Disorderly eating in Marie NDiaye's 'La Gourmandise', or The solitary pleasure of a Mere de famille

NDiaye's typically subtle and polysemic story 'La Gourmandise' (1996) can be interpreted as the cautionary tale of a housewife's short-lived frenzy that could have ended with a descent into madness brought on by the escalation of a destructive secret passion (binge eating). It also represents, writ large, everywoman's everyday battle with food. A third approach might see the protagonist, working-class drudge Antoinette who has little cultural capital, striking out for her own space, creativity, and luxurious pleasure in a tragi-comic rewriting not only of Emma Bovary, but of Marie-Antoinette, legendary for promoting cake, or Virginia, whose intellectual ambitions necessitate a room of her own. The text asks, with Antoinette, what is gluttony and why is it a deadly sin? 'La Gourmandise' moves craftily between the everyday human (woman), the animal, and the sacred. An 'idiot boy', Edo, is the pendant to fleshy Antoinette, her grotesque shadow, and the threshold figure who acts to safeguard the moral community that in the end will keep her in her place, her crazy bid for freedom forgotten.