Reading Food in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks (1871)

Abstract

In her edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s French and Italian Notebooks for publication in 1871 as Passages from the French and Italian Notebooks, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s safeguarding of her husband’s popular image as a highly spiritual writer is partly accomplished by her treatment of his references to food. Both her excisions and the mentions preserved in the text contribute to creating a specific persona of the writer that makes manifest some of the tensions between realism and idealism, materiality and spirituality, that are common themes in Hawthorne research, but only occasionally viewed from the perspective of food studies. The writer’s evolving relation to foreign food is linked to the evolution of his vision of art, revealing the significance of the culturally loaded element of food in relation to identity, and presenting a more nuanced image of Hawthorne’s relation to the material world.