Challenging Contemporary Narrative Theory: The Alternative Textual Strategies of Nineteenth‐Century Manuscript Cookbooks

Abstract

Cookies 2 eggs, 2 cups of Sugar, 1 cup of Milk, 1 Cup of butter[,] 1/2 nutmeg, 1 teaspoon of quick yeast[,] flour enough to make into a stiff dough, roll and cut out, dampen the top with water[,] dip into white sugar, then bake in a quick oven, From Sallie. -Mary Smith's cookbook, 1874 We cannot assume that a text.. tells no story because it does not make its story explicit, formally organized, and finished (that is, fully narrative); we cannot even assume that explicitness is universally a sign of full -Marilyn Robinson Waldman, On Narrative Cookbooks, relegated to the sphere and the realm of domestic economy, have long been considered inconsequential if not altogether immaterial, and certainly have never attained the status of literary text or been considered a part of the canon of American literature. And yet while they seem, as Anne Bower notes, innocent of narrative force (1), they contain an implicit narrative structure and a wealth of cultural and sociohistorical material invaluable to scholars of the nineteenth century and women's history and culture. To begin to adequately define in the nineteenth century requires a willingness to consider a variety of texts never before contemplated as literary works-including cookbooks, quilts, account books, and other cultural artifacts.' In Mythologies, Roland Barthes examines how culture can be read as a text, and how cultural artifacts or myths-everything from soap powder to wrestling matches to guide books-contain a system of signs that can be interpreted and understood both semiologically and ideologically. Barthes thus enlarges the notion of text, extending semiological and narrative analyses into realms. Comparable artifacts from the nineteenth century can also be read semiologically and narratively, including the more overtly literary texts accessible to women (particularly middle-class women) such as magazines, advice books, domestic manuals, pamphlets, fiction, and sermons, but also forms typically defined and designated as nonliterary such as cookbooks, diaries, quilts, fashion, pottery, tapestry weaving, and other arts. By extending structural, semiological, and narrative analyses into these supposedly realms, contemporary scholars of nineteenth-century culture can begin to understand more fully the myriad and complex ways that women expressed themselves, created an institutionalized network of conventions, rituals, and customs based in same-sex relations, and, significantly, developed textual strategies that complicate modern notions of narrativity. Nineteenth-century private manuscript cookbooks are explicit emblems of women's relegation to the domestic sphere, maintaining, as they did, institutionalized patriarchal systems, and serving the organizational core of that system, the family. More than just a collection of recipes or receipts (as they were commonly called), manuscript cookbooks comprised the literary text of the nineteenth-century housekeeper, playing a crucial role in maintaining communal structure, social ties, and cultural tradition. These cookbooks inscribe a narrative which figures household protagonists as protectors of domestic sanctity able to deliver the family from disorder, disease, and waste. Despite the cookbook's overtly collusive function, though, its makers reappropriated the cookbook form and transformed it into a locus of female artistry, empowerment, and social reform. The reappropriation of cookbooks' otherwise domestic function demonstrates not only women's efforts toward empowering themselves and the spaces they inhabited, but also reflects their development of alternative textual strategies that contest dominant conceptions of narrative. Nineteenth-century private unpublished domestic cookbooks are an important example of a material and socioliterary form excluded from critical scholarship by rudimentary concepts of canonicity, overly literal notions of narrativity, and limited ideas about what constitutes a literary text. …