‘‘I C O U L D E A T Y O U U P’’

T H E L I F E A N D A D V E N T U R E S O F A M E T A P H O R

C L A U D E R A W S O N

Everybody recognizes the phrase. It is said (by Claude Lévi-

Strauss) to exist in the erotic vocabulary of most cultures and to
embody an ‘‘analogie très profonde.’’ Lévi-Strauss also reminds us
that the French word consommer can refer equally to sexual and
gastronomic transactions. The more empirical English make a
distinction between consummate and consume. But the linguistic
interpenetration is evident, sometimes at a level of analogy, some-
times in senses where literalism plays a teasing and elusive part. I
shall be looking at a range of examples where analogy, figure, and
metaphor coexist with a kind of uncompleted literal content, and
not only in those physical acts of eroticism where ingestions are
actually taking place, suggesting, among other things, a kind of
pillow cannibalism: kissing, sucking, suckling, the love bite, and
everything we antiseptically call ‘‘oral sex.’’
In this company, the phrase ‘‘I could eat you up’’ carries a special
cargo. Users of this particular endearment, especially in self-
conscious or literary contexts, sometimes activate and even elabo-
rate the literal content in some more or less imaginary specific
form, as when T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney wants to carry his Doris o√ to a
cannibal isle and make of her a nice little, juicy little missionary

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 stew. All right of course if you don’t mean it, or don’t do it, but if
you do, the consequences are by definition deadly, and the fact
raises an issue of when the kissing has to stop. The case is one of
many in which cannibal concepts haunt our intimate acts and
penetrate our conceptual subtexts, activating those oscillations of
the unspeakable in which, in one way or another, we speak it and
unspeak it, or mean it, don’t mean it and don’t not mean it.
Vocabularies of less than total suppression and circumvention
are not confined to the sexual or, for that matter, the cannibal
spheres. They permeate, as I suggested in another context, the
language of actual, putative, or intended killing, especially mass-
killing or genocide, as when we say, ‘‘So-and-so ought to be shot’’
or ‘‘Exterminate all the brutes.’’ The subject of this essay, however,
is the more circumscribed field of love talk, in some literary works,
which, like the other kinds of talk, has a way of spilling over into
‘‘real life.’’ My interest is in the verbal expression, rather than the
enactment, and mainly in these literary works.
I begin with Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique (1764) article
‘‘Anthropophages,’’ which, in a familiar mode of flippantly jeering
rationalism, o√ers an urbane version of Montaigne’s argument
about the irrationality of the prejudice against cannibalism in
‘‘Des Cannibales’’ (1.31). Citing many of the same examples from
Juvenal’s fifteenth satire (Egyptians, Gascons, Saguntines), as well
as Montaigne’s damaging contrast between virtuous Amerindian
cannibals and cruelly callous Europeans who burn their com-
patriots at the stake, Voltaire asks: ‘‘We kill our neighbors in
battle . . . providing, for the meanest reward, food for crows and
worms. That is where the horror is, and the crime: when you are
killed, what does it matter whether you are eaten by a soldier, a
crow, or a dog?’’ (my translations throughout).
Voltaire goes on to question the traditional acceptability of hu-
man sacrifice on live bodies, while we shrink from eating the
corpse of an evil attacker: ‘‘Which is the greater crime, to gather
piously to stab a garlanded girl in the heart in honor of the deity or
to eat a low scoundrel one has killed in self-defense?’’ The irony of
‘‘in honor of the deity’’ echoes Montaigne’s remark about the
atrocities committed under the pretext of piety and religion in the
French religious wars, a passage Voltaire cites in a supplementary
passage in 1770. Voltaire’s emphasis on human sacrifice is the

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counterpart of Montaigne’s on live torture, as something Euro-

peans do, which is worse than the anthropophagy practiced by
savages. It is the humane if politically incorrect obverse of a polar-
ity in wide circulation and made much of by cannibal-deniers of
the mid-postcolonial era, dating roughly from William Arens’s
The Man-Eating Myth (1980). This denies the historical existence
of culturally practiced anthropophagy on the grounds that it was
wrongly imputed to what must in reality have been practices of
human sacrifice, viewed as less culpable in precisely the way Vol-
taire found idiotic, though Voltaire himself was to speak in the
addition of 1770 of anthropophagy as human nature’s ‘‘ultimate
degree of horror’’ before turning to Jewish examples. This may be
fortuitous, but when the original article, reporting the penchant of
the Jews for human sacrifice, asks why (or perhaps questions
whether) the Jews were not also cannibals, Voltaire erupts in a
characteristic fit of enraged anti-Semitism, out of harmony with
the general tone of the entry, explaining that this would be the
only thing they lacked to make them the most abominable people
on earth: ‘‘C’eût été la seule chose qui eût manqué au peuple de
Dieu pour être le plus abominable peuple de la terre.’’ Voltaire is
generally more flippant on these issues than Montaigne, but you
would not find in Montaigne either the loss of cool or the violence
of the sentiment. Not only did Montaigne write of the Jews with
insight and a sympathetic curiosity, but he did not usually express
such hatred for any human group.
Less discordant is Voltaire’s variation on the closing scene in
Montaigne’s ‘‘Des Cannibales,’’ where Montaigne reports meeting,
in November 1562, three Amerindians in Rouen, who show them-
selves wiser in essential matters than their French hosts, even
though the Indians do not wear breeches. The scene has a long
and interesting afterlife. Frank Lestringant has drawn attention to
the episode almost three hundred years later, when on 26 Decem-
ber 1853 Flaubert, also in Rouen, went to look at ‘‘Ka≈rs’’ from
South Africa, on show at 11, Grande-rue, for five ‘‘sols.’’ These, like
the Hottentot Venus of 1810–15, were touristic avatars of the noble
savage, a distinct notch below such favorites of the metropolitan
drawing room as Omai or Ataourou. They are also described as
hairy beasts making inarticulate noises, crouched like monkeys, a
cheap curiosity for the working classes. One of the women, like the
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Yahoo girl in Gulliver’s Travels, made some ‘‘avances lubriques’’ at

Flaubert and o√ered to kiss him.
The protagonist of Voltaire’s story falls somewhere between the
two types, just as his tone lies between Montaigne’s admiring
eloquence and Flaubert’s flatter, unillusioned report: ‘‘In 1725 four
Mississippi savages were brought to Fontainebleau. I had the
honor of conversing with them. Among them was a lady from that
country. I asked her if she had ever eaten humans. She answered
artlessly that she had. I appeared somewhat scandalized. She justi-
fied herself by saying it was better to eat a dead enemy than leave
him to be eaten by beasts and that the winners had a right to the
spoils.’’ There are several earlier versions of this anecdote, includ-
ing chapter 146 of the Essai sur les moeurs (1756?). The lady in
that somewhat less gallant version was ‘‘une femme de couleur
cendrée,’’ an ash-colored woman, rather than a lady from that
country, who, instead of defending herself courteously (‘‘s’ex-
cusa’’), replied curtly and very coldly (‘‘très froidement’’).
It is hard to judge which is more plausible, though the diction-
ary entry is a reworking, and it is amusing to see that it is the
playfully gallant version that has made its way into the reference
book (the Dictionnaire was itself originally intended as a ‘‘port-
able’’ counterpart to the Encyclopédie and was first published as
the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif ). A flirtatious note, un-
Montaigne-like, gracefully concedes all the hard sense to a sensi-
ble lady. She, an Amerindian, is expert in these matters, like the
‘‘American Acquaintance’’ who in 1729, four years after the re-
ported date of Voltaire’s story, advises Swift’s Modest Proposer on
the niceties of cannibal gastronomy. But the expertise that comes
over in Swift as grim sarcasm, emanating from an uncouth barbar-
ian, takes the form in Voltaire of a humane and sensible perspec-
tive, firm and elegantly understated, and articulated by a woman
of evident charm and presence, the ornament of a Mississippi
urbanity which has something to teach the polite persons of
Fontainebleau.
Voltaire’s article engages from the beginning in some badinage
about love, conscious of its alphabetical placing, soon after the
article ‘‘Amour’’: ‘‘Nous avons parlé de l’amour. Il est dur de passer
de gens qui se baisent, à gens qui se mangent.’’ The retrospective
juxtaposition is striking. The articles are not actually contigu-
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ous: three others intervene, ‘‘Amour nommé socratique,’’ ‘‘Amour-

