Samantha Small
Julia Callander
English 98TB
May 27, 2014
Consuming the Beloved: Cannibalism in Gut Symmetries
Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries seamlessly weaves together science and art to explore the boundaries of the body, relationships and life and in doing so reveals how inseparable love and consumption are. Using intimate first person narratives that confront the reader personally, Winterson takes us deep into the minds of Alice, Stella and Jove who find themselves caught in a love triangle that culminates in perhaps the most intimate act: cannibalism. The lives of Alice, a young physicist, Jove, a Princeton professor, and his wife Stella, an emotionally charged poet, collide when Alice meets Jove at sea. As Alice falls in love with both Jove and Stella it becomes painfully clear that in order to love one must consume their beloved forcing them to confront their own knowledge, fate and identity. Set against the infinite background of a quantum universe, both literally and metaphorically each of the narrators consumes those they love as well as themselves. Although the consumption of the bodies of the beloved may seem like a mutual expression of passion, through the intimate musings of Stella and Alice, Winterson’s prose reveals how the lines between our hearts and food are blurred and the female body in particular, becomes a cannibal feast for the men they love.
I am getting married. Spiritually speaking we shall unite as one flesh but for all practical purposes my husband will remain a cut above me. ‘Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded Sunday joint? Will you roll her and bone her garnish and consume her? She has been sealed in her juices unto this perfect day. Please, sit down and eat, we are all cannibal...
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...ip with Jove has left her: “We transfused each other. Now you want me to bleed to death so that no one can tell what wound it was we shared” (Winterson 37). Through love and consumption their bodies are intertwined forever a part of each other, and more importantly her body now a part of his, “man and rib.” When Jove believes their lives are coming to an end, he cuts her open and watches her “bleed to death,” and as they recover in the hospital he surrounds himself with young Italian nurses who “can’t tell what wound they shared”. Having subsumed what he needed from Stella it is all too easy for him to move on and exist, keeping a part of her inside of him. It seems expected for Stella to be able to regenerate herself, after her heart became food and doctors superficially mended her wounds, “no one will notice how much is missing from the inside” (Winterson 43).
In Margaret Edson’s W;t, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of seventeenth-century poetry, struggles with her diagnosis of stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer. During Vivian’s time in the hospital, two of her main caretakers—Susie, her primary nurse, and Jason, the clinical fellow assigned to her—have vastly different goals for the procedure. The juxtaposition of Jason and Susie, whose values and approaches to life drastically differ, shows the progression of Vivian’s character from one who values knowledge above all else, like Jason, to one who realizes that kindness is the only essential part of life, like Susie.
During this chapter of The Omnivore’s Dilemma Pollan talks about fast food. This means that he is speaking to people who regularly eat fast food and those who are wondering what is in their food when they order out. As a part of this he asks biologist Todd Dawson to run fast food items through a spectrometer to see how much corn is in the food. His analyses concluded that “soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent)” (p. 117). This is part of Pollan educating his audience of what is in their food when they go through the drive through. Speaking of his audience, his main demographic is to the people that are truly wonder
Bordo, Susan. "Beauty (Re)discovers the male body." Bordo, Susan. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ninth Edition. Bedford/St.Martin's, 2011. 189-233.
Female subjectivity is a prominent theme throughout Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School. The subjectivity that Janey, the protagonist, observes and experiences, consciously and subconsciously, plays an important role in how she identifies herself and characterizes others around her. Janey is introduced in the novel as a 10 year old girl and the reader is allowed to follow her up until her death at age 14. Thus the reader sees how her young, impressionable mind is corrupted over time and how these experiences and observations not only rob her of an innocent youth but ultimately control her. Janey’s happiness, and existence, is dependent upon her relationships with men.
Sex is more than just a physical act. It's a beautiful way to express love. When people have sex just to fulfill a physical need, as the poet believes sex outside of love-based relationship only harms and cheapens sex. In the beginning of the poem, Olds brilliantly describe the beauty of sex, and then in the second half of the poem, she continues reference to the cold and aloneness which clearly shows her opinions about causal sex. Through this poem, Sharon Olds, has expressed her complete disrespect for those who would participate in casual sex.
Cannibalism is a concept that is foreign to modern society despite its pertinence in recent human culture. In the essay “Cannibalism: It Still Exists,” Linh Ngo explains the concept of cannibalism, discussing in further detail and comparing and contrasting the different types of cannibalism and the situations in which it was utilized. By incorporating devices such as definition, illustration, and cause and effect, the essay was effective in relaying the idea that cannibalism is still around.
