Disseminated through the public school system, privately purchased, or given as rewards for good behavior in Sunday schools, these primers had far-reaching effects, and were an important part of a school curricula that “shaped, taught and moulded several generations of Britain's ruling elite” (Richards 102). Written in large numbers by A Mother or Aunt–and at times featuring hand-colored illustrations and/or maps, the primers were often present in nurseries as recreational reading. The influence of these ubiquitous primers was central to the imperial project and pre-dated the general availability of free public elementary education via the dictate of the National Board of Education in 1899.
Produced to a great extent by middle-class women, primer texts offered these women a chance to recuperate their authority as domestic agents in order to make interventions in imperial discourse. By discussing diet and cooking, women writers were able to extend their domestic authority to the imperial scene. Primers' discussions of eating practices around the world were used to plot Other cultures along a “food chain” model of Empire. The imperial food chain model was not strictly based on the relation of predator to prey ndash;although the spread of colonial control and imperial activity renders that a piquant consideration–but on a survey of Others' different dietary practices and appetites. The English eater occupied a privileged position on the food chain not only because all production and consumption around the world was designed to benefit that body (according to the logic of the primers), but because the English eater emblematized the most proper practice of consumption and the most suitably regulated appetite. Primer writers positioned Other national bodies by the extent to which their curious gastronomical practices caused them to differ from this standard of consumption.
Women primer writers utilized this hierarchy of feeders to demonstrate how individual Other bodies should be controlled through a regulation of their dietary practices. The way a culture ate, whether they were written as eating to excess or by contrast depicted as poorly fed, as well as what people ate, whether they were well-nourished on plain food or accustomed to eating what writers saw as unwholesome fare, was constitutive of national character for the primers, offering an excuse for colonial intervention.2
By arguing that dietary practices constituted character, primers delineate how improper appetites, when unchecked, lead to behaviors such as cannibalism. Though cannibalism
disrupted the orderly model of colonialism and commerce envisioned by the primers, this trope nevertheless also provided women writers with a polarized domestic doppelganger that not only rendered the male body vulnerable to invasion, but demonstrated that the domestic interface of cooking and eating could figure as a potentially threatening site of exchange. In the unequal exchange of cannibalized bodies, individual and national bodies' boundaries are compromised; primer writers emphasize the importance of maintaining the integrity of their national bodily boundaries by instead incorporating Other bodies into their own Empire.
Despite the extent of their cultural influence, the writers of these primers have themselves been subsumed by the historical fiction that primer authors were solely, or even mostly, male. Long-held binaries such as Matthew Edney's assertion that “There was a gender difference between the narratives: geographical (and exploration) narratives were universally the products of male writers, whereas a significant portion of the travel literature was written by and for women” have effaced women's active participation in the imperial project through their production of geographic texts (66). Even Cheryl McEwan, whose Gender, Geography and Empire has laid the foundation for rethinking women's imperial roles, contends that women did not “play a significant role in the establishment of academic geography towards the end of the nineteenth century” (6). As well, the critical focus on women's travel writing has tended to occlude the possibility of other discursive genres written by women. While the body of fine critical work on women's travel writing may help to situate women primer writers' texts within a larger social framework, the two genres employ different discursive strategies, and the position the primer writers adopted in relation to their subjects often differed greatly from travel writers.4
Rehistoricizing primers reveals that women writers of these enormously successful texts played an integral role in instilling a colonialist consciousness in English5
children. Writing within a socially acceptable pedagogical framework, women authors of geography primers like Priscilla Wakefield (
, 1828), Mary F. E. Boscawen (
, 1882), taught children that it was their function as Empire builders to regulate the appetites of Others, while satisfying their own hunger for power and agency.
The Other End of the Food Chain: The Domestic Practice of Nation-Making
THROUGHOUT THE VICTORIAN PERIOD, primer writers infer that British women needed to be involved in the imperial project to produce ordered, industrious home spaces in keeping with British values. To be effective, colonial control had to be based not only on surveillance of public squares but on the regulation of local domestic spaces.6
Domestic agents marketed the home well into the twentieth century. In the United States, this trend led to the professionalization of domesticity in institutions like Hull House: “teaching immigrant women to be ‘good’ housekeepers empowered them as important shapers of U.S. democracy” (Domosh and Seager 21).
In a Foucauldian move, the primer writers emphasize how Other bodies can be subjected to surveillance and regulation through the “concerted distribution”
7 Foucault remarks that “Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes…[to] produce the relation in which individuals are caught up” (202).
of imperial power. The private spaces of eating, coupling, and child-rearing are the true nodes of cultural and social resistance within a colonial network. By linking excesses of the flesh, primers show how overindulgent appetites lead to moral destruction and indifferent attention to the institution of marriage and family as practiced in Britain. Therefore, primer writers argue that Britain had to order these spaces and regulate the activities and appetites of the bodies within them to maintain control over its Empire.
As a result of their supposed indolence, Others are depicted as unable to locate and consume proper food. Within the logic of the primer, this justifies management by a strict Britannia who will see to it that idleness does not prevail, and that appetites and subsequently bodies are better regulated. In Our Parlour Panorama (1882), Anne Jane Cupples, author of over forty-six children's books between 1867 and 1886, contends that the Chinese eat rats and mice, and that the native Australians “would be looked upon by us as a set of lazy fellows; for they neither farm the land nor are they shepherds, and never think of putting a seed or a plant into the ground for themselves…when very hungry [they] even eat reptiles and insects” (43). As the purveyor of food and agricultural expertise, the Englishman in Cupples's geography will alter the dietary practices and work ethic of the Australians for the good of their own bodies.
In addition to being depicted as lacking the industry to secure enough food, people of Other nations are often represented in primers throughout the century as requiring guidance of a specifically English domestic nature to identify the most appropriate fare. In Africa Described (1828), Barbara Hofland relates the specific appetitive irregularities of the Abyssinians with relish: “raw meat was esteemed delicious through the country, and frequently taken from an ox or a cow in such a state, that the fibres are still in motion, and the attendants continue to cut slices till the animal dies” (108). The author of over seventy children's books of travel, adventure, and domestic drama, Hofland herself probably never visited Africa. Despite this lack of first-hand information, Hofland makes histrionic use of italics to thoroughly emphasize the sensational nature of this diet.8
Another primer writer Wakefield contextualizes the Abyssinian dietary practices by “comparing the cruel, bloody gluttonous feasts and licentious attachments of the Abyssinians with the pure, humane, abstemious meals of the Bramins, who reject all animal food, and the enthusiastic fidelity of the Hindoo women, who burn themselves on the funeral pile with their deceased husbands” (187). The overindulgent Abyssinians and the abstemious Bramins offer two extremes while the British body occupies the happy medium. As well, eating is closely linked here with sexual mores as the carnivorous Abyssinians' “licentious attachments” are contrasted to the abstemious Hindoos' “enthusiastic fidelity.”
Another account of improper dietary practices illustrates the effect of poor nutrition on Funchalli Africans who have “a meager, sallow, sickly appearance, which must be attributed to the poverty of their food…and to a life of drudgery and hardship, with a total disregard to cleanliness” (Wakefield 355). A philanthropist from a prominent Quaker family, primer writer Priscilla Wakefield identifies this “total disregard to cleanliness” as a moral as well as hygienic evil which can be salved by a domestic agent.
Primers heighten the importance of their domestic duty by associating the lack of hygiene with disease, mapping Other bodies as diseased versions of a English ideal: “[their] complexion, where not concealed by a thick coat of grease and dirt, is of a yellowish brown, resembling that of an European in one of the last stages of jaundice” (Aspin 165). The Indian represented here in terms of a sick European body, requires a cure. While male agents of Empire could implement this cure through their political and military presence,9
Depictions of India as an ailing body politic extend to the map as Edney maintains in his discussion of the nineteenth-century surveying of India. Within the cartographic context, “The British engineer-surveyor looked at the Indian landscape as a surgeon looks at his patient, as an item to be thoroughly investigated, measured, and prodded so that maladies and imperfections might be identified, understood, adjusted, controlled, and so cured” (52). The mapped representation of India that Edney offers is of a social body to be vivisected, penetrated, and probed, a land scarred by wounds and stricken by internal sufferings; the surgeon's job is to regulate this body politic.
women writers stipulate that a lasting cure requires hands-on domestic intervention to transform ailing social bodies into healthy appendages of Empire. Consigned “the care of young and ailing bodies by scripture and by tradition…women were able to enter the social domain not only as mothers, but as nurses and educators” (Poovey 16). Good middle-class women could write primers featuring overindulged or ailing bodies with authority and social sanction. They could then extend this authority over local bodies to make claims on a larger global scale.
Imperial regulation through domestic intervention is represented in the primers as management effected for colonial peoples' own good. To achieve this end, primer writers identify the need to curb Others' overindulgent appetites. Priscilla Wakefield's 1814 primer contends that “Great pains are taken to render young women corpulent, by stuffing them with balls of nourishing forced meat” (23). Dangerous overindulgence is consistently marked in texts that circulated throughout the century. Hofland asserts in 1828 that “To be extremely corpulent is the perpetual aim of the [African] women” (79). By 1882, Cupples contrasts overindulgent appetites with the touted English self-control. She characterizes the Chinese emperor as “very good-natured and stout; but that is what all Chinamen like to be–as fat as they possibly can” (35). Primers argue that an overindulgent diet affected the temperament as well as the body. As early as 1814, Wakefield's primer connects excessive eating to other excesses of the flesh. Diners in Africa roll raw beef into pieces of cake,
each stuffing these rolls into his or her neighbour's mouth; and he who can swallow down the greatest number of these pellets, is esteemed the most gallant man. After this, you can be surprised at no excesses; such a prelude may be expected to terminate in conduct too licentious for description, I shall therefore drop a veil over it, and proceed to give you some account of their marriages, if the temporary connections these people form can be called so. (185–86)
Upholding British values of moderation, such examples are designed to show how other parts of the world fail to live up to this standard. As Donald Hall comments in
Muscular Christianity, “certain groups of men
10 In light of the work of Burton, Meyer, Morgan, and Frawley on women travel writers, I would add “women” to Hall's designation of groups that shape historical and spatial truths.
have shaped the truth to ensure their own freedom (as well as argue for, comment upon, resist, and/or deny that of others) by referring back to, making use of, and extrapolating from the male body or more precisely, diverse and often competing versions of the male body” (6). Primers mapped these competing versions of bodies by marking Other bodies as overindulgent in contrast to English bodies whose restraint demonstrated physical and mental fitness for ruling the world.
One common trope in nineteenth-century primers is the staging of imperial dinners at which the superiority of the fare ingested by English bodies is underlined. At these dinners the primers arrange a hierarchy of eaters whose contributions to the meal represent their national character and capability. A popular author of children's religious texts,11
Boase's Modern English Biography (1892) records that Mortimer's The Peep of Day (1873) sold over 1 million copies, and was translated into thirty-eight languages in Africa, Europe, Asia, and America (991).
Favell Lee Mortimer closes her primer,
Near Home (1849), with a European Dinner attended by the European bodies politic, bearing their national dishes. As the provider of the main course, England's importance at this banquet is underscored by contrast with nations such as Russia, Norway, and Switzerland that proffer only side-dishes, appetizers, or condiments. The Englishman bears “a sirloin of roast beef, from an ox that fed in one of the rich meadows of England” (Mortimer,
Near 44). Not only is the English dish placed as the climactic entrée, but it is presented in the context of the “rich meadows” of a productive nation in contrast to the “poor Irishman's” potatoes or the Laplander's meager “best dish” of reindeer tongue. In short, England has the resources to feed other nations.
No such banquet is reprised in Mortimer's subsequent geography text on Africa, Asia, America, and Oceanica in Far Off (1852); this discrepancy underscores that a feast of nations is notable not only for who serves the main course, but for who is invited to sit down and participate in international fellowship.12
An activity book, Eighty Pleasant Evenings (1898), suggests an International Social. The exclusion of non-European countries (except the United States) from this meal enforces an early version of a first-world hierarchy, the “worlding” impulse identified by Spivak. This meal fuels a culture of colonial consumption in which Europe dines on its colonial side dishes.
The cuisine of Other countries does not merit a place at the table in these tableaux. In
Life and Travel in Tartary, Thibet, and China (1867) Meredith Jones offers a typical primer perspective on Eastern cuisine when she unflatteringly characterizes Thibetan cookery as an art in which “the natives know no better than to boil pheasants and partridges, and then eat them without seasoning, one can sympathize with any European who might be condemned to feed with them” (107–08). By qualifying food not merely as different, but as inept or inappropriate, primer writers relegate Others to the provision of small side dishes, or banish them from the banqueting table entirely.
Through acts of consumption in the primers, children possess and digest Other cultures. In Sarah Lee [Bowdich]'s Playing at Settlers [1854] three children pretend to be settlers on an unspecified frontier, setting up camp in a makeshift hut on their parents' estate. To celebrate their would-be colonial enterprise, Ernest, Adela, and George invite the friendly vicar and his wife to “A Settlers' Dinner” at which they will consume Eastern kabobs and African “Kuttakim Kicky,” foods representative of the Empire's colonial interests (77, 88). By learning to reproduce and consume Other cultures, the vicar pronounces that the children have become candidates for colonial administration: “‘If you do not turn settlers in some new, wild country…you will be wasted”’ (Lee 84). The “wholesome pastime” of a settlers' dinner provides nutritious matter for the settlers' brains to digest (Lee 90).
The conversation, inspired by this fare, focuses on the customs of different cultures. Though vouchsafing that she gained the “least instruction” from the Africans in her travel books, Adela has nevertheless “obtained” a dish from them (84). The consumption of Kuttakim Kicky is yoked to the consumption of the “Gold Coast” region from which it derives (88): while the diners cut and consume the Kicky, Africa is also being carved and served to whet imperial appetites. Lee herself was familiar with the colonial enterprise in Africa. She accompanied husband Thomas Bowdich to Africa while he conducted treaties with the king of the Ashantee for the Africa Company and his uncle Governor Hope Smith. Left with three dependent children after his death, Lee prepared her late husband's work on Africa for publication, and offered her own African experiences for public consumption.
“You are Who You Eat”: Cannibalism, Capitalism, and Colonialism Constitute Identity
BENEDICT ANDERSON IDENTIFIES how the marking of cuisine as “national” is one means of constituting nation, in addition to shared language, history, and cultural productions.13
In Meade's Four on an Island (1892), Englishman Mr. Fraser raises his family in Brazil but “insisted as far as possible on their being brought up in English fashion…the children morning after morning ate their English porridge and milk with appetite” (10). For Fraser, national identity is constituted through daily consumption.
Undercutting Others' claims to national autonomy, primers display a range of national cuisines to support the intervention of domestic agents in imperial space. Because Other national dishes are cast as inappropriate or un-nourishing by the primers, writers can justify the necessary imperial intervention in Other domestic spaces. As we have seen, issues of authority, autonomy, and control undergird discussions about food in the primers; the flow of power associated with food was nowhere more fraught than in discourses on cannibalism.
References to cannibalism and acts of dismemberment by indigenous peoples are remarked in primers throughout the century like Priscilla Wakefield's The Traveller in Africa (1814), Mary Anne Venning's The Geographical Present (1817), Mary Martha Sherwood's Introduction to Geography (1818), Barbara Hofland's Africa Described (1828), and Mary Hield's Glimpses of South America (1882). Such accounts often reference tales of missionaries, travelers, or explorers who were consumed, usually in Africa or the islands of the South Pacific.14
In Victorian Writers and the Image of Empire, Kitzan notes that “The scenery might be beautiful, even spectacular, but the…natives were given to cannibalism, head-hunting, and licentious behavior” (51).
However, anthropologist William Arens points out that the mobilization of the cannibal threat from the fifteenth-century Caribbean to sixteenth-century Meso-America to nineteenth-century Africa to mid-twentieth-century New Guinea was strategic and consistent with “the latest outpost of Western expansion” (40). Following Arens's analysis, the deployment of the term “cannibal” in the primers may be read as evidence not of material indigenous practices, but rather of imperial ambitions and fears. The trope of cannibalism signifies the threatening threshold of the unknown but desired world.
Recently, work on cannibalism has departed from a focus on what anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday calls “the logic of cannibalism” (xii), an attempt to determine its significance and meaning to indigenous cultures. A growing contingent of postcolonial scholars like Arens, Peter Hulme, and Gananath Obeyesekeree has begun questioning discursive constructions and representations of cannibal acts. The existence of cannibalism as a “figure of speech” has been the topic of some lively debate in the anthropological community.15
Lestringant warns that too close an analysis of the rhetoric describing cannibal acts “runs the risk of losing sight of the reality, underestimating it, or worse still, denying it. It might imply that cannibalism exists only as a figure of speech” (8).
Pointing to inconsistencies and contradictions in Western accounts of cannibalism, Arens contends ultimately that “the ever-present cannibals on the horizon of the Western world are the result of intellectual conjuring” (40). While not precluding the possibility of anthropophagy, Gananath Obeyesekere likewise asserts that “the overwhelming number of cases of imputed cannibalism were products of the European fantasy” (64).
Rather than trying to recreate the material conditions under which acts occurred that travelers and missionaries have interpreted as cannibalistic, the goal of this article is to examine the circulation of cannibal tropes in female discourse written from the metropolitan center of the Empire. What does it mean when Englishwomen take possession of cannibal tales and report them in geography primers? Not only do they relate these narratives, but cannibalism itself offers a textual methodology: these women writers parse together different instances, statistics, and anecdotes from the texts of male missionaries, travelers, and explorers, in effect, enacting a type of discursive cannibalism over the textual bodies of imperial male authors. As an interface in which an unregulated domestic space threatens the success of the imperial sphere, the site of cannibalism offered enticing discursive possibilities to women writers making a bid for imperial agency through domestic aegis.
The primers' preoccupation with cannibalism draws from a long literary tradition. While evidence of cannibalism among Pacific islanders and Africans is often unreliable, the presence of cannibal practices is well documented in Western culture, folklore, and literature, indicating perhaps that a concern with finding, converting, and colonizing cannibals in imperial discourse was at base a desire to rewrite narratives which imperialists had heard in childhood stories. In addition to depictions of cannibals in canonical Western literature read by adults,16
In Hesiod's Theogeny Cronus devours his children (except for Zeus who survives through the ingenuity of his mother) for fear that they will supplant him; the Cyclops threatens to consume Ulysses and his crew; Dante's Satan is a giant orifice stuffed with sinners; Dracula and Frankenstein and the Sweeney Todd tales all feature violations of the integrity of the body; and in a contemporary context the cannibalistic tendencies of Jeffrey Dahmer were front-page news, and the antics of Hannibal Lecter captivated movie-going audiences.
children's fiction is also preoccupied with the dangers of cannibalism in fairy tales like Jack and the Beanstalk and Hansel and Gretel in which children are threatened with being devoured. Marina Warner calculates that “[o]nly four stories by Perrault do not feature cannibalism as such…. In the Grimm Brothers' later, seminal anthology, the tally can't be made, as stories of ogres and flesh-eating witches are so numerous, and many of them overlap” (160). Child readers would have been able to associate the antagonistic witches and ogres who threatened to devour the heroes of their early nursery tales with the dietary proclivities of the cannibals described in primers, with the result that the peoples suspected of cannibalism would have been cast as caricatures of happily-ever-evil and dealt with accordingly.
In addition to appearing in nursery tales and games,17
Fears about cannibalism also pervade late-century children's games. The game anthology Eighty Pleasant Evenings (1898), compiled by the Press Committee of Deems Memorial Christian Endeavor Society of Immanuel Church, includes a cannibal-inspired party game:
Six slips of paper are prepared, three of them longer than the others. The longer three are called missionaries; the others, cannibals. The aim is to so place the slips, two at a time, that one missionary shall escort his five fellow travelers successively across an imaginary river…without leaving the cannibals in the majority on either side. If successful, the missionaries are said to have converted the cannibals. If otherwise, the cannibals will devour the missionaries. (Eighty 19)
The matter-of-fact possible outcome in which cannibals may “devour the missionaries” adds a sense of urgency and danger to narrations of missionary work in children's books, allowing children to rehearse religious imperialism from the safety of the metropolitan center. The game attempts to cultivate problem-solving and analytical skills which will enable the correct form of consumption to occur: that of territory and allegiances, rather than bodies.
cannibals are positioned as the extremely marketable antagonists in popular adolescent children's fiction like Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe (1719), Captain Marryat's
Masterman Ready (1841), R. M. Ballantyne's
The Coral Island (1858), and Anne Bowman's
The Kangaroo Hunters (1859). Interactions with cannibals became another trope in the hundreds of castaway narratives written in imitation of
Robinson Crusoe. Yet even in fiction as in anthropological texts, the witnesses of cannibalism often read the signs of cannibal activity after the fact: Marlow sees heads on sticks outside of Kurtz's cabin in
Heart of Darkness, and Tarzan finds human bones in a hut in Edgar Rice Burroughs' series and makes assumptions about their owner's demise. Such artifacts are read as evidence of cannibalism because travelers and explorers have been primed to anticipate cannibalism: as Obeyesekere asks archly, “What else but cannibalism could one expect to find in the Cannibal Islands?” (70).
The fact that cannibalism became such a ready, able trope reveals the anxieties and conflicted desires of Empire. In some accounts, the land itself is narrated as a gaping mouth ready to consume travelers. En route to Africa in Wakefield's primer, her narrator Arthur listens as his sisters
recited all the dreadful narratives they had read of travelers through the interior of Africa, who had been subjected to the horrors of slavery, swallowed up in showers of sand, torn to pieces by wild bests, carried off by pestilential fevers, or fallen victims to the savage ferocity of the inhabitants. (Wakefield 3, emphasis mine)
The “savage ferocity” of the inhabitants is coupled with the other “horrors” that the sisters imagine will mark or dismember Arthur's body: being “swallowed” by a sandstorm, “torn to pieces” by animals, or “carried off” by fevers. Underlying the narration of these other fears is the ultimate fear that Arthur will be “subjected” to the cannibals and lose control of what his own body is made to signify. As Maggie Kilgour notes, cannibalism may be read as an act characterized by the “desire for total autonomy and control over others who are treated therefore as food” (18). Anxieties about cannibalism are linked to fears of colonial counter-invasion,
18 Meyer identifies in the Brontë children's juvenilia that “Cannibalism is also the ultimate manifestation of the violation of boundaries, and represents the fear, on the most immediately horrifying personal and bodily level, of being invaded and used by another for his own purposes” (119).
the imperialist anxiety that the flow of the food chain could be reversed and that the eaters would be eaten themselves.
In her research on the discourse of cannibalism in Mary Kingsley's travel writing, Cheryl McEwan glosses cannibalism as a strategy of resistance to imperial rule, indicating that the Fan(g) peoples may have exercised some agency over the dissemination of a cannibal mythology. Rather than interpreting the narration of cannibalism merely as an ethnocentric discourse written by travelers seeking to aggrandize their adventures and the dangers they encountered, McEwan reads cannibalism as a threat constructed or exaggerated by coastal Africans to prevent further European penetration into the interior, and also to preserve the economic advantages of African middle men in the dispersal of goods from the interior.19
Postcolonial scholars like Obeyesekere argue that cannibalism must be understood as part of a discursive exchange between Europeans and natives. Hulme concurs with Obeyesekere that “the British fascination with and horror of cannibalism was perceived by the Maori, who responded by admitting to and exaggerating their own cannibalism…sometimes for real as a weapon of terror, one of the few weapons they possessed in an unequal contest” (23).
The circulation of the trope of cannibalism clarifies the primer writers' own investments in the power of appetites, diet, and domesticity. Identifying groups of indigenous as cannibals is a strategic imperial move. As Obeyesekere states, “for the most part cannibalism is a discourse on the Other, defining out-groups in terms of their horrifying man-eating propensities” (63). For primer writers, cannibalism offers the most polarized instance of domestic appetites gone awry and requiring imperial regulation. Gleefully depicting nature as “red in tooth and claw” (Tennyson 176), some texts are explicit about the tortures that await travelers: “Ferocious in character, they [Abyssinians] kill and plunder all whom the [sic] meet with; they are cannibals, and often make war to obtain prisoners, whose flesh they devour” ([Venning] 104). Primer writers did not always present the cannibal threat in such unequivocal detail, however. In her pious Introduction to Geography, popular religious author Mary Martha Sherwood obliquely references cannibalism as “a state of the most degraded heathen darkness” (81) practiced in Africa by “wandering tribes of barbarous men who know not God, and who by their crimes make these howling wildernesses still more dreadful” (Sherwood 116). For these primer writers, cannibalism was at the heart of the darkness that shrouded the unknown world, fraught with issues of power, fear, and identity.20
Narrations of cannibal acts borrow liberally from popular fiction, from an “apprehension-driven gothic sensationalism” (Malchow 50) as well as from the genres of shipboard journalism and sailors' yarns which are marked by tall exaggerations related in a tone of seeming objectivity and hence are “totally unsuitable as an ethnographic resource” (Obeyesekere 65).
The consistency and intensity of the obsession with cannibalism in imperial discourse offers insight into the anxieties and fears of Empire.
Susan Meyer suggests that narrations of cannibalism may reflect fears of “horrific” “retribution” for the violence of imperial acts committed against indigenous peoples (119). While the primers do not frame their distress about the dangers of cannibalism in these terms, colonial anxiety informs these texts. Hofland's primer bewails the vengeance wreaked on Sir Charles MacCarthy and his men by the Ashantee, “Alas! the sculls of these brave men are now adding to the trophies of a court…and there is only one melancholy satisfaction attending their loss, which is, that they died on the field of battle, and were not reserved to bleed as prisoners, and probably by tortures, in the capital” (Hofland 183–84). For these men, being cannibalized is a fate worse than death; their deaths in battle preclude this, thereby affording readers the “melancholy satisfaction” that the soldiers' bodies are not thus invaded, though their “sculls” may become trophies of the cannibal court (Hofland 183–84).21
The “melancholy satisfaction” that the male body's integrity is inviolate parallels trends in accounts of the “Indian Mutiny.” As Sharpe contends, popular press accounts contain no descriptions of male dismemberment because this would equate British men with rape victims and weaken colonial power. The “structured silence” about the dismemberment of the male body resonates with fears about how cannibalism would subject the male body (67).
By the end of the century, cannibalism is read not only as a consequence of imperial expansion as in the case of Sir Charles MacCarthy cited by Hofland above, but as a strategic act of war on the part of the cannibals. Mary Hield's Glimpses of South America (1882), contends that cannibals develop a “taste” for their most-hated enemies; Hield claims that they “hate the African negroes more than the white men, and whenever they can do so they both kill and eat them” (126). By characterizing cannibalism as an act of strategic resistance, Hield argues that the destruction of these cannibals is a just response by white imperialists. She explains to her readers, “When we hear that these Caribs at one time were cannibals, and used to eat their enemies, we can't feel very sorry that now they have become both less powerful and less numerous” (153). By playing on prevalent cultural fears about the depredations of cannibal bogey-men, Hield forecloses the possibility of sympathy with colonized peoples.
We have seen how the consumption of food operated as a critical signifier of individual and national autonomy, and how cannibalism represented not only a threat to bodily integrity, but was glossed as an act of strategic resistance against imperialism. In addition, the trope of the cannibal was mobilized by opponents of capitalism to characterize the social Darwinism of mid- to late-Victorian economics.22
In “Of King's Treasuries,” Ruskin mobilizes the metaphor of cannibalism to discuss social and economic conditions, “How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted physical quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal soul?…because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey” (120). Ruskin's powerful indictment of the economic system depicts those in power as eaters feeding upon the disempowered poor, similar to Swift's ironic suggestions for the economic amelioration of the Irish in his “A Modest Proposal” (1729).
In an economic sense, the eaters were socially empowered capitalists; to be eaten by them was to surrender bodily autonomy. In the increasingly industrial world, only the strongest would not only survive, but would also maintain the integrity of their bodies. Workers were reduced to “‘hands,’ as dissected factors of production…[by] millowners who ‘devoured’ their labor, and an urban environment portrayed as the excremental result of the ‘cannibal feast’ of capitalist consumption” (Malchow 73).
23 If the cannibal feast of capitalism was to be enjoyed only by those who triumphed in a contest of economic strength, then women were at risk as laborers; the economies of cannibalism/capitalism rely on a gendered division of labor: women are identified with production and men with consumption. Subsequently, English women were subject to fears that they would be consumed by their role in production, as evidenced by the public outcry over women's participation in sewing sweatshops. How would their role in the production of goods affect their role as producers of the domestic?
This reading of capitalism as cannibalistic disrupts the primers' proposed model of commerce in which the world system is imagined as a single body through which goods circulate to the benefit of all its members. Since this model of commerce supported the colonialist enterprises, a model of capitalist cannibalism would set the various members of this body against one another, undercutting the aims of Empire.
With these economic and social currents flowing under the primers throughout the century, narrations of cannibalism by women authors acquire a double charge. Not only was the male body as vulnerable to invasion as the female body, but the male body was narrated as a potential object in a domestic space in which women had been traditionally constituted as subjects. The same strategy that Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic employs in identifying Bertha Mason as Jane Eyre's excessive double self24
Despite weighty objections of scholars like Spivak, Madwoman offers interesting possibilities in light of the nineteenth-century taxonomies of womanhood.
can be utilized to read cannibals as domestic agents dangerously empowered to threaten imperial autonomy. A preoccupation with cannibalism in the primers not only showcased an extreme eating practice, but it also offered women writers a domestic doppelganger through which cooking and eating become potentially threatening processes.
Reviewing reports of women as devouring cannibal queens, prostitutes whose disease-riddled bodies consume men's health, as well as representations of the guillotine as a feminized monster, H. L. Malchow mentions that representations of female cannibals “may owe something to an association drawn from the disjointing and cooking kitchen duties of the working-class women” (86–87). I contend that such an association not only informs male imperial discourse, but that women's primer texts capitalized on this anxiety; by emphasizing cannibalism as an example of an unregulated domestic space, women make a bid for imperial power as domestic agents.
The narration of cannibalism can be read in the context of critiques of colonialism as well as capitalism in the discourse of the primers. The map itself, traversed by rivers and peppered with icons representing grain, cattle, or spices, offers a harvest of possibility for imperial and commercial exploitation. Such a map is explained in the primers as the wor(l)d made flesh to be divided among imperial powers. At mid-century and beyond, the figure of the orange, itself a product enjoyed through colonial commerce, appears in primers as a metaphor for the division and consumption of the world. In 1856 Emily Taylor states in her primer that the world is “something like an apple or orange cut in halves, with all the juicy fleshy part scooped out, then pulled, and stretched, and pressed, and made to lie flat on a piece of paper” (14). Taylor could have explained the earth's shape by reference to the “ball” of her title, but instead elected to describe a cannibalized orange to support her contention that children should conceive of the world as a space that is stretched and pulled and “made to lie flat” in representations.
The choice of orange as analogue for the world is significant. Oranges were identified as products of colonial exchange; Geography, by a Lady for the Use of Children (1849) explains that “One of the Azores is named St. Michael, from which the best oranges sold in England are imported” (A Lady 93). By likening the world to the orange, primer writers suggest that worldspace is something consumable and commodifiable. The orange analogue is also utilized in late-century texts like Maria Hack's Travels in Hot and Cold Lands (1877) and Antonia Zimmern's Geography for Little Children (1880), which explains, “Though our earth seems flat like the table or the floor, yet it is really round and full like an orange or ball…the highest places on the land, and the deepest places in the sea, are nothing more when compared with it than are the tiny roughnesses on the rind of a smooth orange” (2).
The orange is also a useful metaphor for imperialists to consider the most just way to divide the world for consumption/colonization. Mortimer's primer depicts the world as “very small, not much bigger than an orange…. Look out of the window. You see a little piece of the world; but you cannot see it all” (Mortimer, Near 1). Children can only see their own small slice of the world, a fact which is recuperated into a moral by Frances Hodgson Burnett later in The Secret Garden (1911). Neighbor and earth-mother Susan Sowerby explains to the housekeeper of Misselthwaite Manor that she tells her children:
“When I was at school my jography told as th' world was shaped like a orange…. No one owns more than his bit of a quarter an' there's times it seems like there's not enow quarters to go round. But don't you–none o' you–think as you own th' whole orange or you'll find out you're mistaken….”' (147; Chapter XIX)
Sowerby's “jography” mobilizes the orange analogue as the basis of a lecture on the evils of greed. Counseling children to share the orange, Sowerby retrospectively comments on Empire's excesses, not the least of which has been to identify the cannibal as a morally bankrupt figure “in order to deflect attention from the utter barbarity of primitive accumulation” (Phillips 202).
The fact that primers posited the mapped world as food for colonialist consumption indicates a desire to base imperial identity on the act of eating what is Outside or Other, allowing the strong to survive and flourish by subsuming those narrated as weak. For our purposes then, the way cannibalism is narrated by these primers reflects a desire by the imperial center to contain the excesses of the periphery, to assimilate the Other– but to do so through technologies of control as expressed by the relations of eater to eaten in an imperial food chain.25
The designation of cannibal was also shorthand that “distinguished those peoples who acquiesced to colonial rule from those who fought against it” (Rice 111). Rice reads slavery itself as a type of “economic cannibalism,” in which Europeans devoured Africa's resources while the Europeans' ships swallowed Africans whole and sent them away on the Middle Passage. The threatening image of the man-eating ship is reflected in the rumors circulated among Africans concerning light-skinned cannibals who stole away kinfolk and fattened them for eating; in his study of the discourse of cannibalism, Rice reports that Africans on ships like Amistad (1839) feared that cannibalism was their eventual fate and often revolted. Such fears have a historical precedent; starving, shipwrecked crews of ships like The Tiger (1766) and The Peggy (1765) cannibalized African slaves.
To preserve the proper flow of power between eaters, and to prevent the threatening reversal represented by cannibalism, primers serve a proper literary diet in which children consume Others. Children's relationships to Others were often depicted in terms of eater and eaten by the primer writers. As we saw in Playing at Settlers, Adela consumes the African culture by preparing Kuttakim Kicky. In Near Home (1849), Mortimer explains that “Some maintain that by reading solid books children will become solid. The physician is not on their side: he prescribes milk for babes” (vii). Her system of teaching geography, she explains, cultivates a thirst for knowledge so that the child will “relish dry books, and dip into deep books, and feed on solid books” (viii). Utilizing the metaphor of literary food, John Ruskin declares in Sesames and Lilies that young girls can forage in libraries to find wholesome food for thought: “Let her loose in the library…[like] a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you, and the good ones too” (158). In narrating knowledge as consumption, primer writers argue that devouring texts builds healthy character.
Primer writers touted their texts as both nutritious and delicious; in The Child's Fairy Geography (1890), Reverend Winslow praises entertaining schoolbooks: “Educational pills as of yore have to be swallowed, but they are so deftly and artfully covered with a luscious coating of sugar, that they slip down with the greatest ease” (x). Words had material effects on living bodies; the primer hierarchies had consequences when they were read/fed to children. Whether primers were offered as deftly coated “sugar” “pills” or dry grains, they still conveyed the doctrines and dictates of imperial action and were essential elements to ensure a healthy British body politic.
As we have seen, children's recreational and instructional reading allowed them to swallow imperial tenets with a spoonful of sugar. By locating imperial privilege within the properly nourished body, primer writers consolidated the Victorian belief in their supremacy at the top of the food chain. Most Victorians believed that “the British were inherently, by ‘blood,’ a conquering, governing, and civilizing ‘race’; the ‘dark races’ whom they conquered were inherently incapable of governing and civilizing themselves” (Brantlinger 21). While primers ultimately reinforced such a hierarchy, the writers qualified the privileged placement by making it contingent on specific domestic practices of regulated consumption.
Thus, food and power are linked in the primers; the proper flow of food nourished the Empire as it consumed the resources and energies of the colonial world. As well, the representation of the interface of eating in discourses on imperial cannibalism provided women writers with an entry-point into the imperial project; as domestic agents, they could intervene in Other domestic spaces to ensure the proper management and regulation of food and appetite, preventing a reversal of the flow of power along the food chain in which the eaters would themselves be eaten.
%20-%20https://sketch.com%20--%3e%3ctitle%3e3ECBBF50-FD08-412A-943D-2CFC5E025A16%3c/title%3e%3cdesc%3eCreated%20with%20sketchtool.%3c/desc%3e%3cg%20id='Stylesheet'%20stroke='none'%20stroke-width='1'%20fill='none'%20fill-rule='evenodd'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(-926.000000,%20-668.000000)'%20id='BUTTONS'%3e%3cg%20transform='translate(100.000000,%20597.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='BTN-/-RIGHTS'%20transform='translate(816.000000,%2065.000000)'%3e%3cg%20id='ICON-/-Rights'%20transform='translate(10.000000,%206.000000)'%3e%3cpath%20d='M13.5752841,0%20L1.34943182,0%20C0.59375,0%200,0.586666667%200,1.33333333%20L0,22.6666667%20C0,23.4133333%200.620738636,24%201.34943182,24%20L17.6505682,24%20C18.40625,24%2019,23.3866667%2019,22.6666667%20L19,5.36%20L13.5752841,0%20Z%20M13.5752841,1.89333333%20L17.0838068,5.36%20L13.5752841,5.36%20L13.5752841,1.89333333%20Z%20M1.34943182,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,1.33333333%20L12.1988636,5.36%20C12.1988636,6.10666667%2012.7926136,6.69333333%2013.5482955,6.69333333%20L17.6235795,6.69333333%20L17.6505682,22.6666667%20L1.34943182,22.6666667%20Z'%20id='Shape'%20fill='%23595959'%20fill-rule='nonzero'%3e%3c/path%3e%3ccircle%20id='Oval'%20stroke='%23595959'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20fill='%23595959'%20cx='9.5'%20cy='13.5355339'%20r='5.5'%3e%3c/circle%3e%3cpolyline%20id='Path-2'%20stroke='%23FFFFFF'%20stroke-width='1.5'%20transform='translate(9.500000,%2013.035534)%20rotate(45.000000)%20translate(-9.500000,%20-13.035534)%20'%20points='8%2016.0355339%2011%2016.0355339%2011%2010.0355339'%3e%3c/polyline%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/g%3e%3c/svg%3e)
