ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the instructions given to American matrons and girls in the nineteenth-century didactic or household manuals, as well as some of the era's most popular novels. Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, Maria Susanna Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner all deploy the power of the breakfast table. Towards the beginning of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mr Shelby addresses the slave trader Haley in conciliatory terms. According to Beecher and the other authors of the household manuals, the American housewife would do well to recognize and embrace her authority. Writing for an audience attuned to the cultural meaning of the breakfast table, nineteenth-century American novelists frequently encoded messages of identity, inclusion, gender roles, and emotional power in this culturally relevant setting. The didactic manuals and novels of mid-century America emphasized the breakfast table, in part, in order to continue educating the general public on the differences between American and European identities.
