Patriarchy as a social construct: a gastro-semiotic criticism of the foodspheres in J.P. Clark’s The Wives’ Revolt

Abstract

The broad theoretical underpinning of this paper is that food is a vital part of the second-order signifying modes in literary texts. Its definite thesis, in relation to the age-long debates on power dichotomy between male and female gender, is that while men merely enjoy and noisily exercise social power sustained by patriarchy, which is a contrivance, women possess a great deal of authentic powers usually not overtly acknowledged. These theoretical and ideological (thesis) statements respectively are demonstrated through a semiotic reading and analysis of four foodspheres in J.P. Clark’s The Wives’ Revolt, using the critical lenses of gastro-criticism, social semiotics and textual cooperation theory. Through these analytical lenses, the paper recognises that each of the foodspheres in this play is a hypertext which transcodes or interogates the diverse gendered power relation hypotexts embodied in religious, socio-cultural and institutional semiospheres. It concludes that the power that women exercise in food preparation and administration, as signified in some of the foodspheres analysed, is a semiotic prototype of the many other unnoticed powers, through which the female homo rule the world.