ABSTRACT
Exploring food as an extension of social structure in nineteenth-century children's texts develops understanding of girls' problematic and culturally embedded relationships with food and eating. The social forces of conventional eating habits are particularly oppressive in girl's lives, and struggles with body image, appetite repression, and domestic confinement are overwhelmingly present in these texts. This chapter explores the ways in which several nineteenth-century stories use food and eating behavior as a means of shaping and disciplining girls' bodies. It begins with Louisa May and Eleanor Putnam's stories about girls and young women whose bodies are commodified through constrained, servile relationships to food. Implications of food continually intersect with gender and class construction, and there is a deeply interwoven correlation between food and social structure, as all of these girls learn to prepare and consume food (or not) to elevate or maintain their social status.
