, manners became a political issue. King Louis XIV and his predecessors, in collecting together the nobility of France to live with the sovereign at Versailles, instituted a sort of school of manners. At the palace, the courtiers lived under the despotic surveillance of the king, and upon their good behaviour, their deference, and their observance of etiquette their whole careers depended. If you displeased Louis, he would simply not see you the following day; his gaze would pass over you as he surveyed the people before him. And not being “seen” by the king was tantamount to ceasing to count, at Versailles. A whole timetable of ceremonies was followed, much of it revolving round the king’s own person. Intimacy with Louis meant power, and power was symbolically expressed in attending to certain of the king’s most private and physical needs: handing him his stockings to put on in the morning, being present as he used his chaise percée, rushing when the signal sounded to be present as he got ready for bed. It mattered desperately what closeness the king allowed you—whether he spoke to you, in front of whom, and for how long.
The point about Versailles was that there was no escape: the courtiers had to “make it” where they were. The stage was Louis’s, and the roles that could be played were designed by him. It was up to each courtier to fit him- or herself into one of the slots provided. The leaders of all the other towns and villages of France were made, largely through the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudenesses and judicious slighting by the tax-collecting intendants, to feel their subordination, their distance from the court. Once, the nobility had relied on strength, swagger, and vigour, even violence, personally to make their mark and uphold their honour; at Versailles, the way to success became discretion, observation, cunning, and the dissembling of one’s aims and passions. At Versailles—and at the courts all over Europe which imitated it—everything was done to make it very clear who was superior to whom; and of course, each time anyone was polite, he or she was simultaneously acknowledging rank and demonstrating who stood where.
The new manners—both the formal rules of protocol and precedence and the unspoken, more profoundly enculturated rules like table manners—were seen increasingly, according to Elias, as ways in which one did not offend other people. You were controlling yourself, so as to prevent other people from being disgusted or “shocked.” People lived very closely together at Versailles; everyone was watched by everyone else, and actual physical proximity helped raise some of the new sensitivity to other people’s real or imagined susceptibilities. Men were expected on the whole to give up physical force as a means of getting their way, and—as always when “the graces” are preferred over brute strength—women began to count for more. Within the aristocratic court circle, people became, in spite of the obsession with rank, far more equal. Secure in the knowledge that just being at court was the pinnacle of prestige, from which most of society was shut out, courtiers could permit themselves to respect each other.
As the bourgeoisie became richer and more indispensable even at court, they demanded—and were given, by self-appointed experts who wrote manuals for them—instruction in how to behave as people did in “the best circles.” In 1672, Antoine de Courtin produced Nouveau traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France parmi les honnestes gens (The New Treatise of the Civility Which Is Practised in France Among Honest People). (“Honest”—honnête—kept its original association with honour and the opposite-but-supporting notion, shame.) De Courtin writes about manners for both hosts and guests, and advises his bourgeois readers on how they should address the nobility. The Church in France also produced handbooks of manners and taught their precepts in schools. Gradually gentility spread down from the court to the bourgeoisie, and finally trickled further down to the rest of the population.
The bourgeoisie were even stricter about standards of civility than the nobility were; having no ever-present king to enforce the rules, they imposed restraints on themselves. Being more anxious to rise, they had more to lose by making slips and gaffes; so their self-inhibiting mechanisms had to be deeper rooted, less obviously the donning of an external persona than the nobility could permit themselves. The policing of emotions became internal, and finally invisible even to themselves: they were able to think that they acted, not in obedience to power and self-interest, but for purely moral reasons.
In the meantime, according to Elias, another momentous change was taking place: “childhood” was invented, in the course of the centuries following the sixteenth. The small, eventually “nuclear” family was engendered by the need for families to become consuming, as opposed to producing, units. Children had to learn the new “civilizing” rules, and in order to do so and to build up the necessary “walls of shame” required by the new individualism and the manners that protected it, they were turned into a whole new social category, different from that of adults. They were held, as no children had been before, for a protracted period in ignorance of the private world of adults.
Twentieth-century children now have, Elias claims, “in the space of a few years to attain the advanced level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries.” Today, our apparent freedom and unconcern about bodily and verbal proprieties is possible only because inhibitions are everywhere, and self-imposed. What we know is “relaxation within the framework of an already established standard.” And the table manners we teach our children at a very early age are those which in the Middle Ages adults had still to be taught.
But drawing a line separating the sixteenth century off from everything that preceded it can give a false impression, as can limiting one’s perspective to that of a single culture. As we have seen, people everywhere teach manners to their children by means of precepts, riddles, and traditional proverbs, and they seem to have done so for millennia. “At the abundant dinner of the gods, do not sever with bright steel the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches,” advised Hesiod about 2,700 years ago. What he meant was, “Fingernails are not to be cut at table.” Didactic poetry has existed since at least
the time of Ptah-Hotep’s Instructions, written apparently to his son, which date to about 2000 B.C. but were almost certainly copied from another book five hundred years older. Eating behaviour has also been described ethnographically and used as a fictional device since ancient times. Aristotle wrote a treatise, which has unfortunately not survived, on the behaviour of diners at the famous Spartan communal feasts called sussitia, and Roman literature includes stories of boorish behaviour, part of the intention of which was to confirm readers in their preference for their own good taste. We would reject today the excesses of people like Petronius’ vulgar boor Trimalchio, and for very much the same reasons as the ancient Romans had for doing so.
Medieval manners books—at first in Latin, and later in Italian, French, German, and other vernacular tongues—had been jingles and rhyming verses, written to be easily memorized. (Books were scarce before the advent of the printing press.) An early English version was The Babees’ Book, composed in the fifteenth century not for what we now call “babies,” but for young pages and maids-in-waiting. The English nobility educated their children by exchanging them, after the age of about eight, with the children of other aristocratic households, so that they could be disciplined outside their own homes; it was an early version of the later British institution of boarding schools. The boys would learn, among other things, how to bow, pose, carve, and wait at table; girls would be schooled in decorative feminine movements, and in serving in the women’s apartments. One English manners book for pages was called stans puer ad mensam, The Boy Standing at the Table (about 1430).
Treatises written to instruct novices in monasteries, like that of Hugh of St. Victor in the twelfth century, included directions on manners. Since monks came from every social class and all had to live together for life, the learning of a common standard of manners must have been an important part of the preliminary training. There is a long tradition of ecclesiastical manners books, designed to teach priests, who often came from the lowest classes, how to behave when they suddenly found themselves dining at the local château, or having to advise and chasten their bourgeois parishioners. A late example of the genre is that by Louis Branchereau (1885).
The Rituals of Dinner Page 8