The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman is a 1969 novel that helped to establish Margaret Atwood as a prose writer
of major significance. It is the story of a young woman whose sane, structured, consumeroriented world starts to slip out of focus. Following her engagement, Marian feels her body
and her self are becoming separated. As Marian begins endowing food with human qualities
that cause her to identify with it, she finds herself unable to eat, repelled by metaphorical
cannibalism.[1] In a foreword written in 1979 for the Virago edition of The Edible Woman,
Atwood described the work as protofeminist rather than feminist.[2]
Atwood explores gender stereotypes through characters who strictly adhere to them (such as
Peter or Lucy) and those who defy their constraints (such as Ainsley or Duncan). The
narrative point of view shifts from first to third person, accentuating Marian's slow
detachment from reality. At the conclusion, first person narration returns, consistent with the
character's willingness to take control of her life again. Food and clothing are major symbols
used by the author to explore themes and grant the reader insight on each of the characters'
personalities, moods and motivations.
Setting is used to identify differences between the characters; for example, Duncan is
encountered in a mundane laundromat, gloomy theatre or sleazy hotel. In comparison, Peter
inhabits genteel bars and a sparkling new apartment. However these changing environments
are also used to explore different angles of existence, contrasting a freer, wilder glimpse of
life, with a civilised, gilded cage. This highlights the difficulties presented to women in the
era, where freedom was synonymous with uncertainty but marriage presented problems of its
own.
This novel's publication coincided with the rise of the women's movement in North America,
but is described by Atwood as "protofeminist" because it was written in 1965[3] and thus
anticipated second wave feminism.[4]
The Edible Woman has been adapted for stage by Canadian playwright Dave Carley.Contents
Plot summary
Marian McAlpin works in a market research firm, writing survey questions and sampling
products. She shares the top-floor apartment of a house in Toronto with her roommate
Ainsley, and has a dependable (if boring) boyfriend, Peter. Marian also keeps in touch with
Clara, a friend from college, who is now a constantly pregnant housewife.
Ainsley announces she wants to have a baby and intends to do it without getting married.
When Marian is horrified, Ainsley replies, "The thing that ruins families these days is the
husbands." Looking for a man who will have no interest in fatherhood, she sets her sights on
Marian's "womanizer" friend Len, who is infamous for his relationships with young, naive
girls.
At work, Marian is assigned the task of gathering responses for a survey about a new type of
beer. While walking from house to house asking people their opinions, she meets Duncan, an
English graduate student who intrigues her with his atypical and eccentric answers.

Marian later has a dinner date with Peter and Len, during which Ainsley shows up dressed as
a virginal schoolgirl the first stage of her plan to trick Len into impregnating her. Marian
finds herself disassociating from her body as Peter recounts a gory rabbit hunt to Len:
"After a while I noticed that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table. I
poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was
a tear."[3]
Marian runs from the restaurant and is chased down by Peter in his car. Unaware of Ainsley's
plan to get pregnant by Len, Peter chides, "Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn't
you?"
At the end of the night, Peter proposes to her. When asked to choose a date for the wedding,
Marian slips into unexpected passivity:
"'Id rather have you decide that. Id rather leave the big decisions up to you. I was
astonished at myself. Id never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing
was that I really meant it."[3]
Marian and Duncan have a surprise meeting in a laundromat, engage in awkward
conversation, then share a kiss. Shortly afterwards, Marian's problems with food begin when
she finds herself empathizing with a steak that Peter is eating, imagining it "knocked on the
head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar." After this, she is unable to
eat meat anything with "bone or tendon or fiber".
Ainsley's plot to seduce Len succeeds. When Len later learns that Ainsley is pregnant, he talks
to Marian, who confesses that pregnancy was Ainsley's plan all along. Len reveals his
childhood fear of eggs, and from that point Marian can no longer face her soft-boiled egg in
the morning. Shortly thereafter, she is unable to eat vegetables or cake.
