Cannibalism in literature

Cannibalism is depicted in literary and other imaginative works across history.^[1][2] Homer's Odyssey, Beowulf, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, Flaubert's Salammbo, and Melville's Moby Dick are prominent examples.^[2]

Several myths and legends involve people eating human flesh without knowing what they are doing, being tricked by a murderous host. This motif has also been reflected in some early novels and plays.

In Greek mythology, Tantalus served the Olympian gods the flesh of his son, Pelops. None of the gods were fooled except for Demeter, who ate part of his shoulder. In another myth, the Thracian king Tereus raped his wife Procne's sister Philomela and cut out her tongue to prevent her from telling anyone. Philomela nevertheless notified Procne, who gained her revenge by serving Tereus the flesh of their son, Itys.

A similar motif can be found in the myth of the hostile brothers Atreus and Thyestes. Upon learning that his brother had committed adultery with his wife Aerope, Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes's sons, serving their flesh to his clueless brother. Afterwards he showed the hands and heads of the murdered boys to their shocked father.

Jaume Roig's 15th-century novel Espill features a scene in which female innkeepers served men's meat to eat in their Parisian restaurant.^[3] A similar motif, though with a male perpetrator, is associated with the legend of the English fictional character Sweeney Todd, whose victims were baked into meat pies which were then sold in a London pie shop.

In William Shakespeare's late-16th-century play Titus Andronicus, the character Tamora is unknowingly served a pie made from the remains of her two sons.

Travel narrative is a literary genre characterized by factual reportage represented and interpreted through techniques better known in fiction. Other aspects of travel literature include the disciplines of ethnography, geography, history, economics, and aesthetics.^[4] Travel narratives were used in the ages of discovery to map the world and, during the exploration of the New World, establish traits of indigenous people, survey for gold, and relate back to sovereigns the positives of their investments while encouraging more travel. This style of writing can be traced back to the 1st century.^[5]

Christopher Columbus invented the term "cannibal"^{[citation needed]} after arriving in the Bahamas in 1492 during his search for India. The friendly Arawak tribe described an island of enemies, the "Carib" or "Caniba" depending on translation, who, as Columbus described them, ate men with their monstrous dog snouts. The binary of friend and foe, good and evil, man and eater can be traced to this point in Western literature.^[6][7]

Herman Melville's Typee (1846) is a semi-factual account of Melville's voyage to the Pacific Island of Nuku Hiva, where he lived for several weeks among the island's cannibal inhabitants before fleeing.

Cannibalism comes up frequently in European literature during the High Middle Ages. The symbolism of cannibalism and representation of cannibals is used "as a literary response to the politics of external conquest, internal colonization, and territorial consolidation".^[1]

Jonathan Swift's satiric essay A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public (1729) proposed that poor people sell their children to be eaten by the wealthy, claiming that this would benefit the economy, family values, and general happiness of Ireland. The target of Swift's satire is the rationalism of modern economics, and the growth of rationalistic modes of thinking at the expense of more traditional human values.

In Voltaire's Candide (1759), the protagonist meets an old woman who lacks a buttock. She tells him that as a teenager she was kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery, ultimately ending in the harem of a Turkish janissary. When defending the city of Azov against the Russians, the Turkish soldiers decided to kill and eat the two eunuchs guarding the harem after they had run out of all other provisions. They wanted to use the women for the same purpose, but "a very pious and humane imam" convinced them to "[o]nly cut off one of the buttocks of each" of them for consumption, thus maiming them but at least sparing their lives.^[8]

Cannibalism appears in several tales of the Marquis de Sade, whose protagonists enjoy surpassing all limits of generally accepted behaviour. In his novel Juliette, the heroine meets a gigantic ogre-like Muscovite named Minski who delights in raping and torturing young boys and girls to death before eating them. He keeps hundreds of children and teenagers as captives in his palace for this purpose, dining daily on their flesh and also serving it to his guests, including Juliette and her companions.^[9] Another man she meets, Brisatesta, tells that together with two other men he once raped a fifteen-year-old boy, afterwards roasting him "alive on the spit and eat[ing] him with relish". One of Brisatesta's companions calls it an "absurdity" to accept the butchering and eating of pigs as normal but to reject the same "operation" when performed on a human.^[10] In several of the stories told or sketched in Sade's unfinished novel The 120 Days of Sodom, cannibalism is practised to gain sexual pleasure.^[11]

In the short story "Captain Murderer" (1860), Charles Dickens retells the Bluebeard folktale with a cannibalistic twist. The title character marries frequently, killing each wife shortly after the wedding and baking her flesh in a huge meat pie for this consumption. He meets his demise after his sister-in-law, in revenge for the death of her sister (his next-to-last wife), marries him and consumes a deadly poison just before he kills and eats her.^[12] For theorists like James Marlow, Dickens's literary use of cannibalism could be an extension of his personal beliefs and fascinations, becoming more of a psychoanalytical tool rather than a literary one.^[13]

"Cannibalism in the Cars" is an 1868 short story by Mark Twain in which the narrator meets a member of Congress who talks about their descent into cannibalism on a train. Twain's use of "parliamentary cannibalism" satirizes 19th century American politics.^[14]

In Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Xiahou Dun engages in autocannibalism when he is shot in the eye in a show of bravery and filial piety towards his parents. Additionally, while Liu Bei is travelling, he takes shelter with a hunter overnight. The hunter is unable to hunt any animals to feed him, and murders his own wife so that the visiting warlord might have meat. This pleases Cao Cao when he hears of it, and the hunter is rewarded.^[15] This showed the Confucian values of being filial and of respecting those of a higher rank than oneself, along with the lack of value women had at the time.

The protagonists of the classic Chinese novel Water Margin engage in "various forms of cannibalism" in addition to "wanton killing" and "excessive retribution".^[16] When celebrating a victory, they sometimes "share their enemies' flesh piece by piece, an action combining cannibalism with lingchi", the slow slicing of somebody to death.^[17] Cannibalism is often mentioned in a "causal tone", with human flesh being eaten not just "in acts of revenge", but also "as a way of living".^[18] Bandits run inns where they sell the flesh of those they have robbed and killed to unsuspecting travellers; poor people sleeping alone in the street are at risk of being kidnapped and sold for food to an innkeeper.^[19] Noting that the outlaws celebrated in the novel were nevertheless widely regarded as "heroes and heroines" over centuries, educator William Sin states that one cannot divide "the meanings of [their] actions" from "the cultural background under which they [were] performed" and that it would be "hasty" to project concepts and values of today "onto the situation of a distant culture" where they may not have applied.^[20]

In Ming and Qing dynasty literature, filial children engage in the practice of gegu^[21] or cutting of their own flesh and feeding it to their parents in order to extend the lifespan of their parents.

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