‘For the cake was so pretty’: Tactile Interventions in Taste; or, Having One’s Cake and Eating It in <i>The Mill on the Floss</i>

Abstract

The feeling of hunger operates under a premise of sensory absence, creating a yearning for taste and for touch. Yet it becomes even more pronounced when a degree of touch is permitted, but taste is denied. In such moments, satiation is brought painfully near, intensifying the emptiness of the stomach. This understanding of physical hunger can be extended to aesthetic desire, reflecting social, intellectual, and sexual longing. Early in The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot constructs a scene in which the three children descending from the Dodsons — Tom and Maggie Tulliver and Lucy Deane — are each given a piece of cake, but are expected to wait to eat it. While holding the cake in their hands, they are not permitted to touch it with their tongues until they are given plates, representing the need for hunger and desire to be ordered by moral respectability. This article examines the ways in which each child’s emotive response to this proximity and denial reveals their aesthetic response to their world. I argue that their capacity to hold onto their cake, as well as to eat it, foreshadows their capacity to negotiate their position within their family and the wider community. The act of eating brings to the fore the tactile quality of tasting, and singularly draws together taste and touch in satisfying hunger and desire. Lucy’s patience, predicated on the aesthetic beauty of the cake, suggests her acceptance of emptiness, while Tom’s impatience and covert consumption of his cake conveys his lack of aesthetic appreciation in favour of capitalist agendas. Maggie’s feelings, however, are the most complex. She drops her cake on the floor, having become ‘fascinated’ by her uncle’s printed image of Ulysses and Nausicaa. As Nausicaa is denied love in Homer’s Odyssey, Maggie will be denied the expression of sexual love. In a moment of aesthetic rapture, the fall of the cake represents Maggie’s own fall with Stephen. The pathos of Maggie’s fall — in that her ultimate self-denial ironically causes her to suffer even more profoundly the social pain of fallenness — is figured most powerfully in her childhood humiliation and unsatisfied hunger.