Romancing the Cannibal: Carnist Realism and the Monstrous Vegan in Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban

Abstract: By bringing cannibal studies and vegan studies into conversation through a reading of Rachel Ingalls’s novel Mrs Caliban (1982), this essay argues that, when we follow what Emelia Quinn calls the ‘monstrous vegan’ into the American novel, the monster’s literary function undergoes a genuinely romantic transformation. Though Ingalls’s ‘Caliban’ has been called a vegetarian by some and a man-eater by others, he is in fact a vegan, and it is his veganism, as much as (if not more than) his appearance, which marks him apart as monstrous, and which makes him simultaneously threatening and appealing to Dorothy, the ‘Mrs. Caliban’ of the title. Though the cannibal and the vegan both challenge the inherent assumptions of what this essay calls ‘carnist realism,’ I argue that the monstrous vegan is far more threatening to the carnist status quo than the cannibal who has quite lost his teeth.