Fear of Cannibalism and Appropriation in Robinson Crusoe

Introduction: Crusoe's Fear of Being Eaten

Robinson Crusoe harbors a deep fear of being eaten. For him, cannibalism represents the farthest extreme from European civilization. This fear begins to develop at a young age, when he decides to embark on sea adventures against the wishes of family and friends. Yet his desire for adventure also reflects an acute drive to acquire — one that involves appropriation, exploitation, and accumulation. That drive to acquire frequently entails the complete domination and overpowering of others. While Crusoe justifies his appropriating behavior as a response to his desperate condition as a castaway, this same condition intensifies his fear of being eaten. These anxieties return in full force when he encounters cannibals and witnesses their customs firsthand.

This fear of being eaten also generates a visceral, biological revulsion to cannibalism, which manifests in Crusoe imagining himself attacking, overpowering, and eliminating the cannibals. However, his outlook shifts when he witnesses a group of European sailors executing prisoners in a manner — and at the very same location — as the cannibals had killed their victims. Later in the novel, Crusoe even partially justifies cannibalism, reasoning that the cannibals cannot technically be called murderers, since they kill to satisfy their need for food — their need, in other words, to appropriate and acquire. He finds a disturbing similarity between their behavior and his own desires, and he begins, to some extent, to sympathize with them.

Cannibalism was one of Robinson Crusoe's most persistent fears and anxieties. "I expected every wave would have swallowed us up" — this is among the earliest indications that Crusoe feared a kind of consumption, expressed here as he recounted his first sea storm. This passage might be dismissed as mere metaphor, but the sequence of events dealing closely with cannibals and Crusoe's dread of them in the latter part of the novel suggests it is something more.

The theme of one creature devouring another does not end with the desert island and cannibal section of the novel. As noted by scholars of Robinson Crusoe, the horror of consumption is repeated at least twice more — when a horse is eaten by wolves, and when a man is eaten by wolves (Defoe and Duvoisin). But a hero who is afraid of being eaten signals something deeper in the author's conception of the character; it is somewhat uncommon for an author to project such a vulnerability onto a protagonist cast as an adventurous hero (Nishimura and Isoda).

Crusoe's fear of cannibalism, as imagined by Defoe, serves to heighten the dangers that Crusoe faces and functions as an important plot device in the adventure story, since such a fear can be understood as a plausible dimension of the human condition. Moreover, cannibalism and the cannibals in the novel serve a broader metaphorical function (Guest).

Desire for Accumulation and Its Origins

The fear and dread of cannibalism, the customs associated with it, and the terror of being consumed by a stronger entity constitute a form of anxiety common to all modes of power and accumulation. The strong and guilt-ridden desire to accumulate and consume is a primary source of this anxiety, alongside the danger of being dispossessed, overpowered, or devoured by a yet stronger force. This anxiety can be recognized throughout human life and society.

Beyond wealth or power, acquisition sometimes extends to people themselves. Crusoe's actions throughout the novel are driven by precisely such a desire. However, this same desire also creates a conflict within Crusoe as the story develops (Defoe and Duvoisin). The early signs of this ambivalence are rooted in his father's attitude and are made clear in the opening pages of the novel, where the father addresses Crusoe's longing for adventurous enterprise. Although Crusoe's father had educated him with the law in mind, Crusoe writes: "I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea, and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will." This inclination was persistently resisted by his father's firm commands and by the entreaties of his mother and friends. They warned, as Crusoe recalls, that a tendency toward sea adventure would lead him to misery (Mackintosh).

Crusoe remembers how his father and mother described his ambitions as suited only to men of desperate fortunes, or to those who sought superior fortune through extraordinary enterprise — men who wanted to rise by venture and make themselves famous through undertakings beyond the common road. Crusoe was told that such paths were either too far above him or too far below his rightful dignity, since he occupied the middle state, or what his father described as the upper level of a low life. His father believed this station to be the best condition in the world and the most suited to human happiness, as he had found through personal experience.

Ironically, these warnings and persuasions did not dissuade Crusoe. Instead, they led him toward a path that would allow him to satisfy his appetite for accumulation — an appetite he had been forbidden to acknowledge or express, and which his father had condemned. As the Daniel Defoe narrative unfolds, Crusoe himself becomes a victim of this repressed drive, because the desire to appropriate and acquire can only express itself through projection onto others. That desire returns to threaten the individual in the form of being captured and devoured — which is precisely the source of the fear of cannibalism.

Cannibalism as Metaphor for Appropriation

Crusoe's misfortune of being cast away on a desert island, and his constant danger of being eaten by cannibals, forces him to confront his overpowering desire for a life of "enterprise." In order to escape his castaway condition, he must accumulate and consume. Robinson Crusoe's life of appropriation, exploitation, and accumulation is thus both justified and underpinned by the fear of being eaten, coupled with a biological revulsion to cannibalism. In realizing a myth of his age, Crusoe — through his drive to become an appropriator and accumulator — also becomes a kind of economic everyman. Justified by the survival conditions imposed by the plot, Crusoe's appropriation amounts to a domesticated form of devouring, dressed up as "enterprize."

This trait was sanctioned by European political economy but tempered by Christianity. The civilizing of this fundamental human characteristic can be witnessed metaphorically when Crusoe manages to wean Friday away from human flesh toward animal flesh. In Crusoe's worldview, rules are more effective than transcendence, and displacement is the preferred means of dealing with the anti-social. According to scholars who have examined the cultural history of cannibalism, the symbolic weight that Defoe assigns to the practice reflects broader anxieties about civilization, consumption, and power.

The primitive form of appropriation — embodied by the cannibals — haunts Crusoe even as he himself acts as an appropriator. This is expressed in his aggressive conquest and incorporation of the external world, reflected even in his eating habits. And even as he appropriates more of that world, Crusoe, in order to stand without guilt in relation to his father, must actively position himself against that primitive style of acquisition. This is captured in his words: "The cannibals capture and devour, not I." In Crusoe's case, however, the need to project fundamental aggressive appropriation onto others is not limited to the personal dimension but extends to the cultural as well.

Conclusion: Relevance to Modern Society

The fear and dread of cannibalism, the customs associated with it, and the terror of being consumed by a stronger entity represent a form of anxiety common to all modes of power and accumulation. The guilt-laden desire to accumulate and consume — and the corresponding fear of being dispossessed or devoured — is not confined to Defoe's eighteenth-century narrative. This experience of Crusoe can be applied to modern society, where acquisition is an accepted and celebrated norm, and where the drive to appropriate and dominate sometimes extends to human beings themselves.

Defoe's novel, read through this lens, functions as an enduring exploration of the psychological costs of a culture built on accumulation. The cannibals, far from being mere exotic villains, serve as mirrors that reflect back the very impulses Crusoe — and his civilization — seek to disavow. As scholars such as Kristen Guest have noted, the act of eating in literature carries ideological weight that extends well beyond the literal, touching on questions of power, civilization, and the boundaries of the human.

References

Defoe, Daniel, and Roger Duvoisin. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1946. Print.

Guest, Kristen. Eating Their Words. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Print.

Mackintosh, Alex. "Crusoe's Abattoir: Cannibalism and Animal Slaughter in Robinson Crusoe." Critical Quarterly 53.3 (2011): 24–43. Web.

Nishimura, Kinya, and Yutaka Isoda. "Erratum to 'Evolution of Cannibalism: Referring to Costs of Cannibalism.'" Journal of Theoretical Biology 228.2 (2004): 291. Web.

Novak, Maximillian E. Transformations, Ideology, and the Real in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Other Narratives. Print.