Peter decides to throw a party, to which Marian invites "the office virgins" from her work,
Duncan, and Duncan's roommates. Peter suggests that Marian buy herself a new dress for his
party something less "mousy" than her normal wardrobe. Marian submits to his wishes and
buys a daring red dress. Before the party, Ainsley does Marian's makeup, including false
eyelashes and a big lipsticked smile. When Duncan arrives, he says, "You didn't tell me it was
a masquerade. Who the hell are you supposed to be?" He leaves and Marian follows. They
end up going to a sleazy hotel, where they have unsatisfying sex. The next morning, they go
out to breakfast and Marian finds that she cannot eat anything.
After Duncan leaves, Marian realizes that Peter is metaphorically devouring her. To test him,
she bakes a pink cake in the shape of a woman and dares him to eat it. "This is what you
really want", she says, offering the cake woman as a substitute to him feeding upon her. Peter
leaves, disturbed. Marian eats the cake herself.
Marian returns to her first person narrative in the closing pages of the book. Duncan shows up
at her apartment; Marian offers him the remains of the cake, which he polishes off. "'Thank
you,' he said, licking his lips. 'It was delicious.'"

Characters
Marian MacAlpin is the protagonist, and the first-person narrator during Part One and Part
Three of the novel.
Ainsley Tewce is Marian's roommate.
Peter Wollander is Marian's boyfriend, and later, fianc.
Len Slank is a bachelor friend of Marian's from college.
Clara Bates is another friend from college; Clara drops out second year to marry Joe and has 3
children
Duncan is a graduate student with whom Marian has an affair.
Lucy is one of three "office virgins"
Emmy is one of three "office virgins"
Millie is one of three "office virgins"
Mrs. Bogue
Fischer Smythe is one of Duncan's roommate.
The Landlady is Marian and Ainsley's land lord, alligorically representing traditional female
ideals.
Themes
Loss of identity ( search of herself ) Marian's refusal to eat can be viewed as her resistance to
being coerced into a more feminine role. In a description of Peter's apartment, Marian
describes the "clutter of raw materials" that had, through "digestion and assimilation", become
the walls of the lobby. She sees that construction precedes consumption
the body's assimilation of raw materials (food) is analogous to the social body's assimilation
and processing of women into socially acceptable feminine subjects. By not eating, Marian
refuses to take in the raw materials used to re-construct her into a role of domesticity.[5] This
struggle is made explicit when one of Duncan's roommates expounds on Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland as having a "sexual-identity crisis", then goes on to describe the structure of both
Alice and The Edible Woman: "One sexual role after another is presented [to the heroine] but
she seems unable to accept any of them." Marian is shaped first by her parents' plans for her
future, then by Peter's.[6] Once married, Marian fears Peter's strong personality will obliterate
her own fragile identity. This subconscious perception of Peter as predator is manifested by
Marian's body as an inability to eat, as a gesture of solidarity with other prey.[7] Following
her engagement, the switch to third-person narrative shows that Marian's story is controlled
by someone other than Marian herself; following Marian's regaining of identity, Atwood
returns to first-person narration.[4]
Alienation
In the transitions from first person to third person, Atwood demonstrates Marian's growing
alienation from her body. At the company Christmas party, Marian looks around at the other
women, thinking "You were green and then you ripened: became mature. Dresses for the
mature figure. In other words, fat."[3] Marian refuses to become fat (i.e. mature), which
would transform her into a woman and as such be constrained by a sexist culture. Marian is
therefore alienated from nature as she places herself outside the process of maturation.[8]
Allusions and references to other works
Allusions to Atwood's personal life

Atwood worked for Canadian Facts, a Toronto-based survey research firm, from 1963 to
1964, fact-checking and editing survey questionnaires. Canadian Facts had a similar work
environment to the fictional Seymour Surveys where Marian worked.[4] In Margaret Atwood:
A Critical Companion, Cooke argues that the characters of Peter, Lucy, and Mrs. Sims were
drawn from people in Atwood's life Peter being a fictionalized version of Atwood's
boyfriend (also an amateur photographer) and later fianc. It is also likely that the name of her
roommate and friend Ainsley was inspired by Annesley Hall at Victoria University in the
University of Toronto, to which Atwood belonged. This is an all-female residence building
which was built in 1903 and was the first university residence building for women in Canada.
