Madeleine Frost
Starvation is said to lead people to extreme measures; when deprived of nutrition and sustenance, one’s mind does not function to its fullest capacity, which often leads them to make choices they would not normally make—like cannibalization. Horror frequently uses cannibalism to portray a physiological starvation, but, recently, has portrayed cannibalism as a representation of love. Regardless of its representation, cannibalism is often linked with brutalization and body horror. Women are frequently the ones who fall victim to the brutalization found within horror; they are highly sexualized, victimized, objectified, and mutilated. To name only a few examples, brutalization is portrayed through Marion of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) (sexualized and mutilated), Mina of Stoker’s Dracula (victimized), and many of Art the Clown’s victims found throughout the Terrifier franchise (sexualized, victimized, and mutilated). Women are often portrayed to have high levels of vulnerability and to have little to no agency. Here, they find themselves victims at the hand of a male killer or as a damsel in distress who needs her male counterpart to rescue her. But what if the script was flipped? What if women had the opportunity to save themselves, without the help of a man? What if it was not a man who was the villain? In Chelsea G. Summers’ 2020 novel A Certain Hunger, protagonist Dorothy Daniels does such a thing—she flips the script for what it means to be a woman in the horror genre. Food journalist by day and cannibal by night, Dorothy seduces, murders, and cannibalizes her male partners, reclaiming the agency women are often stripped of in horror.
The novel opens with Dorothy describing her interest in hotel restaurants and her expensive taste in food, alcohol, and life in general. In the first chapter, we learn of her status as a food journalist (and how artfully she views food and consumption) and of her relationship with sex and men (transactional). The novel alternates between the past and present and is complemented throughout by Dorothy’s cooking and eating experiences. Throughout the novel, we get snippets and commentary on her current imprisonment (and how bad the prison food is); the main story, however, revolves around the interpersonal relationships Dorothy has with men and how they each ultimately result in Dorothy cannibalizing them. Within the nonlinear timeline of the novel, she chronologically forges relationships with and murders the following men: Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, Marco, and Casimir. She engages in each relationship because she believes she will be able to get something from them, whether that is professional success, sex, or the human connection she desires. However, her ferocious appetite—for food, sex, power, and men—proves to be a weak spot for Dorothy. She notes that her “fondness for gratification has always been my downfall” (Summers 98). Ultimately, she is blinded by her appetite and slips up, leading to her conviction and imprisonment. Up until her imprisonment, however, Dorothy is a powerful woman who challenges social, patriarchal, and horror norms.
As a teenager, Dorothy begins to associate food not only with connection, but with agency too. Dorothy mentions “Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk. Adolescence immersed me in an ouroboros of desires, and it was ecstasy. What choice did I have but to lose my virginity to a fry-cook” (35). Here, Dorothy suggests that femininity is “junk” or, in other words, that being a woman as expected by society is “junk.” She does not want to conform to the social norm of women being weaker than men. Instead, she decides to find power for herself. The connection she makes between food and sexuality, as seen in her sexual relationship with a fry cook, suggests that she finds a sense of agency and choice in selecting the food she eats and the people she involves herself with; she attempts to avoid the “junk” of traditional femininity by instead partaking in the “rebellion” she finds in food and consumption. This rebellion allows her to embody a sense of agency from a young age. Instead of being portrayed as a weak woman who relies on someone else to make choices, Dorothy forges her own path by using food and sex as a means of obtaining and practicing agency.
In several horror works, women are highly sexualized. Take, for example Heather Miller in Luessenhop’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D (2013), who is left half-naked and as bait for the killer. Or, we can examine Beverly from Stephen King’s It (both the book and film), who, despite being a child, is consistently sexualized by nearly every male she encounters. In these examples, we see that these characters are sexualized in a way that does not advance the plot; this sexualization is included as a way to make women appear weaker and more susceptible to male-inflicted violence and objectification. But Summers’ Dorothy challenges this by flipping the script and sexualizing men as a way for her to exert power. From an early age, food and consumption surround Dorothy’s life—they give her a sense of agency and power that allows her to explore relationship dynamics with food, others, and herself.
