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À Table: The Power of Food in French Women's Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
Contemporary women's theatre in France provides a rich corpus of plays that explore the social and psychological significance of food. Little wonder, given the deep, universal ties between women, particularly mothers, and food. As the anthropologist Carole Counihan explains:
Food is a particularly important concern and symbol for females in all cultures. Women have universal responsibility for food preparation and consumption … They are defined as nurturers and carry out this role principally throughfeeding. In addition, women themselves are food for their children during pregnancy and lactation, intensifying their identification with food and its relevance as symbol … Western women also use food as symbol of self.
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References
Notes
1. Counihan, Carole, ‘An Anthropological View of Western Women's Prodigious Fasting’, Food and Foodways, Vol. 3, No. 4 (1989), p. 360.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2. Barthes, Roland, ‘Pour une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation contemporaine’. Cahiers des Annales, No. 28, 1970, pp. 307–15.Google Scholar
3. See Lévi-Strauss, Claude, Le Cm et le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1974).Google Scholar
4. Chernin, Kim, The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity (New York: Harper Collins, 1985)Google Scholar and Bordo, Susan, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).Google Scholar
5. Kaschak, Ellyn, Engendered Lives. A New Psychology of Women's Experience (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), p. 190.Google Scholar
6. Ibid., p. 191.
7. Quoted in Chernin, , The Hungry Self, p. 99.Google Scholar
8. Ibid., p. 101.
9. Chawaf, Chantal, Chair chaude (Paris: Mercure de France, 1976).Google Scholar First performed in Paris at the Lucernaire in 1978. English translation by Makward, Christiane P., Miller, Judith and Running-Johnson, Cynthia: Warmth: A Bloodsong in Plays by French and Francophone Women: A Critical Anthology, edited by Makward, Christiane P. and Miller, Judith (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).Google Scholar
10. Leclerc, Annie, Parole de femme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1974)Google Scholar; Cixous, Hélène, ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L'Arc, 61 (1975), pp. 39–54.Google Scholar
11. ‘We must find, find anew, invent words, the sentences that speak the most archaic and the most contemporary relationship with the body of the mother, with our bodies, the sentences that translate the bond between her body, ours, and that of our daughters. We have to discover a language [langage] which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language [langue] attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal’.The Irigaray Reader, edited by Whitford, Margaret, translated by Macey, David (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 43.Google Scholar
12. Le corps-à-corps avec la mère, p. 20. ‘A primal womb, our first nourishing earth, first waters, first envelopes, where the child was WHOLE, the mother WHOLE’. (Irigaray Reader, pp. 38–9).
13. The ‘matricial’ is a complex notion referring to the exclusive mother-child universe, relationship originating in the womb or matrice in French; to theories of écriture féminine claiming that women's writing is a creative process inextricably linked to the matrice; and to a psychoanalytic theory of the aesthetic positing a different type of subjectivity modelled on the matrice rather than the phallus. See Cecilia Beach, ‘De la maternité au matriciel: La Représentation du maternel dans les oeuvres modernes de femmes dramaturges françaises’, dissertation, New York University, 1993.
14. Féral, Josette, ‘Writing and displacement: Women in Theater’, Modern Drama (12 1984) p. 550.Google Scholar
15. Defromont, Françoise, ‘L'Epopée du corps’, in Hélène Cixous, chemins d'une écriture (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), p. 92.Google Scholar
16. DAUGHTER. YOU nourish me at your breast. You pour into my mouth in waves that spill onto me and I am filled to overflowing.
MOTHER. Being this close to you, having my skin against yours, frees me. Life is stable near your mouth, your hands. I am fed by my own milk.
DAUGHTER. Your milk comes in great swells.
THE HEART. We are together. The newborn presses her lips to the nipple.
DAUGHTER. Life is young.
MOTHER. Flesh takes root in flesh, in roots and in nodes and in lumps of Earth, and in the future (239).
17. ‘Your voice flows freely on, like waves of butter and cream’ (p. 239).
18. Cixous, Hélène, ‘La Venue à l'écriture’, Entre l'ecriture (Paris: des femmes, 1986), pp. 30, 60.Google Scholar The polysemy of French term nourrir allows Cixous and Chawaf to play on the two senses: ‘nourish’ and ‘nurture’; the mère nourricière is both the nourishing mother and the nurturing mother. In this passage, I have chosen to use the English word ‘nurture’ which can also express both meanings: ‘I was raised on the milk of words … I let myself be nurtured by the voice, by words … Writing … is milk. I nurture. And like all women who nurture I am nurtured. A smile nurtures me. Mother, I am a daughter: if you smile at me, you nurture me, I am your daughter’.
19. ‘the pre-civilization, the beginning where nothing has yet been confined within the law’. ‘I like to restore an oral quality to the word, because, I feel the word passes through the mouth: like food’. (p. 74).
20. ‘The text is the product which I draw from the raw material of words through the craft of the writer, I press and tread the fruits of the unconscious to express the juice. And the paragraphs, as they arrange themselves, come together or push apart, establish a time-span, the fermentation of the juice up until the last words of the last page when I know that the text is ready and that the transformation of the abstract signs (the lexical material) into concrete product, into a corporeal product has taken place’.
21. MOTHER. Air penetrates my expanding tissues. Vermillion and scarlet matter harbours densely floating particles, while soldering masses detach themselves from my walls. Life carried along in the flood descends and begins to emerge, and our bodies reinforce each other's movements. My blood boils, my flesh explodes; forcing a passage, growing salty with milk; my blood cells, my plasma are electric, my breasts, are stretched, engorged, overfilled. They fold themselves, their expansion mirrored in the release of red energy, swelling, bloating, bursting forth; and the other red matter, the blood clots, melt; and the umbilical cord presents its seven knots, and life empties into day …
THE HEART.… and breaks the membrane with a cry.
