 |
| Newnham College |
It is a shame to lift the meal descriptions out of their full, intricate context. I am not sure their brilliance will survive the attempt, but I shall try. Here is the Oxbridge luncheon:
"It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten. It is part of the novelist's convention not to mention soup and salmon and ducklings, as if soup and salmon and ducklings were of no importance whatsoever, as if nobody ever smoked a cigar or drank a glass of wine. Here, however, I shall take the liberty to defy that convention and to tell you that the lunch on this occasion began with soles, sunk in a deep dish, over which the college cook had spread a counterpane of the whitest cream, save that it was branded here and there with brown spots like the spots on the flanks of a doe. After that came the partridges, but if this suggests a couple of bald, brown birds on a plate you are mistaken. The partridges, many and various, came with all their retinue of sauces and salads, the sharp and the sweet, each in its order; their potatoes, thin as coins but not so hard; their sprouts, foliated as rosebuds but more succulent. And no sooner had the roast and its retinue been done with than the silent serving-man...set before us, wreathed in napkins, a confection which rose all sugar from the waves. To call it pudding and so relate it to rice and tapioca would be an insult. Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, ...the...profound, subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse."
 |
| Girton College, from an old postcard |
Here is the Fernham dinner, several pages later:
"Here was my soup. Dinner was being served in the great dining-hall. ...It was a plain gravy soup. There was nothing to stir the fancy in that. One could have seen through the transparent liquid any pattern that there might have been on the plate itself. But there was no pattern. The plate was plain. Next came beef with its attendant greens and potatoes - a homely trinity, suggesting the rumps of cattle in a muddy market, and sprouts curled and yellowed at the edge, and bargaining and cheapening, and women with string bags on Monday morning. There was no reason to complain of human nature's daily food, seeing that the supply was sufficient and coal-miners doubtless were sitting down to less. Prunes and custard followed. And if any one complains that prunes, even when mitigated by custard, are an uncharitable vegetable (fruit they are not), stringy as a miser's heart and exuding a fluid such as might run in misers' veins who have denied themselves wine and warmth for eighty years and yet not given to the poor, he should reflect that there are people whose charity embraces even the prune. Biscuits and cheese came next, and here the water-jug was liberally passed round, for it is the nature of biscuits to be dry, and these were biscuits to the core. That was all. The meal was over. Everybody scraped their chairs back; the swing-doors swung violently to and fro; soon the hall was emptied of every sign of food and made ready no doubt for breakfast next morning. ...conversation for a moment flagged. The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together,...a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes."I'm in no position to critique the respective menus, since I barely recognize most of the entrées. (This was [admittedly British] food of my great-grandmother's era, by the way!) It is the ambiance as much as the menu that Woolf dislikes. The "silent serving man" at Oxbridge contrasts with the crowded dining hall and scraping chairs at Fernham. At Oxbridge the meal lasts as long as the diners wish, while at Fernham it ends on a schedule. The most curious thing about the two meals is Woolf's insistence that good eating is necessary to good thinking. George Orwell says something similar in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). Do we think this anymore, in our age of overabundance? I associate good eating with feeling sleepy... Good thinking goes with coffee and a muffin!
Personally, I think Woolf was too picky about the food at Fernham, but I'm not complaining about A Room of One's Own. Like an impressionist painting, it may disintegrate upon close examination but it is a highly effective whole. The food is fictional; Woolf is using it to capture the long history of women's exclusion from academic leisure.
