The Edible Book: White Female Pleasure and Novel Reading

The Ideal Observer Meets The Ideal Consumer: Realism, Domestic Science, and Immigrant Foodways in Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918)

“…As Cree LaFavour points out, "The pleasure of a novel that is difficult to put down was akin to the sweets that women and children gobbled as they turned the pages in a kind of rapturous self-indulgence." 7 In other words, in the mid-nineteenth century, the pleasures of reading and eating were dually perceived as dangerous activities; when left uncontrolled, they were thought to threaten the physical and mental health of white, middle-class women and, by proxy, the health of their families and the nation. These restrictive attitudes about consumption persisted into the later decades of the century as both the realists and the domestic scientists sought to refashion the American body on individual and national scales by attempting to control how the public consumed the world around them.…”