[4]

Metaphor of Body in Margaret Atwoods The Edible Woman

The Edible Woman was written in the 1960s, when the society was dominated by men. In this
period of time, post-war feminist movements were trying to conquer the patriarchal model of
family and femininity and to distance themselves from the position of consumers. Traditional
gender roles such as mother, wife, housekeeper, or lover were improper for modern women.
They looked for some options, but the only one which was delivered by the social system was
a position of a worker stuck in a dead-end job. In the absence of any realistic possibilities to
change their condition, women uttered their objections, frailty, and anxiety through their
outlook toward food and, as a result, through their bodies. This condition led to the rise of
feelings of frustration, anger, and unfulfilment among feminists. The novel's publication
coincided with the rise of the women's movement in North America, but it is described by
Atwood as "protofeminist" because it was written in 1965 and thus anticipated feminism by
several years. The female protagonist, Marian MacAlpin struggles between the role that
society has imposed upon her and her personal definition of self; and food becomes the
symbol of that struggle and her eventual rebellion. Margaret Atwood employs an eating
disorder in her novel The Edible Woman as a metaphor of a revolt and protest. Atwood in an
interview says:
Its a human activity that has all kinds of symbolic connotations depending on the society and
the level of society. In other words ,what you eat varies from place to place, how we feel
about what we eat varies from place to place, how we feel about what we eat varies from
individual as well as from place to place. If you think of food as coming in various categories:
sacred food, ceremonial food, everyday food and things that are not to be eaten ,forbidden
food, dirty food, if you like- for the anorexic ,all food is dirty food. (lyons 228)
The main protagonist of the novel, Marian MacAlpin is a young, triumphant woman, working
in market research. Her job, private life, and social relations seem to be idealistic, but when
she finds out her boyfriends consumer nature during a talk in the restaurant, she cant eat.
Marians initial lack of desire for food finally leads to an eating disorder, very similar to
anorexia nervosa, which is her bodys response to the societys effort of imposing its policy
on the heroine. Moreover, the three parts of the novel propose the course of this eating

disorder. Background causes are shown in part one, Part Two indicates the mind/body split
and Part Three reflects the spontaneous declaration of the problem.
In the essay, "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists," Patricia Goldblatt states that
"Atwood creates situations in which women, burdened by the rules and inequalities of their
societies, discover that they must reconstruct braver, self-reliant personae in order to survive."
At the end of The Edible Woman, Marian partially reconstructs that new persona or concept of
self through a renewed relationship to food. Non-eating in The Edible Woman is mainly a
symbol of the denial of the patriarchal model of femininity. Although the protagonist is an
educated bright woman who lives on her own, she feels manipulated and unable to take
decisions for herself. Her fianc Peter, Ainsley, Clara, and three office virgins as well as her
own friends believe in traditional values and try to make Marian think in an old-fashioned
way and accept her gender role.
However, once Peter proposes to her, she loses this sense of self and becomes a victim to the
male-domination that females in society are used to. Marian does not make decision anymore
and relies heavily on Peter to choose what to do. Astonishingly, Marian actually loses her
ability to control her own life. It is claimed that the heroine is doubtful about who she is and
who she might become. Atwood uses a switch to the third person to show this change though
the story still follows Marian through she, not I.
The kind of pressure that drives her towards the marriage institution is by no means imposed
from above: the pressure is rather psychological and cultural which have structured her
subjectivity that constantly stops her from thinking or doing anything which is socially
abnormal. Marian notes that she and Peter have never fought. There has been nothing to fight
about because Marians social conditioning has helped her to accept the victim role. She does
not understand her feelings initially because, according to the way she has been conditioned,
she should not have these feelings.
Marians character is formed first by her parents' plans for her future, then by Peter's. Marian
fears Peter's tough personality will ruins her own delicate identity. This subconscious
perception of Peter as predator is shown by Marian's body as a lack of ability to eat. Marian's
rejection to eat can be seen as her struggle to being strained into a more feminine role.
