Abnormal Female Appetites in Wilkie Collins and Florence Marryat

The article investigates the social and symbolic meanings attached to female dietary habits in late-Victorian literature. Special attention is paid to two novels by Wilkie Collins and Florence Marryat, "I Say 'No'" ((1885) and "The Blood of the Vampire" (1897), whose characterization of female gluttons dismantles nineteenth-century gender stereotypes. In an age when food consumption significantly shaped socio-normative models of womanhood, Collins and Marryat used dietary deviance to challenge orthodox images of the woman as nurturer or nonappetitive lady. The subversive function fulfilled by their female gourmands is deciphered in light of recent studies of the discursive intersections between food and gender, as well as of theories developed by anthropologists and cultural critics (i.e. Mary Douglas, Roland Barthes, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida).