Cannibalism in Literature and Film

J. Brown

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137292124
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

A comprehensive study of cannibalism in literature and film, spanning colonial fiction, Gothic texts and contemporary American horror. Amidst the sharp teeth and horrific appetite of the cannibal, this book examines real fears of over-consumerism and consumption that trouble an ever-growing modern world.

Part I

Mr Cannibal I Presume? The Colonial Cannibal

1

No Petticoats Here – Early Colonial Cannibals

From Daniel Defoe to H. Rider Haggard

Colonial adventure fiction was a genre popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The stories were usually set in the colonies, typically India or Africa. These locations were sites for adventures involving treasure, rebellious slaves, wild animals, and inhospitable lands. Andrea White notes how the adventure fiction served various ‘utilitarian purposes’, such as ‘dispensing practical historical information and . . . promoting an officially endorsed ideology of patriotic heroism and Christian dutifulness compatible with imperialistic aims . . . besides having great popular appeal, the works were also educational and inspirational’ (Joseph 81). Indeed, adventure fiction achieved a certain authority for being inspirational and educational, and for demanding credibility. The romance writing of the mid- and late nineteenth century played an important part in British culture as a narrative depiction of theories of social change (Daly 5). The novels of Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. Rider Haggard provided readers with ‘knowledge’ of the far-flung territories of a burgeoning empire. This was a profitable exercise as armchair adventurers proved to be avid consumers of colonial fiction. Importantly, though, these novels provided information not only about the colonies but also about England and the notion of Englishness. While being largely ‘off-stage’, England is the space that defines, and is defined by, the ‘heterotopias’ of the adventure novel for, as Daly notes, ‘to sketch the primitive is also to illustrate the civilized’ (58).

A crucial element of this English identity was heroism. The dark places of the earth were places where heroism was still possible. The majority of these tales display optimism and serene confidence in the glory of imperialism. The fiction worked to provide adventurous scenarios for brave men to prove their worth. There was a desire for the ‘fresh air’ of the empire, removed from the commercial ‘fug’ of the metropole (61), and these novels provided just such an escape, replete with dashing heroics and exotic adventures, and were indicative of concerns regarding a decline in masculinity on the home front. The revival of ‘romance’ in the 1880s was intended to reclaim the kingdom of the English novel for male writers, male readers, and men’s stories. According to Elaine Showalter, in the wake of George Eliot’s feminization of the novel, male writers needed to remake the high Victorian novel in masculine terms. Consequently, in place of the heterosexual romance of courtship, manners, and marriage that had become the speciality of women writers, male critics and novelists extolled the masculine, homosocial romance of adventure and quest. As Showalter points out, the new romance ‘descended from Arthurian epic . . . Haggard and Stevenson were hailed as the chivalrous knights who had restored the wounded and exiled King Romance to his throne’ (Showalter 78–79). These adventures often took place in the colonies as they provided locations away from home, therefore away from marriage and women, and allowed for scenarios where men could be men, showing off in feats of great courage. The dangers they faced were exotic and new, far from the trials of courtship and etiquette explored in the domestic novels, and they were, in fact, a means of avoiding such domestic ordeals, leading Haggard to promise that there were ‘no petticoats’ in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Substituting a feminized exotic landscape and culture for actual English women, male adventurers could find a way to exorcise what they viewed as the increasing feminization of English society. Unusual landscapes, strange animals, harsh climates, shipwrecks, and native tribes featured strongly in the ordeals suffered by the heroes of colonial fiction. Adventure fiction offered a welcome change to the urban domestic novels, the plight of the poor, and grey industrialized cities, and it managed to ‘mollify frustration at the apparent ineffectualness of reform, eliminate the confusion of an increasingly complex world, and fulfil the desires for forthright, heroic action’ (White Joseph 63). For many writers there was the desire to revitalize not only heroism but aristocracy. In The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), John Carey notes the equation of the term ‘mass’ with savages, women, children, bacilli, or animals in the writings of many intellectuals and literary figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Colonial subjects came to be seen as a mass, not merely degraded and threatening but also not fully alive. A common allegation was that they lacked souls. Carey also argues that the desire to eliminate the semi-human mass was a common one: ‘Dreaming of the extermination or sterilization of the mass, denying the mass were real people, was then, an imaginative refuge for early twentieth century intellectuals’ (Carey 15). He further argues that since the ‘mass’ is an ‘imaginary construct, displacing the unknowable multiplicity of human life, it can be reshaped at will, in accordance with the wishes of the imaginer’ (23). In colonial fiction the mass was often configured as the savage cannibal, threatening to consume all that was held dear to Victorian England.