DAUGHTER. YOU shine gloriously from the inside outward.
MOTHER. A pouch of warm water fell from my belly and inundated my thighs.
DAUGHTER. Blood surged through the placenta.
MOTHER. I apply a dressing to your navel (pp. 242–3).
22. ‘You feed me as though the pulse of the umbilical cord had not stopped’ (p. 244).
23. MOTHER. I brought you into this world.
DAUGHTER.… Or did I perhaps welcome you to this world?
MOTHER. It no longer matters …
MOTHER. Are you my mother? or my daughter?
DAUGHTER. We can no longer say … (pp. 237–8).
24. ‘And one does not move without the other. But we move together. When one comes into the world, the other falls back beneath the earth. When one carries life, the other dies. And what I expected from you was that, bearing me, you too would remain alive’.
25. Rouanet, Marie, ‘La cuisine: lieu des femmes’, in Nourritures d'enfance (Paris: Autrement, 1992), p. 42.Google Scholar
26. Clément, Marie-Christine, ‘La Cuisine-sorcellerie’, in Norritures d'enfance, p. 144Google Scholar: ‘the mystery of cooking is linked to the mysteries of birth and death, fertility, fermentation, transformation and mutation’.
27. Chalem, Denise, A cinquante ans elle découvrait la mer (Paris: Actes Sud-Papiers, 1985).Google Scholar First performed in Paris at the Petit Odéon in 1980. All translations are from the English version, The Sea between us, trans. Danielle Brunon, Adine Sagalyn and Catherine Temerson (New York: UBU Repertoire Theatre, 1986).
28. ‘So how are you? What's new? I bought some haddock it wasn't expensive with new potatoes new potatoes cost an arm and a leg these days I'm going to make a cake tonight chocolate what if guests come over on Sunday I'm dying to pee …’ (p. 3).
29. ‘for you, outside meant the living room’ (p. 11).
30. ‘I'm fed up with my breasts. You understand? Fed up! I'll have to cut them off and that'll be the end of it! Period!’(p. 7)
31. ‘It's thanks to that you're worth something. After all, it's what attracts a man’ … ‘the daughter comes back wearing a pair of trousers, a man's shirt and a cap’ (p. 8).
32. ‘A woman who has no children is not a woman. Something will always be missing in her life’ (p. 34).
33. As the anthropologist Joëlle Bahloul points out in traditional Jewish meals, ‘the table becomes a miniature temple, the kitchen an altar or a sanctuary, the family and guests are the congregation and the woman-cook a priestess’ (20). This is all the more true of immigrant Jews, like the mother in this play, for whom food traditions become an important means of preserving their cultural identity. Le Culte de la table déesse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983).
34. ‘God's laws became the Mother's law’ (p. 13). ‘May God be with you, eyes of mine. I wish you all the happiness in the world’ (p. 14).
35. ‘I'm sick of you, sick of your cooking, sick of the way you go on and on about money, how much this costs, how much that costs. You babble on more and more every day’ (p. 20).
36. ‘her sole purpose in life was to be a mother’(p. 20); ‘a mother must always sacrifice herself for her children; the children come first'(p. 45).
37. 'How I regret that I didn't study. I could have been someon …’ (p. 39).
38. ‘Darling you're not here tonight the sea's between us and yet I want to celebrate your birthday with you any way I can … happy birthday darling I made you some chicken with a good bottle of wine we don't have a cellar here so obviously we can't have good wine that often I was too tired to make a cake but I found one downstairs at the bakery made of chocolate and pure butter not too expensive though everything is getting so expensive these days I wonder where it will end how long they think we can hold out but I'm talking eat the chicken is good I know you like the leg She lays two empty plates on the table. She sits down’ (pp. 43–4).
39. She is hungry—today—for basboussa for cobebga for menenna, and she doesn't know how they are made, she didn't want to listen when she was given the recipes ‘just a drop of orange-blossom water, darling, no more’. Fool she was. (p. 23)
40. Le corps-à-corps avec la mère, pp. 29–30. ‘It is also necessary, if we are not to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, for us to assert that there is a genealogy of women. there is a genealogy of women within our family: on our mothers' side we have mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, and daughters. Given our exile in the family of the father-husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity’. (The Irigaray Reader, p. 44.)
41. Foucher, Michèle, ‘La Table’, Avant-Scène-Théâtre 636 (15–10–1978).Google Scholar First performed at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg in 1977. Quotations here are from the English version, ‘The Table: Womenspeak’, in Makward and Miller, Plays by French and Francophone Women.
42. Miller, Judith Graves, ‘Contemporary Women's Voices in French Theatre’, Modern drama (03 1989), p. 10.Google Scholar
43. ‘The stage represents a dining room … In the foreground, a table which cuts the room in two & The table must be central; it represents the only possible meeting place between the Mother and the Daughter (the meal, only moment when they meet), but this is also the time when, forced to get together, they devour each other: the table is a place of sacrifice. Finally, since they never connect, the table also represents the boundary that separates them’. Hinschberger, Claire, L'Interrupteur (Paris: Papiers, 1986), p. 13.Google Scholar First performed in 1986 by the Théâtre Ouvert de Luxembourg at the Festival de l'Acte in Metz. My translation.
44. Counihan, , ‘An Anthropological View of Western Women's Prodigious Fasting’, p. 359.Google Scholar