Cannibalism in Literature and Film
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Cannibalism in Literature and Film Jennifer Brown
Jennifer Brown 2013 Foreword Marc Jancovich 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-36051-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34784-1 ISBN 978-1-137-29212-4 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137292124 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13
For my Grandpa, Eric Brown, who always asked me if I was reading anything good
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Contents Foreword by Mark Jancovich Acknowledgements ix xi Introduction 1 Part I Mr Cannibal I Presume? The Colonial Cannibal 1 No Petticoats Here Early Colonial Cannibals: From Daniel Defoe to H. Rider Haggard 17 2 Into the Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness 31 3 Off the Beaten Track? The Post-Conradian Cannibal: From Graham Greene to Hollywood and the Italian Cannibal Boom 54 Part II Yeehaw! The Regional Cannibal 4 Borders and Bean The British Regional Cannibal: The Regional Gothic and Sawney Bean 85 5 Hillbilly Highway The American Regional Cannibal: From The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to The Hills Have Eyes, Originals and Remakes 107 Part III Cannibals in Our Midst: The City Cannibal 6 City Slashers and Rippers London Cannibals: From Jack the Ripper to Sweeney Todd 153 vii
viii Contents 7 American Psychos: From Patrick Bateman to Hannibal Lecter 170 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 234 Filmography 249 Index 251
Foreword Hannibal Lecter is an odd figure, both animal and aesthete. He is a cannibal who eats human flesh but his appetite is not born out of base hunger. He makes human flesh the centre of elaborate gastronomic feasts; and, in the process, his consumption of other human beings celebrates his superiority, and control, over them. He particularly enjoys eating the flesh of authority figures: A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti. Those, like Mason Verger, whom he considers to be beneath his culinary standards, are consigned to a more horrifying fate: Lecter does not consume Verger s flesh but persuades his victim to cut his face off and feed the flesh to dogs. Lecter may have been a cultural icon in the 1990s, following the success of the film version of Thomas Harris s novel The Silence of the Lambs, but he is hardly the first cannibal and, as Jennifer Brown demonstrates, he is heir to a long tradition that dates to the beginnings of modernity and beyond. The ways in which the figure of the cannibal transgresses taboos about what is good to eat, and what is not, not only tells us about monsters, or about food consumption, but about the modern world more generally. For Brown, the history of the cannibal, or at least mediated representations of it, can be divided into three phases, phases that are not only temporally but also spatially organized. In the first, Brown considers the ways in which the cannibal is mobilized in the encounter between the colonizer and the colonized, and the common association between savagery and cannibalism. In the second, she moves on to explore the ways in which this spatial opposition shifts to figure anxieties about the relationship between the urban and the rural. In a range of narratives, the cannibal is a decadent rural hillbilly, not simply a figure of pre-modernity but of underdevelopment. For example, the cannibals in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre turn to cannibalism as the factories that employed them are closed down and as their provincial backwater becomes excluded from the networks of modernity in the USA, vast tracts of the country have become known as flyover states! Finally, if the second stage shifts the encounter from colonizer to colonized closer to home and refigures it as an encounter between the urban ix
x Foreword and the rural, the third phase brings the cannibal home to the centre of the modern world the urban itself. As Brown puts it: If real-life serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein helped fuel the cult of the hillbilly cannibal in the mid twentieth century, then Jeffrey Dahmer is the late twentieth century s cannibal: white, middle class, male. In these ways, Brown demonstrates the way in which the cannibal operates as a mutable monster, a figure that changes and develops through the centuries and can be put to different uses by different groups. If the cannibal reappears in various guises, the question is one of masks. Leatherface, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, is named after his mask of human flesh; and Lecter himself escapes imprisonment by wearing the face of a guard, the flesh having been cut from his victim s head. But is the cannibal a constant that takes on different guises ; or is the cannibal itself a guise that is used to make sense of different fears is the cannibal a metaphor for other things? Of course, it may be that both options are possible: the cannibal is a metaphor that is used to talk about different fears; but the metaphor demonstrates continuities in our cultural understandings of these fears. Mark Jancovich
Acknowledgements This all started some years ago with an idea I had to examine the uses of food in literature at that stage I was thinking along the lines of chocolate and wine! Following encouragement and gentle persuasion from my colleagues and supervisors at Trinity College Dublin, the idea slowly transformed into a focused study on cannibalism. So, I thank them for their encouragement. It has, I believe, paid off. In particular, I want to thank Dr Jarlath Killeen who patiently read countless drafts and offered insightful suggestions. I also want to thank Dr Darryl Jones for inspiring an early love in gore and Gothic in me and for his ebullient enthusiasm in supporting this project, and Professor Mark Jancovich for his kind participation and support. The staff at Palgrave Macmillan have been gracious and helpful from the beginning. In particular, I want to thank Catherine Mitchell and Felicity Plester for answering all my many queries promptly and patiently, even those that must have seemed trivial or strange, and for guiding me through the thrilling process of my first publication. Finally, I want to thank, with all my heart, my parents for their unstinting love and pride in everything I do, John for never letting me forget the urge to follow my dreams, and Sully for all the above and so much more, but mostly for constantly reaffirming that the rest is just details. xi