Food, rationing, and national identity in midcentury British fiction

This dissertation charts the construction of national identity in mid-twentieth-century British literature and culture through a focus on food. While official food cultures emerged out of scientific findings, they were predicated on ethical conceptions of good citizenship. Emphasizing stoicism and self-sacrifice, the wartime Ministry of Food linked the purchase, preparation, and consumption of food to heroism and treachery. After the Second World War, controlled distribution and "fair shares" became pillars of welfare state reforms, which sought to ensure that those who had fought and worked for the national good never went hungry. Though rationing and food controls led to discontent in the postwar period, the ideal of shared sacrifice remained a potent symbol of national identity. Midcentury British novelists registered their responses to shifting food and nutrition policies by adapting, distorting, and challenging patriotic models of consumption. Chapter One draws upon theories of hospitality to explore depictions of invasion—by foreign cuisines, cultures, and armies—in wartime fiction. As the Second World War disrupted host-guest relations, anxieties about selecting, cooking, and consuming traditional foods reflected larger threats to British identity. Novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Patrick Hamilton, P.G. Wodehouse, and Evelyn Waugh process fears of cultural and national invasion through portrayals of shared meals and domestic space. Chapter Two reads thriller novels against civilian and military health guidelines to delineate a midcentury ideal of patriotic, masculine eating defined by self-discipline. In Ian Fleming's James Bond novels and Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939), food fortifies spies' bodies and minds. Such fortification occurs within a larger generic history that extends from Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys (1908) and John Buchan's The 39 Steps (1915) to Alan Sillitoe's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958). Chapter Three analyzes culinary encounters among Britain, France, and the Mediterranean to illustrate the paradoxical treatment of foreign foodways in wartime and postwar literature and culture. Barbara Pym's novelistic depictions of food and eating intersect with food writing by Elizabeth David, Fanny Cradock, and others. Their engagement with gendered food roles and models of communal consumption reflects larger patterns of public and private dining in the welfare state. Chapter Four explores the restriction of consumption in novels by Muriel Spark and Nancy Mitford in relation to postwar fashion and slimming culture. Portraying slenderness as a marker of sophistication, their novels prioritize the competitive cultivation of beauty over collectivity and patriotism. Both authors scrutinize femininity, morality, and citizenship to depict slimming as simultaneously empowering and oppressive. Reading fictional meals against literary and historical contexts, this project calls attention to conceptions of nationalism, gender, class, and cultural distinction embedded in the preparation and consumption of food. Just as heroes of midcentury thrillers feed themselves to prepare for battle, eating both fortifies citizens for sociopolitical engagement and concretely performs that engagement. In midcentury novels, discourses around diet, nutrition, and healthy eating shape national identity symbolically, narratively, and ideologically.

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