Colonial fiction served an important purpose in presenting the supposed refinement of the colonizers in complete contrast to the savagery of the colonized. The English colonial novel has as its primary motivation the justification of the colonial mission of the nineteenth century and the elevation of English ethnic superiority over the cultures it encountered overseas. In The Savage in Literature (1975), Brian Street examines the hierarchy of races represented in English fiction from 1858 to 1920. Cannibalism, he argues, is used as a way to distinguish between the gentleman and the savage. The Englishman does not practise cannibalism because his instincts, passed down to him through his race, revolt against it (Street 75). In Colonial Desire, Robert Young looks at the cultural obsession with race in the late nineteenth century and the emphasis on distinction. He points out that an effective mode of differentiating was to label the Other as cannibal. This allowed the European to distance himself from these lesser races in a simple and clear way: they eat human meat, we do not; they are savage, we are not. Indeed, Claude Rawson claims it is probable that a ‘geo-political history of empires could be written by charting the successive places where a dominant culture located its cannibal other’ (Rawson ‘Unspeakable’ 9). The imperialist, adventure fiction of Victorian and fin de siècle England saw civilized heroes pitted against savages and cannibals in far-flung jungles, islands, and deserts. The hero could then be portrayed as brave, civilizing, and superior, morally as well as physically.

Famously, Arens has argued that since cannibalism (along with incest) is considered the ultimate evil and taboo in civilized society, the accusation of cannibalism against a people was a means by which their colonization was justified. In the scramble for profit as Africa replaced the Caribbean and South America as the source of material and labour, it also became the new site of savage cannibals in need of civilizing and enlightenment. Arens points out that ‘as one group of cannibals disappeared, the European mind conveniently invented another which would have to be saved from itself by Europeans before it was too late’ (Arens Man Eating 80). The charge of cannibalism denies the accused their humanity, lowering them to animal status and therefore legitimizing their enslavement. Invariably it is the Other, distant in time or location, who is believed to be cannibalistic, affording the non-cannibal a sense of superiority. The strategy of self-definition against a projected alien group certainly became an element of colonial discourse. The essayists in the important collection Cannibalism and the Colonial World argue that the savage cannibal was a construct used as an antithesis to the civilized man, and that the savage’s monstrous cannibalism was used as justification for imperialism. Frantz Fanon suggests that ‘face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism’ (Fanon Black 225). The theme of the black savage has left a deep trace in postimperial memory, and the trope of naming the Other as cannibal has been central to the construction of the non-European Other. The battle for progress and production was waged against a perceived inferior race of people whose supposed cannibalism represented their savagery and their need to be civilized. Ultimately their existence was antithetical to the values of European society and economy. According to Young, civilization and culture were the standards of measurement in a hierarchy of values. European culture was defined by its position at the top of a scale against which all other societies were judged: ‘the principle of opposition, between civilization and barbarism and savagery, was nothing less than the ordering principle of civilization as such’ (94–95).

