“Fidelity to Both Pleasure and Humiliation.” On M.F.K. Fisher’s Feminist Realism

In 1943, M.F.K. Fisher published The Gastronomical Me, an interwar food memoir chronicling her move from the US to Dijon, by way of Strasbourg, Lausanne, Marseille, Guadalajara. At the time, food writing was a genre that neatly sat as a “women’s domain” and TGM was published into a crowded market that included reads such as 1940 Hostess Cook Book and Calavo, the Aristocrat of Salad Fruits. But as all those recipe books, cooking manuals, and food memoirs were slowly lost to the annals of time, what was it that kept Fisher’s work alive for readers decades later?

TGM has all the underpinnings of a trendy, pulpy modern bestseller—mad sexual politics, farcical political theatre, a palpable homoeroticism. But most enduringly, Fisher had designs on something rather tricky: she aimed to tell the truth about women. TGM chronicles how it felt to be part-appendage to a husband, to witness sexual brutality inflicted on the “undeserving,” and to swat away a conveyor belt of French men at endless dinners. Alongside her viciously pointed writing about food, Fisher’s most astute observations are less about meals and more about interwar womanhood—what she herself terms “female realism.”

As Fisher attends a dinner one evening, one of the guests floats the idea of inviting Klorr, a locally-known man who Fisher deems “the most rat-like human I have ever seen.” While the men at the table dissent and groan at the prospect of Klorr, a female dinner guest welcomes his presence on the grounds of his power and importance. “We will be glad to have a friend in him,” she says, acknowledging the value in keeping one’s enemies close. Fisher is slightly astounded, admiring the “enormity, the basically female realism of it,” that is, the insistence on practicality, the sharp eye for social dynamics, and broad truthfulness over idealism. Put simply, it’s something women tend to be markedly better at than men—tact.

In the face of rather rigid bourgeois sexual politics where men are the chasers and women the chased, Fisher displays an unerring ambivalence—she desires both independence and interdependence. “Not all wives were like me” she says, “but I have never profited from being away from men I have truly loved, for more than a few days.” For Fisher, romance starts in a deficit model that must be carefully nurtured into credit, and the truth of it is that women are to be those nurturers of “that delicate web,” the “invisible thread of understanding and sympathy” that “they should not risk tearing.”

To a contemporary audience, it seems Fisher is writing (decades earlier) in opposition to Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint, wherein “women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking.” If, as Berlant puts it, the central ideal of women’s participation in heterosexual culture is their “disappointment in the tenuous relation of romantic fantasy to lived intimacy” then Fisher gets ahead of all that disappointment by living in close proximity to the truth of that tenuousness. In one chapter, for instance, Fisher describes being deeply in love and intimately close with her husband, and then a few sections later: “I came back alone to America, to tell my family that I was going to get a divorce from Al. Chexbres said, “Why not write it?” I had no answer; I felt I must do it myself, a kind of castigation for hurting good people.” She writes with one foot in reality, however unsentimental that reality may seem.

If men are the “coarse, stupid and fantastic” simpletons of the TGM, women, including and especially Fisher herself, do not get off lightly—self-obsession and unwieldy lust abound. As she sails across the sea, Fisher laments “I wanted everyone to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.”

In “My First Oyster,” an essay near the start of the book, the sapphic undertones come thick and fast, a sort of knowing wink as Fisher recalls her girls’ school formal. An older student, Inez, attempts seduction while Fisher herself yearns for the class president who “moved about the school in a loose-limbed dreamy way that seemed to me seraphic.” All the while, Inez teases her to eat her first oyster, “Try one, Baby-face. It ain’t the heat, it’s the humidity. Try one. Slip and go easy.” The triangulation between the three girls, as well as the near-erotic madness of their school cook, ends in Fisher “suddenly and violently” wishing to never see an oyster again.

At the level of the sentence, Fisher is rightly lauded; Auden said of her, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose;” David Foster Wallace famously semi-poached her title “Consider the Oyster” for his essay collection. Aside from her provocations, the descriptions in TGM stay humming in your chest—a dinner guest with “white, thick skin, the kind that would bend a hypodermic needle;” the “cerulean blood” of a mouse; or the observation that “the tugging of the moon can somewhat safely be ignored by men, and left to the more pliant senses of women and seeds and an occasional warlock.”

And, of course, the food. In TGM, food is mythic—as close to pure sensation as one can get. Meals are little electric shocks that wake one up to oneself. After one dish, for example, Fisher begins to cry, calling it, amongst other things, “a flick from the whip of melancholia… terrifying… nameless.” She speaks of one friend whose “loneliness made her own food bitter to her.” And yet food also heals that loneliness; “The spaghetti was like ashes, because I felt myself coming to life again.” Food is art, it’s sexy—it gets you out of the banality of disassociation (surely a constant in interwar Europe) and into your body; “it not only surrounds me with a wall of awe, but makes my private life more interesting and keeps me from boredom.”

To Fisher, food is the domain where no men or children or expectations need intrude. In fact, one of her biggest food joys in TGM is to eat as a solo drifter. “I taught myself to enjoy being alone,’” she says, “if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I “knew my way around”; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them.”

And so, we are left with the half-scolding, half-confessional legacy of The Gastronomical Me. Fisher is keenly aware of her woman-shaped role, contingent on an entire infrastructure of heterosexuality, of time, of women’s beauty, freedom. Her repulsion towards sentimentality bypasses the ideals of what a food writer—or any writer—should attend to. With fidelity to both pleasure and humiliation in equal measure, she’d rather just tell us the truth of what is.