Appetite and Desire in Early American Travel Narratives

From Richard Ligon's throbbing turtle hearts to Mary Rowlandson's boiled horse leg, Lewis and Clark's bear gut pudding, and James Riley's feast on putrid goat, graphic accounts of food and dining dominate early American travel writing. In this dissertation, I take a comparativist American Studies approach to argue that travel writers from both North and South America, including the Caribbean, from the mid-seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, read and write their environments through a hermeneutic of appetite. As these authors cross geographical and cultural boundaries, their stomachs and tongues mediate between their individual bodies and their transforming encounters with new systems of religion, economy, and enslavement. Literary scholars in the psychoanalytic tradition have long offered helpful explanations of oral metaphor as a representation of desire. My work, however, participates in recent interdisciplinary efforts among cultural historians, sociologists, and art historians to focus more on the physiological than the psychological articulation of gastronomical language. Early American travel writers record through a language of food and eating the physical transformations that they believe confirm their religious piety, their economic viability, their visions of themselves as citizens of a civilized nation, and the success of their nation's imperialist projects. In each of these instances, these authors articulated through a language of taste their anxieties about what they encountered, their pride in their successful interactions with previously unfamiliar institutions or people, and even their hopes of furthering personal or national and imperial gain. Culinary language in this literature is key to understanding how Anglo-, Franco-, and Ibero-Americans reacted to change in their economic, religious, and social environments, or even resisted or adapted to this change. Through a hermeneutic of appetite, these writers described how they regulated, transformed, or reformed their desires, and thus themselves, to come to terms with an environment out of their own control.