‘Stolen fruit is best of all’: The Pleasures of Subversive Consumption in the Late Novels of Molly Keane

Abstract

This chapter argues that Molly Keane’s heretical late novels violate every possible standard of good behaviour, especially in their scandalous emphasis on the unsavoury aspects of eating and excreting. Mesmerised by these nauseating details, critics have tended to overlook Keane’s affirmation of the pleasures of food and its redemptive value for her Anglo-Irish heroines, trapped as they are in the crumbling Big Houses of the moribund Protestant Ascendancy. Keane insists on the uncomfortably close relationship between the grotesque and the delicious in a context where denial of physical pleasure and suppression of appetite are important markers of class and gender, as elements of good behaviour. In Keane’s Big Houses, women seek out forbidden food as private consolation for their confinement and alienation.