Clarissa and Ritual Cannibalism

Abstract

Lurid eighteenth-century accounts of sacrificial cannibalism in West Africa and other parts of the globe color Richardson's language and imagery in his delineation of Clarissa's highly ritualized persecution and death. Explaining cannibalism as a rudimentary cultural institution that symbolically expresses a collective psychic economy dominated by the preoedipal mother imago, modern anthropological theory shows that Richardson's novel represents this practice as the nexus between the personal (or intrapsychic) and the social (or cultural), between the text's twin obsessions with the preoedipal mother and orality and with social aggression directed mainly, but not exclusively, against women. As in actual cannibal cultures, where a preoccupation with nursing and weaning results in a pervasive oral metaphorization of thought and action, in Clarissa the ritual killing and eating of victims is the paradigmatic gesture underlying all major forms of social action, including the protracted “tearing in pieces” of the scapegoat heroine by relentless “blame.”