Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(51)
The story ends badly for the ogre who, thanks to Little Thumb, slits the throats of his own seven daughters by mistake. Adding to the ogre’s misery, Little Thumb not only manages to steal the ogre’s magic boots but also cheats Mrs. Ogre out of all of their money. The tiny lad then returns home “where he was received with an abundance of joy” from his father who quickly realizes that he can probably retire from a career spent tying together bundles of twigs. One moral of this story is that you should not knife anyone in a darkened room where your kids are sleeping. Another appears to be that child-eating cannibals will not live happily ever after.
The brothers Grimm revisited a similar plot in Hansel and Gretel, which also detailed the abandonment of the young and the threat of cannibalism. The story begins with a concise and vivid portrayal of famine (“great scarcity fell on the land”) but in the Grimms’ tale, rather than an ogre’s wife, a kindly old woman takes in the lost brother and sister. The hag, however, quickly reveals both her true witchy identity and her intentions after she locks Hansel in the stable. “When he is fat I will eat him,” she cackles, and later, “Let Hansel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him and cook him.”
Other fairy tale writers also employed the cannibalism angle, most notably Englishman Benjamin Tabart (1767–1833) in his 1807 story The History of Jack and the Beanstalk. According to Maria Tatar, a leading authority on children’s literature, Tabart, like Perrault and the brothers Grimm, based his tale on older tellings of the story. Although Jack existed in many versions, it is Tabart’s that would become the model for subsequent adaptations, notably that of Joseph Jacobs, who compiled and edited five popular books of fairy tales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Tabart’s story, Jack is “indolent, careless, and extravagant,” and his actions bring his mother to “beggary and ruin.” Trading in the family’s milk cow to a stranger for a handful of seeds seems like a typical move for this lame incarnation of Jack, but of course things get interesting when his mother tosses the seeds away and an enormous beanstalk shoots up in hyper-bamboo fashion just outside their cottage. Climbing the ladderlike super stem, Jack meets a curiously tall woman and asks her for some breakfast. “It’s breakfast you’ll be if you don’t move off from here,” she tells him. “My man is an ogre and there’s nothing he likes better than boiled boys on toast.” But Jack is starving and, ignoring the danger, he convinces the wife to bring him back to her place for a bite. Soon enough, though, the ground is rumbling and Jack barely has time to jump into the oven before the Big Guy bursts in, reciting the most famous lines in all of ogredom:
Fee-fi-fo fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I’ll have his bones to grind my bread.
Unimpressed, his wife tells him that he’s probably dreaming, “Or perhaps you smell scraps of the little boy you liked so much for yesterday’s dinner.” Satisfied, the ogre has his breakfast before settling down for a nap. Jack, showing just how thankful he is to have been spared by the ogresse, promptly steals not only the couple’s gold and a harp that plays itself but, because you can never have enough gold, he filches a goose that lays golden eggs. Next, after somehow hauling all of this loot down to the ground, Jack shows off his logging skills by cutting down the beanstalk just in time to send the ogre plummeting to his death.
In Joseph Jacobs’s revised epilogue, a “good fairy” shows up and informs everyone that the giant had actually stolen the gold from Jack’s late father. With the theft and killing justified, “Jack and his mother became very rich, and he married a great princess, and they lived happily ever after.”29
In story after story, the Grimms, Perrault, and other fairy tale writers piled on scenes of cannibalism or, at the very least, its threat. In Cannibalism and the Colonial World, Marina Warner describes these collections as “the foundation stones of nursery literature in the West.” As such, these stories served to reinforce the idea, for readers of all ages, that cannibalism was the stuff of nightmares and naughty children.
Beyond the historians, playwrights, poets, and compilers of fairy tales, there were others who contributed to what became our culturally ingrained ideas about cannibalism. Three of the most influential were the writer Daniel Defoe, Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer, and the Father of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
Daniel Defoe (ca. 1660–1731) was a prolific author and perhaps the founding father of the English novel. Born in London as Daniel Foe, he eventually changed his name in an effort to construct an aristocratic origin from what had actually been a lower-class upbringing. It was a childhood during which young Daniel survived not only London’s Great Plague in 1665 but also its Great Fire the following year. After abandoning an up-and-down career as a businessman, Defoe began writing books, pamphlets, and poems—many of them with a political bent. Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, was his most famous work, and by the end of the 19th century it had become a worldwide phenomenon. Running through nearly 200 editions and translated into 110 languages, Robinson Crusoe has been abridged, pirated, spun off, and turned into an array of children’s books, an opera, and several movies.
The plot of Robinson Crusoe follows the decades-long adventures of the shipwrecked title character as he struggles to survive on a tropical island, possibly based on the isle of Tobago. After establishing a relatively comfortable life for himself, Crusoe knows that the most serious threat to his safety comes from the man-eating savages who frequent the island. These wretches, the reader is informed, battled each other in canoes with the victors killing and eating their prisoners Carib-style. This grim predilection for murder and the consumption of human flesh is spelled out in sensational detail when the castaway comes upon the remains of a cannibal feast on the beach.