| In nineteenth-century England, tea occupied the pivotal position of a "necessary luxury," an indulgence which had become essential to English daily life. As an article of physical ingestion, tea literally constitutes the individual bodies of English men and women, and therefore the consumption rituals that accompany tea-drinking are represented as powerful icons of English identity. Combining textual analysis with historical and anthropological theory, I develop a context for my exploration of consumption within Victorian novels through Victorian advertisements and nineteenth-century histories of tea. My readings of Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Anthony Trollope's Orley Farm, and Margaret Oliphant's Hester reveal the tensions within representations of tea-drinking.;Tea-drinking operates as a liminal ritual poised on the boundaries between multiple ideological binaries which structure Victorian culture: middle-class/lower-class, man/woman, Empire/domesticity, labor/leisure, moderation/excess. Tea simultaneously challenges and reinscribes boundaries of national identity, gender, and class within English culture. In nineteenth-century representations, tea-drinking both upholds and elides the distinctions between the private space of the home and the public sphere of the marketplace and between the domestic interior of England and the wider confines of the British Empire. Nineteenth-century texts often celebrate the power of tea to create an English society unified by their collective tastes, but representations of Englishness adhere to a specifically middle-class consumer culture. Similarly, tea-drinking rituals explicitly inscribe gender roles by establishing the tea-table as a female realm, while the patterns of tea-drinking cross gendered boundaries and suggest that both men and women participated in creating Victorian domestic life. The rituals of the tea-table thus mediate between the various contradictions of English identity to create a national community of tea-drinkers. |
