Animals and Other People. Heather Keenleyside

or slave trader involve the metaphorical devouring of other people. But Defoe repeatedly insists that eating is not only a figure for human relations.³⁰ From the moment that Crusoe arrives on the island, his narrative is filled with frequent and extended accounts of what and how he literally eats: the effort he expends protecting his crops of barley and rice; gathering and drying grapes; mastering the tasks required to make a loaf of bread; and hunting or taming turtles, pigeons, and goats. And such activities occupy Crusoe’s time as much as they do his narrative: he reports that his “Morning Walk with my Gun” to bring home “something fit to eat,” “generally took me up three Hours each Morning”; the “great Part of the Day” was then spent “ordering, curing, preserving, and cooking what I had kill’d or catch’d for my Supply” (60, 91).

      Just as eating occupies much of Crusoe’s time on the island, it also plays a central role in the political-philosophical imaginary of the novel, in ways that bring Defoe’s engagement with Locke into sharper focus. For Locke invokes eating as his first example of the natural dominion of persons over things, which he calls property: “The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life.”³¹ In his reading of this key passage from the Second Treatise of Government, Wolfram Schmidgen remarks that Locke uses “the ingestive act as a vivid figure for a property that is inalienable because it is physically tied to the body.”³² Indeed for Locke, eating is at once a “vivid figure” for property and also a primary mode of appropriation. This means that eating occupies a strangely central place in Locke’s account of political society, and particularly, in his crucial distinction between political authority and property right. This distinction would seem to proceed from given and natural grounds: from the distinction between (human) persons and (all other) things. But the distinction between persons and things does not come to Locke ready-made, as it might seem from the Second Treatise alone. Instead, Locke strives throughout his First Treatise of Government to constitute the kind of being on which his politics comes to depend: a being defined by its a capacity for speech and—more peculiarly—by the specter of cannibalism.

      Locke constitutes this being—the human person—by working through the same territory of creatureliness and cannibalism that shapes Robinson Crusoe. He begins by attacking Robert Filmer for sanctioning anthropophagy: “If God made all Mankind slaves to Adam and his Heirs, by giving Adam dominion over every living thing that moveth on the Earth, Chapt. I. 28. as our A—would have it, methinks Sir Robert should have carried his Monarchical Power one step higher, and satisfied the World, that Princes might eat their Subjects too, since God gave as full Power to Noah and his Heirs, Chap. 9.2. to eat every Living thing that moveth, as he did to Adam to have Dominion over them, the Hebrew words in both places being the same” (160). In this passage, Locke’s move against Filmer seems sensationalist and somewhat slight: he shocks his readers by literalizing a common figure of speech, that of a sovereign consuming his subjects. But as Locke proceeds, the charge of cannibalism becomes a serious first step in an extended exegetical discussion of our God-given right to eat. The first passage to which Locke refers is God’s donation to Adam at creation: “And God Blessed them, and God said unto them, be Fruitful and Multiply and Replenish the Earth and subdue it, and have Dominion over the Fish of the Sea, and over the Fowl of the Air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” (Gen 1:28, qtd. in Locke 156). On the basis of this passage, Filmer insists that there is only one kind of dominion, which is granted by God and wielded by the monarch over the earth and every living thing (fish, fowl, or human): “Adam, having here Dominion given him over all Creatures, was thereby the Monarch of the whole World” (Filmer, Patriarcha, qtd. in Locke 157). By contrast, Locke argues that there are various types of dominion, not all of which are divinely instituted. To support this claim, Locke looks to God’s second covenant, with Noah. As with Adam, Locke points out, God grants Noah “dominion” over “every living thing that moveth.” For Noah, however, this dominion includes the right to eat, while Adam’s dominion did not even permit him, as Locke puts it, to “make bold with a Lark or a Rabbet to satisfie his hunger” (167).