Envisioning a ‘good’ utopia on a dystopian island: culinary and cultural conflicts in Lord of the Flies

Abstract

Thanks to the rising interest in island literary studies, there is a considerable body of research on the relationship between islands and utopia/dystopia, but the motif of food, namely, what characters eat on an island, has seldom been explored. Using Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson’s theories on utopia and dystopia as an interpretive lens, and drawing upon the varied contentions regarding food and eating by Levi-Strauss, Paul Atkinson, Carol J. Adams and other theorists, this paper examines the triangular relationship of island, food, and utopia/dystopia in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The paper argues that although this island story is generally categorized as dystopian, it blends both utopian and dystopian discourses and represents a literary endeavour to envision a ‘good’ utopia. This argument is supported by a detailed analysis of how the eating practices of the British schoolboys marooned on a desert island parallel their attempts to construct a desirable microcosm. By vividly depicting the boys’ contrasting culinary patterns of gathering fruit and hunting pigs, Golding subverts the hierarchy built upon the opposition between the raw/vegetable and the cooked/meat and their corresponding implications of ‘the barbarous’ and ‘the civilized.’ His further depictions of the boys’ cannibalism and degeneration into savages showcase his vision of human beings’ universal evil, his doubt about the linear progress of Western society, and his caution about the potential disasters that might befall seemingly progressive civilization due to the fall of mankind.