propre,’’ and ‘‘Ange.’’ Voltaire is evidently keen to imply a linkage,
though a piquant feature of the juxtaposition is that it takes the
form of an explicit uncoupling, asserting as it does that it is hard to
pass from those who kiss to those who eat one another. But if the
transition from one entry to the other was hardly immediate,
there was no pressing reason to issue the reminder. The e√ective
outcome is that the uncoupling ends up a≈rming the coupling it
pretends to undo.
At all events, the juxtaposition taps an ancient idea. The article
‘‘Amour’’ had said that kissing is unique to humans, precisely what
Juvenal says about cannibalism in that same fifteenth satire Vol-
taire also cites – that only humans do it, not other animals. Ad-
dressing the human creature, Voltaire says: ‘‘Aucun animal, hors
toi, ne connaît les embrassements; . . . tes lèvres surtout jouissent
d’une volupté que rien ne lasse, et ce plaisir n’appartient qu’à ton
espèce.’’ Lestringant is surely right that implicit in the passage
from kissing to biting is in fact Voltaire’s recognition of the ‘‘secret
a≈nity’’ which underlies the ‘‘shocking transition.’’ He cites An-
dré Green, the psychoanalytic writer, who announced that ‘‘there
is more than one way of loving someone to the extent of becoming
one with them. Anthropophagy is one of them.’’ It cannot, how-
ever, be right that ‘‘Voltaire was surely the first to recognize the
secret a≈nity’’ between kissing and biting, or the philosophizing
cargo that goes with the territory in the mode of Green, which has
Platonic origins.
The transition is, for example, present in Iachimo’s untruthful
boast in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline about the mole under Imogen’s
breast, that ‘‘I kiss’t it, and it gave me present hunger/To feed
again though full’’ (2.4.137–38). What Voltaire left implicit is well
established as a direct progression of the two acts, though Iachimo
is in fact lying, and his hunger and feeding are metaphorical in the
usual ways.
A more literal and more fully developed instance of the transi-
tion occurs in several stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where,
within the terms of the fiction, the obliteration of one or both
partners can take place through metamorphosis rather than death.
Such unions are not always voluntary and o√er varying degrees of

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satisfaction to the parties. Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne is compared

to a hound about to close its jaws on an escaping hare. Daphne
eludes Apollo by getting herself changed into a laurel tree, but
Apollo decides that if she won’t be his bride she can be his tree,
which he embraces as if it were still a body, so that his hair, his lyre,
and his quiver will ‘‘always be entwined with thee, O laurel,’’ an
arrangement to which Daphne seems able to consent (1.532–66).
Cadmus and his wife, Harmonia, are changed into serpents inter-
twined as one (iunctoque volumine). Arethusa narrowly escapes
(or, in other versions, does not escape) merging with Alpheus when
he changes her into a river so that he can ‘‘mingle’’ with her (se
mihi misceat, 4.569–603, 600; 5.619–41, 638), though in some
non-Ovidian versions the incorporating rape is successful. (Thom
Gunn’s ‘‘Arethusa Saved’’ and ‘‘Arethusa Raped’’ are modern ver-
sions of the two accounts, in a book which not only contains
Ovidian retellings but includes some ‘‘songs for Je√rey Dahmer’’
and other poems exploring the idea of sexual eating.) Narcissus
o√ers an interesting variation in which Echo’s desire for incorpora-
tion with him is frustrated by his own self-love. Realizing that he is
in love with his own reflection and cannot embrace it, he wants to
‘‘die together in one breath’’ with the reflection and is literally
burnt up by the fire (carpitur igni) of his love, leaving behind a
yellow flower with white petals. His farewell to his shadow is
plaintively echoed by Echo, who had been yearning to unite her-
self with him, and who by now has been reduced to a mere
unbodily voice (3.370–510, especially 472, 490, 510, 500–501).
The most interesting example is the story of Salmacis and
Hermaphroditus, where again the male is resisting the embraces
of the female but in this case is frustrated by the gods, who grant
Salmacis’s prayer (4.329–79). The forced union is achieved with a
total literalness that results in the transfiguration of Hermaph-
roditus and Salmacis into a single being, a painful success oblit-
erating both, and resulting in a man-woman who is neither man
nor woman (4.373–79). This gives an added meaning to Her-
maphroditus’s name, originally derived, as he makes a point of
recalling, from his parents, Hermes and Aphrodite (4.288, 384).
The outcome of the desired incorporation is rendered by George
Sandys (1621) as:

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Even in that space

Their cleaving bodies mix: both have one face,
As when we two divided scions joyne,
And see them grow together in one rine:
So they, by such a strict imbracement glew’d,
Are now but one, with double forme indew’d.
No longer he a Boy, nor she a maid;
But neither, and yet either, might be said.
I cite Sandys because his commentary makes particularly explicit
the point articulated by Green and adds that (as in all normal
erotic approximations to incorporation) the attempt is doomed to
incompleteness: ‘‘The reason why lovers so strictly imbrace; is to
incorporate with the beloved, which sith they cannot, can never be
satisfied.’’ Sandys relates this to Plato’s ‘‘fable’’ (what Yeats called
‘‘Plato’s parable’’) of ‘‘how man at the first was created double, and
for his arrogancy dissected into male and female: the reason of
their a√ected conjunction, as coveting to returne to their orig-
inall.’’ Sandys cites with an even more emphatic sexual ferocity a
passage from Lucretius (4.1076–1113) on lovers:
Who hurt what they too eagerly imbrace,
Stifle with kisses, and their soft lips bite
With ravenous teeth . . .
They greedily imbrace, joyne mouths, inspire
Their soules, and bite through ardor of desire:
In vaine; since nothing they can thence translate,
Nor wholy enter and incorporate.
For so sometimes they would; so strive to doe:
And cleave so close as if no longer two.

•
This ‘‘metaphysic’’ of the kiss is a specialized, partially literalized,
extension of the figure of speech whose most common formulation
is ‘‘I could eat you up.’’ The idiom taps into traditional analogies,
which occupy a persistent idiomatic or semi-idiomatic presence in
writings of all periods. Eighteenth-century English fiction, from
which I draw my next set of examples, often shows an accentuated
and particularized interest in the idea behind the idiom, more
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perhaps than in the idiom itself. As far as I know, ‘‘I could eat you
up’’ does not often appear, in the modern way, as an admissible
amorous come-on. I cannot remember any example of it as an
acceptable part of the vocabulary of courtship or seduction, but
perhaps the written word in such matters did not keep up with the
spoken. This is not to say that lovers are not shown as thinking in
such terms, as when Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Fanny ‘‘pam-
pered their Imaginations with the . . . exquisite Repast’’ of their
impending wedding night. But we don’t imagine either of them
saying, ‘‘I could eat you up.’’
In novels eating someone up is the kind of phrase a narrator
might use about characters but perhaps not one which characters
address each other unless they are particularly brutish, like Mr.
Greville, in Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, who tells
Harriet Byron: ‘‘I could eat you.’’ He gloats on the idea, telling
Mrs. Reeves immediately after: ‘‘By Jupiter, . . . I had like to have
eaten up your lovely cousin. I was beginning with her hand.’’ This
gloating is su≈ciently intense to seem on the point of escalating
into literalism, and indeed he had already ‘‘made prints’’ on her
hand ‘‘with his teeth.’’ There is some harping on Mr. Greville’s
teeth: Harriet comments that ‘‘next time he gets me by himself, he
shall eat up both my hands.’’ The idiomatic phrase continues to
sustain grossly emphatic intimations of a physical follow-through.
This may possibly distinguish Mr. Greville’s words from those of
an equally gross twentieth-century counterpart, the eponymous
hero of Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes, when he tells Doris that he will
carry her o√ to a cannibal isle, and
Yes, I’d eat you!
In a nice little, white little, soft little, tender little,
Juicy little, right little, missionary stew.
Sweeney’s grossness is not identified as a brutal aggression be-
cause the language is acceptable to Doris, and its sleazy purport is
assumed to be natural to the downmarket underworld they both
inhabit. As with Mr. Greville, the image underlying the colloquial
phrase is subject to some literal overspill, though both the phras-
ing and the purport seem more fully assimilated to the prevailing
social vocabulary of Sweeney and Doris than of Mr. Greville. In
Sweeney’s elaboration of what he proposes to do, the potential
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shock of a cannibal reality is further mitigated by the macabre

