ABSTRACT
Cannibalism was a strange but continuous preoccupation of Daniel Defoe; so often the protagonists in his tales fear they will be devoured. In Robinson Crusoe the horrors of cannibalism are often depicted and the spectacle of savages inhumanly feasting upon the bodies of their fellow-creatures is condemned as the “pitch of inhuman hellish brutality and the horror of degeneracy of human nature”. Defoe’s exaggerated apprehensions of cannibalism tell us of the fears of retaliation, of a terror that the breast he wished to devour will devour him. In an attempt to allay the fears of the retaliatory consequences of his own sadistic yearning, Defoe repudiates his gruesome appetite and projects it upon the savages that he conjures up within his wondrous tales. Behind his tales of devouring cannibals there looms not only a mother begrudging the breast; there is too a father unable or unwilling to give the emotional nourishment for which the boy was clamouring.