Ironically the colonized cultures had long considered their colonial masters and the ‘civilization’ they represented as the true cannibals. The slave traders were seen as desiring black bodies, not for economic reasons but for culinary ones. Indeed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some of the most significant misconceptions held by Europeans and Africans concerned cannibalism and its associated barbarism. It is repeatedly recorded in accounts from European slave traders that half of the slave revolts on ships were caused by ‘the Negroes’ total conviction that they were being taken over the sea not to Skye but to be eaten in Barbados’ (Pope-Hennessy 32). Some Africans believed the white man to be a species of sea monster since he came from over the horizon where there was no land. Homi J. Bhabha tells of a Christian missionary causing terror when teaching vegetarian Indian Hindus about Holy Communion: ‘Suddenly it is the white English culture that betrays itself, and the English missionary who is turned into a cannibalistic vampire’ (qtd. in Young 162). Just as black was, for most Europeans, the colour of night, darkness, and evil, for many Africans white was the colour of devils and the source of terrifying villainy. The irony is that the African perception of the colonizer as all-engulfing was more accurate than the European’s widespread racist myth of the savage man-eaters of the jungle.

This perception of the white European as cruel and greedy needed to be quashed in the popular imagination. However, colonial fiction made such efforts to mark the differences between white and black that it actually ended up articulating colonial anxiety rather than ethnic security. This anxiety was concerned with the sheer desirability of the exotic Other and also the danger of such close relations with this very Other. Ultimately it expressed the fear of pollution and degeneration. One interpretation of the threat posed by the savage cannibal was that he had the power to contaminate the pure colonizer. The fear of ‘going native’ and the civilized man being reduced to a barbaric state was a popular theme in novels such as H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), in which the indigenous inhabitants of the island are wild animals and interbreeding has gruesome results, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in which succumbing to the contagious bite of a foreigner leads good English girls to sensuality and hunger. I will examine this theme in greater detail with particular reference to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1902). The fear of being either cannibalized or converted to barbarism resulted in the reduction of imperialism to a convenient justification of ‘eat or be eaten’. Moreover, this fiction displays an intense and often paranoid awareness of how dependent on the colonial Other English self-identity is, as noted by Chinua Achebe: ‘For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa’ (Achebe in Kimbrough 262). Young posits that the many English colonial novels betray themselves as ‘driven by desire for the cultural Other’, often concerned with ‘cross-cultural contact and interaction, an active desire, frequently sexual, for the Other, or the state of being . . . an “in-between” ’ (3). If we consider the English novel, we find that what is portrayed as characterizing English experience is often a sense of uncertainty and a painful sense of need for Otherness. This need stems from an ambiguity of the Self and unstable identity. Perhaps the fixity of identity for which Englishness developed such a reputation was, as Young maintains, ‘designed to mask its uncertainty, its sense of being estranged from itself, sick with desire for the other’ (Young 2).

Cannibalism becomes an interesting trope in colonial fiction on different levels. Firstly, in the eighteenth-century fiction of Daniel Defoe, and later in Rider Haggard’s and R.M. Ballantyne’s nineteenth-century novels, cannibalism is seen as a means of differentiation between civilized and savage. The cannibals in these tales are seen to be in need of education, civilization, and salvation from their barbarous ways. As the empire reached its zenith and tales of imperial atrocities, such as the Boer War and Leopold II’s brutality in Congo, became common knowledge, cannibalism fulfilled a different role. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, cannibalism is a reflection of the West’s voracity, and the question of who is civilized and who is savage is starting to be asked. Indeed, I view Conrad’s work as a site of change in the colonial cannibal’s position. For this reason the colonial fiction before and after Heart of Darkness are grouped as similar texts and given rather shorter page space. In the early decades of the twentieth century and in the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Edgar Wallace, there appears to be a policy of containment regarding the cannibals of popular fiction. The high moral standpoint of earlier fiction is replaced by practical management of colonies; the cannibals do not need to be civilized, just kept in check. As anthropology and travel writing replace colonial fiction as genres concerned with the colonies, the encounters with cannibalism change. Of course, these are supposedly factual accounts and attempts to understand the world and its people. However, Graham Greene’s travel writings display a certain nostalgia for the heroic adventures and hand-to-hand battles with anthropophagous fiends. Towards the end of the century, as the empire had collapsed, colonial fiction seemed to be no longer as relevant to the reading public. Colonial cannibalism did not disappear, however, and suddenly, in a post-colonial world of turmoil and power snatching, cannibalism appeared again in a boom of Italian cannibal films. These films are effectively a culmination of most of the above factors: there are wild cannibals in the jungle in need of civilization; the natives are driven to extreme savagery by interfering Westerners; the Westerners are as savage as the native tribes; and the question of truth and representation in the media and film is central. In all of these works the colonial cannibal represents fears and desires of the West with regard to the Other – fears and desires I will now examine in detail.