musical-comedy jokiness, and especially by Sweeney’s exotic fan-
tasy of jungle adventure. The literal force of reports of cannibal
activities tends to increase in proportion as they are manifestly
fictive, and, from the Odyssey onward, to be most freely and cir-
cumstantially imagined in the reassuring context of an otherwise
‘‘unreal’’ setting. The punning slippage from ‘‘eating up’’ to sexual
contact that Doris takes in her stride undoubtedly threatens ag-
gression to Harriet. In both cases the literalism is indeterminate,
and evidently less than total. Even if nobody is likely to think that
Greville would actually eat Harriet, there is no doubt of the un-
welcome solidity of advances, in a language both carnal and car-
nivore, whose gross physicality gives accentuated force to the can-
nibal intimations. There is vivid physical fear instead of the
consensual indulgence in exotic fantasy of Eliot’s mini-drama.
The ingredient of cannibal terror which enters into Harriet’s
well-founded sense of danger is triggered in the first instance by
the verbal slippage whose truth content has a menacing but elu-
sive force, a phenomenon especially common in cannibal contexts,
not restricted to sexual issues. A not dissimilar, and not uncon-
nected, process may be detected in some age-old scare stories of
political propaganda, a fertile field of cannibal imputation. Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) amusingly explores an interface with
the sexual theme. The young Cleopatra is troubled by fears that
the Romans ‘‘are coming to eat us up’’: ‘‘They are barbarians.
Their chief is called Julius Caesar. . . . They all have long noses,
and ivory tusks, and little tails, and seven arms with a hundred
arrows in each; and they live on human flesh’’ – much as, two
millennia after Caesar, Argentinian soldiers were said to have
been indoctrinated with fears that they would be eaten if captured
by the British in the Falklands. Similar warnings are said to have
been given to slaves who were thought to intend escaping to the
territory of a foreign power.
This political or tactical application of the cannibal theme in-
habits a linguistic twilight zone in which, as in sexual contexts,
literal enactments may coexist with fantasy and metaphor, in
recorded cases of battlefield or siege anthropophagy or in tribal
practices like those described by Montaigne, whose historical real-
ity is not always neutralized by the fact that (as Arens’s book keeps
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reminding us) they are the subject of politically fueled imputa-

tions, or that the imputations are sometimes false. The well-
recorded facts of cannibal events in warfare and victory rituals have
their sexual counterparts not only in the cases of Je√rey Dahmer,
Armin Meiwes, and other recent events in America and Europe but
in the less completely ingestive processes of everyday (or, as we
might say, bread-and-butter) lovemaking, whose consummation
does not necessarily exclude consumption, and which give a par-
ticular edge to generally innocent wordplay on these subjects.
Shaw treats the slippage in both spheres with engaging deri-
sion, at the same time perceiving the kinship between them. His
Cleopatra begins by invoking the political fantasy in a literal but
presumably nonsexual form. The formula, however, soon acquires
secondary sexual characteristics, bordering on the literal but, as in
Eliot, keeping the usual safe distance from it, as Caesar’s relation-
ship with Cleopatra ripens from flirtation to full-blown a√air.
From ‘‘Caesar never eats women . . . But he eats little girls’’ in Act
1, Caesar proceeds in Act 2 to ‘‘I really think I must eat you, after
all,’’ to which Cleopatra replies, ‘‘You must not talk to me now as if
I were a child.’’
Harriet Byron’s view of such language is not treated with the
same levity. Nor would her author take the genial Shavian view of
the fact that little girls get over such anxieties. Fielding might
almost be guying or anticipating some Richardsonian admonitions
on the topic when he complains that, in the common upbringing of
girls from childhood, ‘‘Miss is instructed by her Mother, that Mas-
ter is a very monstrous kind of Animal, who will, if she su√ers him
to come too near her, infallibly eat her up’’ (Joseph Andrews, 4.7).
‘‘Master’’ here alludes to little boys rather than to characters like
Mr. B., though Fielding was no more likely than Richardson to
approve of Shaw’s light-hearted handling of Cleopatra’s progress.
Most eighteenth-century authors would regard this as a cynical
coarsening, a view undoubtedly reinforced by the low opinion of
Cleopatra’s subsequent sexual career (a matter on which Fielding’s
sister wrote with particular severity) then in circulation. In John
Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748), the young
heroine views the prospect of being eaten up in the manner of
Harriet Byron’s fears rather than of the repast of Fielding’s new-
lyweds. Fanny (Hill, not Andrews) also registers, with a dismay not
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seen in Shaw and possibly glancing back to Fielding’s remarks on

female education, how a girl, or ‘‘Miss,’’ ‘‘by degrees begins no
longer to look on man as a creature of prey that will eat her,’’ a
distinct loss of innocence. With the brothel’s Madam she seems
also to have to endure the lesbian variant, which shows itself
through the eager voyeurism of her prospective procuress: ‘‘She
look’d as if she would devour me with her eyes,’’ perhaps a recol-
lection of Mrs. Jewkes’s comportment with Richardson’s Pam-
ela. (The ‘‘squob-fat’’ Madam has physical resemblances to Mrs.
Jewkes, as well as to Mrs. Slipslop, Fielding’s parody of her in
Joseph Andrews.
Eating up, in these contexts, is usually both menacing and
mainly metaphorical. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a relation of
Fielding’s, wrote in a poem about a footman who tried to rape a
lady: ‘‘’Tis not for scoundrell Scrubs to wish/To taste their Mas-
ter’s Meat,’’ an outlook Richardson’s first novel was sometimes
thought to have challenged in both the social and sexual spheres.
Such language occurs a good deal in Fielding, an exceptionally
food-conscious writer. It is often brought in as an elaboration of
the metaphor of sexual appetite or sexual hunger which runs
through the novels from Jonathan Wild and Joseph Andrews,
whichever is earlier, to Amelia. It should be apparent by now that
at one extreme metaphor is not always securely uncoupled from
the literal. But at the other extreme from literalness, metaphors
may have become such fully naturalized figures of speech that we
are more aware of their semantic tenor than of the metaphorical
vehicle on which we are conditioned to being taken for a ride.
Fielding is often actively aware of this, and rings the changes on
the extent to which he wishes to insist on the intrinsic content of
the image, rather than leaving it to its attenuated idiomatic force.
Such sarcasms are not always at the expense of prudential admo-
nition, unless perhaps Richardson is the target. From his own
perspective, Fielding is denouncing sexual predators who have
self-interested, rather than loving, designs on women, and many
of his examples operate within the limits of the merely idiomatic:
Wild’s ‘‘Passion (or rather Appetite) for the chaste Laetitia’’ (Jon-
athan Wild, 3.9); Peter Pounce’s dashed ‘‘hopes of satisfying his old
Appetite with Fanny,’’ though they come on the back of some
literal remarks about the pseudo-politeness of declining to ‘‘eat . . .
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such a nice Morsel’’ while actually being ‘‘very desirous to swallow

it’’ (Joseph Andrews, 3.12); the sexual glutton of the chapter ‘‘Of
Love’’ who ‘‘hungers after such and such Women’’ (Tom Jones,
6.1); Blifil regarding Sophia as ‘‘a most delicious Morsel’’ (Tom
Jones, 7.6, though Blifil is a somewhat special case).
There is a variant from female to male that taps the idea of the
devouring witch, or voracious virago, but does so with the elabo-
rate comic fuss of a mock-Homeric simile: ‘‘As when a hungry
Tygress, who long had traversed the Woods in fruitless search, sees
within the Reach of her Claws a Lamb, she prepares to leap on her
Prey; or as a voracious Pike, of immense Size, surveys through the
liquid Element a Roach or Gudgeon which cannot escape her
Jaws, opens them wide to swallow the little Fish: so did Mrs.
Slipslop prepare to lay her violent amorous Hands on the poor
Joseph’’ (Joseph Andrews, 1.6). It is hard to take this as sinister in
the way tiger-women are usually portrayed as sinister. Fielding
seems to have regarded the idea of women courting or lusting
after men as comic and unmenacing. His female predators are not
taken seriously. They are either too nice, like Mrs. Waters, or
figures of fun and ultimately harmless, like Slipslop or her em-
ployer and rival, Lady Booby, despite some e√orts to portray the
latter as a dire menace to Joseph Andrews’s chastity, on a par
with Mr. B.’s threat to Pamela’s. Mrs. Waters is at the generous,
or genial, end of the spectrum, while Mrs. Slipslop’s and Lady
Booby’s lusts are more aggressive. But none of them amounts to
any sort of serious depravity, and in none of their cases is the
eating analogy anything more than a good-natured foolery. When
it is elaborated, it is simultaneously derealized by extravagant
mock-Homeric similes and other comic stylizations.
It is male voracious lusts which are up for serious condem-
nation, in spite of an ethos that provides, in heroes like Tom,
and Booth in Amelia, examples of sexually transgressive passions
which are valued for the human warmth that goes into them and
are explicitly preferred to a cold and loveless chastity. By a curious
contrast to the case of Slipslop, where the similes of devouring
have a declamatory or operatic brio, many of the food-sex analo-
gies, when they are allowed to overspill their idiomatic core, have
a lingeringly graphic quality. It is striking, however, that in both
cases the descriptive energy goes into the gastronomic or ingestive,
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rather than the erotic, part of the equation. Thus, in Jonathan

