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.
I was perfectly confounded and amazed; nor is it possible for me to express the horror of my mind at seeing the shore spread with skulls, hands, feet, and other bones of human bodies; and particularly I observed a place where there had been a fire made, and a circle dug in the earth . . . where I supposed the savage wretches had sat down to their human feastings upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures.
After spewing his lunch (the suitable response of any civilized Englishman), Crusoe hurries back to his side of the island and his “castle” where, for the next two years, he fixates about “the wretched, inhuman custom of their devouring and eating one another up.” Crusoe fantasizes gruesome plans for revenge, including one in which he sets off explosives under the cannibal cooking pit and another in which he blows off their heads from a sniper’s nest. While brooding over his own obsession, Crusoe begins to doubt whether the savages actually knew that they were committing horrendous crimes. In a rare instance of 18th-century clarity regarding Columbus and those who followed him, Crusoe wonders whether killing the cannibals would “justify the conduct of the Spaniards in all their barbarities practiced in America, where they destroyed millions of these people.”