Natalia Andrievskikh

Food Symbolism, Sexuality, and Gender Identity

in Fairy Tales and Modern Women’s Bestsellers

“I love my pizza so much, in fact, that I have come to believe in

my delirium that my pizza might actually love me, in return. I am
having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair.”—Elizabeth
Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love (79)

“If there’s a sexier sound on this planet than the person you’re in
love with cooing over the crepes you made for him, 1don’t know
what it is.”—Julie Powell, Julie and Julia (223)

Given the basic, primary importance of food, it comes as no

surprise that food imagery comprises the lion’s share of all the sym­
bols created by humanity. Throughout cultures and epochs, metaphors
of consumption act as a major symbolic vehicle to both convey and
shape concepts of sexuality, agency, and gender identity. In literary
and popular contexts, appetite often stands for sexual desire, descrip­
tions of eating mask language of possession, and representations
of cooking express both enslavement and empowerment. Perhaps
predictably so, food symbolism carries a particular importance for
women due to the culturally determined association of women with
cooking and nourishment. In this essay I will discuss the intersections
and similar functions of food imagery observed in traditional fairy
tales and in two examples of contemporary, popular culture narratives
written by women: Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman s Search fo r Every­
thing Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
and Julie and Julia: My Year o f Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell
(2005). Drawing on examples from these texts, I will outline how
food imagery across folklore and contemporary popular literature
contexts serves to address issues relevant to and of special concern
for women. Through establishing structural and symbolic similarities
between fairy tales and popular narratives (in this case memoirs), this
article will attempt to align contemporary women’s bestsellers with an
older narrative pattern about women’s lives.
In terms of genre, both texts are personal memoirs, i.e. nar­
ratives that claim to tell a story that has actually happened. Placing

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texts of autobiographical character together with fairy tales, which,

by definition, are fictional stories that could not have happened in
reality, presents a rich possibility for scholarly inquiry. A number of
recent studies have addressed the issues that arise at the intersection
of these genres, such as the “thin blue line” between truth and fiction
or the role of the fairy-tale mode in shaping the autobiographical “1”
(see Kate Bemheimer, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, and Kevin Smith,
among others). However, the present analysis does not make its goal
to elaborate on the contribution that fairy tales make to the develop­
ment of the autobiographic genre. Rather, I will treat the two analyzed
memoirs as a subtype of the wider category of contemporary popular
narratives. The major reason is these texts’ affinity with romance nov­
els, albeit based on real events. Search for fulfillment and romantic
love are prominent, even though not the only central, topics of both
Gilbert’s and Powell’s books.
Fairy tales and certain modern popular culture narratives can
be placed in the same genre category due to their shared structural
similarities and the underlying belief in magic. In fact, the modern
society that seemingly no longer believes in fairy tales is still engaged
in creation of them, only in new, less obvious ways. However, the
significance of these popular narratives lies not as much in the wish-
fulfillment element they possess, but more in providing a psychologi­
cally sound model to deal with anxieties readily identified by readers.
Conflicts and struggles represented in popular narratives are typical
for the contemporary society and protagonists represent the every-
man (or rather, everywoman) figure that appeals to general audiences.
Similarly, characters of fairy tales are “typical rather than unique,”
which helps the reader to identify with the characters and ensures the
therapeutic effect of the narrative (Bettelheim 8). Bruno Bettelheim
emphasizes the timeless psychological relevance of fairy-tale narra­
tives: “True, on an overt level, fairy tales teach little about the specific
conditions of life in modem mass society . . . [but we can learn from
them] about the inner problems of the human beings, and of the right
solutions to their predicaments in any society” (5). Likewise, the two
popular texts I will discuss deal with psychological conflicts that ring
true for any time and society: the need of self-expression, struggle to
define one’s identity as a woman, and embarking on a journey to un­
derstand one’s own desires and fears.