Wild, à propos of the hero’s craving for Mrs. Heartfree, we are
introduced to a type of sexual gluttony which, Fielding says, ‘‘the
Gentlemen of this our Age agree to call love, and which is indeed
no other than that Friendship which, after the Exercise of the
Dominical Day is over, a lusty Divine is apt to conceive for the
well-drest Sirloin, or handsome Buttock, which the well-edified
’Squire, in Gratitude, sets before him, and which, so violent is his
Love, he is desirous to devour. Not less ardent was the hungry
Passion of our Hero, who, from the Moment he had cast his Eyes
on that charming Dish, cast about in his Mind by what Method he
might come at it’’ (2.8).
In a way, this too is a simile, like the passage about Slipslop, and
not un-Homeric. As in Homer, the content of the simile competes,
or more than competes, with the matter it purports to illustrate,
with an overplus of parodic brio. Although we know that it is Mrs.
Heartfree to whom the well-dressed sirloin and handsome buttock
(or ‘‘rump,’’ as in steak) are being compared, it is the sensuous
attractions of the food rather than of the woman that command
attention. It is only when the gastronomic dishes have been laid
out that the amorous tenor of the literal meaning makes any show
of force, with ‘‘Not less ardent was the hungry Passion.’’ These
culinary excitations also sustain a stingingly ‘‘realistic’’ evocation
of scenes of provincial life, just as the simile of the ‘‘hungry
Tygress’’ in the Slipslop passage is preceded by a virtuoso send-up
of servant-speak, as the lecherous and barely literate maidservant
clumsily strains for ladylike airs.
It would seem from such scenes that the reputedly profligate
novelist devotes considerable writing power to imagery designed
to displace or override the erotic subject it is supposed to illustrate.
Wild’s hunger for Mrs. Heartfree leads in the ensuing chapter to a
project of conveying ‘‘his Dish, to continue our Metaphor . . . , to
one of those Eating-Houses in Covent-Garden, where female
Flesh is deliciously drest, and served up to the greedy Appetites of
young Gentlemen.’’ Although the use of dish to describe a desirable
woman is common, its force in this passage obviously goes beyond
the inertly idiomatic. But the energies of the description similarly
redirect attention from the sexual point to the culinary illustration
and the sarcasm on social mores. If there is an allusion to a con-
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temporary practice in brothels of ‘‘serving up’’ women on pewter

plates (possibly hinted at in Scene 3 of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress),
even this comes over less for its sexual allure than for its sugges-
tion of perverse grotesquerie. In all these assorted cases, where
eating metaphors are applied to sexual ‘‘realities,’’ it is the image
rather than the reality that generates the most vivid attention.
This is probably true even in contexts where the idiomatic neu-
trality of the analogy prevails, as in the passage in Tom Jones
about ‘‘what is commonly called Love, namely, the Desire of satis-
fying a voracious Appetite with a certain Quantity of delicate
white human Flesh’’ (6.1).
It was paradoxically Fielding’s preeningly virtuous rival Rich-
ardson who was known from 1740 onwards for his attention to the
delicate white human flesh of his own heroines, to which he had
dedicated all the censorious particularity of a Kenneth Starr (a
resemblance which did not escape notice during Starr’s moment of
fame). Fielding seized on this feature as early as Shamela and
never let up. His habit of announcing, whenever a love scene is in
the o≈ng, that he will not go into sexual details usually signals
that he is distancing himself from his rival. When he says in Tom
Jones that he will not, unlike certain pornographers, cater to
readers whose devotion to the fair sex needs to be raised with the
help of pictures, it is unlikely that Richardson was not tacitly
implicated. Fielding’s putdowns in this department are the lordly
accents of one who feels free to indulge in coarsely demotic or
even ‘‘obscene’’ humor without losing caste, but who will not lose
his cool about sex in the manner of his merchant rival – who
frequently reciprocated with an oily uppishness of his own.
The fact that in the passages about Wild’s sexual ‘‘appetites’’
Fielding’s graphic intensities are focused on the sensuousness of
the food, as though the idiom of soft porn so evident in these
passages were being displaced from the sexual to the gastronomic,
does not invite portentous conclusions. It is more likely to suggest
that Fielding does not want to sound lubricious in Richardson’s
way than that he is registering an unexpected transfer of pro-
clivities. Richardson, though a looming, ghostly presence, provides
an example of, and a stimulus for, a signposted sexual reticence,
which seeks to be genially open about sexual conduct without
indulging in hothouse intimacies. It is not an indication that he
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thinks sex is immoral, but that insistent intensities are tactless and
indiscreet about things which polite persons take in their stride.
Some transfers of descriptive exuberance from a sexual subject
matter to its culinary analogues occur with inventive variations in
Tom Jones and, as I shall suggest, are part of a larger pattern of
displacement. One perverse variant is Blifil, whose sexual lusts are
also imagined as those of a gastronomic epicure. But unlike the
sensualists in Jonathan Wild or the chapter ‘‘Of Love,’’ Blifil is
despised for tepid rather than overheated appetites:
Tho’ Mr. Blifil was not of the Complexion of Jones, nor ready
to eat every Woman he saw, yet he was far from being desti-
tute of that Appetite which is said to be the common Prop-
erty of Animals. With this, he had likewise that distinguish-
ing Taste, which serves to direct Men in their Choice of the
Object or Food of their several Appetites; and this taught him
to consider Sophia as a most delicious Morsel, indeed to re-
gard her with the same Desires which an Ortolan inspires
into the Soul of an Epicure. [7.6]
Blifil shares this attenuated sexuality with other characters, like
Squire Booby in Shamela and Lord Didapper in Joseph Andrews.
They too lack Wild’s gross voracity, but one would not describe
them as ‘‘epicures,’’ a term which suggests a greater taste for
pleasure than any of them possesses and in Blifil has additional
associations of perverse or specialized tastes. Blifil’s otherwise low-
energy appetite for his delicious morsel of ortolan is enhanced by
Sophia’s distress, her aversion to him, his prospects of triumph and
revenge, and, since he also has an eye on her fortune, a material
rapacity that gives a special tang to the recognition that his
cupidity does not indeed derive from the god of love:
Now the Agonies which a√ected the Mind of Sophia rather
augmented than impaired her Beauty; for her Tears added
Brightness to her Eyes, and her Breasts rose higher with her
Sighs. Indeed no one hath seen Beauty in its highest Lustre,
who hath never seen it in Distress. Blifil therefore looked
on this human Ortolan with greater Desire than when he
viewed her last; nor was his Desire at all lessened by the
Aversion which he discovered in her to himself. On the con-
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trary, this served rather to heighten the Pleasure he proposed

in rifling her Charms, as it added Triumph to Lust: nay, he
had some further Views, from obtaining the absolute Posses-
sion of her Person, which we detest too much even to men-
tion; and Revenge itself was not without its Share in the
Gratifications which he promised himself. The rivalling poor
Jones, and supplanting him in her A√ections, . . . promised
another additional Rapture to his Enjoyment. [7.6]

