Henry James's Art of Eating
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Imagine marrying Mr. Mudge. Such is the fate of the telegraphist heroine in Henry James's 1898 novella, In the Cage—to tie herself for life to a man whose entire being seems permeated by his grocer's trade. "His very beauty was the beauty of a grocer," she thinks of her "oleaginous" fiancé; moreover, his thought processes seem equally bent on reducing love and pleasure alike to their alimentary equivalents. For Mudge, "all enjoyments were . . . interrelated. . . . The more flirtations, as he might roughly express it, the more cheese and pickles. He had even in his own small way been dimly struck with the linked sweetness connecting the tender passion with cheap champagne, or perhaps the other way round." Unsurprising, then, to find that on their holiday together, the mysterious "'sundries'" which "had figured conspiciously in his prospective sketch of their tour" finally, after much deferral, "defin[e] themselves unmistakeably as chocolate-creams."1 As the girl tries to tell her grocer friend about some of what has been occupying her inner life of late, these chocolate-creams calmly disappear, one by one, into the mouth of Mudge.
It has long been assumed that no one does much eating in James's fiction. In one critic's words, "It is hard to think of an occasion in a novel of James when a real taste is tasted or a real smell smelled."2 His interest in, rather, the rarefied realm of thought and feeling was for years the scholarly commonplace; yet what, then, can we say about the chocoholic Mudge? In fact, though Mudge does introduce the world of food into at least one Jamesian text, his mode of doing so would seem rather to confirm than to deny the existing understanding of James's relation to that universe.3 In essence, Mudge affirms the Kantian line separating the "taste of sense"—physical, gustatory taste—from the "taste of reflection," or aesthetic "taste," which to achieve disinterestedness must leave the desiring body behind.4 That is, Mudge's very tendency to recur to the world of physical tastes, both literally and as a heuristic for making sense of other pleasures, clearly works in the novella to distinguish his commonplace, earthbound ambitions from the imaginative flights of his more sensitive fiancée, herself often read as a stand-in for the author.5 As Tony Tanner puts [End Page 27] it, neatly linking these two aspects of Mudge's character, the grocer "leads a purely physical existence: he voices the claims of the creature who wishes to join the herd."6
I.
Need our bodily appetites perpetually signify, as they do for Tanner, no more than the lowest common denominator of human existence? What if James, of all writers, could show us ways in which the two forms of taste interact rather than opposing one another? This is what I wish to argue here. The dismissal of the gustatory realm has recently begun to receive a sustained and, in many respects, salutary challenge from a burgeoning interest across the humanities and social sciences in taking food and eating seriously as subjects for scholarly consideration. New volumes—from Sociology on the Menu to Kitchen Culture in America—strive to make clear alimentation's significance to the structuring concerns of their respective fields; others, such as the anthology Food and Culture: A Reader, demonstrate that this work is not wholly without historical precedent.7 Of the disciplines in question, anthropology appears to possess the longest history of attending to eating practices; philosophy, perhaps the shortest.8 As Carolyn Korsmeyer points out in Making Sense of Taste: Philosophy and Food, philosophers since Plato (who in the Timaeus presents appetite as "a wild animal . . . chained up with man") have posited a "hierarchy of the senses," with the purportedly more objective, detached sense of sight at the apex, and taste, weighed down by its associations with gross sensuality and "selfish interest," at the bottom.9 The Kantian distinction between aesthetic and gustatory taste, then, clearly grows out of this framework. Aesthetic theory becomes a way to develop a model of clearheaded judgment and preference not tied to...