Food as Magic Agent on the Hero’s Journey

Both analyzed narratives are accounts of psychological strug-

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gle and recovery. Elizabeth, the narrator in Gilbert’s book, is at a point

in her life when she is no longer content with the role of a wife. She
has settled too early and now feels imprisoned in her own house;
moreover, she recognizes that she has issues with setting personal
boundaries in relationships with men. To break out of her domestic
prison, Elizabeth initiates a divorce and embarks on a journey to three
different countries. The gastronomic adventures she has while travel­
ling provide Elizabeth with an unlikely medium for soul-searching
and exploration of her sexuality. Similarly, Powell’s narrator is a mar­
ried woman “pushing thirty,” with failed dreams of becoming an ac­
tress, and on the brink of depression. Julie’s job does not bring her
satisfaction, yet she does not yet feel ready to plunge into motherhood
as an alternative to a career. Following an impulse, she commits to
a project that involves cooking 524 recipes in one year from Julia
Child’s famous cookbook, as well as blogging about the experience
every morning. With its ups and downs, the “year of cooking dan­
gerously” proves to be a psychological journey to self-discovery and
self-expression.
The threefold title of Gilbert’s book intuitively affirms the
important psychological truth that any significant change happens in
stages. First, one needs to acknowledge one’s repressed needs and
desires; eating unlimited quantities of food in Italy marks this stage
for Elizabeth. Then, a spiritual cleansing has to happen in order to
come to terms with oneself and one’s past. In the book, this stage cor­
responds to Elizabeth’s meditation in India and her self-questioning
and looking back on her life. Then, at the next stage, personal integra­
tion is achieved, which is marked by the narrator’s readiness to enter a
new relationship, more spiritually fulfilling than the previous ones. In
the case of Powell, there are no clear-cut stages to her transformative
journey, just as there is no actual, physical journey as such. Unlike
Elizabeth, she never leaves for foreign lands in search of fulfillment,
but finds it at home. However, the process of her personal growth
takes a calendar year and therefore comes full circle, structuring the
narrative according to the rules of mythological time. Over the year,
Julie goes through periods of success and failure, dealing with differ­
ent psychological and culinary challenges. As she is slowly mastering
the art of French cooking together with the art of self-sufficiency and
joy, Julie also undertakes a journey not unlike that of a fairy-tale hero.
That fairy-tale (and mythical) heroes must go on a journey is
a widely recognized motif. Joseph Campbell, a renowned American
mythologist, named this narrative pattern a monomyth, arguing that

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cultures throughout the world have similar stories following the same
basic blueprint (Campbell). Vladimir Propp, the author of Morphol­
ogy o f the Folktale, also famously pointed out universal patterns in the
narrative structure of fairy tales, thus providing a helpful guide to fur­
ther studies of the genre. Usually, the initial situation that prompts the
hero to start a journey is some “lack” or “insufficiency” that the hero
has to remedy (Propp 34). Among various things that might be lack­
ing, Propp distinguishes several categories, such as lack of a bride,
lack of “rationalized forms” such as money or means of existence,
and lack of a magical agent or a wonder-of-wonders (34). “Translat­
ing” fairy-tale material into that of contemporary popular narratives,
there is a definite similarity between the initial situations that set the
hero on a journey. Both analyzed narratives start with the narrators
feeling unhappy; both Elizabeth and Julie find themselves wishing for
the “wonder-of-wonders”-joy and meaning of life. Julie character­
izes herself as “a secretary-shaped confederation of atoms, fighting
the inevitability of mediocrity and decay” (Powell 125). Elizabeth is
desperately looking for escape from her unhappy marriage: “The only
thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more
impossible than staying was leaving . . . . I just wanted to slip quietly
out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then
not stop running until 1 reached Greenland” (Gilbert 12). Their deter­
mination to actively search for a better life places Julie and Elizabeth
in the category of heroes that Propp calls “seeker-hero” (20).
In Russian folklore, the following pattern is widespread: the
hero comes to Baba Yaga, a witch who lives deep in the woods, to ask
for advice.1 The woods, according to Jungian interpretation of fairy­
tale motifs, represent the unconscious mind; therefore, entering the
woods is symbolic of a journey into one’s soul. Typically, Baba Yaga,
instead of offering advice right away, first treats the hero to dinner—as
she does in “The Frog-Tsarevna,” for instance. Then, the guest is invit­
ed to wash himself in the Russian banya, or bath, which, besides being
a cornerstone of Russian tradition, is symbolic of spiritual cleansing.
After that, the guest “sleeps on it” until morning to gain emotional
distance from the problem. Then the scenario can go two ways: either
a sexually attractive partner provides help in resolution of the prob­
lem or the hero is able to find a solution on his or her own, which is
still followed by a new relationship, usually a marriage. Thus, the last
stage of the transformation process is finding love, which is seen as a
prize and fulfillment that comes after the hero overcomes the struggles

