The Edible Woman, the premier work of fiction by noted Canadian poet Margaret Atwood, is a forerunner of much of the feminist literature that would follow the theme of woman in search of individual identity and worthwhile meaning in her life. The work is divided into three distinct sections, separated by the literary device of alternating narrative point of view. Although the narrator does not change, the voice changes as her perspective of herself alters. Section 1 employs first-person, though unreliable, narration, in section 2 the narrator refers to herself in third person as she essentially loses touch with who she is, and the third section returns to first person as the narrator reclaims her identity. At the time of its release, the novel was a fresh approach to the presentation of women characters in fiction, an almost surreal type of feminist black humor.

Although the story is set within the time frame of the free-love 1960’s, when women were beginning to discover themselves as individuals, the protagonist, Marian MacAlpin, seems wedged in by the values and myths of the generation that preceded her. Consequently, it is her adopted belief that in order for a woman, even an educated woman, to attain full identity, she must be defined by association with a successful man. In acquiescence to this code, Marian becomes involved with and subsequently engaged to Peter, an attractive young up-and-comer who expects her to act and react only in prescribed, predictable, and, above all, sensible ways.

The metamorphosis of Marian begins one evening when she has too much to drink at a dinner party and begins to realize that she is essentially disappearing as an individual. To illustrate this point, she first crawls under a bed, mentally escaping the others in attendance; then, when discovered, she physically runs away. Peter pursues and reclaims her. Titillated by her out-of-character behavior, he proposes marriage. Atwood employs a trite but effective conceit as, at Marian’s moment of acceptance, lightning flashes, permanently etching her reflection in his eyes.

Because the impending marriage also implies subsequent childbearing, Marian is surrounded by signs of fecundity; almost every female character in the novel is either already a mother, expecting a child, or plotting to become impregnated. It is no accident that the novel opens at the beginning of Labor Day weekend and that Marian refers to herself as a rabbit—not based on her desire for fertility but because of her basic vulnerability.

At a second party, an engagement party of sorts hosted by Peter, Marian begins to feel trapped and equates Peter with a carnivorous hunter destined to capture and to consume his prey. Yet subjected to his constant scrutiny of her behavior, Marian attempts to suppress these negative warnings from her subconscious and to return to “normality.” The feelings persist, however, and begin to manifest themselves in different ways: first in her affair with Duncan, an Ichabod Crane-shaped graduate student in English literature, whom she meets while conducting a meaningless consumer survey for the marketing firm where she works, and later in her body’s refusal to accept certain foods. Beginning as an aversion to eggs (an obvious fertility symbol) and to meat (the trophy of the hunter), the block is eventually generalized to other foods and culminates in her not eating at all, even though the majority of scenes are set in restaurants or kitchens and much of the action involves ingestion. At this point in the novel, Marian’s only means of control is over what she will or will not eat; she descends into an anorexic claustrophobia, afraid of losing her shape, of spreading out—in essence of losing herself. Eventually, as she rejects sustenance completely, Marian realizes that she equates herself with food, that she is being consumed, gnawed away by those persons making demands on her life, and that she must eat or be eaten.

Accepting her own complicity in being a victim by allowing others to dictate her actions, Marian, ceremoniously and appropriately, bakes a sponge cake shaped like a woman and dressed as she was dressed for the party at Peter’s. She offers the cake to Peter as a surrogate for herself, a variation of ritualistic cannibalism. When he refuses the offer and subsequently walks out, Marian realizes that she is free, and with Duncan’s assistance, she consumes most of the cake, thus ending her anorexia. The irony is that even though the conclusion contains a certain element of optimism because Marian has indeed freed herself from victimization, she is right back where she started, a circular wanderer locked into an inconsequential existence.

Although The Edible Woman was poorly received in initial reviews, it has come to be considered one of the first heraldings of women’s right to independence. The book was not released until 1969, after a delay of five years, and despite the fact that the women’s movement had made significant strides during the 1960’s, an independent woman was not yet a totally acceptable ideal at that time. Additionally, and regardless of the fact that ritualistic cannibalism has been a theme in the world’s literary canon since its conception, some critics were offended by the approach in Atwood’s work, chiding her for moral irresponsibility when discussing birth and emotions in such tones.

Near the end of the work, Duncan, as alter ego to the protagonist, points out, as they sit on the edge of an empty pit, that Marian’s life is her “own personal cul-de-sac,” that she invented it and she would have to find her own way out. Though Marian MacAlpin has been little changed by the unfolding events in her life, she nevertheless becomes more human as she retreats slightly from her dead-end destination and becomes a hero of sorts in accepting her own complicity in her victimization, thus serving as a positive role model for future authors and readers alike. One reviewer missed this point, however, and complained that the novel was wasted paper, peopled with insignificant characters. Although the work is open-ended, one is left with the faint hope that Marian will escape her “abnormal normality” and become a beacon of hope for others trapped in their own constrictive relationships.