Blifil’s impulses are an attenuated version of those of his father,

who at the time of wooing his mother preferred ‘‘to possess every
Convenience of Life with an ugly Woman, than a handsome one
without any of these Conveniences. And having a very good Ap-
petite, and but little Nicety, he fancied he should play his Part very
well at the matrimonial Banquet, without the Sauce of Beauty’’
(1.11). After his death, his widow ‘‘could never be brought to listen
to any second Proposals,’’ and the narrator could not determine
‘‘whether Mrs. Blifil had been surfeited with the Sweets of Mar-
riage, or disgusted by its Bitters,’’ though she enjoyed ‘‘Flattery
and Courtship’’ and was not above some extramarital dalliance
with the philosopher Square (3.6).
The passage reporting that young Blifil, like his father, is more
interested in Sophia’s fortune than her person poses a problem
about Tom. If the comparison with Tom in ‘‘Mr. Blifil was not of
the Complexion of Jones, nor ready to eat every Woman he saw’’
places Blifil with Booby and Didapper and, somewhat unlike both
his parents, in the despised role of lukewarm lover, it also seems to
suggest that Tom himself is on a par with Wild and other glut-
tonous predators. No reader responsive to context is likely to think
this. Though Fielding gives a bad press to male sexual predators,
his male heroes, even in their infidelities, are not predators but the
happy objects of female predation, of which Fielding takes a ge-
nial view, and the passage has a local force, implying Tom’s ca-
pacious sexual generosity.
If resemblances between Tom and Wild require a piece of meat
to quiet the housedog of the mind, the distinction is made discur-
sively in the chapter ‘‘Of Love’’ (6.1), where the true love that is
distinguished from the gluttony for sexual ‘‘dishes,’’ though it
‘‘satisfies itself in a much more delicate Manner,’’ is said not only
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to seek ‘‘Satisfaction as much as the grossest of all our Appetites’’

but to be vastly enhanced by sexual gratification itself: ‘‘That this
Love, when it operates towards one of a di√erent Sex, is very apt,
towards its complete Gratification, to call in the Aid of that Hun-
ger which I have mentioned above; and which it is so far from
abating, that it heightens all its Delights to a Degree scarce imag-
inable by those who have never been susceptible of any other
Emotions, than what have proceeded from Appetite alone.’’ The
test is generosity and mutuality, the ‘‘kind and benevolent Disposi-
tion, which is gratified by contributing to the Happiness of oth-
ers.’’ In those conditions, ‘‘though the Pleasures arising from such
pure Love may be heightened and sweetened by the Assistance of
amorous Desires, yet the former can subsist alone, nor are they
destroyed by the Intervention of the latter.’’ The disapproval of a
sexuality that is no more than mere eating does not suggest that
the highest love ought to do without sex any more than any life
can do without food.
The equation of love with sexual appetite and hunger becomes
disreputable when it is a case of ‘‘Appetite alone,’’ not because
eating or sexual appetite is bad, but because sexuality is capable of
higher manifestations, and indeed of enhancing them, whereas
eating is not, though there are recurrent jokes about the notion of
‘‘some Writers of Romance, that a Man can live altogether on
Love’’ (13.6), without what a character in Jane Austen’s Love and
Freindship called ‘‘the mean and indelicate employment of Eating
and Drinking,’’ deemed unfit for ‘‘an exalted Mind.’’ That heroines
of romances were above physical needs and that ‘‘Romantick
ladies . . . never eat’’ (1707), seems implicit in love poetry as well as
in polite ‘‘fair-sexing,’’ provoking genial jokerie in Fielding as well
as the appalled wonder of Swiftian swains at the disillusioning
discovery that Celia shits.
Thus Fielding says that, on the contrary, love increases the
appetite for food in healthy constitutions:

In strong and healthy Constitutions Love hath a very dif-

ferent E√ect from what it causes in the puny Part of the
Species. In the latter it generally destroys all that Appetite
which tends towards the Conservation of the Individual; but
in the former, tho’ it often induces Forgetfulness, and a Ne-
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glect of Food, as well as of every thing else; yet place a good

Piece of well-powdered Buttock before a hungry Lover, and
he seldom fails very handsomely to play his Part. Thus it
happened in the present Case; for tho’ Jones perhaps wanted
a Prompter, and might have travelled much farther, had he
been alone, with an empty Stomach; yet no sooner did he sit
down to the Bacon and Eggs, then he fell to as heartily and
voraciously as Partridge himself. [Tom Jones, 12.5]

This looks back to the scene at Upton in book 9, chapter 5, memo-

rably recycled in the John Osborne–Tony Richardson film of Tom
Jones (1963), which plays an amusing variation on this topic by
exploiting the gastronomic aspects of Tom’s famous sexual en-
counter with Mrs. Waters. More remarkably, the passage once
more assimilates Tom, however sympathetically, to the predatory
sexual gluttons, the ‘‘well-powdered Buttock’’ harking back with
an ironic lack of censure to the ‘‘handsome Buttock’’ placed before
the ‘‘lusty Divine’’ in Jonathan Wild (2.8).
Such a reversal is validated by the special status of Tom’s a√ec-
tions, irradiated by a sense that his appetites are generous, outgo-
ing, and whole-hearted. But the novel seems in such places to
insist on a collaboration, rather than divergence, between the two
hungers. There is, beyond this, an evident readiness to accommo-
date within this scheme the smaller, shabbier cases where sexual
passion is easygoing rather than predatory, as unfussy as Molly or
even the dreary Square may be over whom they make love with,
and attractively free from jealousy. Thus Square, in pursuit of
Molly, finds that Tom has already possessed her: ‘‘But when the
Philosopher heard a Day or two afterwards, that the Fortress of
Virtue had already been subdued, he began to give a larger Scope
to his Desires. His Appetite was not of that squeamish kind which
cannot feed on a Dainty because another hath tasted it. In short,
he liked the Girl the better for the Want of that Chastity, which, if
she had possessed it, must have been a Bar to his Pleasures; he
pursued, and obtained her’’ (5.5). The passage is downbeat about
its celebration of this secondhand love, but it is a celebration,
responsive to the una√ected and unenvious character of both
lovers – though they are hardly paragons of moral worth – and
giving a value to the undemanding, low-level warmth for what it
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is. The ‘‘philosopher’’ had not thought of Molly as within the

reach of his feasting, except as the visual object of ‘‘pleasing Ideas’’
and ‘‘liquorish’’ chats with other philosophers, a dessert ‘‘after a
full Meal of serious Meditation.’’ Fielding seems more tolerant of
such postprandial fantasies than he is of readers who need the
‘‘help’’ of inflaming descriptions, and there is some downbeat sat-
isfaction that a proper repast does in fact become available to
Square once the ‘‘Danger and Di≈culty’’ of seducing an innocent
girl are out of the way. The distinction of Square’s appetite from
those who ‘‘cannot feed on a Dainty because another hath tasted
it’’ thus acquires a positive spin quite di√erent from that given to
Wild, and which the gastronomic jargon does nothing to under-
mine. It is thus one of several places in Fielding where the imple-
mentation of the idiom ‘‘I could eat you up’’ is not undercut by the
rule that eating people is wrong.
The passage about Square is one in which the eating analogy
coexists with two other traditional idiomatic assimilations in the
poetic, as well as colloquial, lexicon of courtship and love: those of
warfare and conquest, and of hunting prey. All three are repeat-
edly implicated in the elaborate pattern of playful displacement I
have been discussing, and all three occur almost in anthologized
sequence in this passage: ‘‘The fortress of virtue . . . subdued,’’
feeding ‘‘on a dainty,’’ he ‘‘pursued, and obtained her.’’ They are re-
lated only by their common application to love, taken for granted
as so idiomatically natural that each image’s intrinsic content runs
no strong risk of drawing attention to its literal aspect. Eating
receives the most extended exposure, with four mentions in a
single sentence: ‘‘His Appetite was not of that squeamish kind
which cannot feed on a Dainty because another hath tasted it
[emphasis added].’’
Hunting and eating images are naturally connected, over and
above the shared sexual application. If a ‘‘plump Doe’’ has escaped
from the forest, the ‘‘whole Parish’’ is alerted, and ‘‘every Man is
ready to set his Dogs after her; and if she is preserved from the rest
by the good Squire, it is only that he may secure her for his own
eating.’’ This opening paragraph of book 17, chapter 4, is a prelude
to an elaborate comparison of the hunted animal with women of
fortune and fashion, chief among them Sophia. It acts as a pre-
emptive Homeric simile, whose literal tenor is then unfolded:
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I have often considered a very fine young Woman of For-

tune and Fashion, when first found strayed from the Pale of
her Nursery, to be in pretty much the same Situation with
this Doe. The Town is immediately in an Uproar, she is
hunted from Park to Play, from Court to Assembly, from
Assembly to her own Chamber, and rarely escapes a single
Season from the Jaws of some Devourer or other . . . , for the
most part at least, [she and others] are at last devoured. . . .
Of all these Paragons, none ever tasted more of this Per-
secution than poor Sophia. Her ill Stars were not contented
with all that she had su√ered on Account of Blifil, they now
raised her another Pursuer, who seemed likely to torment
her no less than the other had done.