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of soul-searching. However, the first and crucial stage is indulging

one’s desires and fulfilling the most immediate needs through sharing
food, which often has a supernatural effect on the eater.
The tendency to consider certain foods special and endowed
with magic is as ancient as humanity. In traditional belief, potions
and decoctions can heal illness and arouse love; certain foods, for
example apples, may bestow the eater with youth, beauty, or immor­
tality. James Frazer in his monumental work on what he calls “primi­
tive thought” describes the law of contagious magic that “commits
the mistake of assuming that things which have once been in contact
with each other are always in contact” (13). According to this belief,
certain qualities of food can be transferred to the eater through con­
tact: “The ancient Greeks thought that to eat the flesh of the wakeful
nightingale would prevent a man from sleeping” (Frazer 36). Propp
ascribes food the function of magic helper or agent, one of the crucial
functions in the development of a tale. Often the fairy-tale hero has to
consume an animal or a part of it to acquire supernatural abilities: for
example, “three beverages provide the drinker with unusual strength;
the eating of a bird’s giblets endows heroes with various magical qual­
ities” (Propp 45).
In addition to being a magic agent helping the hero to ac­
cess his inner strength, food has a celebratory function. Most fairy
tales end with a feast that shows no moderation.3 Notably, popular
narratives about food have a tendency to celebrate pleasure from eat­
ing. Eating without constraint certainly represents refusal to conform
to socially determined gender behavior marked by moderation and
constant worry about body image. Comparing her own eating habits
in Italy and back home, Elizabeth says: “In my real life, 1 have been
known to eat organic goat’s milk yoghurt sprinkled with wheat germ
for breakfast” (Gilbert 81). Now, on her soul-searching journey, she
does not think about eating “organic” and healthy or keeping track of
the quantity of what she consumes: “Homemade limoncello liqueur.
Homemade red wine. Pasta served in unbelievable quantities...” (59).
Moreover, she does not care about the appearances and conventions of
eating in public, “sopping up the leftover gravy from my plate with a
hunk of bread and then licking my fingers” (59). The sense of freedom
is empowering and provides Elizabeth with a new relationship to her
own body: “when I look at myself in the mirror in the best pizzeria in
Naples, I see a bright-eyed, clean-skinned, happy and healthy face,”-
and that is despite weight gain that apparently would have troubled
Elizabeth back in “real life” (81).2

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“I Could Eat You Up:” Food Consumption and Sexuality

