Author: Alexandra Sorina Radulescu
Translation: Alexandra Sorina Radulescu
Consumption as the ultimate act of love or desire
There are many ways of demonstrating your love to your dear ones, especially your lover: caring about them and helping them in their hard times, making them their favourite food or buying them their favourite gift are some examples. However, other times these tokens of love can get a bit more tragic, trespassing the morality threshold, mostly in fictional works.
Sacrificing oneself for the protection of your lover is a recurrent trope in both classical and modern literature and more recently, on television shows. It is portrayed as a selfless act, one of the greatest displays of bravery and love. But, what if there was an act that takes this concept to the next level, an act that not only involves death, but also the consumption of your lover?

Cannibalism: the origin
Cannibalism is described as the consumption of members from your own species, but it is more commonly known as humans who consume other humans. The origin of this ritual is not clear as, while some sources date the first cases of cannibalism to Neanderthals, others attribute them to Native American tribes.
Although the origin is not clear, the general opinion about this practice nowadays is that cannibalism is seen as a completely immoral act. Throughout history, western white societies have accused discriminated minorities (jews, natives, gypsies) of cannibalism in order to affirm their moral superiority, how they were above these nations who were marked as savages.
Despite the bad reputation this ritual entails, literature and cinematography have tried to “idealize” it by including fantastic characters and fictitious cannibalist cases. Many of these works deal with common feelings like love, desire and passion, but they take it to another level, piquing their curiosity or even creating an inevitable level of morbidity in the reader or watcher, so much so that they want to know more about this controversial topic. We could say that one of the most well-known examples both in literature and television are vampires.
Are vampires cannibals?
These creatures are not principally categorised as cannibals as they are normally portrayed drinking the blood of their victims instead of eating their flesh. However, following the definition of this concept, we could say that vampires are creatures with a moderate level of cannibalism.

In Twilight, the Cullen’s are portrayed as a vampire family that have even stopped consuming human blood. Even Edward’s father is a doctor, a profession in which it is inevitable to see, smell or even handle human blood. However, it is quite obvious that Bella’s blood scent immediately activates Edward’s vampiric instinct as we can observe him being quite affected, so much that he has to escape from Bella in order not to succumb to his desire of consuming her blood:
”I wanted to kill you. I’ve never wanted a human’s blood as much as I want yours in my life … Your scent … Is like a drug to me. You are like my personal brand of heroin.” (Meyer 190)
Although Bella finds out about Edward’s vampire state and the danger that it entails even being around him, she decides to commit herself romantically to him and have a relationship with the creature; a relationship in which there will always be the possibility of her being physically consumed by her lover, a fact that she highlights and even desires:
”About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him, and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be, that thirsted for my blood; and third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.” (Meyer 190)
In this situation, Bella’s character is put in a constant position of vulnerability but, is it not a position of desire? After all, the only thing that prevents Bella from being consumed is Edward’s own self-control about his desire for her, a feeling that knows little about playing by the rules. Our protagonist leaves her whole life in the hands of a creature that is known for transgressing morals and rational thoughts to satisfy its own passions; and she does all this for love.

When talking about cannibalism it is impossible not to mention desire and passion, two emotions which are extremely connected to sexuality. In television series, vampires are normally represented as creatures with sexual freedom, without any attachments or limits. Even their most characteristic act, biting the neck of their victims, is something rooted in sexual practices and reminisces hickeys or lovebites: it is usually done in an erogenous part of the body -the neck or the thigh- and it has the aim to satiate a carnal desire. That is why we could say that in a more symbolic way romantic and sexual relationships could be a more restricted way of cannibalism, which sometimes needs something deeper than intercourse to be completely satiated.
To better illustrate this opinion we will use examples from the series The Vampire Diaries. In the first chapters we are given context about two types of vampires: Stefan, a vampire whose diet is based on animal blood, described as a calm character who worries about humans; and Damon, a textbook vampire that kills people to feed on, described as carefree, savage and egotistic.
Here we can see how the description of these two vampires depends on the popular opinion about this topic. Consuming humans is immoral, therefore Damon is illustrated as a savage beast, while Stefan, who feeds himself on animals is seen as human.
However, even Stefan shows his vampiric features when he is with Elena, his lover. On the occasion where Elena cuts herself with a knife, the viewer can see how Stefan’s face starts morphing involuntarily, acquiring bloodstained eyes with thick veins around, and growing fangs. This appearance will also manifest in situations in which there is no blood involved, for example each time they kiss, symbolising how his romantic and sexual desire for Elena brings him to a state of little self control that lets his vampiric features in full view.
Although in that chapter they manage to consummate their love without putting Elena’s life at risk, sometimes that lust and desire is not sated only with the sexual relations, on the contrary, they boost these feelings. The next step in this case would be, evidently, consuming your lover, as we can observe in Stefan and Elena’s case, but in the book, he ends up biting Elena and consuming her blood, altogether with her love and desire for her.

Till death do us apart (or not)
We have talked about what we’ve named “restricted cannibals” but, where is the real cannibalism? Those who do not control their desire, or unfortunately, have no other option than to be carried away by this immoral act. As a last example, we will be analysing a scene from Yellowjackets, a series less known than the awarded movie La Sociedad de la Nieve, but which addresses the cannibalism topic in the same way: due to necessity.
In Yellowjackets, we come across a completely different situation, as we do not have vampires anymore. In this case, we observe how a human girl soccer team has a plane crash that leaves them completely stranded in the middle of the woods in winter. Two of the protagonists, Jackie and Shauna were very good friends, some would even say that their mutual love trespassed their friendship. However, their love will not only trespass the limit of friendship, but also the limits of morality.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of the second season, Jackie dies of hypothermia and her body cannot be buried due to the extremely low temperatures. Due to Shauna’s love for her best friend, she is unable to get past her death and regularly visits and talks to her dead body, displaying the necessity of being by her side even after death. One day, as Jackie’s body is decomposing, her ear falls off and Shauna, to the surprise of many of the spectators, eats it.
That is how the topic of cannibalism begins. Yet, it does not end here, as Jackie’s body will accidentally be cooked to perfection while the girls are trying to incinerate it. The body becomes not only Shauna’s, but also the other girl’s meal, which they explicitly and lasciviously feast on. Being within an environment in which she cannot be judged by society, isolated from morality and rationality, Shauna understands cannibalism not only as a necessary act to survive, but also as a ritual that has led Jackie and her to become one.
Shauna being portrayed as the first one consuming Jackie is symbolic and recalls the public loving demonstrations between lovers, displaying in front of everyone the connection between these two even after death. Although normally these love vows are made by couples in weddings, in this
case we have the more explicit version of “till death do us apart”, since not even death has been able to separate them.

Conclusion and suggestion
I don’t believe there is a proper way to conclude this topic apart from highlighting the many metaphors and symbolism that can be used to talk about love in all its versions; and certainly, cannibalism is not the most uncanny metaphor out there. I encourage you to search for other metaphors, maybe less explicit and fleshy, about love or any other feelings.
Finally, about cannibalism as a metaphor of love and desire we could recommend all the films and series I have talked about, together with Ethel Cain’s music album called Preacher’s Daughter.
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
pauppic (25 de octubre de 2024). Consumir como el acto definitivo de amor o deseo . El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 23 de abril de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/12kne