The sketch of country mores has choreography of the kind Tony

Richardson transposed into the film’s hunting scene, an episode
that is not itself found in the novel but which visually captures
what has been called ‘‘the brutal, predatory quality of eighteenth-
century life in the provinces.’’ By the same token, it is remarkable
that Fielding could convey some of the force of this visual atmo-
sphere by verbal means, especially when referring to what is a
metaphorical hunt, connoting sexual pursuit rather than an actual
animal chase. It is another example of a metaphor’s vitality over-
riding its prose meaning, though, as in some of the eating paral-
lels, the verbal applications of the image (‘‘another Pursuer,’’ for
example) sometimes remain casual phrases, more or less inert in
colloquial near-abstraction. In this passage, eating images coexist
logically with hunting, and the rhetoric increases in decibels when
eating competes with hunting as the leading metaphor of sexual
appropriation: ‘‘secure her for his own eating,’’ ‘‘the Jaws of some
Devourer or other,’’ ‘‘they are devoured.’’ And if the extended
emphasis of this protracted simile is on the chase rather than
ingestion, we know from the first mention of the ‘‘plump Doe’’
that the chase has a meal in view.
The film’s visual transposition of this small-scale figurative
fantasy of hunting and eating into an episode not found in the
novel is replayed, in an equal and opposite way, in another change
from the book, so subtly appropriate that it is seldom recognized as
a change. It involves another playful crossing of the eating analogy
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with the third of the traditional parallels: between sexual relations

and warfare, in which the language of ‘‘siege,’’ ‘‘conquest,’’ and
‘‘killing’’ plays a similar competing role to that of the chase. The
classic example is the seduction of Tom by Mrs. Waters in book 9,
chapter 5. Those who remember the movie will perhaps not re-
member that this is so, because the military imagery in the novel
is verbal rather than visual, and all the visual energy in the film is
transferred to eating, as the sensuous act most immediately resem-
bling, as well as directly leading to, the sexual consummation. The
slow-motion ingestion of each item, accompanied by ogling and a
languid sensuousness of movement on the part of both lovers, is
again a visual translation of genuine features of Fielding’s verbal
style, except that it specifically does not conform to the novel’s
text, a transfer of rhetorical registers that is sometimes overlooked
in comparisons between the novel and the film.
The chapter, entitled ‘‘An Apology for all Heroes who have good
Stomachs, with a Description of a Battle of the amorous Kind,’’
begins with Tom eating a huge piece of beef with ‘‘immoderate
Ardour’’: ‘‘It may be doubted, whether Ulysses, who by the Way
seems to have had the best Stomach of all the Heroes in that
eating Poem of the Odyssey, ever made a better Meal. Three
Pounds at least of that Flesh which formerly had contributed to
the Composition of an Ox, was now honoured with becoming Part
of the individual Mr. Jones.’’ By an irony that may seem oddly
appropriate, an incorporation takes place of a kind which theorists
of the kiss thought lovers were pursuing through their practice of
that act. Tom’s eating, for once, is not an image nor even the
prelude (as it were, foreplay) of a sexual transaction but a tempo-
rarily preferred substitute, and therefore an obstacle, to that trans-
action. Fielding may in some sense be nudging us toward a joky
sense that the ‘‘incorporation’’ to which the kiss is supposed to
aspire is fulfilled in a literal way by an act that prevents or defers
the kissing itself. Another feature is that Tom seems for the mo-
ment placed in the role for which Fielding rebukes the glutton
lovers who love women as they love roast beef, except that Tom,
again for the moment, actually prefers roast beef. Or perhaps that
is the saving of him, for he knows that beef is beef and women are
women, and refuses to treat either as though it were the other.
Tom was, like a good Homeric hero, very hungry: ‘‘This Particular
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we thought ourselves obliged to mention, as it may account for our

Heroe’s temporary Neglect of his fair Companion; who eat but
very little, and was indeed employed in Considerations of a very
di√erent Nature, which passed unobserved by Jones, till he had
entirely satisfied that Appetite which a Fast of twenty-four Hours
had procured him; but his Dinner was no sooner ended, than his
Attention to other Matters revived.’’
Eating competes with love, and vice versa, in Mrs. Waters’s
case, ‘‘who eat but very little,’’ an unusual separation in Fielding.
Within a page, however, we get the more usual thing. ‘‘To speak
out boldly at once, [Mrs. Waters] was in Love, according to the
present universally received Sense of that Phrase, by which Love is
applied indiscriminately to the desirable Objects of all our Pas-
sions, Appetites, and Senses, and is understood to be that Prefer-
ence which we give to one Kind of Food rather than another.’’ Back
in this familiar territory, Mrs. Waters is like Wild and the other
wicked sexual gluttons except that she is a woman, and women
sensualists, as I have suggested, tend to be portrayed as un-
threatening, genial, or a√ectionate, when they are not comically
harmless, rather than as menacingly predatory. Her readiness to
sleep around, like her preference for Tom, are both in their way
signs of emotional grace, a superior conterpart to Square’s accep-
tance of Molly’s infidelity. When Mrs. Waters becomes aware in
the next chapter of Sophia’s presence at the inn, although she
understands that she has ‘‘some very dangerous Rival’’ for Tom’s
a√ections,
she gave herself no Concern about it. She could feast heartily
at the Table of Love, without reflecting that some other
already had been, or hereafter might be, feasted with the
same Repast. A Sentiment which, if it deals but little in
Refinement, deals however much in Substance; and is less
capricious, and perhaps less ill-natured and selfish than the
Desires of those Females who can be contented enough to
abstain from the Possession of their Lovers, provided they are
su≈ciently satisfied that no one else possesses them.
She is generous in the distribution of her favors and has the
sensibility to prefer Tom over the rest. If we must find her a male
counterpart, it is less likely to be Wild or even Square than Tom
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himself, though he is a ‘‘finer’’ version of the type. At such points

one might be disposed to feel that the censoriousness implicit in
some of Fielding’s analogies between eating and love falls short of
the kind of disapproval of Tom’s or Mrs. Waters’s transgressions
that is assumed by those who view Tom Jones as a defense of
chastity. Fielding paid his tribute to that virtue, but his sym-
pathies were on the side of such transgressors, and the guilt-
inducing insistence on the depravity of sexual gluttons like Jon-
athan Wild or those of the chapter ‘‘Of Love,’’ may act as an
atonement for not being severe enough, an oblique expression of
‘‘guilt,’’ or perhaps a guilty feeling of insu≈cient guilt.
Nevertheless, says Fielding, the original insistence of the eating
scene with Mrs. Waters is on the di√erence, not similarity, be-
tween eating and loving, and has to stand: ‘‘For how much soever
we may be in Love with an excellent Surloin of beef, or bottle of
Burgundy . . . yet do we never smile, nor ogle, nor dress, nor flatter,
nor endeavour by any other Arts or Tricks to gain the A√ection
of the said Beef, &c. Sigh indeed we sometimes may; but it is gen-
erally in the Absence, not in the Presence of the beloved Ob-
ject.’’ There follows a joke about Pasiphae and her beloved bull,
‘‘whom she endeavoured to engage by all the Coquetry practised
with good Success in the Drawing Room,’’ but then it definitely
was not eating that Pasiphae wanted to do with that particular ox.
So when Mrs. Waters starts working on Tom, the seduction is
not what happens in the film. On the contrary, as Fielding ex-
plains, her e√orts are devoted to seducing him not, as in the film,
by provocative displays of gastronomic pleasuring but by getting
him to stop eating. Here the military metaphor takes over, and in
more than one sense Mrs. Waters goes to war with Tom’s joint of
beef. She uses the whole ‘‘Artillery’’ of her charms, sending out for
example ‘‘two pointed Ogles.’’ These, in epic fashion, are deflected
from their target. ‘‘Happily for our Heroe’’ they actually hit not
the real target but ‘‘only a vast Piece of Beef which he was then
conveying into his Plate, and harmless spent their Force.’’ The
‘‘fair Warrior,’’ sexiest of all fabled Amazons, then releases a
‘‘deadly Sigh,’’ similarly ‘‘driven from [Tom’s] Ears by the coarse
Bubbling of some bottled Ale.’’ The attack continues, with a ‘‘Vol-
ley of small Charms’’ (punning on small-arms fire), supplement-