In both Eat, Pray, Love and Julie and Julia, eating functions
as rebellion against restrictions imposed by society’s idea of woman­
hood. Modem Western society persistently exercises disciplinary uses
of food. In his 2005 address to the American Folklore Association
devoted to food symbolism in culture, Michael Jones discusses appe­
tite in relation to gender identity. He cites cross-cultural research that
shows instances when demonstrating healthy appetite in women is in­
terpreted as “acting up” and giving in to passions. As a result, females
often feel a pressure to downplay their appetite, especially in public:
“research on female college students demonstrates that being thin and
eating lightly function as social indicators of femininity because of
their importance in achieving status, popularity, and sexual partners”
(Jones 135). A similar example Jones mentions from literature takes
place in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, in which Scarlett
O’Hara famously eats a full dinner before going to a barbeque in order
to be able to eat daintily in public. Furthermore, many foodstuffs are
considered more masculine, or more aggressive and sexually marked,
and therefore not appropriate for female diets: Victorian women, for
example, “rejected meat associating a carnivorous diet with sexual
precocity, abundant menstrual flow, and even nymphomania and in­
sanity . . . . Spices and condiments also excited the sensual nature
rather than moral character of a young woman . . . . Then and now,
denial of appetite expressed an ideal of female perfection and moral
superiority,” Jones reflects (141).
In this regard, appetite for food is inseparable from sexual
appetite. Sexual desire sublimated into a socially accepted sphere of
food consumption is one undeniably important food-related motif
found in folklore and popular genres. Mark Morton in Eat Your Words
remarks that “the language of food and the language of sex often tan­
gle and interpenetrate, like the tongues of kissing cousins” (Morton
8). In an article on aphrodisiac foods, Miriam Hospodar points out
that the popular belief in the power of certain foodstuffs to increase
sexual potency is reflected in language: “Food and sex are bedrock
to the survival of the species and have been rocking in bed together
for as long as they have kept all creatures great and small alive. Lan­
guages on several continents have words that mean both ‘to copulate’
and ‘to eat’” (82). One fairy-tale example of such a double entendre
is the Big Bad Wolf gobbling up Little Red Riding Hood (Zipes 10).

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While fairy-tale weddings mostly resort to scenes of a feast to signify

sexual pleasures of the newly-wed couple, modem popular narratives
are more explicit in solidifying the connection between food and sex
through suggestive descriptions.
The narrator in Eat, Pray, Love does not directly indulge in
sexual pleasures on her journey, yet this does not mean suppression
of sexual desire. Back in “real life,” sexual relationship for Elizabeth
meant subordination and disappearing in the partner, rather than ac­
knowledgment of her own needs. Now, through playful exploration
of gastronomic pleasures, she is able to realize and symbolically ex­
press what it is that she wants, as well as enjoy herself in newly found
independence. Food is often described in the book with the use of
explicitly sexually charged language: “Sausages of every imaginable
size, color and derivation are stuffed like ladies’ legs into provoca­
tive stockings, swinging from the ceiling of the butcher shops. Lusty
buttocks of hams hang in the windows, beckoning like Amsterdam’s
high-end hookers” (Gilbert 97). Sexual constraints are thus symboli­
cally broken. It comes as no surprise, then, that the next episode in
the book describes how Elizabeth goes out to buy a transatlantic flight
ticket’s worth of lingerie, all of which she buys to please herself, not
a partner (105).
Powell also explicitly invites her readers to ponder the af­
finity between sex and food. Early on in the narrative, Julie makes a
confession about two books that have ever captured her imagination,
pulling the strings of desire and longing: “If The Joy o f Sex was my
first taste of sin, Mastering the Art o f French Cooking was my second”
(Powell 30). Both books share the same seductive quality: the appeal
of the forbidden fruit, be that the promise of sexual discoveries or
rich and savory descriptions of exotic dishes. Writing about her cook­
ing experiments, Julie often emphasizes this association through vivid
imagery. Consider, for instance, this description of making mouclades
together with her husband: “I . . . steamed them in vermouth flavored
with curry, thyme, fennel seed, and garlic. The kitchen smelled divine,
the mussels were plump and pink and ruffled as tiny vulvas, or per­
haps that comparison was just a reflection of my jaunty mood” (174).
Or, in the episode with cooking bone marrow, which is prefaced with
a hilarious description of the family’s search for a suitable bone, Julie
ponders: “The taste of marrow is rich, meaty, intense in a nearly too-
much way... I could think of nothing at first but that it tasted like re­
ally good sex” (76, emphasis original). Needless to say, Julie feels that
her culinary experiment is not only successful, but also profoundly

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satisfying, even despite several occasional kitchen failures.