Following her engagement, the change to third-person narrative shows that Marian's story is
restricted by someone other than Marian herself; following Marian's regaining of identity,
Atwood returns to first-person narration.
Marians distancing from her body permeates the novel. It is perhaps most obvious in the
disrupted narrative, which shifts from first- to third-person narration in order to convey
Marians increasing distance from her somatic self. Marians disassociation is reminiscent of
the attitudes of some early second-wave feminists, to whom it seemed necessary to minimize,
or even ignore their bodies and their maternal possibilities. Theoretically, by erasing the body,
women can evade patriarchal control. As Marian comes to learn, however, the body will not
be disposed of so easily. In a scene symptomatic of Marians corporeal estrangement, her
body is forced to make its presence known:
After a while, I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had
materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a
little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then! (70)
Acceptance is what her body is crying out for; it refuses to be dismissed. In abstaining from
certain foods, Marian faces each day with the forlorn hope that her body might change its
mind (178). Her rejection of food acts as a metaphor for her rejection of the male-dominated
society to which she belongs. Her whole life is run by men. When Peter proposes, Marians
body starts to refuse food and she is unable to eat. Because she feels like she is being
consumed by Peter, she cannot consume food. Not only has she lost her appetite, but also she
has lost her sense of self. In order to show how limited are the models offered by society to

adult women, Atwood uses food imaginary. The menu, which appears when Marian goes to
the restaurant with Peter, represents an illusion of choice. Even though Marian can choose
anything from the list of meals, she cannot get anything else. This situation suggests that the
heroine is trapped by the options presented to her at work and in her personal life. What is
more, the fact that it is Peter who places an order in the restaurant emphasizes Marians
passivity and dependency on others:
It got rid of the vacillation she had found herself displaying when confronted with a menu:
she never knew what she wanted to have. But Peter made up their minds right away. (147)
The moment, in which the heroine finds out that she is expected by society to adjust to the
role of a wife and mother, she loses the ability to eat. The sudden and spontaneous reaction of
Marians body to the events happening around and to her are the first step on her way to
regaining independence. As she slowly discovers the nature and causes of her eating disorder,
she starts to understand her own needs and feelings. One of the symptoms of her unconscious
inner rebellion against adjusting to the role of the mother that Clara embodies is her bodys
refusal to eat dinner with Peter, even though she is hungry.
Marians both the body and the feelings have gained independence from her conscious
intentions and that they will keep on behaving in an unpredictable way till she acknowledges
and integrates them, in fact, it is just once Marian has assimilated mind and body that she
retrieves her narrative power. Marians reply to gendered binaries is to isolate herself from her
body; by enabling Marians body to protest against that detachment, Atwood denounces the
repressive dichotomies that order society. In this novel we can see the oppressive control the
female body endures under patriarchy. Atwood indicates that the solution is not to
acknowledge and to become accustomed oneself to authoritarian culturally-defined
conventions, but to re-write them.
