Human, It's What's for Dinner

Melissa L. is a sharp, thoughtful student, who loves research and analysis, which is evident in this guest blog entry. Despite her inability to resist writing about cannibalism, she does a great job with her material. Do check out the sources she references.

You might expect to encounter one human dining on another in a horror film or B grade zombie film, but fairy tales? Cannibalism has been known to happen between once upon a time and happily ever after quite commonly. It’s so prolific in this medium, that Francisca Vaz da Silva, author of “Cannibalism” in Haase’s The Greenwood’s Encyclopedia of Folk and Fairy Tales has offered it as a “staple” issue in fairy tale genre. Which ones? Well, if you include anthropomorphized beings (ie.ogres, trolls, wolves etc) the list can get quite lengthy. Because scholars like Silva offer us a comprehensive list of cannibalistic themed fairy tales and their relevance to fairy tale literature, I’m offered the freedom to explore its symbolic functions.

I’ll use Snow White. Most American’s think of Grimm’s version, in which an evil Queen seeks to devour Snow White’s lungs and liver via huntsman delivery. What sets the Queen in motion? A magic mirror declaring Snow White has replaced her as the fairest in the land. Anne Sexton’s poem "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" further exaggerates the source of conflict between Snow White and the Queen as envy for the beauty offered by youth. Sexton explicitly details the Queen’s body as demonstrating tell tale signs of aging, such as spots on the skin or hair growth on her face. Sexton juxtaposes these undesirable symptoms with Snow White’s blossoming, completely unspoiled by the toils of age. In Sexton’s version, the Queen devours the heart of a boar with great satisfaction, believing it to be the heart of Snow White.

Some scholars debate cannibalism as symbolizing complex, archetypal underpinnings. Grimm’s Snow White is asserted as an epic battle for patriarchal approval imposed by a cruel society in Gilbert and Gubar's "Snow White and Her Wicked Step Mother." While I find such analysis fascinating, it seems to me that some sort of foundation is lacking in the argument. Sure, there’s an intoxicating drama involving the age old human endeavor to wrestle with feelings of jealousy, but surely eating their organs is an unusual means in which to so. Eating one of our own species is such a deeply ingrained taboo in our society that it leaves me wondering why people aren’t more reactive to the evil Queen’s dietary proclivities. Sure she’s evil, and maybe the cannibalistic act is simply the story teller’s clever way of merging our distaste of eating other people with our distaste of the character. But I can’t help but ask, why that? Out of all the ways to create “a bad guy” why use cannibalism?

Maybe it’s basically a matter of believing we are what we eat. The wicked Queen is tortured by her vanity, which is inexorably linked to her aging form. Snow White stands juxtaposed as the figure that has attained the status of fairest by blossoming as a new woman. I pose the thought that the core of the act of ingestion of Snow White’s organs is simply a desire to be merged with the object of her desire, in this case her former beauty fortified by the vitality of her lost youth. Believable?

Sure, if you buy Frazier’s law of contagion (as outlined in The Golden Bough) as a common human phenomenon. To engage in the law of contagion is to believe a component remains inexorably linked to its whole even if that violates rules of time and space. For example, a person who obtains a clipping of hair and attaches it to a Voodoo doll believes that the hair of the person violates laws of the physical universe, by remaining connected to its former owner. Once the hair is attached, whoever controls the doll controls the person missing a lock of hair. Maybe the Queen sought to eat Snow White’s organs as a means to hold her youth and vitality in her being forever. Perhaps the phenomenon of contagion is so implicit that scholarly explanation seemed austere.

What kind of contagion superstitions are alive and well in you? As for me, I’ll pass on those fava beans and Chianti, just in case…