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Dinners and Men
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (November 26, 1910) : 21
U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
Stanford copy/scan (via archive.org) : link
 

      note on the title, belowA woman consuming a table d’hôte dinner feels herself to be working in a medium to which she is by nature ill adapted. The men sitting at the table on either side are on such good terms with food; yet, they are its masters, and because they specialize in it they keep it up to the mark. Women vacillate between abandonment to materialism and frenzied breaks away from it toward an austere Utopia where sustenance is derived from clarified ideas detached forcibly from the whole. A man engrossed in a meal of measured procedure is an object-lesson in the established fact that men have accepted this as a material world and are on amiable workable terms with materialism. Women vacillate between abandonment to materialism and frenzied breaks away from it toward an austere Utopia where sustenance is derived from clarified ideas detached forcibly from the whole. A woman omits a course, eats too much of one that should have been partaken of lightly, resents being called upon to devote an hour to boresome eating, wilfully takes with the entrée vegetables that should have gone with the roast, is too wearied by the time coffee and cheese are reached to care for either, and rises from the table with morose digestive organs, marvelling at those male creatures who behave with such a striking difference.
      They come to the table as to a ceremony at which they themselves are to be the worshipped and worshipper. Their tubbed keenness seems a preparation partly the result of a realization of how important a function they are about to set in motion, but also a precaution taken that they may do full justice to this opportunity opening before them. They look over the menu, weigh its ingredients, and, catching, as it would seem, the main lines on which it is constructed, feeling, with a delicacy hardly material at all, its deeper meaning, cast about in their minds, and bring their imaginations to bear on a wine that will precisely suit it. Their senses being so much keener than a woman’s, they will have the wine that is fit, though they sacrifice their personal preference for beer or a whiskey and soda, thus showing themselves aware of a law of harmony higher than what they in their lowness sometimes like. Their actions are those of perfect materialism, of materialism carried to its peaks, or of people so uncontrollably ordered and spiritual that they derive an enriching experience from the nightly partaking of mere food. The woman diner nibbling dully at something she is incapable of unmasking wonders if her being cowed and depressed by a meal is actually better than rising above it to such an extent that one’s face sheds the exalted beams of a Wagnerian chef d’orchestre.
      If a hors-d’oeuvre is lacking or seems insufficient in its whetting powers, the man adds one on his own initiative and eats it in a slow ecstasy. The waiter hovers over him as if he were a chrysalis about to burst and send his soaring soul into a heaven where the waiter had been long privileged to dwell and longed to welcome a newcomer. Fish is served to him, and with a snap of his fingers the head waiter is summoned to his side, and he exclaims, a dreamy tentativeness in his eyes mingled with a glare of senses outraged: “This is not sole with sauce Colbert. It’s whiting, man, and the sauce — there is a something I miss.” The waiter, that personage so overbearing and lofty with women, pleads softly and passionately for the reputation of the house. It is sole — that he insists upon, he swears to it; but the sauce — ah, there he admits a slight sin is embedded. One herb, one single leaf, was at the last moment impossible to procure, and, though the town was searched, the chef rendered prostrate with anxiety, the leaf was of necessity omitted. When forgiveness is intimated by a grieved inclination of the head, the waiter cringes from the presence of a master, a man of discrimination, a palate with ideals, And the woman who has observed all this agape knows herself for a thing of blunt sensibilities, absurdly hoping to rise above materialism when she has not yet passed through it and is but vaguely aware of its refining influences and processes. a soul so far above the feminine burdens who, tiresomely enough, have to be fed after a fashion, that the superiority of the one compensates by so handsomely overbalancing the unintelligent feeding of the other. And the woman who has observed all this agape knows herself for a thing of blunt sensibilities, absurdly hoping to rise above materialism when she has not yet passed through it and is but vaguely aware of its refining influences and processes.
      Men talk of food as they eat it; their jests are all suggested by food; they tell stories of food they have known in other places and food they have always desired to know. They speak sadly of food they ne’er shall see again and plan to travel far, that they may meet other food long anticipated. Serious, even stodgy old gentlemen are spurred by the partaking of food into poetic rhapsodies on the source from which it came and the mission it will shortly fulfil. Men, when they eat (earnestly and responsibly, be it understood, at a dinner, which is a matter entirely different from a turgidly consumed breakfast or a makeshift luncheon), do it with such gusto, such gallant enthusiasm, that the repast cannot but return the compliment by having every respect for their welfare.
      A woman gazes on them ruefully, repelled by their horrid heartiness, yet half enviously aware that they are attuned to the offices of life, that they accept for use the weapons placed in their hands and by the vim of their acceptance achieve a certain standing. The position achieved causes in women a wonderment that will not be downed, a scornful, puzzled irritation at the creatures’ eating with such finish and form, with such artistic fervor, that the gross act almost passes for a rarefied accomplishment, a suspicion that there may be something in eating, after all, a thought instantly refuted by one’s experience to the contrary; all of which is summed up in a vexed decision that this is called a man’s world, not because it was planned with no thought for women — an absurd idea on the first showing — but because men are so admirably adapted to living here and have made it their own by sheer force of knowing precisely what to do with it. Women may sniff superciliously — of course they do — but they admit, with chagrin, that they are clumsy, mutinous materialists, while men, by the hearty welcome they gave material delights in the beginning, have fairly lifted them into precious planes whither we cannot follow.
 

Ostensibly on dining, the essay is as much concerned with women, as it is with men so “attuned to the offices of life” in what “is called a man’s world.”
 

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