Jane Austen e il cibo: contesto e significazione in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, ed Emma.

Abstract

The main purpose of this work is to investigate references to meals, food and drink in Jane Austen's novels, and analyze how these references contribute to illustrate characters, assign moral worth, and reveal moral values. Specifically, this dissertation will center on the novels where eating and drinking are of paramount importance: Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, and Emma. Readers are often solely focused on what happens around the table - lively dialogue, plot development - to recognize that what happens on the table is important too, and that food itself, its consumption and circulation, use, abuse and refusal, may convey a great deal of information. These considerations seem to be confirmed by the large number of references to food and drinks collected during the analysis of the above-mentioned novels: 295 reference to food and drink and 204 references to meals. Obviously, these references are too numerous to be merely coincidental. The analysis of Austen's treatment of food demonstrates indeed how references to meals, food and drink help understand better characters, determine their social status, clarify the time of the action. They provide crucial insights into morality and behaviour, as well. Food and drink, therefore, are not only a source of nourishment and bodily welfare but are also imbued with additional meaning and cultural significance that ensure a more comprehensive and critical reading of texts. For this reason I have explored Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma with a food-oriented approach and I have dedicated a whole chapter to the analysis of each novel. After having created an analytical index of meals, food and drinks per novel, and provided a narrative context for each reference, I have tried to understand and explain the function of food within each novel. I have divided the functions assigned to food and drink in Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Emma into three categories, which I name: Food and the Self, Food and Us, and Food and the "Other".