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ing the cannonade of her ‘‘two bright Orbs which had already
begun to make an Impression on poor Jones.’’ Tom puts up a
‘‘Dutch Defense, and treacherously delivered up the Garrison,
without duly weighing his Allegiance to the fair Sophia.’’ At the
end of the ‘‘amorous Parley,’’ Mrs. Waters ‘‘unmasked the Royal
Battery, by carelessly letting her Handkerchief drop from her
Neck.’’ Thus ‘‘the Heart of Mr. Jones was entirely taken, and the
fair Conqueror enjoyed the usual Fruits of her Victory.’’
So at the moment of sexual transaction, the novel becomes
more occupied with analogies of erotic warfare than of food. The
military conceit prevails, as the warrior conquers. The fact that
the conquest is by the female over the male overturns the usual
conventions of gallantry, just as, in its military aspect, it reverses a
scenario of Amazon warfare, in which the hero (Achilles, it might
be, or Theseus) defeats the Amazon, as well as sometimes falling
in love with her. The fifth canto of Pope’s Rape of the Lock has
an epic battle of the sexes, in which the women (one of them bear-
ing the name of the Amazon queen Thalestris), armed with looks
and frowns, scatter the battlefield with vanquished males, whose
‘‘deaths’’ are of course presumed to be orgasmic, and who, in a
customary mock-blasphemous extension, are allowed to rise again
after a suitable interval.
Fielding also makes a joky production of the fact that the van-
quishing of Tom and its supposed overturning of expected sce-
narios can be accounted for by ‘‘natural means,’’ without the aid of
a deus ex machina. This disclosure, learnedly invoking Horace’s
prescription for dramatic plots and possibly glancing at some mili-
tary or amorous foolery in the heroic plays he had satirized almost
two decades earlier in the Tragedy of Tragedies, occurs in a por-
tentous preamble to the conquest: ‘‘Many other Weapons did she
assay; But the God of Eating (if there be any such Deity; for I do
not confidently assert it) preserved his Votary; or perhaps it may
not be Dignus vindice nodus, and the present Security of Jones may
be accounted for by natural Means: for as Love frequently pre-
serves from the Attacks of Hunger, so may Hunger possibly, in
some Cases, defend us against Love.’’ Tom was thus eventually
overcome by the natural means of hunger itself being overcome,
not indeed by love, but by a three-pound steak. The seductive

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woman was not finally or mainly victorious over that steak but
made her conquest when the steak had been put away. And she did
not conquer, as in the movie, by force of sexy nibbles, or hearty
chewing, of toothsome shellfish and chicken (rather than beef, as
it happens), mimicking and prefiguring kisses and love bites to
come, but through the artillery of her well-armed person on that
alternative metaphorical battlefield. When the hero of Kate Atkin-
son’s One Good Turn (2006) remarked of his actress girlfriend that
‘‘he’d never met anyone for whom the line between food and sex
was so thin. The things she could do with a strawberry were
enough to make a grown man blush,’’ one suspects he had not seen
Joyce Redman as Mrs. Waters, concluding the eating scene in Tom
Jones with a lewd exercise on a wishbone.
It is arguable that the movie got it right in spirit, if not the spirit
of the text. For the image of food a≈rms its primacy even in this
formal antagonism to the act of love, which elsewhere it is said to
resemble rather than negate, and the piece of beef gets almost as
much attention as the deployment of Mrs. Waters’s batteries. It is
only when it receives its appropriate homage of consumption that
the alternative of consummation may occur, and the kissing has to
start.
So a species of cannibalism enters into Fielding’s treatment of
the subject, particularized and made vivid, passing the love of
women in its way, but ultimately, if only ultimately, kept at arm’s
length by firm reminders of its metaphorical character. For all the
foolery, no one actually eats anyone. It is in such contexts that a
figure of speech shows its power simultaneously to exploit and to
defy its literal implications. We should now return to the kiss, and
its rhetoric, to see what role that plays when, because an element
of action is involved, the literal cannot quite be kept at bay.
•
It is obvious that one much-cherished feature of the kiss is pre-
cisely that it defeats the project of incorporation attributed to it by
Ovid, Lucretius, and others. By the same token people who say, ‘‘I
could eat you up,’’ are also implicitly saying, ‘‘but I won’t.’’ At least
one hopes so. And if the professed meaning of the kiss or the love
bite is incorporation of the beloved, it can only survive through its
own unfulfilment. If this calls to mind the lovers depicted on
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Keats’s Grecian Urn, it is because there too the act is, in its own
way, incomplete:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
In Keats it is the kiss itself that never quite happens, achieving the
specialized or paradoxical fulfilment that comes with never being
satiated. Satiation, by contrast, is a more conventional and inferior
fulfilment, described by Keats as leaving ‘‘a heart high-sorrowful
and cloy’d.’’ The price of the Keatsian alternative, a species of
meta-fulfilment, is nonconsummation, which, in languages other
than the empirical English, is sometimes the same as the word for
nonconsumption.
The case of the Urn’s lovers di√ers from the Ovidian idea of
amorous intermerging because its incompleteness is that of the
sublimated nonevent. It achieves its high fruition through the
absence of all corporeal contact, both because the kiss never hap-
pens and because the people have no bodies. The Ovidian formula,
on the other hand, is dependent on physical contact. If it is a figure
for incorporation, the metaphor (or should it be called meton-
ymy?) is enacted on a physical plane, not a figure of speech but a
figurative act. In that sense, it is like the Eucharistic doctrine of
the real presence, which defies its own literal purport through the
physical objects of bread and wine, acting as what some have
called metaphor (or even metonymy), where the metaphor is a
thing, not a word, that is literally eaten. But when we speak of the
Ovidian kiss, we really refer to what one might call bread-and-
butter embraces, to which we ascribe figurative significance as an
attempted incorporation. This imagines the kisses as evoking the
cannibal endgame they mimic, an endgame which would defeat
them at the moment of attainment since the result must be the
death of at least one of the lovers. It has been a persistent feature
of the discourse of cannibalism that its language tends to evade
the cannibal fact. In our sexual operations, oral activity, in a not
dissimilar way, usually circumvents the cannibal act.
It is not always so, however, in literature or in life, as some
recent events, like the case of Je√rey Dahmer, have demonstrated.
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The great literary exception of the last years of the eighteenth

century is perhaps to be found in the works of Sade: in the cavort-
ings in Prince Minsky’s Gothic castle in the Histoire de Juliette or
the programmatic jottings that survive from the 120 Journées de
Sodome. These do, of course, involve multiple deaths. But they are
conceived, I believe, more as transgressive enormities, as exten-
sions of the range of permitted sensation, than as literalizations of
figures of speech about devouring passions or of phrases like ‘‘I
could eat you up.’’
It is perhaps not until Monique Wittig’s Le Corps lesbien (1973)
that one finds a work of fiction devoted entirely to the literal
enactment of these figures of speech, in a graphic detail pre-
figured by some scenes in Jean Genet’s Pompes funèbres (1947), in
which the body of a lover is consumed, for the most part appar-
ently in fantasy, though with overtones of the sacrament rather
than the love bite. In Wittig’s novel especially, it is not really clear
whether the ingestive activities ‘‘really happen’’ in the story or are
part of the fantasy life of the narrator. I have suggested elsewhere
that the reticence which tells explicitly what is presumed to have
happened but does not tell whether it ‘‘actually’’ did has its sym-
metrical obverse in the ‘‘unspeakable rites’’ of Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness, where we know that it ‘‘happened’’ but not
what it was.
My final example is from Heinrich von Kleist’s play Penthesilea
(1808). The Amazon Penthesilea goes back to a lost epic of the
Trojan War, the Aethiopis, ascribed sometimes to Homer but usu-
ally to the possibly contemporary Arctinus of Miletus. Penthesilea
is not mentioned in the Iliad, which has two passing references to
Amazon wars, but she fights with Achilles in the Aethiopis and is
killed by him. Thersites accuses Achilles of having fallen in love
with her and is said to have been slain by Achilles for his insolence.
But the tradition of a sexual passion between the two warriors
acquired a life of its own, including, in one version, a necrophilous
penetration of the Amazon’s corpse by the lovelorn hero.
The story has exercised many of the second-rate minds of the
Western world, including the English John Lydgate and Joseph of
Exeter. It has, however, also excited the pens of Boccaccio and
Christine de Pisan, and Kleist’s position on this scale must remain a
matter of taste. It should be remembered that Amazons, in both
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their classical Graeco-Scythian or Graeco-Libyan manifestations

