PROOF Contents Foreword by Mark Jancovich ix Acknowledgements 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 PROOF viii Contents 7 American Psychos: From Patrick Bateman to Hannibal Lecter 170 Conclusion 215 Bibliography 234 Filmography 249 Index 251 PROOF 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 adven- tures involving treasure, rebellious slaves, wild animals, and inhos- pitable 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 patri- otic heroism and Christian dutifulness compatible with imperialistic aims ...besides having great popular appeal, the works were also educa- tional 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 nine- teenth 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 con- sumers 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 impe- rialism. The fiction worked to provide adventurous scenarios for brave men to prove their worth. There was a desire for the ‘fresh air’ of the 17 PROOF 18 Mr Cannibal I Presume? The Colonial Cannibal empire, removed from the commercial ‘fug’ of the metropole (61), and these novels provided just such an escape, replete with dashing hero- ics 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, man- ners, 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). Substitut- ing 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 fic- tion offered a welcome change to the urban domestic novels, the plight of the poor, and grey industrialized cities, and it managed to ‘mol- lify 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 Intellec- tuals and the Masses (1992), John Carey notes the equation of the term ‘mass’ with savages, women, children, bacilli, or animals in the writ- ings 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 com- mon allegation was that they lacked souls. Carey also argues that the desire to eliminate the semi-human mass was a common one: ‘Dream- ing of the extermination or sterilization of the mass, denying the mass PROOF No Petticoats Here – Early Colonial Cannibals 19 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 sup- posed refinement of the colonizers in complete contrast to the savagery of the colonized. The English colonial novel has as its primary motiva- tion 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 prac- tise 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 accu- sation 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 canni- bals 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 PROOF 20 Mr Cannibal I Presume? The Colonial Cannibal 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 antithe- sis 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 post- imperial 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.