58 pages • 1 hour read
Fannie FlaggFried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Food
As the novel’s title suggests, food is an important motif in Fried Green Tomatoes. In the frame story, for example, nearly every visit Evelyn pays to Mrs. Threadgoode begins with a mention of food—typically, something Evelyn has brought with her to the nursing home. Evelyn and Ninny share a sweet tooth, and Evelyn offers things like vanilla ice cream, peanut butter cups, and honeybuns to her friend. She occasionally brings Mrs. Threadgoode meals as well and, after hearing how much the elderly woman misses home-cooked Southern food, spends all day preparing a “plate of perfectly fried green tomatoes and fresh cream-white corn, six slices of bacon, with a bowl of baby lima beans on the side and four huge light and fluffy buttermilk biscuits” (355). Food is even more prominent in the novel’s flashbacks. Ruth realizes her love for Idgie when the latter brings her a honey comb, and “Railroad Bill” raids supply trains to feed Troutville’s citizens during the Depression. The cafe feeds Whistle Stop’s white customers, Troutville’s black residents, and penniless drifters like Smokey Lonesome.
The common thread tying these representations together is the idea that food creates and maintains social bonds. Given that women have traditionally been responsible for cooking, it isn’t surprising that it often serves as a vehicle for female friendships, but this isn’t the only social function food serves in the novel. The Whistle Stop Cafe functions as the center of the local community, providing a place for people to meet and talk with one another, so when it’s forced to close in the 1950s, the town quickly follows suit. As Dot Weems puts it in her final bulletin, “Now that I look back, it seems to me that after the cafe closed, the heart of the town just stopped beating. Funny how a little knockabout like that brought so many people together” (385–386). The latter sentence is especially significant; food is something that people appreciate (and need) regardless of their class, race, or gender, so a cafe is uniquely poised to bring people of very different backgrounds together. This is particularly true of the Whistle Stop Cafe, since Idgie goes out of her way to feed those who might otherwise be unwelcome in society.
The fact that food often serves a social purpose sheds light on the subplot surrounding Evelyn’s attempts at dieting. Flagg suggests that these diets are harmful not because Evelyn hopes to lose weight (in fact, she ultimately does lose weight by joining an exercise program), but rather because of what her negative relationship with food symbolizes: her self-isolation and fear of embracing to pleasure.
Trains and Railroads
Early in Fried Green Tomatoes, Mrs. Threadgoode describes Whistle Stop as “nothing more than a railroad town” (102). The town is so close to the railroad that Mrs. Threadgoode says the rattling of the trains regularly broke her dishes. Some of the novel’s characters, like Jasper Peavey, are directly employed by the railway companies, but even those who aren’t benefit from the passage of trains. This is particularly true of the Whistle Stop Cafe, as Mrs. Threadgoode notes: “The big L & N switching yard was only two blocks down the street, and all the railroad people ate there, colored and white alike” (51). As a result, the decline of train travel in the second half of the 20th century coincides with the decline of Whistle Stop, as businesses are no longer able to sustain themselves.
The fact that the town’s life cycle is so closely intertwined with the railroad’s points to the train’s figurative significance in Fried Green Tomatoes as symbols of life’s journey. Mrs. Threadgoode’s words that at the parallel between the two: “I wouldn’t take anything for the trains. What would I have done all those years? They didn’t have television yet. I used to try and guess where people were comin’ from and goin’ to” (103). She then segues into a discussion of the different ways Artis and Jasper Peavey “turn[ed] out,” underscoring the idea of life—like trains—as a form of conveyance to sometimes unexpected places.
Like life, the trains produce both negative and positive outcomes. Trains kill Idgie’s beloved brother and permanently disfigure Stump. On the other hand, trains brought Smokey Lonesome to his secret love, Ruth, provide Whistle Stop with its economic life blood, and aid Railroad Bill in providing the black community with canned goods. The danger of the town’s trains is ever-present, but simultaneously they’re a vehicle for “bringing” new things. They bring supplies, people, gossip, and financial security. Like the characters of Whistle Stop--Sipsey who is both a murderer and a nurturer, Idgie who is both a thief and a forward-thinker, Jasper who is both a murderer and a caring friend—the trains are dichotomous and are not strictly good or evil.
Towanda
Towanda is an alter ego Evelyn invents for herself after she is insulted and attacked by a young man in the supermarket parking lot. In her fantasies, Evelyn becomes a superhero who travels around the world avenging wrongs, many of which are sexist in nature. She imagines “machine-gunning the genitals of rapers and stomping abusive husbands to death in her specially designed wife-beater boots” (238). As the violence of this fantasy suggests, Towanda is more a product of years of suppressed anger than a healthy attempt to address injustice. In fact, many of the injustices Evelyn focuses on are trivial: “She would stop the construction of all condos, especially ones with red tile roofs; and Van Johnson would be given a show of his own…he was one of Towanda’s favorites” (239). While Evelyn eventually relinquishes Towanda in favor of more positive life changes, the fantasy marks an important phase in the change she undergoes over the course of the novel. Towanda is Evelyn’s first real attempt to articulate why she’s unhappy, and thus represents the first time Evelyn recognizes the validity of her own feelings and desires.
Disease and Disability
Disease and disability are prominent motifs in Fried Green Tomatoes, and to some extent serve the same purpose: underscoring the fragility of the human body. For Evelyn, who was left traumatized by her mother’s death from cancer, disease and age are a major source of anxiety and bitterness: “She wondered why she had to live in a body that would get old and break down and feel pain. Why couldn’t she have been living inside a desk, a big sturdy desk? Or a stove? Or a washing machine?” (59). Those who are less phobic about disease and injury aren’t immune to it, as the fate of characters like Ruth and Albert demonstrate. Ruth dies of cancer in her forties, and Albert sustains brain damage while he’s being born..
The novel’s depictions of disease and disability also reflect themes relating to gender. The conditions that preoccupy Evelyn and that claim the lives of the novel’s female characters tend to be gendered in nature. Evelyn, for instance, reflects bitterly on how painful childbirth was when lamenting her body’s fragility, and the cancer Ruth develops originates in her “female organs” (285). By contrast, several of the novel’s male characters lose body parts; a train accident severs Stump’s arm, and Frank loses an eye during WWI. This theory is supported when Ed responds to Evelyn’s plans to neuter their cat by complaining that she “might as well just go on and put him to sleep” if she was “gonna cut his balls off” (276). The loss of a limb or eye may serve as a symbolic form of castration. Following this logic, Frank may feel emasculated by his disability and abuse women as a way to shore up his sense of his masculinity. Likewise, Stump feels that his missing limb will inhibit sexual relations with Peggy, but he feels more confident after Idgie takes him to Eva. He deals with his emasculation in a different way, under the tutelage of Idgie, and doesn’t follow his father’s violent path.