and their Renaissance American reincarnation, are traditionally
identified with cannibalism. We read in Aeschylus’s Suppliant
Women (ll.287–89) of ‘‘husbandless, flesh-eating Amazons,’’ which
may possibly mean carnivore rather than cannibal, but Amazons
were recurrently associated with cannibalism through Scythian as
well as Amerindian connections. The lines in Aeschylus also refer
to the Amazons’ practice of archery warfare, disreputable in Greek
eyes, not only as a kind of coward terrorism (killing from a ‘‘safe
distance’’) but, when used, for example, by the Persian enemy, as
formidably menacing in the way gunpowder, and later nuclear
weapons, came to be viewed. Either way, Amazons were dangerous
opponents, both in the straightforward military sense, and within
the familiar sexual arena which borrows its language of siege,
conquest, surrender, and killing from the doings of warriors, and
which provides the setting of the great mock-epic of the sex war,
The Rape of the Lock, one of whose heroines is named after an
Amazon queen. Monique Wittig has written a wittily mock-epic
but grimmer novel on the same hostilities entitled Les Guérillères
(1969), which adds modern overtones of guerrilla warfare to the
equation. Amazons are thus also archetypal protagonists of the
battle of the sexes, both warring and mating with heroes in heroic
literalized enactments of what our own culture a√ects to call the
love-hate relationship.
And so to Kleist. His Penthesilea is set before the walls of Troy.
The topoi of love and hate, and indeed of sexual and military
conquest, are on full display. The posthumous eroticism of the
original story, which tells of Achilles’ passion for the Amazon’s
corpse, undergoes various piquant reversals. One is that in Kleist it
is the Amazon who kills the hero, not the other way round, revers-
ing the military outcome on a sexually fraught but gory and literal
plane, as Mrs. Waters’s ‘‘artillery’’ conquered Tom more blood-
lessly in an amorous victory. Another is that stirrings of nec-
rophilia are experienced prospectively in the lifetimes of both
Achilles and Penthesilea, in something like the way the earl of
Rochester’s Disabled Debauchee anticipates the jouissances of
retrospect. Both protagonists are already in love before battle, let
alone death, and both are turned on by the same simultaneous
forces of Eros and Thanatos. Thus, Achilles is thinking of having
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his ‘‘sport with her’’ even as he contemplates adorning her brow

‘‘with bleeding gashes’’ and dragging her, Hectorlike, ‘‘by the feet
behind my car.’’ Penthesilea (who under Amazon rules can only
mate with a male she has captured) asks in sympathetic symmetry
what it is that she longs for when she strikes Achilles. She answers,
to send him ‘‘headlong to the shades,’’ or, rather, ‘‘to this warm
breast . . . to draw him close.’’ These Amazon rules, here derived
from a lurid, racially charged mythology, are explained to Achilles
with the added blandishment that women who only have their left
breast remaining are said to be better lovers because all their love
is concentrated closer to their heart.
After a disagreement as to which of them will be brought to the
other’s country, Achilles gallantly challenges Penthesilea to single
combat, intending her to defeat him so that he can go as her
captive to the Temple of Diana. He is sure that she won’t kill him,
but here is the surprise: she arrives, with stage-directed thun-
derclaps, accompanied by ‘‘dogs and elephants . . . And a whole
savage host on horseback,’’ full of battle fervor. Even the Amazon
priestess is appalled. She calls Penthesilea a ‘‘lewd she-dog’’ (in
a curious overturning of a dialogue between Achilles and Hector
in the Iliad) and tries to restrain her. The lightly armed Achilles
tries to flee, like Hector, but she shoots him with her bow and sets
her hounds on him, ‘‘a bitch/In the company of dogs,’’ while
Achilles, ‘‘in a pool of his own gore,’’ utters startled words of gentle
love.
At this, ‘‘tearing his armor from his limbs,’’ she ‘‘Strikes deep
her teeth into his snowy breast, She and the dogs in ghostly ri-
valry’’ (these women/dog substitutions are themselves an inver-
sion of a whole chain of Homeric conceits). ‘‘Black blood was
dripping from her mouth and hands.’’ After such knowledge, what
forgiveness? Penthesilea, having surprised even herself, then sub-
sides into asking her women, self-reassuringly, whether perhaps
what she did was not actually to bite but in fact to ‘‘kiss him dead.’’
She throws herself on the mangled body, exclaiming, in words that
give a whole new meaning to the idea of a slip of the tongue:
It was a slip – believe me! – the wrong word –
I can’t control my too impetuous lips.
But now I tell you clearly what I meant:

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This, my belovèd, this – and nothing more.

(She kisses him.)
Stripped of special pleading, her act reverses Othello’s sequence,
killing her lover ere she kissed him. As the women try to remove
her, she boasts that many a woman will tell a man ‘‘that she loves
him so/Beyond words she would eat him up for love.’’ But who has
in fact done it except herself? ‘‘I did it word for word.’’ An ordinary
woman, she explains, does not love enough to do this. Her love is
‘‘sated’’ before the eating starts: ‘‘When she would prove her words,
Sated she is of him – sated almost to loathing’’ – or, in a sanguin-
ary application of Keatsian language, ‘‘cloy’d.’’
Beside this play Kleist’s famous novella The Marquise of O———,
also published in 1808, seems a parable of wedded tranquillity. As
Abby Kleinbaum, to whose account of the play I am indebted,
points out, ‘‘Kleist makes extensive use of language that equates
eating and lovemaking.’’ You might call that putting it mildly.
Freud spoke of the play in 1900 as an example of the cruelty
inherent in human love. And Kleinbaum cites the English poet
Laurence Binyon, who wrote a more conventional version of the
story and came to a similar conclusion about the cruelty of love
five years later:
Hate, hope, fear, longing, ’tis all one, ’tis love,
Betwixt a man and a woman.
These verities are, of course, beyond the scope of my immediate
topic. The interest of Kleist’s play in the present context is that it
grasps the nettle of literal implication contained in the figures of
speech about eating one’s lover up or experiencing a devouring
passion. When Penthesilea is trying to make sense of what hap-
pened in the delirium of battle and hears answers from the
priestess and other women, she asks, as we have seen, if ‘‘I did kiss
him dead?’’ It is the prelude to the self-reassuring casuistry ‘‘Kiss-
ing – biting – /Where is the di√erence? When we truly love/It’s
easy to do one when we mean the other’’ and o√ers the only
possible mundane conclusion to the unfulfilled aspiration inher-
ent in the idea of the ingestive or incorporating kiss. The alterna-
tive of a mutual incorporation is not on o√er, and the understand-
ing is accepted that the literal end product of eating your lover

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is his death. When she has recovered from her murderous delir-
ium and understands that she has ‘‘overcome and won Achilles,’’
Penthesilea claims the further fulfilment of being herself ‘‘More
than happy! Quite ripe for death.’’ That this reaches out to larger
notions of sublime self-obliteration, of a miraculeuse nuit nuptiale
so unsurpassable that it can end only in the death of the lovers
(still virgin in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axël and thus, like those on
Keats’s urn, never ‘‘cloy’d’’) or the narrower conjunctions between
dying and sexual climax explored in a long tradition of pre-
Freudian jokes and Freudian nonjokes, can only be above, or be-
low, the story I have been trying to tell.