“So Cute, I Could Eat Him Up”: Maternal Hungers in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract:This paper analyzes the formal occurrence of the edible child in Monica Ali’s 2003 novel Brick Lane, language which crystalizes stereotypical identity markers of the immigrant Bengali woman: food preparation and child-rearing. I both identify the strides Ali’s novel makes and temper them, refusing a dichotomic understanding of the text as either participating in the exoticization of Bengali women, largely through cuisine, or representing an ethos of independent womanhood, but rather arguing for the interdependence of such readings. Ultimately, I find that Nazneen’s linguistic connection between food and children, focalized through the close, third-person narrator, signifies her relationship to both eating and motherhood, casting each as a coping mechanism to quell her worsening depression, even as she begins to find independence romantically and economically.