Sophie Gee's "The Barbarous Feast"

Sophie Gee is professor of English at Princeton University and the Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Making Waste: Leftovers and the Literary Imagination and The Scandal of the Season, a historical novel recreating Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. She cohosts the popular literary podcast The Secret Life of Books.

Gee applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World, and shared the following:

Page 99 of The Barbarous Feast gives a pretty good glimpse of what the book is about. I’m saying that in his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe (usually regarded as the first novel in English), Daniel Defoe uses the image of the cannibal feast Crusoe encounters on his “deserted” island as a surrogate for the ravenous colonial appetites of Britain and Spain, which have turned the entire Caribbean into a contested zone of greed, rapaciousness and bitter conflicts.

I write:

Defoe’s writing in Crusoe and elsewhere figures the region as a site of omnipresent and mutually ravenous hunger among colonial occupiers and “savages” alike. Defoe’s cannibal realist mode in Crusoe, his insistence on cannibal hunger as a defining feature of the area, places the emerging form of the novel firmly within a preexisting tradition of European writing that figures the Caribbean as both devouring and needing to be devoured.

As the chapter continues, I argue that cannibalism has another significance in Defoe’s novel. Real cannibalism, as opposed to the kind burlesqued in European writings from the period, belonged to complex predation rituals for constructing subjectivity in the Arawak diaspora. Such predation rituals (which might once have been practices on the Leeward Islands where Crusoe is set) used ritual eating to construct kinship relationships between enemies and convert strangers into tamed friends. Crusoe, and by extension Defoe, fear cannibals because they fear their non-European models of interiority and selfhood, which defy being folded into European ways of imagining human inwardness and relationship.

The title of my book comes from the cannibalism scenes in Robinson Crusoe. I use the idea of a “barbarous feast” to refer to any eating ritual or practice that sees subjectivity and inwardness in terms that resist, defy or do not comply with mainstream, authoritarian conceptions of how selfhood and inwardness should be.

What won’t be obvious from page 99 is that I am offering a new history of the novel, in which eating rituals and imaginative fictions become entangled and interdependent during the eighteenth century, because of intensified British imperialism. It also won’t be apparent that The Barbarous Feast is unusual because it includes a series of creative non-fiction essays interspersed with chapters of scholarly writing. I wrote these when I was finishing the book, on a sabbatical in Sydney, Australia. On returning to the place in which I had grown up but left in my early 20s, I saw it afresh as a colonial landscape that had been remade by British settler colonizers, informed by the same ideas of interiority and subjectivity that I was describing in my scholarship.

Learn more about The Barbarous Feast at the Princeton University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Sophie Gee's The Scandal of the Season.

Writers Read: Sophie Gee (June 2009).

--Marshal Zeringue