Giovanni and Aylmer demonstrate manipulation of authority over women in order to pursue their unhealthy infatuation with scientific experimentation. The capability to exercise this desire while controlling another human’s life threatens the Romantic ideal of love for the natural world.
Among all the copious themes of fairy tales, cannibalism was indeed a more ambivalent one. Despite the obvious manifestations of good karma, positive characteristics and amiable nature, the common depictions of cannibalism alluded that fairy tales were more than stories that were “too good to be true.” Fairy tales such as The Juniper Tree and Hansel and Gretel even presented cannibalism with an attitude of apathy, as if cooking human stew were nothing churlish but ordinary. However, those vivid descriptions of cannibalism, though appeared to be too cruel and baleful for innocent children, played significant roles. It completed their coming of age journeys, providing them masculinity while“relieving their preconscious and unconscious pressures”(Bettelheim,
However, the easily overlooked similarity is the concept of love. This emotion is merely overlooked. Through this similarity, it becomes evident that love not only is something yearned for by humanity, but also a temptation so strong it can blind us to reality. This blindness can cause the pain of death. Love can cause people to do crazy things, and if you are Lieutenant Cross, even make you treat a pebble as if it were a tongue. Frank’s love for Mary Ann, as innocent as it may seem, exists as a love for a married woman. Love and lust are dangerous beasts, ones that we as readers must be weary of, for if we are not, we may find ourselves sharing the same fate as Frank, death by
Cannibalism as a Sexual Disorder Cannibalism occurs prevalently in both Tarzan and Heart of Darkness, and is a controversial topic with which the public is largely unfamiliar. Although cannibalism is generally thought of in a primitive animal sense, experts have revealed that cannibalism can be identified as a sexual disorder (O’Connor). A cannibal is scientifically classified as an anthropophagus (“Anthropophagus”), which falls under the category of Anthropophagy. Anthropophagy by definition is the sexual gratification caused by consumption of human flesh or blood. Although rather disturbing, sexual cannibalism is now accepted as the more common variety of cannibalism (O’Connor).
Romantic writer Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein does indeed do a lot more than simply tell story, and in this case, horrify and frighten the reader. Through her careful and deliberate construction of characters as representations of certain dominant beliefs, Shelley supports a value system and way of life that challenges those that prevailed in the late eighteenth century during the ‘Age of Reason’. Thus the novel can be said to be challenging prevailant ideologies, of which the dominant society was constructed, and endorsing many of the alternative views and thoughts of the society. Shelley can be said to be influenced by her mothers early feminist views, her father’s radical challenges to society’s structure and her own, and indeed her husband’s views as Romantics. By considering these vital influences on the text, we can see that in Shelley’s construction of the meaning in Frankenstein she encourages a life led as a challenge to dominant views.
Butler, Judith. "Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'". New York. Routledge. 1993
The Spleen by Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchelsea, presents an interesting poetic illustration of depression in the spleen. The spleen for Finch is an enigma, it is mysterious, shape-shifting, and melancholic. Melancholy leads the subject to flashes of a grander, terrifying emotion: the sublime. The subject of Finch’s Pindaric ode experiences the sublime, and yet has the uncanny ability to reflect and reason on the feeling with acuity--even though the subject suffers from depression, which in effect dulls sensory information. The fact that she intensely perceives the sublime suggests a paradox where dulled senses can produce a penetrative emotional episode. To understand the paradox, the theory of the sublime and Finch’s engagement with the sublime in The Spleen must be traced to conceive the state of the dulled mind in the thrall of an infinite, and transcendent wave of emotion. The focus of this essay is that Finch understands that Dullness, as a by-product of depression, enables rational thought during a sublime experience. Furthermore, she thus illustrates her experience through images where she emphasizes her sensory information and her feelings, which were supposedly numbed by depression. Her feelings, indicated in The Spleen, are the crux to how Finch is able to simultaneously feel numb, and process the sublime.
“Everything in this room is eatable, even I’m eatable. But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.” –Willy Wonka
In Literature and Life, Love is a powerful force. Sans love; feelings, desires and relationships may seem empty. This force however, can also be destructive, even may end a marriage. Marital discord, arising in general, due to infatuation, lust or affection for a third person, may crop up primarily facilitated by adverse familial, economic or societal conditions that do frequently find their mention in the written word. Some of these concerns like family, marriage, sexuality, society and death, are notably illustrated by the authors, Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Laura Esquivel in Like Water for Chocolate.