While the site is under construction, some pages may be unavailable. Those interested in adding missing info for service hours, please reach out.
Jump to a Literary Trope:
What Is It: Sharing food in literature is never just sharing food. As Foster claims, food scenes are boring so they have to mean something else. In this case—in an allusion to the Last Supper—they mean communion (community). When people eat together, their social relationships (the good and the bad) are on full display. People getting along at dinner represent community. People not getting along at dinner or snubbed dinner reservations represent broken community.
How to Annotate for It: Look for the food! If there is food, there is a chance to talk about community. Once you find the food, consider if the author is showing the connections or lack of connections between characters. Consider: what kind of food are they eating? Does it show the sharing of cultures? Where are people sitting and who is talking with whom? Who hasn’t shown up or shows up late? Why?
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde establishes Lord Henry as the perfect Decadent dandy who introduces Dorian to the world of high society. In all of his interactions, he appears to be the perfect socialite who uses his connections to travel through Victorian England’s art center. Despite this, Henry is a man without community. He and his wife are forever estranged, sneaking around each other’s backs and only briefly glimpsing each other across the opera house. While he has many standing dinner reservations, Henry constantly abandons them on whim. When he first meets Dorian, he stands up a friend for dinner in order to take Dorian to dinner instead before heading off to the opera. His continual abandonment of these dinner plans represent his lack of a solid community, certainly his lack of a community of people he respects. Instead, Henry stands on the outside of culture, looking in and observing everyone else as if they were a science experiment. In fact, even when he does keep his dinners with friends, like Dorian or Basil, his reflections seem to imply that he is more interested in seeing what becomes of their life than any active engagement. Moreover, he is often late for those engagements, perhaps playing to see how long people might wait for him as a measure of his influence over them. Indeed, instead of holding community, Henry has subjects for his studies.