4 - The Matter of Early American Taste

Summary

This chapter employs the example of the first American Thanksgiving, its facts and fictions, to explore the origins of a national sense of taste in the USA. It traces this sense of taste, equal parts gustatory and aesthetic, to a philosophy that linked personal taste to the expression of republican values and ideals which was mobilized well into the nineteenth century, as writers including Sarah Josepha Buell Hale and Lydia Maria Child employed characters who exhibited republican taste – especially at the Thanksgiving table – in order to illustrate appropriate political behavior. This chapter places Hale’s political advocacy concerning Thanksgiving, as articulated in Godey’s Lady’s Book and to the government directly, against Child’s more imaginative – and more liberatory – evocation of Thanksgiving in her story “Willie Wharton,” so as to show how Child more fully connected the symbolism of food and eating to the cultivation of personal taste. It argues, moreover, that Child demonstrates a more inclusive conception of the USA, even as it remains limited by her inclination to subsume indigenous cultural influences within an already dominant Anglo-American national identity.