In the mid-eighteenth century, Lord Chesterfield warned his son that gentlemen never laugh, they only smile; laughter makes a disagreeable noise and shockingly distorts the face. The rule is especially strict at table. One should take into account everything one knows about the guests—not “mentioning a rope in the house of a man who has been hanged.” It is tedious to drag a subject willy-nilly into the conversation. Chesterfield knew a man “who had a story about a Gun, which he thought a good one and that he told it very well; he tryed all means in the world to turn the conversation upon Guns—but if he failed in his attempt, he started in his chair, and said he heard a Gun fired, but when the company assured him that they heard no such thing, he answered, perhaps then I was mistaken, but however, since we are talking of Guns,—and then told his story, to the great indignation of the company.”
It was good manners, and openly acknowledged as such, not to draw attention to oneself, not to be loud, not to be embarrassing, not to be repetitious or boring. (“Bore” is an eighteenth-century word, first appearing in English in 1766.) One was expected, by our standards, to be deliberately artificial, thinking of subjects for conversation in advance, preparing witticisms, polishing paradoxes, seeking occasions to insert them—but all must be done with an air of complete naturalness and simplicity, with what the French were calling je ne sais quoi. Any signs of trying too hard, of not taking all the circumstances into account, not only spoiled the story being told but much more permanently ruined the reputation of the speaker. Ease constituted proof that one had had long practice in the social graces; one had “good breeding” and “a fine upbringing.”
By the late nineteenth century, the rules—those expressed in the manners books, at any rate—were even more careful. People were supposed to memorize the names of everyone to whom they had an introduction (powerful and popular persons severely limited the number of people who could be introduced to them), and to talk correctly and without slang or vulgarisms such as “awfully pretty” and “immensely jolly.” One listened even to the most boring talker: this was a person who had been deemed worthy of an invitation to dinner, and one owed it to one’s host and to the whole company present to accept and encourage this interlocutor, at least for the time being. Even enmities were to be buried at the table—though an extremely experienced dinner-goer could save her hatred, her hostess’s feelings, and the smooth operation of the whole gathering, all at the same time. Emily Post describes how “At dinner once, Mrs. Toplofty, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, ‘I shall not talk to you—because I don’t care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication tables. Twice one are two, twice two are four—’ and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her [my italics]. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion.” The man she disliked had shown that he was one of her sort: is it permissible to imagine Mrs. Toplofty unbending a little after this incident?
Nineteenth-century manners books, reflecting as they do the ideal of gentlemanly and lady-like behaviour, exhorted polite people to be sympathetic and animated but never flippant. Compliments must be sincere but flattery was vulgar, and scandal and gossip a disgrace. One must never interrupt, or allude to another person who is at the table (“How awkward to ask, ‘Who is that vulgar, red-faced woman?’ and receive the reply, ‘My wife, Sir!’”). Private or indelicate matters must not be mentioned, or even given an opportunity to be thought of. Foreign languages, and even quotations from the classics, should be avoided, together with all ostentatious displays of knowledge, expatiation on one’s hobbies, and dogmatic opinions: “Politeness is universal toleration.” Impertinent questions, unsuccessful witticisms, and fault-finding were all social gaffes. Women had to realize that men had larger appetites than they, and should not ask questions which forced men to forego too much of their eating time. Women were now present at all dinners, and a gentleman should “Pay them the compliment of seeming to consider them capable of an equal understanding with gentlemen … When you ‘come down’ to commonplace or small-talk with an intelligent lady, one of two things is the consequence; she either recognizes the condescension and despises you, or else she accepts it as the highest intellectual effort of which you are capable, and rates you accordingly” (1885). (It should be noted that many, if not most, of the etiquette books were now being written by women.)
No wonder it was so important to carry about a stock of small talk, and that successful hosts tried everything they could think of to keep the conversation flowing upon ego-soothing and probably safe subjects: “In order to prolong the time, and to enjoy the gentlemen’s society as much as possible,” wrote Alexis Soyer (1853), “I do not have the dessert placed on the table until ten or twenty minutes after the cloth is removed; this gives an opportunity for my guests to admire the beautiful Sévres dessert plates, containing views of different French châteaux; this, of course, gives a subject of conversation to those who have visited them.”
Dessert has remained a favourite locus for conversation, especially in those cultures where the table is still “de-served” or desservie, meaning that everything is removed and the cloth swept clean so that talking can continue, only raised to a higher intensity. In Hispanic countries the practice of conversation after dinner—the descendant of Greek and Roman symposia but without the copious drinking—is called hacer la sobremesa, “doing the tablecloth” or “doing dessert.” Coffee is brought to the table (the sweet course itself usually counts as part of the dinner, and is removed for this ritual) and the guests linger, talking, sometimes for hours together. The Danes are similarly famous for conversation round the table. The table is felt actually to aid the conversation: moving away to the “withdrawing” room would mean a break in the togetherness achieved during dinner, and a moving apart from one another. The comfort of padded armchairs is not enough to tempt the group away. The table is something to lean on, to gesture over; it expresses what everyone has in common.