Robinson Crusoe

Although outside the scope of this book, the almost mythical figure of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), who famously encountered savage cannibals during his many years as a castaway, cannot be ignored as inspiration for the later colonial romances of Haggard, Ballantyne, Stevenson, and most other adventure writers. The plot encompasses some of the most prevalent tendencies of Defoe’s time: profit is Crusoe’s vocation and the whole world is his territory. James Joyce called Crusoe the embodiment of British imperialism, and the novel a prophecy of empire, stating that Defoe’s hero is the ‘true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday . . . is the symbol of the subject races’ (qtd. in Ellis 15 and Richetti xxviii). As such, Defoe’s novel sets the dichotomy of civilized versus savage cannibal that would be used by many writers throughout the next 250 years. Robinson Crusoe represents the imperialist desire for mastery over all that is foreign, summed up by the need to incorporate rather than be incorporated. Crusoe becomes an inspiration to economists and empire builders. Critic Ian Watt argues that Crusoe is not bound to nationality by sentimental ties but is satisfied by people who are ‘good to do business with’ (Watt ‘Robinson’ 42). Throughout his adventures, Defoe sends Crusoe to locations ripe for exploitation. Indeed, Crusoe finally amasses wealth from his plantation in Brazil. As Pat Rogers points out, the course of empire in Defoe’s time was advanced by arguments from many spheres. Crusoe himself is part missionary, part conquistador, part trader, part colonial administrator (Rogers 47). In all of these roles he must keep himself busy and civilized, and he must either battle against or trade with the natives he encounters.

The location for Crusoe’s battle to remain civilized is an island at the mouth of the Orinoco River. Crusoe ponders the fact that without his tools he would not have survived, or would have survived but in a primitive state: ‘That if I had kill’d a goat, or a fowl, by any contrivance, I had no way to flea them, or part the flesh from the skin and the bowels, or to cut it up; but must gnaw it with my teeth, and pull it with my claws like a beast’ (Defoe 104). Critic James Sutherland sees these ‘homely virtues’ as a celebration of Crusoe’s middle-class Englishness. Although he is not bound by sentimental ties to his nationality, practically, he embodies the stereotypes of his homeland. He may be a symbol for all mankind but he is first and foremost an Englishman (Sutherland 6). The difficulties he faces (catching and cooking food, building a shelter, making clothes) are the sorts of problems that civilized man has long since forgotten and in some ways he retraces the history of the human race (27), using his nation’s civilization and his class’s resourcefulness to overcome these difficulties. Throughout these difficulties, Crusoe keeps his English sense of self-respect by not being naked, clothes becoming an important sign of his sanity and civilization. On the island, he struggles against the past, primitive state and overcomes it, showing himself to be modern, educated, rational, and, therefore, civilized. His ability to keep himself occupied by building shelters, farming, and sailing is his means of maintaining sanity in extreme solitude. His ordered, structured dwelling marks his resistance to savagery; fenced, clean, dry, and warm, it is clearly separate from the wilderness of his desert island. Edwin Benjamin believes the geography of the island is conceived in moral terms. The side on which Crusoe lands is less favoured naturally than the other side, which has lots of fruit, goats, hares, and turtles. However, that is also the side where the cannibals are accustomed to land for their ‘inhuman feasts’. The richness is illusory; the grapes might be bad, the goats are harder to catch because of lack of cover, and there is the large wooded valley where Crusoe gets lost in a haze for days. There are suggestions of luxury, sloth, and lassitude, all features Crusoe’s religion, nationality, and class shun, and ‘the thither side of the island becomes to him, like Egypt to the Israelites on the march to Canaan, a temptation to be resisted’ (Benjamin 37). On his island Crusoe enjoys ab...