47 pages • 1 hour read
A Certain Hunger
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Desire and Consumption
Many—perhaps even most—of Dorothy’s monologues have an underlying sexual charge. She is almost a combination of carnal and culinary need personified, a metaphor she agrees with when she describes one of her impulsive killings as “raw id” (208). This refers to one of Freud’s three categories that comprise a person’s psyche: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the hedonistic center that produces appetites. It requires, in Freud’s formulation, the ego and the superego to regulate it. An unchecked id is a destructive force that cannot account for the feelings of others. Dorothy is the human form of raw id.
As a creature of great and varied appetites, Dorothy prioritizes good food, wine, and sex over everything else. Each of Dorothy’s pleasures requires her to consume. Even in terms of her literary ability, she says she becomes a writer “to give voice to food’s consumption” (30), as if she is bearing witness on behalf of the consumed food. Dorothy frequently uses her cooking skills—and her sophisticated palate—to harm others while flattering herself. She has expensive tastes because she has an expensive appetite. When she gets to prison, the change in her diet is one of the first things she mourns.
Consumption can be part of desire, but it isn’t necessarily always involved. A hunger pang is not the same as a desire. To literally consume something is to eat it. Whenever possible, however, Dorothy’s most intense pleasures involve consumption: not mere hunger, or arousal, but the act of subsuming something into herself.
Consumption also has commercial aspects. Customers are known as “consumers” because they consume—pay for—goods and services. When Dorothy begins writing the lifestyle column that she hates, she is still filling a need that consumers demand. That consumption helps drive the economy, and Dorothy’s opinions on what people should consume instead are irrelevant.
The biggest difference between Dorothy and most consumers is that she embodies all the types of consumption, and consumption is her primary driver. Worse, she consumes whatever gratifies her. Consumerism is the subject of much debate, and Dorothy is an example of what happens when consumerism goes too far.
The reasons for desiring exquisite food and drinks are obvious—they taste good, they satisfy a craving, they produce happiness and intoxication, and the sharing of food and drinks is a social rite for humans. For her, they are a means to an end—pleasurable activities that lead to more extreme pleasures that only people like Dorothy are capable of enjoying at the extreme end of consumerism.
Power Dynamics in Relationships
Most people describe their relationships—romantic or platonic—in terms of equality and partnerships. It’s hard to imagine someone saying they are looking for someone to be superior to them. Even in relationships between submissives and dominants, the dynamic is not about inferiors and superiors, but about who wields the power and how.
Dorothy describes herself as being incapable of sustaining non-transactional friendships and relationships. There is no such thing as equality for Dorothy, which makes a legitimate partnership impossible and undesirable. Dorothy is incapable of having someone else’s best interests at heart.
Even in her subordinate jobs as a writer for various publications, she uses her relationship to her bosses and their resources to gather information she can use for blackmail. Information is her currency, not affection: “Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild” (42). Dorothy also uses information as a way to protect herself as a woman behaving in unconventional ways in what she perceives as a fixed society.
Besides information, Dorothy’s primary tool is lust. She says that she understood the relationship between lust and power as early as 12 years old, and in her fifties, she says that “[p]ower is the ultimate aphrodisiac” (71). Dorothy accumulates wealth and power—at least, power over several other people—by pursuing her own appetites. Power is an aphrodisiac that must constantly be replenished. Dorothy could never accumulate enough power to resist her appetites because her desires are at the core of her identity. Power is a thrill, and the intensity of a thrill is ephemeral by nature.
Dorothy repeatedly catches men by surprise because, whatever their motives, they think they are operating in a familiar system of seduction: “Americans adore systems. We want a system that obscures the system so that we feel comforted by there being both a system and a conspiracy system behind the system. We Americans are absolute fiends for rules” (67).
Dorothy has no interest in rules and follows them only to benefit herself and avoid the consequences of breaking rules that could matter the most, such as laws.
When Dorothy decides that her relationship with Alex is unsatisfactory, it is largely due to the boredom of predictability. There is no obvious power dynamic between her and Alex. In fact, she is bemused to find that she wants to do small favors for him just to make him happy. He has gained a level of power or influence over her emotions that she finds intolerable.
The Intersections of Food, Sex, and Death
Dorothy’s ruminations on the violence of common metaphors allow her to make a case for a cannibalistic nature: “We as an English-speaking people can't not eat our dead—our language loves a cannibal. We don't just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express a baby's cuteness, we say we could eat her up” (100). Cannibalism is the most obvious intersection of food, sex, and death, and Dorothy serves as a tour guide of historical cannibalism.
Dorothy’s butchery of Marco is the most acute example of these intersections. She fellates him, brings him to orgasm, and kills him like one of his cattle just after he climaxes. She has sex with him, while killing him, in order to turn him into food, and she finds pleasure in it all.
Food, like sex and death, involves the transformation of one substance into another. They are activities based in fluids, flavors, breakdowns and composition, and deep variety. During her euphoria at Marco’s death, she describes the smell of his exposed intestines as the smell of “atavistic lust and honor and jubilance and ecstasy” (171).
Dorothy frequently speaks about a fear of boredom, and her appetites keep boredom at bay. People rarely seem to tire of the novelties of food, sex, and death, although their degree of participation in the act of death may not resemble Dorothy’s proclivities. It could then be said that Dorothy actually lives in a constant state of fear that can only be fought off by giving into her passions for food, sex, and death. Indeed, even in prison, where she is deprived of these things, she turns to writing as an absolute necessity to sustain some version of herself that is immersed in food, sex, and death.
The connection is explicit in the passages during which she writes about the nature of consumption. No matter how humane the machinery or the circumstances, something must die if people are to eat meat. There are no predators without prey, and much of the culinary world relies on death. For Dorothy, part of the pleasure of food comes from the fact that her food had a soul: “I’ll never understand people choosing to eat soulless food—monsters all, say I, the cannibal” (126).
Unlock all 47 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: