Sweets are constantly consumed in George Eliot’s short story, “Brother Jacob.” In the opening chapter, Mr. David Faux convinces his brother, Jacob, that he is able to turn the guineas he has stolen from their mother into candies. David does this in order to keep Jacob from revealing his secret: that he intends to take their mother’s money and use it to help him create a new life for himself in the West Indies where he believes he can improve his lot in life and become something more than a confectioner. Though “David chose his line [of work] without a moment’s hesitation; and with a rashness inspired by a sweet tooth . . . the tooth lost its relish and fell into blank indifference; and all the while, his mind expanded, his ambitions took new shapes” (49). By stating that David was “rash” when making his decision to become a confectioner, the narrator implies that there was a certain level of immaturity on David’s part. However, now the narrator seems to suggest that David has outgrown his sweet tooth, and with his maturation, his life as a confectioner no longer suits. Why is this? Why is sugar and its consumption controversial in the nineteenth centruy?
Laura Eastlake provides answers. She claims that by midcentury, “sugar and sweet-eating were associated with juvenility, femininity, and the domestic sphere” and were considered “antithetical to adult British manliness” (516). If sugar and sweets were associated with youth, femininity, and the domestic sphere, David’s desire to change his life begins to make more sense. As a young British man, his work as a confectioner provides him with no means to elevate himself within society. His maturation and loss of his sweet tooth seems to imply that he wants to become the epitome of British manliness; however, because of the work that he does and the negative way that sweet-eating is viewed, he is unable to do so. Instead, he is forced to stay in this perpetual state of juvenility and unseriousness. Thus, the tension between the life that David wants to leave behind and the one that he wants to create becomes clear. If he is to be a “real” man, he must give up sweets on all fronts.
Eastlake also claims that in addition to being associated with juvenility and unmanliness, the “seemingly domestic acts of sugar consumption became highly politicized and were made analogous to the consumption not only of slave labor but of human bodies and blood” (516). As someone who makes his living on the selling and consumption of sugar, David’s connection to sugar plantations is established. Taking Eastlake’s claims into account and the narrator’s suggestion that David wants to create a new life for himself outside of being a confectioner, I wonder if perhaps Eliot is critiquing both what it means to be a British man and the practice of slavery simultaneously. If British men who are the epitome of manliness should not consume sugar and sweets, then it would seem that sugar plantations should not hold value to them. By extension, I would argue that Eliot suggests that British men who are the epitome of manliness should therefore not support slavery and the way that sugar plantations are managed.