Culinary Exhibition: Victorian Wedding Cakes and Royal Spectacle

Abstract

When Adrian Harley, the pampered gourmand and theatrical voyeur of George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), discovers that Richard has defied his father and married in secret, he takes it upon himself to inform the family of Richard's nuptials. In a chapter called "The Procession of the Cake," Adrian gleefully distributes pieces of Richard's wedding cake to his shocked relatives, savoring the delicious spectacle of their outrage and disappointment and forcing upon them not only the knowledge of Richard's mésalliance but also a kind of guilty complicity with the act. When Richard's dyspeptic uncle and erstwhile guardian rejects the proffered morsel as poisonously rich, Adrian responds, "Your share you must take and appear to consume. One who has done so much to bring about the marriage cannot in conscience refuse his allotment of the fruits" (314). Accepting the cake would mean accepting the marriage, becoming a mute if somewhat belated witness to the ceremony. The rite of inclusion that Adrian stages as a series of unwelcome revelations is really nothing more than a warping and expansion of the wedding feast proper, since the distribution of the cake is always an apportioning of responsibility, an act of inclusion via gustatory performance.

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