FEEDING, FEASTS, AND FEMALES
Because male and female sex roles are on a purely physical level complementary, gender has always been a primary metaphor for the allocation of roles in society. The image has allowed people to conceptualize such ideas as “Give and take,” “Do what you can, and what you are most capable of doing,” “Entrust yourself to other people when it becomes right to do so,” and even “Take their wishes into account.” The sexual model can be made to say other things also: “Protecting somebody proves the protector’s superiority,” “Might must prevail,” or “Some are born to privilege and others to serve the lusts of the former.” Poetic connections arise, as one would expect, from a metaphor: for example, production and reproduction may find themselves linked in thought, so that sexual behaviour is felt to influence the fruits of the harvest; if sexual behaviour is unsatisfactory, there will be nothing to eat. Men may decide that they too produce “babies,” in the form of food; but men are needed for women to produce human babies, therefore women must help in the fields. The actual process of eating, which begins always with mother feeding and child being fed, is also “like sex,” and the perceived similarity can influence such important social decisions as where and with whom people can be permitted to live. The provision of food and the serving of dinner are often organized on a sexual model, too. Men go, get food, and give it to their wives, while women stay, receive it, cook it, and serve it forth.
In order that all these perceptions and conventional distributions of power, and many others like them, might fit and operate without hitch, enormous care is taken to ensure that the sexual model translates smoothly into the social structure. Men and women differ sexually; everything must be done then to differentiate them (along the lines already perceived, of course) through the allocation and refusal of power and prestige, in kinds of employment, in clothing and socially approved physique, in carefully instilled outlook and expectation. Men and women must do different things, and
doing different things will work better if they feel different things as well. If males and females are not constantly distinguished and kept separate, important features of the social structure, clear and comfortable features, might become blurred and shaky.
It has for most of history been common for men and women to eat apart, especially in public. Often taboos ensure that they eat different foods, women typically being forbidden various edible substances judged dangerous either to their morality or to their reproductive powers. Eating together in private often both entails and “means” marriage: it involves sharing the same house. Ceasing to eat together is tantamount to divorce—or ceasing to “sleep together,” as we still put it. Our euphemism is not merely coy; it contains the suggestion of sharing the same private space. Cooking, like digesting, is a common metaphor for pregnancy. The woman offers cooking in exchange for sex; the man offers sex in exchange for cooking. It follows that women “receive” sex as men “are fed” food. Eating can be spoken of as synonymous with the sex act itself. In the languages of the Ghanaian LoDagaa and Gonja, the verb “to eat” is frequently used for sex, covering a semantic field very similar to that of the English word “enjoy.”
The conjunction of the opposite poles of femaleness and maleness in the married couple is very commonly made to stand for socially and culturally vital oppositions, including one or more of the following: private and public, inside and outside, domesticity and “work,” down and up, left and right, dark and light, cold and hot, back and front, curved and straight, soft and hard, still (female) and moving (male), and so forth. Being made to “stand for” these in turn enforces conformity with the expectations. If “a woman’s place is in the home,” her place implies all the “female” characteristics: interiority, quietness, a longing to nurture, unwillingness to stand forth, and renunciation of the “male” claims to authority, publicity, loudness, brightness, sharpness. These qualities have a multitude of practical applications; for example, they either make a woman altogether unfit and unwilling to attend feasts, or they influence the way she behaves while participating in them.
An ancient Greek wife would not have been seen dead at a symposium. She was thought—and considered herself to be—the embodiment of purity in the family. Her honour was, and had at all costs to remain, unassailable: the legitimacy of her offspring, and the honour of her menfolk, depended upon it. It was all right for hetairai (courtesans) to mix with revelling and orgiastic males; they were shameless women, outrageous in their freedom and lack of tenue. A dining room was called an andron, “a room for men”: a woman eating there was a woman out of place, marginalized and unworthy of respect. Unphilosophically minded ancient Greeks apparently thought, as many people nowadays still do, that important ideas should never be discussed at table. Plutarch has one such symposiast put it like this: “Philosophy should no more have a part in conversation over wine than should the matron of the house.” According to this view, the Persians got it right when they drank and danced with their mistresses, but never with their wives. Wives were serious, but hetairai and mistresses could be taken lightly. When men, therefore, were asked to a party, they left their wives at home. But a wedding feast was a crowded affair, Plutarch makes his sympotic conversationalists say elsewhere, because women were responsible for a lot of the activities at a wedding—and an invited woman must invariably come accompanied by her husband.
