Marmalade is a prism through which issues of national identity in the context of Britishness can be clearly viewed, and it gives a modern relevance to the sticky argument about whether the ancient orange sweetmeat is Scottish or English.
So say students of Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain, a new course for second-year students of English Literature at the University of Swansea.
The course, devised this year by Prof Daniel Williams and taught by Dr Kieron Smith as a fresh way of examining the "question of Britishness", requires students to choose a subject related to English literature that they see in the press each week. This gives them the chance to try out ideas which are then posted on the course blog. Students chose the Herald and Sunday Herald's stories about Scotland reclaiming marmalade as its own after making toast of the English entries in this year's World Original Marmalade Awards, which took place last month in Penrith.
On their blog post, entitled Scotland and the Cultural Politics of Marmalade, four students - Hendrik Gruber from Germany, Sara Meltzer from Calilfornia, and Joy Morrow and Lauren Pittard from Wales - said that by trivialising the well-known rivalry between England and Scotland, we had also trivialised the question of Britishness. They said that by naming the clans who had submitted entries to the Stirring of the Clans category, as reported in The Herald, we had "trivialised the idea of a nation desperately trying to flex its muscles in order to frighten its way more powerful neighbour".
"The implication is that these once distinguished clans are now trying to restore the damaged national consciousness by producing marmalade, as if saying: 'If we cannot be an independent nation, we at least have the best marmalade on the island'," they said, adding: "Such an attempt to bolster the nation's ego was found a few hundred years before in Shakespeare's Henry V. Instead of having the famous 'limbs made England', the Scots at least can be proud of having 'marmalade made in Scotland'."
They also saw links with Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Whereas Smollett's protagonists are afraid not to find any edible food at all north of the Border, the Scots in our articles seemed to be driven by the desire to refute this prejudice, they said, and in order to achieve this goal, the Scottish grandmas travel in the opposite direction to Henry's army in Shakespeare's play. They inferred that the implication of our article was that this is where the battle between Scotland and England should remain: at the level of marmalade. They also inferred that the absence of the idea of Britain in the piece drew attention to the more significant things that England and Scotland have in common.
"Britishness is an extraordinarily dynamic concept characterised by flux and renegotiation, an entity which is constructed, and deconstructed, just to be reinvented again. The article seems to suggest that there are no real grounds of difference between England and Scotland," they said. "The Scottish nationalist position deserves no more respect than the claim for superior marmalade."
When he realised that the Herald and Sunday Herald had taken different views on the recent Referendum on Scottish Independence, Prof Williams invited us to correct any misinterpretation of our stories on their blog. "It may be that there are bigger issues at play and that marmalade could be seen two ways: from both the Yes and the No viewpoint. This means marmalade may be less trivial than it seems, and is the trigger that allows other issues to come out," he said. "The discussion about it in our seminar was one of the liveliest we have had so far, due no doubt to the fact that the Referendum has invigorated the debate about identity and independence in Wales too."
Sara Meltzer told the Sunday Herald: "We found the subject interesting because it doesn't look important, it looks like a tiny battlefield, but actually food is a microcosm of a greater identity and it is very important to people. People get territorial about food, and you see that in other cultures around the world. For example, there's a big debate ongoing about who invented falafel."
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