Interestingly, Marian considers herself to be acting of her own free will, in spite of the fact
that it is Peters prompting that causes her to endeavor into the salon without regard for her
own console. In this episode, female space is not a place for women to accomplish their own
desires, but a space created for women to fulfill the desires of men. Atwoods clinical
treatment of the beauty salon is a reflection of the scrutiny patriarchy inflicts on the female
body. Arguably, the beauty salon episode is an example of patriarchy encroaching on female
space to control the female body. Marian is extremely conscious of the heavy burden
patriarchy forces upon her bodies. In this case Peter is pictured as a physician that inspects her
body in detail. After making love, his visual approach is comprehend by the feeling of his
hand gently over her skin , without passion, almost clinically , as if he could learn by touch
whatever it was that had escaped the probing of his eyes. The distressing portrayal of Marian
as a patient on a doctors examination table clearly signifies the sexual politics at work within
the relationship between the protagonist and her husband-to-be. Marians body turns into a
tangible space whose surface and visible elements are subjected to a medical glance that
examine her in order to grasp her deep and hidden psychological entrails to control and
dominate her subjectivity. Peters medical glance is an invasive, and violent, intrusion within
Marians selfhood. Thus Marian turns to a person who desire to please Peters expectation and
to embody the patriarchal idea of femininity. As Susan Bordo states, these practices of
femininity may lead women to utter demoralization, debilitation and death.As the feminine
ideal becomes increasingly confining, she imagine herself disappearing. Sitting in the bath,
Marian is suddenly overwhelmed by the fear that she is dissolving, coming apart layer by
layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle (218). This image is initially introduced by a
dream:
I [Marian] had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve, like melting jelly, and
had put on a pair of rubber boots just in time only to find that the ends of my fingers were

turning transparent. I had started towards the mirror to see what was happening to my face,
but at that point I woke up. (43)
With profound perception, Marian imagines her colleagues as edible women:
They were ripe, some rapidly becoming overripe, some already beginning to shrivel; she
thought of them as attached by stems at the tops of their heads to an invisible vine, hanging
there in various stages of growth and decay. (166-67)
In The Edible Woman, Atwood disassembles the patriarchal concept of femininity and offers a
new account of the female body. By re-appropriating the body, Atwood is able to articulate
womens anxieties over her oppressive cultural experiences as well as confront that
oppression. Her fiction exposes the falsities of mind/body dualisms that alienate woman from
her body, and drive her from her somatic self. In so doing, Atwood proposes a transcendence
of those falsities and the restricting boundaries they promote. For Atwood, the body is a
means by which woman can assert her existence, and not a manipulated existence defined for
her. In her fiction, Atwood employs a corporeal language of resistance. The female body
manifests female powerlessness while simultaneously protesting against it, adapting the eating
disorder to this purpose. Atwoods consideration of the female body as a site of power and
resistance is one of the most crucial and profound statements of her work.
Typically, some critics have studied Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman as either an
optimistic celebration of female "liberation" or a materialist-feminist protest. But the style
which Atwood uses is primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view and her
use of an unbalanced, tripartite structure--reflects a more complex picture of capitalism and
female subjectivity in the 1960s.
The last part of the novel describes how the desire returns and at the same time Marian comes
back to herself. This is illustrated by her choice to make a cake in the shape of a woman, a
picture of herself? When Peter, the groom, refuses to eat the substitute for his bride and takes
to flight, Marian devours it. The stomach of the hungry woman returns to normal. The edible
woman can eat again.
Marian desires a classical, clean and proper body. She has mixed feeling towards pregnancy,
motherhood and full female bodies. If we combine the feminist and the anorectic aspects of
the story, it seems that the unconscious of the young woman protests against the conventional
female role that Marian is expected to by marrying Peter. When the relation with the lawyer
becomes more serious and he proposes to her, Marians reaction is pictured in these words:
"I drew back from him. A tremendous electric blue flash, very near, illuminated the inside of
the car. As we stared at each other in that brief light I could see myself, small and oval,
mirrored in his eyes." (83)
Step by step, the items that remind Marian of a human body become inedible and they seem
to be reminders of her own bodily existence and her identity and position. It appears that food
is too similar to herself, to her body: she is an edible like the foodstuffs she detests. She
suddenly finds herself identifying with the things being consumed. She can cope with her
tidy-minded fianc, Peter, who likes shooting rabbits. She can cope with her job in market
research, and the antics of her roommate. She can even cope with Duncan, a graduate student
who seems to prefer Laundromats to women. But not being able to eat is a different matter.
Steak was the first to go. Then lamb, pork, and the rest; next comes her incapacity to face an
egg. Vegetables were the final straw.
