ABSTRACT
At meals the author was very abstemious always, while the author took nothing in the middle of the day except a glass of wine and a biscuit. Throughout Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, things meant for eating and even things not meant for eating are described deliciously, with tasty words at the tip of the narrator’s tongue. The effect of the Alice stories, like that of In Search of Lost Time, is to emphasize consumption based on withholding. Consider those tarts, stolen but not eaten. Like Oppenheim’s work, the Alice stories present a reader with plenty of feeding, but not much nurturing. Although not named as such, nor even seen, Lethe, the meandering river of forgetfulness, is everywhere in the geography of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Falling headfirst right down that rabbit hole “filled with cupboards,” Alice initiates the eating down under by grabbing a jar labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” although “to her great disappointment it was empty”.
