Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies perspective. In particular, this book focuses on food as an analytical category in the study of tough masculinity as represented in American hardboiled fiction. Through an examination of six American novels: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett's No Good from a Corpse, Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and Rex Stout's Champagne for One, this book shows how these novels reflect the gradual process of redefining consumption and consumerism in America, which traditionally has been coded as feminine. Marta Usiekniewicz shows that food and eating also reflect power relations and larger social and economic structures connected to class, gender, geography, sexuality, and ability, to name just a few.
Author(s): Marta Usiekniewicz
Series: Crime Files
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 239
City: London
Acknowledgments
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Consumption, Control, and Cannibalism
Missing on the Plate: Food in Crime Fiction
Crime Fiction and the Crisis of White Masculinity
Tough White Masculinity and Austere Consumption
Cannibal at the Table
Tough Masculinity and the Crime Fiction Timeline
Overview
References
Chapter 2: Criminal Consumption in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929)
Prophylactic Impenetrability
The White Isolated Body
Whitewashed and “Queerless” San Francisco
White Consumption
Gender Policing at the Table
Civilizing Masculine Restraint
The Eating Detective
The Masculine Carnivore
Success to Crime
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: Control and Cannibalism in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939)
Consumption and the Subject
Excess and Gendered Consumption
Control, Consumption, Cannibalism, and Abjection
Suspicious Ingestion
Unreliable Narration and Marlowe’s Meals
Homosocial Control and Consumption by Proxy
Drinking to Excess
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Mature Consumption in Leigh Brackett’s No Good from a Corpse (1944)
Genre Blending
Narrating Clive’s Tough Body
Maturity as Hegemonic Masculinity
Consumption and Punishment
Consumption and Homosocial Care
Generic Vice
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: Pathologies of Prophylactic Masculinity in Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947)
Competing White Masculinities: Alienation and Integration
Cannibal: Insatiable Appetites and Restraint
Spectacular Consumption of Food
Masculinity, Girth, and Embodiment
Racializing Domesticity
Conclusion
References
Chapter 6: Dangers of Postwar Satiety in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952)
Lou Ford: A Subject Split
Unstable Rural Masculinity
Eating Is Ordinary
Food as Measure of Health and Satisfaction
Sexual Consumption and Murderous Meals
White Cannibalism and Waste
Barren Land or Impotent Rurality
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: Homosocial Consumption in Rex Stout’s Champagne for One (1958)
Formula, Innovation, Anachronisms, and Popularity
The Plot and the Nonstory
Nero Wolfe: The Sedentary Genius
Archie Goodwin: The Man Who Memorized All
A Salute to Crime for the 1950s
The Book of Household Management: Homosociality at West 35th Street
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Conclusions
References
Index