Scenes of the Mouth: The Pleasures of Eating and Speaking Up

It is no accident that an overwhelming number of cookbooks
and contemporary food narratives focus their attention on foreign cui­
sine. Trying exotic foods provides freedom from oneself and promises
transformation into a more sophisticated, more experienced, and more
powerful person. This interpretation brings us to the larger academic
conversation on the tendency to exoticize the Other, whom we know
little or nothing about, ascribing all imaginable qualities (either posi­
tive or negative, but always extreme) to the foreign body. Mimicking
the Other is an escape from limitations of one’s own body; it is also a
way to recognize some of one’s own qualities that can become known
only through alienation.
Similarly, descriptions of fairy-tale feasts emphasize the ex­
otic nature of the foodstuffs on the table. The apples of youth are not
your ordinary apples, but those growing in a distant country over­
seas. The wondrous tablecloth offers meals from every far end of the
earth, which obviously echoes the same theme of exotic Otherness.
To try foreign foods is a means to possess the Other, to become the
Other, and therefore to be empowered through the exotic experience.
Both Gilbert’s and Powell’s books feature foreign cuisine, Italian and
French, respectively. Elizabeth obviously takes delight in the foreign­
ness of the food she eats, for example, having for dinner “not only
lamb and truffles and carpaccio rolled around hazelnut mousse, but an
exotic little serving of pickled lampascione, which is—as everyone
knows—the bulb of the wild hyacinth” (Gilbert 56). The exotic expe­
rience of trying the intestines of a new-born lamb, roasted endive, or
a plate of oxtail provides alienation from her ordinary eating routine
and life routine in general.
The opportunity to enjoy an exotic dinner brings forth the joy
of being able to pronounce the foreign names of the served dishes.
Gilbert’s descriptions of these related abilities are reminiscent of a
religious bliss:
For the longest time I could not even touch this food because it was
such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making
something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the
prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my
clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while
reading a newspaper article in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every

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molecule (64).
As seen from this passage, the source of happiness lies both in food
and in the narrator’s newly acquired ability to read in Italian.
In fact, both narratives insightfully emphasize the connec­
tion between the pleasures of eating and speaking. Powell even com­
pares Mastering the Art o f French Cooking to a secret code; the exotic
names of Julia Child’s recipes transform Julie’s dull reality. “Piece
de Boeuf a la Cuillere,” “Boeuf Bourguignon,” “Oeufs en Gelee,”
“Bifsteck Saute au Beurre”—Julie enjoys saying the French names
of her dishes as much as she enjoys tasting the dishes themselves.
Elizabeth chimes in: “All I really wanted was to eat beautiful food
and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible . . . the amount
of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable,
and yet so simple” (Gilbert 63). According to the law of contagious
magic, objects and their names are related to each other; therefore,
pronouncing the names of foreign foodstuffs facilitates possession of
the desired otherness. Notably, eating and speaking are often linked in
folk imagination; for example, abstaining from food during a fast in
many cultures and religions is often accompanied by abstinence from
talking. Lois Marin in his study Food fo r Thought explains the con­
nection between consumption and verbal expression through their lo­
cus in the mouth. According to Marin, “from the moment that the first
cry of want and hunger is released,” human communication serves
to express the desire to possess and consume (36). An infant literally
uses the mouth as a tool of appropriating reality to its own needs,
while at the same time voicing its hunger, the void that it feels within.
The mouth, therefore, is “a locus of need,” as well as of expression
through voice and later, through language (36). The two oral functions
are similar in their ability to symbolically reclaim—digest—take over
the surrounding reality.
Marina Warner also refers to fairy tales themselves as using
the metaphor of hunger. Instead of emphasizing the didactic, restric­
tive function of the ‘wholesome nutriment’ of tales, she suggests that
storytelling is capable of nurturing imagination. She opens From the
Beast to the Blonde with a retelling of a folk story in which a poor
man feeds women with “the meat of his tongue”:
[T]he tongue meats that the poor man feeds the women are not ma­
terial. . . . They are fairy tales, stories, jokes, songs; he nourishes
them on talk, he wraps them in language; he banishes melancholy
by refusing silence. Storytelling makes women thrive—and not ex­
clusively women . . . . When I was young and highly robust, I still

