‘The bit of bread, the draught of coffee’: Food Imagery in Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) foregrounds the subject of food, depicting the material culture of mid-Victorian society. The text is rife with alimentary imagery and metaphors. Each section of the novel explores different aspects of food, hunger and privation, drawing upon food motifs in varying degrees to map out the heroine's development into a moral agent. In general, food discourse tends to elucidate the major themes of the novel: childhood trauma; identity formation; education and discipline; love, marriage and sexuality. The novel thus suggests that the issue of food is associated with a wide range of human experience. It engages the reader to critically reappraise food and its consumption, seemingly a banal practice of everyday life, which resonates with material, symbolic and socio-cultural significance.