Eating People Is Wrong

Since Fit to be Tied is kind enough to remember it, and since it was sitting around on my hard drive, here’s my superannuated essay on cannibalism, homosexuality, and Herman Melville. It was published almost exactly a decade ago, and lots more is known about all the topics involved, though not perhaps by me. Anyone interested might, for a start, track down the latest issue of Melville Society Extracts and look at Henry Hughes’s report on a July 2003 conference on Melville held in the Marquesas, where Robert Suggs (whom I footnoted, ten years ago) led an expedition.