Early in the novel, Dorothy outlines her desires as she describes an elaborately long and ornate dinner table. She notes, “In my imagination, these men I loved would sit together […] joined by their adoration for me, and united in their befuddlement. They wouldn’t know one another. They wouldn’t know why they were there, and I would just sit at the head of the table, smiling” (23). Though she seems fiercely independent, Dorothy yearns for human connection and relationships. From her dinner table fantasy alone, it is clear that Dorothy loves the idea of being surrounded by love and the validation of being “adored” by others. Her use of the word “befuddlement” is worth examining, as it suggests her want for a certain power dynamic between her and her human connections. She wants to have the upper hand, which challenges women’s typical roles in horror. Dorothy sees the men in this scenario as aloof and only interested in her and, at the same time, sees herself as powerful and wealthy in their admiration and acceptance.
Dorothy elaborately creates plans when she selects the next man she wants to seduce and murder. Take, for example, when she decides she wants to murder Marco. She later returns to Italy to visit him and tours the slaughterhouse he owns. She describes her time there, saying, “And I walked through it all, rubber boots pulled over my Woldford stockings, tight smile on my face, feigning interest in order to be closer to Marco, incessantly asking myself one question: Why. The answer was so that I could kill him and eat him” (149). She describes her outfit to visit Marco and her overall demeanor when they are together; she is trying to emotionally and, perhaps, sexually manipulate him in order to achieve what she wants. As is evident in her dinner table fantasy, Dorothy loves control.
In general, horror frequently depicts women as lacking control. For example, Christine of the 1925 film Phantom of the Opera or Caroline, Elizabeth, and Justine of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. The women in these works are portrayed to rely on men to save them, leaving them little room to have the opportunity to utilize any agency or control they might possess. They serve as plot points that assist the males of the film to be seen as heroic and strong, leaving the women of these works to look reliant and weak. Dorothy, however, emotionally and sexually manipulates (controls) men before inflicting physical violence onto them. She drugs Andrew and uses carbon monoxide poisoning to kill him, makes Gil go into anaphylactic shock, plunges an ice pick in Casimir’s throat, and slits Marco’s throat while performing fellatio. Dorothy intentionally kills these men and posthumously (with the exception of Casimir) takes parts of their bodies.
The exception to her plotted routine is Giovanni; Dorothy says she “accidentally” ran him over. However, like the other men, she purposefully and carefully removes part of his body, his liver, for her own pleasure and consumption. Giovanni is the first of the men to die at Dorothy’s hands. After she runs him over with her car, she “flicked open the foil cutter on the corkscrew and walked back to the body that lay limp and perfect, glinting still in the silent night” (87). She makes the conscious choice to mutilate Giovanni and take part of him with her. She goes on to describe how she removes his liver and the condition of it—“hard, slippery, and hot”—before placing it in her nylon bag (87). Giovanni’s murder is an important one to examine. Because he is, presumably, the first of Dorothy’s victims, we can see her motives in cannibalizing men. Perhaps taking a part of them is her way of fulfilling her desire for human connection. Her consuming those parts could be her twisted way of keeping them close to her, thus giving her a (false) sense of the connection and intimacy that she yearns for.
As the novel progresses, we further see that to find human connection, Dorothy uses sex as a means to get close with men. She frequently catches the men off guard because they are blinded by lust. She uses this moment of weakness to her advantage as she murders them. Take, for instance, her description of Casimir’s murder: “It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a male orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.” After watching his eyes grow “blank with ethereal suddenness,” Dorothy remarks on the rarity and “privilege” of watching a man die (18). She equates witnessing the death of a man with orgasming. Similarly, she describes the act of planning Andrew’s murder as “mental masturbation” and that enacting it is “better than most sex” (93). Instead of being mutilated, tortured, and/or murdered, Dorothy flips the script and is the inflictor of violence. She finds great pleasure in the power found in using men’s sexualization of her and their own lust to her advantage. Dorothy empowers herself and takes the power (and life) away from the men who attempt to sexualize her or treat her as a woman in horror is often treated.
Alice McLean, feminist food studies expert, notes that food studies have “revalued women’s considerable appetite—for food, for knowledge, for power, and for creative self-expression—reclaiming women’s hunger as a source of empowerment” (McLean 252). Certainly, cannibalism is a unique means of “creative self-expression”, as it challenges social norms. If we examine McLean’s claim, though, it is evident that Dorothy’s cannibalist practices represent her ferocious appetite for food, power, and connection. Cannibalism is frequently portrayed to be a result of physiological starvation, but if Dorothy is starving for human connection, this is where we see Dorothy’s reasoning to cannibalize men come in. Dorothy attempts to justify cannibalism by saying “Starvation is the most easily understood reason for cannibalism. Pressed close to death, even a vegan will make a meal of man meat. Our survival instinct is too strong to not eat the food put in front of us” (Summers 99). The utilization of the phrase “pressed close to death” suggests that, perhaps, Dorothy experiences such a strong lack of connection that it feels fatal to her. As we know, Dorothy associates love, connection, and validation with food and culinary settings, like the dinner table she describes in her fantasy. Dorothy’s food journalism skills allow her to employ an ethereal and romanticized narrative about her cannibalizing men.