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felt a great hunger for fairy tales; they seemed to offer the possibility
of change, far beyond the boundaries of their improbable plots of
fantastically illustrated pages. The metamorphosis promised more
of the same, not only in fairy-land, but in this world . . . . (xi-xii)
This is another powerful testament to how the female hunger for lib­
erating change finds expression in fairy-tale contexts. Importantly,
Warner emphasizes that the possibility of change reaches beyond the
confines of the plot and imagery; the modality created by the fairy-tale
world stretches to other texts, becomes a characteristic of a certain
mode of expression. ‘In this world’ the transformation happens not
through magic as such, of course, but through the magic of writing and
speaking: the hunger for change is satisfied through the second sphere
of orality—expression through language.
Contemporary feminist writers often explore the theme of eat­
ing disorders as a result of inability to speak up one’s mind and express
one’s needs. Recently, many feminist critics have focused on the link
between eating disorders and what Kristeva terms asymbolia, or in­
ability to express one’s feelings and desires in words (Chernin, Gilbert
and Gubar, Heller and Moran, Sceats). Margaret Atwood’s The Edible
Woman is a widely-cited example of a narrative in which the female
protagonist finds herself unable to eat as she is letting go of control
over her life in general, failing to understand or express what is going
on with her. In a moment of realization, she makes a cake in the shape
of a woman to express her own objectification and powerlessness.
In Julie and Julia, eating and speaking up are similarly re­
lated, only speaking is effectively substituted by writing. Blogging
about her experiences with food and cooking allows Julie to express
herself through humor, create a charming persona, and reach out to
similar-minded people. Julie recognizes the transforming alchemy of
Juliaverse, as she calls her new reality that the cooking project has
brought about: “Here [in the Juliaverse], I took butter and cream and
meat and eggs and I made delicious sustenance. Here, I took my anger
and despair and rage and transformed it with my alchemy into hope
and ecstatic mania. Here, I took a crap laptop and some words that
popped into my head and I turned them into something people wanted,
maybe even needed” (Powell 125). Above all, cooking-as writing-is
a metamorphic (and therefore magical) experience that involves a cre­
ation of something new out of a set of ingredients, “the art of making
something out of nothing” (Gilbert 64).

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Cooking, Female Empowerment, and Succession of Sacred

Knowledge
This interpretation of cooking as empowerment goes against
the mainstream feminist critique of kitchens as a sexist space. As Sher­
rie Inness states in Kitchen Culture in America, references to cook­
ing in conservative contexts are often used to subordinate women,
confining them to traditional gender roles. Commercials that contain
representations of domestic bliss in the kitchen as well as cookbooks
and household manuals reinforce women’s duty as homemakers. In
her cultural case study, Inness identifies kitchen spaces as oppressing,
restrictive, and offering only illusory fulfillment. However, she does
acknowledge that many scholars doubt the statement that cooking lit­
erature necessarily has had a socially conservative role (Inness 8),
recognizing that kitchen spaces can offer more ambiguous and com­
plex messages to consumers. While the domestic sphere proves to be
a space for power struggle between the sexes and subordination of
women, on the opposite end of this axis is the promise of symbolic
empowerment of women through cooking that is one of the central
motifs in modem popular culture (see Avakian and Haber or Visser,
among others). In fairy tales, as well as in contemporary women’s
bestsellers, imagery of cooking allows for expression of female ex­
perience in contexts of transformation, creation, and empowerment.
The actual kitchen space in Julie and Julia, “a crappy out­
er-borough kitchen” (Powell 23), is opposed to the cubicle of her
downtown workplace. Unlike the stifling and soulless office space
that brings no satisfaction, Julie’s kitchen is a place of magic and
transformation. It is an effective alternative to modern society with
its sense of alienation, a call to re-connect with the roots and the lost
knowledge that can transform ordinary reality. Remarkably, the story
of Julie’s initial enchantment with cooking involves the novel Like
Water fo r Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, a fairy tale in its own right.
The main character, Tita, can express her feelings through cooking so
that her dishes have a powerful emotional effect on anybody who tries
them. In Esquivel’s universe, for example, a teardrop in the wedding
cake batter casts deep sadness on all the guests. Julie admits that she
actually tried to replicate the recipe of quail in rose petal sauce, an
aphrodisiac dish from Esquivel’s book, to seduce her future husband
(Powell 216). In fact, then, Julie attempted to master the secret art of
cooking more than once, first following Laura Esquivel’s recipes and
then Julia Child’s.
The motif of the secret knowledge shared by women brings

