This leads to a provisional explanation for the congruence of cannibalism and homosexuality. The body is a convenient boundary for the definition of the self. In theory a sort of social anthropology may rationalize cannibalism or homosexuality, but in practice the peculiar act violates that boundary. The act offers an ecstatic union; it offers to relieve the self of the burden of selfhood; it offers a chance to surrender the body, to consume or be consumed by another. Melville's hero, a solitary and self-reliant American of the nineteenth century, desperately wants to lose his self. Although his freedom and independence are precious to him, they bind him to responsibilities and isolate him in distrust; they weigh him down, and he dreams of laying them aside. But the penalty for this kind of transgression-for the violation of allowing himself to be violated-would be severe. Cannibals would tear his body to shreds, like Pentheus's; intimacy with a man would threaten him with a mutilation only slightly more abstract. It would compromise both his spiritual and bodily integrity. He would not be his own man. He would no longer be free; he would be as subject as a woman; and he would therefore no longer be fit for the role of citizen in a democracy. Cannibalism and homosexuality violate the distinctions between identity and desire; between self and other; between what we want, what we want to be, and what we are. This is why they are appealing; this is why the nineteenth century American man is horrified to discover that they appeal to him.
- Caleb Crain, Lovers of Human Flesh: Homosexuality and Cannibalism in Melville's Novels