Formality at public events is almost invariably a male affair, because it involves social rank (which has often been denied to all but the very top women) and publicity. Formality has always been contrasted with relaxation and intimacy, which are enjoyed at home, where the women have their place. (Men inhabit both spheres, public and private, whereas women have rarely done so; this one-sided overlap is one of the important inconsistencies in the scheme.) It follows that at a banquet in many traditional societies, men observe rank and precedence at table, while women serve the diners, or sit and eat in a separate place where far less ceremony is observed; they might sit in a crowd in the middle of the room, for example, while the men are ranged in order round the walls. At a Winnebago Indian feast, the men sat observing strict precedence round the periphery of the meeting house, with plenty of room between them; the women and children crowded together in a tiny space behind a screen at the back. The women have generally cooked such feasts, though occasionally men will have insisted on handling the meat (a prestigious, “masculine” food) themselves. The women may even think of being permitted to serve the food as a tremendous, and jealously guarded, privilege. Women, say the Javanese who practise the slametan feast, are mburi, “behind” (that is, in the kitchen; during the feast they peep through the bamboo partitions at the men as they eat), whereas men are ngarepan, “in front,” consuming the food prepared by the women.
In nineteenth-century Japan, women were seldom invited to dinner, but if they were they were expected to sit apart, in one corner of the room. In China, they feasted separately from the men, as women do in societies where there is a very strong division between the sexes. In the Ming period, the imperial women, dowagers, wives, daughters, and sisters of their men would host the wives of ministers and officials in the Inner Quarters of the Palace of Female Tranquillity. Their banquets were accompanied by female musicians. Hostesses were required, however, to offer fewer courses at dinner than the men, and to offer wine less often. It is assumed that in private, on ordinary occasions, male and female members of the imperial family ate together, as the commoners did. In the United Arab Emirates today, as in other Arab countries, women often meet and dine together, with complex and sophisticated civility.
It is with a great sense of superiority that a male host may “feed” his guests but not himself partake of the meal; and a woman who cooks and serves a dinner without eating much of it herself may do so with a real sense of the power conferred by the bestowal of food. (Guests always feel uncomfortable eating in front of an abstemious host.) But it is necessary for the giver to be present during the meal to enjoy this particular kind of ego enhancement, for prestige is personal: it is non-existent where there is no knowledge of the person being honoured. As late as the nineteenth century in French peasant households, the women would serve the men at table, but themselves eat standing, or draw up stools by the fire and hold their dishes on their laps; the old and the children might be expected to join them there. It is possible, but unlikely, that such an arrangement expressed appreciation and respect for women.
Young boys in strictly sex-segregated societies must one day make the transition from living as children with the women to joining the men. The initiation, whether accompanied or not by ceremonial rites, is effected in large part by the young male taking his predestined place in public life, among the men at dinner. Girls do not take this step; they remain, in this sense, children. (To “stay where you are,” even metaphorically, is of course to cleave to the principle of stillness and centrality which has hitherto been so important in the symbolism of being female.) A man often prefers a woman to keep the status of dependent child: he may reward her for accepting this position by finding her sexually attractive if she does so.
A woman maintains her role as mother by feeding her family; some African societies are said to think of the wife as “mother of her husband” for this reason. Food is a female concern, and often one of the main sources of a woman’s power in the household. Women gather food, shop, choose what is to be eaten, and cook it. Social anthropologists have long called women the “gatekeepers” of food supplies in the house. However, since they choose food which they know their husbands and children like and demand, the “gatekeeper” role is often merely executive. Women are reported to make their cooking expressive of their feelings: they “reward” men by producing a special dish, with particular care; they show disapproval by not having dinner ready on time, or by refusing to put effort into the meal. Gertrude Stein tells the story of her French cook Hélène, who disapproved of Matisse because a Frenchman “should not stay unexpectedly t
o a meal particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner.” One could expect such behaviour from foreigners, but in a Frenchman it was unacceptable. When Matisse was invited to dinner she would, for example, serve him fried eggs, never an omelette. “It takes the same number of eggs,” she coldly asserted, “and the same amount of butter, but it shows less respect.” Monsieur Matisse would understand.
If an African wife refuses to cook at all, her husband cannot make her do it; men are often not only incapable of cooking but forbidden to cook. In some Nigerian tribes they are not allowed even to discuss food or express directly a desire to eat: a Jukun male will say, “I am going to eat,” when he means he is thirsty, and use a phrase like “I shall go into my hut” (the kunguni, where Jukun males eat alone) for “I want some dinner.” Eating, for him, requires the kind of euphemism which in our society is reserved for sex or excretion. This attitude towards eating is part of the allocation of roles, and again it goes back to the sexual model: “giving food” for women corresponds to “giving sex” for men; it would be extremely confusing to do things the other way round. It is fairly common for a man to refuse to eat what his wife has cooked, as a sign of his displeasure; he is protected, of course, from having to do without food altogether if he has several wives. A further connection between food and sex is suggested by the fact that a polygamous male usually eats food prepared by the wife he is currently sleeping with.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 34