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Julie and Julia on a level with folklore motifs of initiation into wom­
anhood and female competition. Julie’s personal and spiritual devel­
opment depends on her success in duplicating Julia Child’s achieve­
ment. While Julie admits no explicit intention to compete with Julia,
her project itself is competitive by definition. Julia Child in this case
assumes a role similar to that of the old witch in fairy tales, or else, the
fairy godmother; the difference from the point of view of Jungian psy­
chology would be minimal (see Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother
and Andreas Johns’ Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch
. . .). Child personifies the Mother archetype, an older woman who
possesses knowledge and power. The younger female, Julie, has to
overpower the witch and establish her own female authority as central
to the narrative. The power dynamic here is that of a mother-daughter
relationship that implies the psychological necessity of competition.
Thus, the modem image of a cook in control of her kitchen
is related to the parental figure of the fairy-tale witch through their
exercise of power and subordination of others. Midori Snyder in her
wonderfully written article “In Praise of the Cook” ponders:
Perhaps because the cook, like other ambiguous archetypes, func­
tions as catalyst o f transformation, myths and fairy tales are filled
with all manner o f cooks, some creatively heroic and others deeply
villainous.. . . There are the jealous step-mothers pulling their reci­
pes from black magic cook books to make poisoned apples. And
there are the truly terrifying, the cannibal cooks, who in their jeal­
ous rages extract hearts and livers from their step-children to make
stews which they feed to an unsuspecting parent (Snyder 1).
Snyder calls Baba Yaga of the Russian folklore “the most
powerful of the ambiguous and transformative cooks in the fairy tale
tradition,” who “straddles the threshold between life and death, be­
tween the promise of change and the imminent threat of destruction,
between learning to cook a meal or become the meal. . . . Baba Yaga
is a potent mix of domestic and fantastic—potential helper to the hero
or heroine in the guise of a ferocious grandmother with iron teeth and
wicked claws” (Snyder 2). Both helpful and dangerous, Baba Yaga
will force the hero to prove that he or she is worthy of help. While
she is clearly a cannibal, she can bestow on a deserving hero her wis­
dom, presents, and a blessing of marital bliss with a partner of choice
(as happens in “The Frog-Tsarevna”). Being initiated into her realm
means to some extent becoming like her, and that is an underlying
anxiety behind the idea of womanhood in general and the image of a
woman-cook in particular.

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Tracy Willard in her analysis of female cannibal cooks points

