“Bonbons in Abundance”: The Politics of Sweetness in Kate Chopin’s Fiction

Abstract

Critical writing on the fiction of Kate Chopin is marked by culinary inattentiveness. Unlike Chopin’s representation of sexuality or urban space or medical practice, her mappings of complex food cultures in Creole and Cajun settlements in late- nineteenth-century Louisiana have failed to generate significant interest. Compared with critical fascination with the vestimentary in her work—there is a veritable hermeneutics of Edna Pontellier’s bathing suit in The Awakening (1899)—the alimentary has fared badly.1 This chapter addresses, therefore, a major deficit in Chopin scholarship. Reserving for another occasion analysis of the politics of jambalaya, gumbo, and other savories mentioned by Chopin, we take sugar consumption as our subject instead and pursue references to sweet foodstuffs across not only The Awakening but also the earlier novel At Fault (1890), the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), and several uncollected short fictions. The sugary will be interpreted here as key to Chopin’s negotiation of regional, national, racial, ethnic, gender, and class identities. In claiming such cultural significance for this food type, we follow the example of sugar’s foremost historian, Sidney Mintz: “Studying the varying use of a single ingestible like sugar is rather like using a litmus test on particular environments” (Sweetness and Power 7).