Food metaphors in Gerard Manley Hopkins

As anthropologists and cultural theorists have amply demonstrated, the consumption of food is a ritual activity. For Mary Douglas, food categories constitute a social boundary system which significantly shapes subjectivity, and represent the convergence of material (biological) and moral (cultural) elements. Similarly, Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that, by incorporating food into the body, we turn it into our self both literally and symbolically. Our nourishing practices carry the symbolic weight of our self-construction as socialized beings, who then acquire specific identity markers. Religious beliefs themselves pivot around food ceremonies, as confirmed by the centrality of the Eucharist in Christianity. All these aspects are relevant for an understanding of Hopkins’s troping of food as a component of ritualised ascetic practices. Besides embodying the ideals to which individuals aspire in their process of self-creation, food represents social and existential fears that ultimately evoke the spectres of death and self-dissolution. As Julia Kristeva contends, “food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection”: it incarnates a deep-rooted fear of meaninglessness, of “what disturbs identity, system, order”. If the process of abjection entails a confrontation between the self and otherness, the dread of what is “not me” is often expressed through gothic metaphors of devourment. In an imperialistic age like Victoria’s, images of cannibalism, vampirism and feral repasting render mounting anxieties of reverse colonization. Hopkins himself seems to (more or less consciously) draw on such gothicised images in his writings. This article aims to ascertain to what extent Hopkins appropriates and reconfigures tropes of food consumption that circulated widely in his cultural milieu. On the basis of food theories developed in the last fifty years, the article examines some poems that include images of ingestion and reflect on the specific cultural desires or fears they express. In particular, it proves that Hopkins’s rather infrequent food metaphors are worth exploring as they convey two main sets of meaning. On the one hand, some metaphors render the physicality of the divine, which the poet tirelessly sought to express through language (i.e. in "The Wreck"). Early poems such as “The Habit of Perfection”, “Barnfloor and Winepress” and “Easter Communion”, moreover, offer clues to his connection between food, asceticism and aestheticism, which is also found in his letters and lectures. On the other hand, food sometimes conveys a disempowering sense of uncanniness and anguish. This sense permeates poems written at various times, but it is best visible in some “terrible sonnets” (i.e., “Carrion Comfort”), whose tropes of devourment and disgust pose a threat to the subject’s socialised identity.