out an important connection between two fairy tales from the Brothers
Grimm collection, “The Juniper Tree” and “Hansel and Gretel.” Both
stories, she observes, feature two children as major characters, whose
roles in the conflict with parental figures are gender-specific (Wil­
lard 22). The girls are drawn into the domestic space of the kitchen
and made part of the cooking process as preparation for womanhood,
while the boys remain outside of the domestic realm or become its
victims. Moreover, the agency demonstrated by the girls in both of
these stories suggests young girls’ potential to choose their own way
of empowerment through accessible tools of domesticity. Naturally,
this empowerment has to happen through confronting and overcom­
ing the wicked female figure (the witch or the evil stepmother), suc­
ceeding as the next authority after her demise.
Even though Julia Child is not Julie’s competitor, Julie feels
threatened by the possibility of Julia’s judgment and disapproval.
Therefore, one of Julie’s challenges is to make peace with Child’s im­
age, accepting the chance that the “real” Julia might not actually like
her (Powell 297). In a way, she has to cut the apron strings to gain full
independence from Julia’s influence after the cooking project is over.
In the end of Powell’s narrative and of “the year of cooking danger­
ously,” Julie makes a pilgrimage to the Smithsonian Institution to visit
Julia Child’s kitchen exhibit.4 There, under Julia’s portrait, she leaves
a box of butter as a tribute to her fairy godmother. Intuitively, Julie
finds the best way to reach a narrative and psychological closure.
The frustrations and triumph that the cooking project brings
to Julie’s life play a crucial role in her transformation into a confident
woman who has “found her way in the world” (Powell 305). What
contributes to the empowerment and successful establishment of self-
worth in Julie and Julia is the element of commercial and professional
success of the project, already established by the time of creation of
the narrative. Similarly, Elizabeth from Eat, Pray, Love also enjoys
the financial fruit of her journey. Both characters are transformed by
their encounters with food and are then able to transcend the sphere of
domesticity to establish themselves as successful public figures.

Conclusion
While a number of scholars have considered food as a theme
in multiple contexts, few attempts have been made so far to relate
the folklore motives of eating and cooking to the larger discourses of
food production and consumption, or to connect fairy-tale and mytho-

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Natalia Andrievskikh

logical material with modern popular narratives. Meanwhile, there is

an important continuity in the ways food imagery is used throughout
both contexts. Symbolic meanings of culinary practices simultane­
ously shape and are shaped by the larger socio-political hierarchy and
corresponding cultural values. To pay attention to food symbols across
genres is to recognize the deepest human desires and anxieties, as well
as ways of conceptualization of self and others.
Notably, all of the meanings presently analyzed express the
underlying desire for power, be that control over oneself and one’s
identity, over public and domestic spaces, or over multiple Others.
Profoundly loaded with metaphors of magic and secret knowledge,
food-related images stand for a variety of ways to achieve empow­
erment— as Julie and Julia and Eat Pray Love illustrate. Rooted in
repressed anxieties related to gender and sexuality, food imagery de­
livers and builds on stereotypical attitudes to gender that influence
popular opinion.

Notes
'For an illustrative selection of such tales, see Afanas’ev.
2See, for example, standard expressions used to describe a feast in
Russian folktales: “riup ropoit” (a mountain of a feast), “nup Ha Becb M a p ”
(a feast for the whole world). Also, see a popular book Fairy-tale Feasts by
Jane Yolen, a renowned expert on folklore.
3Editor’s note: On the body in Eat Pray Love, see also Janani Sub-
ramanian and Jorie Lagerwey in the Fall 2013 issue of this journal.
4I am grateful to my anonymous reviewers for pointing out this
detail.

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 Food, Fairy Tales, and Modern Women’s Bestsellers

Natalia Andrievskikh is a Fulbright alumna and a doctoral candidate in

the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. Her
research areas include Gender and Sexuality in contemporary women’s lit­
erature, Digital Writing, and Rhetoric and Composition Pedagogy. She has
served as Managing Editor of the literary journal The Broome Review and
was the guest editor of Yellow Medicine Review’s Spring 2013 issue devoted
to re-imagining the fairy tale in contemporary indigenous literature. She is
the author of several academic and creative writing publications and is a
Pushcart Prize nominee. An alumna of international professional develop­
ment programs administered by Central European University, Harvard Uni­
versity, and the University of Edinburgh, she has lived, taught, and studied in
Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Scotland, and the U.S.

Studies in Popular Culture 37.1 Fall 2014 153

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