Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot's Wife's Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in "Cleanness."
- Author/Editor
- Fumo, Jamie C.
- Title
- Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot's Wife's Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in "Cleanness."
- Published
- Fumo, Jamie C. "Eating Well/Well Eaten: Lot's Wife's Folly and the Wisdom of Salt in 'Cleanness.'" Exemplaria 30.2 (2023): 141-62.
- Review
- Jamie C. Fumo investigates the "Cleanness" poet's treatment of salt, arguing "the poet capitalizes on salt's status as a vexed and unstable signifier in medieval cultural discourse" (142). Fumo begins her article by first tracing the "predominantly favorable cultural coding of salt in the Bible" before engaging "Cleanness." She uses Derrida's concept of "hostipitality"--a portmanteau of hostility and hospitality--to analyze the tension present in Lot's Wife's domestic tasks. Fumo claims, "Lot's wife . . . not only 'sins in salt' by ignoring her husband's stipulation about their guests' dietary requirements, but she also upends the episode's one absolute culinary requirement deriving from Genesis 19: neither she nor anyone makes any bread at all, at least as far as we are told" (146). Fumo effectively demonstrates the poem's reappropriation of salt's significance; she calls this a "queering of salt," adding that such queering challenges 'the moral coherence of Lot's wife herself as exemplum" (147). Fumo continues to explain the cultural and historical significance of salt from culinary uses to social markers in order to situate Lot's wife and her eventual transformation. Of special interest to Gowerians, Fumo offers some comments on Gower's "Tale of Lichaon" from Book VII of the "Confessio Amantis." She claims Gower's version of this tale (in comparison to Ovid's) focuses "on hospitality, as befits a lesson on proper governance, while also intensifying his source's cannibalistic theme" (154). This discussion then leads Fumo to address commensality within hospitality. From this perspective, she offers explanations for why indeed Lot's Wife is turned into salt--what potential culinary/hospitality transgressions named in the poem might suggest. Fumo concludes Lot's Wife in "Cleanness" shows the need for, "radical humility of acknowledging one's capacity to be tested, tasted, and perhaps devoured. To partake of such wisdom not only nourishes the body social in the here and now but maximizes one's chances of being a diner, not a dish, at the final, most exclusive feast" (157). [JGS. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 42.2]
- Date
- 2023
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations