Leftovers: The persistence of cannibal imagery in twentieth-century American literature.

摘要

Writers typically have used and understood cannibalism as a metaphor communicating some aspect of the relationship between the self and the "other," a way to define insider and outsider. It has illustrated difference or similarity between "civilized" and "savage," largely in relation to colonialism. Critics have also noted in this incorporative act the links between personal, national and cultural bodies. The cannibal motif usually participates in one of two modes: it is an expression of fear or a metaphor of consumption that addresses the expanding ravenous boundaries of a nation. This dissertation continues to probe these explanations of fear and consumption and the relationship between the self and the other. However, I am not interested in continuing to develop the traditional binary of external and internal; rather, I focus on a more complicated network of power and expression as it relates primarily to the individual and the individual's intersection with the familial, social and cultural bodies to which he/she belongs. My discussion explores the anxieties that cannibalism both masks and exposes. Beyond the traditional foci of identity questions, it will also consider power, consumption, creativity, self-destruction and constructions of whiteness.; A prefatory chapter discusses the historical view of the most note-worthy literary texts of cannibalism (Seneca, Columbus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Defoe, Melville). The bulk of my study though focuses on twentieth-century American works and reaches beyond actual representations of cannibalism to explore the language and imagery of cannibalism. I examine Tennessee Williams's literal and metaphoric cannibalism in "Desire and the Black Masseur" and Suddenly Last Summer, Joan Didion's and Sylvia Plath's metaphoric references to cannibalism that are linked to anxieties and concerns about motherhood, Tina Howe's plays Approaching Zanzibar and Birth and Afterbirth which use metaphors of cannibalism to examine the difficulties of parenting and maintaining creative autonomy, and American Indian authors Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Leslie Marmon Silko who reverse, explode, and expand the traditional uses of the cannibal and cannibal metaphors. The final chapter looks briefly at the continued use and expansion of the cannibal in a selection of films of the last three decades.