Sarah Rose Etter, Cake, imagery of the cake, short story, sexual act, mental processes, ritual, narration, notion of motion, motionlessness, pleasure, body, powerlessness, dominance
"Cake", written in 2008 by Sarah Rose Etter, tells the story of a husband and his wife who share a peculiar routine every two weeks on Friday nights: the husband watches his wife eat a whole cake on her own, and it gives him a lot of pleasure. This short story can be divided into three distinct parts: the first would be the setting and the beginning of this routine on the present day of the narrator, on a Friday evening (from line 1 to 31); then, from line 32 to 46, there is an analepsis, that is, a retrospective or flash-back of the very first Friday night when it all started; and finally, the last part would run from line 46 to the end as it comes back to what had happened in the first part of the present-day Friday evening. This embedded or framed narrative helps the reader understand how and why this activity became a habit of the couple. The first time I came across this short story and read it, I was horrified and overwhelmed by a feeling of disgust. This is what made me want to work on this particular short story, so that I may know how the author has stylistically managed to make me feel that way.
[...] In other words, the story takes place in a modern period of time. This idea of time actually helps to create this feeling that I felt while reading the short story, for the main time operation used is a "pause": narrative time is longer than that of chronological time, with lengthy descriptions. As a result, the reader witnesses the scene for a longer time since the premises of one evening meal, which probably lasted about ten minutes, are depicted in all the lines of the text, except for the fourteen lines of the analepsis (which corresponds to the period of time that took place more than two months ago, a whole evening and the whole night) followed by a small ellipse of three sentences, summing up a long period of more than two months. [...]
[...] Even the few instances of direct speech are introduced by the narrator through the use of clauses says" ll 69; "he said" ll and 39; "he murmurs" l. 61; and "he whispers" l. 75). It is actually the lexical and semantic networks, i.e. the isotopies, that allowed me to structure my thoughts. Indeed, as it is often the case in descriptive texts, the story progresses through an amplification of the crowning theme (here the cake) and through secondary themes, often linked by anaphoric recurrence (hence the overflowing number of "the" and for instance). [...]
[...] It seemed to me, therefore, that the only thing she is allowed to do is give him pleasure will explain why in the following part). So the narrator is experiencing different feelings: fear, dread, panic, and disgust, but not openly, with the use of the passive form, for instance, to distance herself from these emotions, while at the same time emphasizing them ("The dread makes itself known" l. 3-4). The other notion, that of motion/motionlessness, can be found in her interaction with the cake. [...]
[...] In fact, the text relies mainly on self-referentiality, in particular through the use of deictics, especially place, time, person and a few empathetic deixis "that," to give just a few examples of each of them). That way, the woman does not say who she is, for instance, because she already knows; she has all the references herself, inside her head, so she does not need to share them with the reader, who has to find clues by himself during his reading to fill the gaps. For example, in "my seat" shows that it is all very ritualized. [...]
[...] From here, a second close-reading allows the discovery of many nouns that are body parts (from the head to the toes), particularly towards the end ("teeth," "hand," "blood," "temples," "chest," "lungs," "ribs," "mouth," "eyes," "stomach," "belly," "limbs," "lips," "tongue," "throat," "body," "face," "legs," "knee," "thigh") as well as a bunch of words with figurative sexual undertones ("fleshy," "moist," etc.) related to the five senses (particularly touch and taste): that is, touch rubs my leg slowly" l "his hand squeezing right above my knee" l.68, "to pick up the fork" l.42), taste slip the fork back into my mouth" l "dissolve against my tongue" l.52, "the icing meets the heat of my mouth and slides to the back of my throat" l. 52-53), hearing moan" l "he murmurs" l "quietly humming" l.8-9), vision ("naked" l "unties the bakery strings" l "white icing" l. and smell ("the scents [ . ] mix and rise up" l.23). I will therefore dare to go further in interpreting the possible imagery in play here, considering the white icing as . well, either vaginal discharges and/or semen, depending on the situation (ll. 49-51, 74). [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
