Digestive systems in Radclyffe Hall’s Adam’s Breed (1926)

Radclyffe Hall’s prize-winning, now largely forgotten 1926 novel Adam’s Breed is organised around the processes of eating, digestion, and indigestion. Depicting a community of shopkeepers and restauranteurs in the Italian expat community of London’s Soho, it focuses on a waiter who, witnessing a post-WW1 frenzy of hedonistic dining and consuming, becomes disgusted with food and human appetites, eventually retreating from society to become a hermit in the New Forest. In 1924, the British Medical Association had declared ‘war on modern diet’, condemning just such rich, luxurious, dainty, concentrated, preserved, and foreign foods as fill the shops, restaurants, and pages of Hall’s novel. This article demonstrates how Adam’s Breed interacts with and satirises such discussions about food and health occurring in the medical sphere, foregrounding food—external food networks, ecologies, and technologies, but also internal embodied experiences of eating—as fundamentally entangled with identity. In addition, it suggests that the novel’s form is structured to mirror digestive processes. From tantalising descriptions of food in the early stages of the plot, the novel progresses to unhealthy forms of consuming, stages of surfeit, sickening, indigestion, and finally the expelling and ‘passing’ of the protagonist. The novel makes experimental use of the digestive system to chew over and break down the complex emotions around, and tensions between, self and community in the wake of the war.