Historical and Cultural Context
Patricia Goldblatt in "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists" begins her essay by describing the historical and cultural context within which Margaret Atwood lives and works:

Margaret Atwood weaves stories from her own life in the bush and cities of Canada. Intensely conscious of her political and social context, Atwood dispels the notion that caribou-clad Canadians remain perpetually locked in blizzards while simultaneously seeming to be a polite mass of gray faces, often indistinguishable from their American neighbors. Atwood has continually pondered the lack of an identifiable Canadian culture ... In an attempt to focus on Canadian experiences, Atwood has populated her stories with Canadian cities, conflicts, and contemporary people.

Atwood and a handful of other women writers in Canada are considered to have marked a turning point in Canadian literature. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was written before the resurgence of the women's movement, but the ideas in her novel helped to spark the need for change. Atwood attended college during the 1960s, both in Canada and in the United States. It was during this time that the feminist movement, also referred to as the Women's Liberation Movement, experienced a renaissance in both countries. Intrinsically involved in this rebirth were two books that Atwood has admitted reading. Darlene Kelly, in the essay "Either Way, I Stand Condemned," states that "Margaret Atwood recalls that when she composed the book [The Edible Woman] in 1965 there was no women's movement in sight, 'though like many at the time I'd read Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir behind locked doors.'"

Friedan's book was called The Feminine Mystique, and it raised awareness of the suppression of women's rights to work outside of the home. Women should be allowed, Friedan observed, to have the same freedom as men. Friedan also attacked the conditioning of women to accept passive roles and depend on male dominance. Two years after Friedan's book was published, Friedan helped start the National Organization of Women (NOW).

Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex, discusses how women always define themselves in relation to men. One of her basic concepts is that of the "other," as in how men see women not as a being like them, a peer or collaborator, but rather that they see women in the same way that they see a stranger or someone foreign to their country. Women, de Beauvoir suggests, have submissively accepted this role, which has been imposed on them by men.

These books raised women's awareness about their role in society. This awareness led to the organization of women's liberation groups in Canada. These groups began to form in the late 1960s, most of them as consciousness-raising groups. In other words, women gathered together to discuss common problems and to help make one another aware of issues of oppression. The issues focused on economic and social equality.

According to the article "A Battle Not Yet Won" by Rupert Taylor,

feminists of the 1960s concluded that the whole of society is pervaded by a sexism that relegates all women to a subservient role. Sexism is a deep-rooted, often unconscious, system of beliefs, attitudes, and institutions in which distinctions between people's worth are made on the grounds of their sex and sexual roles.

Taylor continues by pointing out that a man who is a sexist sees women as inferior. Having had these issues brought into women's awareness, one of the major issues of feminism during the 1960s was for women to gain control over their bodies. As these groups progressed, they joined together into larger groups, giving them a stronger voice and helping them influence their government and judicial systems, changing laws which would eventually lead to great equality.

Canada's federal government set up the Royal Commission on the Status of Women in 1967 to examine women's role in society; three years later, the commission made 167 recommendations for greater equality for women.

Point of View
One of the most obvious style techniques that Atwood uses in The Edible Woman is her unusual use of point of view, or the perspective from which the story is told. Atwood begins the story with a first-person narrator, Marian McAlpin, telling the story from her own perspective, almost sounding as if she were talking to herself.

However, immediately following Marian's engagement to Peter, Atwood changes the narrator, and for the entire second part of the book, the story is told from a third-person point of view. This distances the reader from Marian, just as Marian begins distancing her mind from her body. Darlene Kelly says in "Either Way, I Stand Condemned" that Marian "seems always out of touch with reality, even with who she is ... this estrangement from herself corresponds perfectly to her use of a detached, third-person voice." In the last two chapters of the book, Marian comes back to herself with the statement, "Now that I was thinking of myself in the first person singular again, I found my own situation much more interesting." Correspondingly, Atwood switches back to a first-person narration.

Cultural Attitude
Prevalent in The Edible Woman is the cultural attitude of the early 1960s toward women and the institution of marriage. This was a time prior to the revitalization of the women's movement, a time when women were expected to marry and upon that marriage to quit their jobs, if they had them, and stay home and have children. "Atwood's pragmatic women," says Patricia Goldblatt in "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists," were "young women blissfully building their trousseaus and imagining a paradise of silver bells and picket fences." Goldblatt continues, "these women . . . search for a male figure, imagining a refuge. Caught up in the romantic stereotypes that assign and perpetuate gender roles, each girl does not doubt that a man is the solution to her problems." Struggling against the patriarchy, or male-dominated society, and the roles that society imposes on women, the female characters in The Edible Woman each deal with the cultural attitude in their own way, each coming to different conclusions, each taking different paths.

Figurative Language
Food and eating are the prominent metaphors, or images, in The Edible Woman. Beginning with the title of the book and journeying through the final chapters, someone or something is either being described in terms of food, or is being eaten. Besides the obvious and plentiful breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that prevail throughout the book, Marian uses food to describe herself and her environment. For instance, her office is "layered like an ice-cream sandwich" with her department being the "gooey layer in the middle." And in one of Marian's dreams she says that her feet were dissolving like "melting jelly."

