Alice Weinreb
Taste no Evil: The Dangers of the Mouth in Ancient Rome
Summary
The essay grapples with the erotic overtones of culinary literature of Ancient Rome. By compiling a wide range of sources, including poetry, drama, and historical writings, the author attempts to reconstruct the metaphoric and symbolic values of the Roman food-world. Locating this world around the problematic construction of an elite Roman masculinity, she argues that the mouth became both literal and metaphoric center of manliness, and ultimately thus Roman-ness. Because of its liminal position on the body and its vague gender identity and attributes, the construction of the os impurum, the mouth polluted by contact with the world of sexuality and food, haunts much of the Roman writing. Embodying a dangerous bridge between sexual pleasure and gustatory pleasure, the mouth, envisioned as cause and effect of oral sex and oral consumption, was posited as a profound threat and a main site of vulnerability for the masculine body. Descriptions of feasts, criticisms of table manners, recipes, and erotic verse, all are woven together to locate the mouth at the heart of the literary Roman self, and present to the modem reader a startlingly graphic and disturbing vision of the erotic and grotesque body.
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Zasady cytowania
Nr 4 (2002)
Opublikowane:
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski