ABSTRACT
In Western culture, women have borne the primary responsibility for food preparation and management. This has often been read as a means of oppression: keeping them barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen – or, in the Victorian case, elegantly shod, in a delicate condition and issuing correct orders to the housemaid. Here, I propose that, in Victorian spiritualism, food management provided more; it became a means for women to gain a voice in the faith, but, more significantly, to gain spiritual control and authority while successfully operating under the aegis of womanly propriety. There are, after all, few things considered more feminine than food management – especially in the home, where spiritualism was often practised. Moreover, the connection between manipulation of food and of the social landscape makes sense in a faith that centralized ‘communing’ across boundaries (between the living and the dead, God and humanity, the spiritual and the material) and the ingestion of food as both Eucharist communion and a form of pleasure. In fact, if we trace the connections between body and bread in the faith, they provide insight into a host of ways in which women reconfigured their relations to others, countering notions of the woman as passive spiritual receptacle and crafting new articulations of physical (and often erotic) acts like eating, touching and the use their own bodies. This significant retheorizing of the self may have even helped nurture the evolution of cultural norms outside the faith.
