Abstract
This article argues that food acts and eating in the nineteenth century children’s novel The Coral Island (1858) reveal adult socializing intentions in the context of an expanding British Empire. Written during a transitional historical moment, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island communicates to middle- and upper-class public school boys messages encoded in food to control their physical appetites and to become leaders of an expanding imperial power. Food acts and feasting fantasies become instrumental in inscribing these messages to the young audience of this novel, which drew inspiration from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), and later influenced other novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Food acts become critical in revealing how the boys achieve a sense of cultural distinction from the natives and also learn to become enterprising leaders of the British Empire.
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Notes
Fiona McCulloch also writes that oral consumption in The Coral Island is “very much associated with Freud’s theory of the child’s polymorphously preserved sexuality,” which “disrupts notions about the innocence of both the child and the children’s novel as a literary genre” (2000, p. 140).
Such an approach also circumvents the structuralist perspective taken by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1969), where he compares food and cooking rituals to the structure of language, distinguishing between societies that eat cooked food from those that do not.
Chapter 2 says that Peterkin Gay is “about fourteen years old,” which Ballantyne specifies as “thirteen” in chapter 19 (Ballantyne, 1858/1982, pp. 7, 151).
For more on historical partnerships between privateers and British imperialists, see Hanna 2015.
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Sarah Yoon is a graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Yonsei University, South Korea. Her research interests include children’s literature, utopian and dystopian literature, neoliberalism, and political communication. Her Master’s thesis studied the postmodern revision of the detective fiction formula in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1987). She lived in London, England, for fifteen years prior to attending university in South Korea.
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Yoon, S. ‘A Glutton or an Epicure’: Food Acts in R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island. Child Lit Educ 51, 361–373 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09385-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09385-6