The Food Metaphor : the Intertextual "Afterlife" of a Literary Text, from Dickens to Joyce

Food is a leitmotiv in Dickens’s novels, and in Great Expectations it appears to be the objective correlative of the social rank and the moral stance of the characters. This is especially evident in the verbal and visual representation of Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: by letting food putrefy, Miss Havisham reduces her own body as mere flesh to feast upon, and it is only by nourishing herself on other bodies that she can satiate her appetites. After exploring how Dickens relates the verbal and visual representation of food to the depiction of his characters’ emotionality, this essay focuses on Miss Havisham’s banquet and its literary ‘afterlife’ in James Joyce’s “The Dead”.