After discovering that more than mere prevention was essential, Marian takes a fundamental
step to win back her identity. A very brave move on Marian's part is symbolically showing
Peter that she can no longer be controlled. She does this by designing a cake in the image of a
male's ideal woman. In the end, Marian is able to eat again. She is free to hunger, no longer
estranged from her own body Marian is absorbing the power of woman and her body that she
has ignored till now. In fact, she literally eats herself and then the sense of self, and the I

returns. The leading metaphor of the novel, an edible woman in the symbolic shape of a
cake, which Marian bakes and ices for peter ,is both the ultimate image of bodily
dismemberment and also the sign of Marians recovery and finding self-identity. The baked
woman is a duplication of Marian as an item of patriarchal consumption. When Peter refuses
to eat it, she suddenly feels extremely hungry and starts devouring the cake. Instead of being
consumed by the male-dominated society, Marian chooses to consume herself, thus
demonstrating that Marian is, once again, in control. She progressively becomes fully aware
of the degrading effect these male-oriented cultural values have on her identity. She becomes
her own person and her own decision-maker. With Marian McAlpin, Atwood is defying the
conventional female figure and breaking the wife mould that most females were expected to
play during the 1960s. Waugh observes: by her act Marian has registered a voluntary and
international protest which release her body from its involuntary rejection of food (Waugh
181).
In this way Marian is saying no to the rigid form of femininity and curing her damaged female
self. She is capable of thinking for herself and making choices accordingly. She has becomes
self-aware. Marian achieves self-knowledge by asserting against her passivity and rejecting
Atwoods caricatures of the roles of the underpaid worker, the ideal of femininity, the mother \
wife oppressed by society, the lover alienated by her emotions. She decides to act and no
longer be acted upon.
However, though she is capable of expelling Peter from her life, she has not achieved
independence from degrading effect on her identity. I realized peter was trying to destroy me.
So now I m looking for another job, (73) explain Marian to Duncan over the phone before
she invites him for the tea. As Atwood states: my heroines choices remain much the same at
the end of the book as they are at the beginning; a career going nowhere, or marriage as an
exit from it. But these were the option for a young woman, even a young educated woman, in
Canada in the early sixties(76).
Atwood suggests that in conventional society, women are edible. They are swallowed up by
their male counterparts. Marian accepts this and decides that if she must be eaten, then she
will take control of her own life and eat herself. The objective of this novel is to present
female confrontation to social expectations and demands, which is inseparably associated
with the female body. Eating disorders in Atwoods works are therefore employed as symbols
of womens bodies responses to social pressure. Even before Marian returns to first-person
selfhood, she sees that there might be a way out, that becoming trapped by a repressive or
unsatisfying role need not be the end of the matter. In order to do that, they first have to
realize that any act of patriarchal surveillance and control is learned, cultural, and ideological
process that can and must be dismantled. Atwood is urging women to assert their right to eat
and re-inhabit their own bodies:
Trough this novel, Marian examines and rejects the roles presented to her by society and also
rejects domination of social conventions in order to achieve self identity and self
knowledge and self-awareness. In the last part which is only five pages long Marian
comments: I was thinking of myself in the first person singular again. (278)
This suggests that the narrator has been Marian all the time, but during the engagement she
had distanced her former self into the third person narration. The cancellation of the wedding
and the engagement changes the narration and perspective:
Before devouring the cake, Marian talks to her creation: You look delicious () Very
appetizing .And thats what happen to you; Thats what you get for being food() she felt a
certain pity for her creature but she was powerless now to anything about it .her fate had been
decided .(270)
The cake and Marian are delicious edibles, made for other peoples pleasure, not their own.
The fate of cake and a bride are decided upon and determined beforehand. They will be

consumed and eaten. At work, Marian is assigned the task of gathering responses for a survey
about a new type of beer. While walking from house to house asking people their opinions,
she meets Duncan, an English graduate student who intrigues her with his atypical and
eccentric answers. The self absorbed English graduate also functions as another mirror image
for Marians anxieties and bodily extinction.
To sum up, the novel reflects the constant theme of lack of distinct identity. In this case the
character demonstrates the large quantities of strength necessary to protect her own
individuality, which was slowly degenerating all because of the communities in which she
lived. In the novel Margaret Atwood represents the inner strength that she believes is in all
women. By recognizing the hardships that daily activities bring, the necessity for all women
to be able to stand up for themselves is emphasized. Finally, women cannot give in to the
distorted preconceptions that they must be gentle, soft-spoken and submissive.