FOOD OR LOVE? MOTHERING, FEEDING, EATING AND DESIRE IN FAY WELDON’S REMEMBER ME

Öz

Since the publication of her first novels, Fay Weldon has been continuously acclaimed as a feminist writer whose writings represent an angry retort at the oppressive conditions which trap the contemporary female personality within the traditional boundaries of a patriarchal society. It may be so, but there are many other literary concerns in her novels which, although regard directly the status of women, become independent thematic perspectives and as such deserve to be topics of critical interest. Among them, food and its consumption, which are the central themes of Remember Me. The present study aims to disclose the ways in which the novelist confers literary significance to food and employs it as a means of rendering the private and social experience of women, which comprises, in the case of this novel, such issues as self-identity, social interaction, wife-husband and mother-child relations, nourishment, love, desire, and sexuality

Anahtar Kelimeler

• food
• eating disorders
• body
• desire
• self-identity
• mother-daughter relationship
• inter-human relationship

FOOD OR LOVE? MOTHERING, FEEDING, EATING AND DESIRE IN FAY WELDON’S REMEMBER ME

Öz

İlk romanlarının yayınlanmasından bu yana Fay Weldon, ataerkil toplumun geleneksel sınırlarında kalan günümüz kadın karakterinin kısıldığı kapanın baskın koşullarını öfkeyle eleştiren feminist bir yazar olarak tanınır. Weldon’ın romanlarında kadınların durumuyla ilgili olsa da eleştirel analiz gerektiren bağımsız tematik perspektifler de yer almaktadır. Bunların arasında Remember Me’nin temel izleği “yemek” ve “yemek tüketimi” olarak kabul edilebilir. Bu çalışma, romancının yemeğe verdiği yazınsal önemin etkilerini açığa çıkarmayı ve onu kadının özel ve toplumsal deneyimlerinin –ki romanda bunlar öz kimlik, sosyal etkileşim, karı-koca ve anne-çocuk ilişkileri, beslenme, aşk, arzu ve cinsellik şeklinde ortaya çıkmaktadır- bir aracı haline getirmesinin önemini ortaya koymayı amaçlar

Anahtar Kelimeler

• yemek
• yemeğe bağlı bozukluklar
• beden
• arzu
• öz kimlik
• anne-kız ilişkisi
• insan ilişkileri

Kaynakça

1. BAKHTIN M. (1968) Rabelais and His World. Cambridge, MITP.
2. CHODOROW N. (1978) The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley, University of California Press.
3. DEMETRAKOPOULOS S. (1982) The Nursing Mother and Feminine Metaphysics: An Essay on Embodiment. In: Soundings: an Interdisciplinary Journal, nr. 65 (4), pp. 430-443.
4. FREUD S. (1961) Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VII. London, Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis.
5. GARNSEY P. (1999) Food and Society in Classical Antiquity. West Nyack, Cambridge University Press.
6. KRISTEVA J. (1982) The Powers of Horror. New York, Columbia University Press.
7. SCEATS S. (2000) Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Port Chester, Cambridge University Press.
8. SCHWARTZ L. (1977) Quartet Plus Ghost: Review of Remember Me by Fay Weldon. In: Village Voice, 3 January 1977, nr. 58, rpt. Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 9.

9. WELDON F. (2003) Remember Me. London, Flamingo.