Appetite, Body, and Urban Space in Pilgrimage

Appetite, Body, and Urban Space in Pilgrimage

本文試圖由理察森的小說《歷程》，探究維多利亞晚期的勞動階級女性，如何以食物消費的身體經驗，挪用新興的都市用餐公共空間，展現獨特的身體能動性。傳統維多利亞父權社會將女性身體泛道德化，無論是身體的外在體態或生理食慾需求，往往成為道德論述意欲規範、批評，甚至宰制的被動客體。對當時大量湧入倫敦求職謀生的勞動階級女性而言，食慾乃是身體因應工作需求與工作環境的固有存在，而非以道德意義約束或衡量的產物，因此總是無可避免地遭受到性別與階級雙重的歧視與挫折。獨自在倫敦工作謀生的主角米莉安，微薄的經濟能力只能負擔當時盛行的平價連鎖茶室，然而此種連鎖茶室的空間特質，對米莉安而言，不僅提供身體物質上的滿足，豐富了飲食經驗，更使她日趨熟悉都市的社會脈絡，也型塑了她的主體性與空間認同。

This paper aims to explore how late-Victorian working women’s appetite and body was conventionally moralized and discriminated yet how they interacted with London’s public eating places and further established specific experiences indicative of certain agency. In Victorian culture, the act of eating was profoundly affected by the social parameters of class and gender. Various instructions, for instances, conduct books, medical texts, and popular magazines always enforced severe disciplinary constraints on what and how women consumed, including concerns of appetite, ideal diet, and body shape. Yet for working women, food consumption, intimately linked with their specific working conditions, characterized the most frequent and immediate form of bodily experience in their city life. Appetite therefore functioned as a class marker between woman who chose not to eat and woman who chose to eat because of work. In metropolitan London, working women could seldom visit the more expensive dining places and could only order the cheapest meals even in less expensive eateries. These dining places obviously constituted a boundary to discourage them from entering. However, the act of eating out normally was necessary to support their labor and reduce their time spent on preparing food, especially for those single workers. To meet the consuming need of a growing amount of working women in late-nineteenth-century London, a new type of mass catering rose and became another alternative for public dining places: the teashop, where Miriam Henderson, the heroine in Pilgrimage, had quite a great variety of experiences and perceptions. For Miriam, dining out in public provided her with a direct way to contact and experience the city. Her dining experiences were growing wider and richer despite some class discriminations and economic limitations and interlocked with her independence and identity. Miriam’s body reveals a conspicuous example of how a woman pursued her independence and identity through appetites and particular public dining space.