For example, when she describes cooking Giovanni’s liver, she writes that she “relished it with a good Chianti and a kiss of irony. The pate was surprisingly tasty, sapid yet nuanced” and that “given Giovanni’s decades-long adherence to veganism and a lifestyle so ascetic it anesthetized his desires, what else could I do. It was the cleanest human liver ever likely to cross my path” (81). Dorothy romanticizes cooking and eating in general, but this is especially evident when she describes the process of cooking and consuming the men throughout the novel. Similarly, Dorothy uses phrases such as “fatty, lucious delicacy” and “lovely little morsel, surprisingly delectable” to describe her experience with Gil’s tongue (144). Kima Cargill, who studies food theory, suggests that from a psychological perspective, “The act of finding food, gathering around the fire, cooking and consuming it, is a profoundly important experience, not just to the body, but to the self” (Cargill 42). This notion is certainly applicable to Dorothy: She “finds” men to connect with, kills them, cooks them, and consumes them all while utilizing her culinary skills to romanticize the practice. Cargill’s idea lends itself to understanding the empowerment Dorothy feels when she kills and consumes men. Though most of the relationships she creates with the men are disingenuous and primarily transactional, perhaps these relationships provide her with a false sense of intimacy and human connection. The way in which she descriptively details these instances and this particular “profoundly important experience” demonstrates how she feels validated and empowered; Dorothy exists as a woman in horror who is empowered and has agency.
Dorothy refers to herself as an “unrepentant, unabashed eater of meat” and she notes, “every mouthful is a choice; I liked to be an informed consumer. To be otherwise is to be a zombie, mindlessly consuming — good, bad, or egregious” (Summers 201). Dorothy is unapologetic for her cannibalization of men. She refers to her choice to select and kill specific men as a way of being an “informed consumer”. Scholar Aline Ferreira articulates that women “rebel against patriarchal society and androcentric norms through their dietary styles” (Ferreira 157). Dorothy’s dietary style rebels against patriarchal society, as she murders and consumes patriarchal figures — men. Dorothy goes as far to refer to cannibalism as “magic” when she states: “In my experience, eating a human is like eating unicorn, or Pegasus, or griffin…To eat human is to dine on a chimerical hybrid, a marvelous, mythical meat” (Summers 94). She continues, saying that eating men “makes a god out of a woman. But then, I am an excellent cook” (94). With Ferreira’s argument in mind, it is clear that Dorothy rebels against the patriarchy through her dietary choices; she consciously makes the choice to repeatedly hunt, murder, and cannibalize men while praising herself for her culinary expertise.
Instead of being the victim of the typical brutalization and body horror women experience in horror, Dorothy is the inflictor of violence. She uses consumption of food and men as a means of agency and rebellion against the patriarchy. Her advanced culinary skills assist her in executing murders concisely and swiftly. These skills lend themselves to Dorothy’s ability to perfect the art of cannibalizing the men she murders. When Dorothy eats the men, she exercises agency and forges her own path, eliminating the threat that often challenges women in horror — men. As she acquires the human connection she desires, she allows herself to enjoy her appetite for agency and relish in the destruction of the patriarchy.
Works Cited
Cargill, Kima. “Historical Background of Food Scholarship in Psychology and Major Theoretical Approaches in Use.” Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, edited by Ken Albala, Routledge, 2013, pp. 39-47.
Ferreira, Aline. “The Gendered Politics of Meat: Becoming Tree in Kang’s The Vegetarian, Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Ozeki’s My Year of Meats.” Utopian Foodways: Critical Essays, edited by Teresa Botelho, et al., U. Porto Press, 2019, pp. 147-161.
McLean, Alice. “The Intersection of Gender and Food Studies.” Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies, edited by Ken Albala, Routledge, 2013, pp. 250-264.
Summers, Chelsea G. A Certain Hunger. Unnamed Press, 2021.