Emma Parker in "You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood" says that "eating is employed as a metaphor for power." Those who eat are the powerful, Parker says, and those who don't are the powerless. As Marian's wedding approaches, she begins to feel that Peter is consuming her. This is when Marian stops eating. There are several scenes where Marian cannot eat, but she sits watching Peter eat without restraint. At the end of the book, Marian offers herself as food to Peter in the form of a cake. It is at this point, when Marian has reestablished her power within herself, that Peter is unable to eat the cake, and Marian eats it for him. "Food is one of the few resources available to women," says Parker. Females, in the cultural context of this story, control food. It is their major responsibility to buy and cook food. Parker says that in Atwood's works, "food functions as a muted form of female self-expression."

Given Atwood's proclivity for creating first person narrative voices, her experimentation in The Edible Woman is doubly intriguing. Parts I and III allow Marian to speak in her own voice, emphasizing her greater sense of personal control and identity, while in Part II, which begins soon after her engagement to Peter, she is presented in the third person. Although it becomes clear that here too Marian's consciousness still shapes the narrative, the third person objectification stylistically supports the fact that Marian feels herself becoming a thing, the object of other people's appropriation of her life. It is after she bolts from her engagement party and bakes her edible woman that she regains the use of her own voice, acknowledging that now "I was thinking of myself in the first person singular again."

Another striking stylistic aspect of the novel is Atwood's skillful blending of realistic surfaces and fantastic, even surreal, depths, as a recognizable and wittily observed social scene becomes the milieu through which the idiosyncratic psyche of the narrator travels. On one level the novel functions as an entertaining comedy of manners in its juxtaposition of widely divergent communities in a rapidly changing Toronto, including upwardly-mobile young singles, would-be intelligentsia, and aggressively conventional middle- class families. On a more abstract level Atwood's poetic sensibility enables her to create powerful symbols like that of Marian's "edible woman" cake, an image synthesizing her consumer revulsion and feminist awakening. Marian's hold on surface reality repeatedly gives way in Part II to imaginary extrapolations of the situations in which she finds herself: with little narrative warning the reader is often plunged into tangents whereby Marian attempts to escape the constrictions of her "normal" life. The novel's wryly comic tone presents Marian's dilemma as the absurd consequence of a society with absurd preoccupations and habits.

The Edible Woman offers a fascinating glimpse into the situation faced by talented young women before the social changes brought about by feminism, and as such it should provoke considerable conversation among older readers about the starkness of the choices women were permitted in the not so distant past. But it should also stir debate about the emotional turmoil still facing women trying to determine the direction of their lives since the Women's Movement has rendered such decisions so much more self-conscious. It thus invites discussion about the ambivalence with which young women assess their options and the complex baggage they must sort out concerning traditional roles as wives and mothers. Readers might also be intrigued by Marion's fears of being devoured by adult female responsibilities, particularly the "traps" of sexuality and fertility. Eating disorders, one expression of that fear, have become a familiar topic of conversation since the novel's publication, and will no doubt elicit considerable commentary.

The trenchant satire of contemporary consumer culture offered by this late sixties novel should stimulate analysis about how the situation might be described today—which assumptions of that earlier era can be said to have continued on pace, for example, and which have been discredited or reconfigured. In sum, has the condition of consumer society improved or worsened?

1. How do you assess the circumstances in which Marian finds herself at the novel's outset? What is the source of her indecision about her future? What options does she have?

2. What kind of prospective husband is Peter? What is the basis of his relationship with Marian? What do his views of marriage reflect about him and about the culture that has produced him?

3. What is the thrust of the satire directed against Clara as earth mother? What possible future does Marian see her representing?

4. How much of an alternative is Ainsley as the "new woman"? Why is she so unsatisfactory in this regard? What prompts her to become as male-centered in her own way as the more traditional women in the novel?

5. What kind of rescue from Peter does Duncan offer Marian? How does he address her sexual and emotional needs? As an intellectual-in-training, how does he critique the option provided by his rival? How convincing an intellectual is he? In what ways does he suggest that the realm of the intellectual is built within the walls of patriarchy? How might a woman negotiate that terrain, if this novel is any indication?

6. Does Fish's theory regarding the psychosexual meaning of Alice in Wonderland seem plausible? How does his commentary on that subject invite comparison to Marian's experience in the course of this novel?

7. Always a writer of the body as well as the psyche, Atwood gives us an early study of anorexia in Marian's eating problems. What seems to explain her behavior in this regard? Why does eating play so prominent a role in consumer culture? In female psychology?

8. What is behind Marian's tentative "recovery" by the end? Do you regard it as a move toward "normality"? Does the novel actually offer us anything we might call "normal"? If so, how does Atwood herself seem to regard it?

9. Atwood has called this an "anti-comedy," working against the conventions of romance since no couple is formed at the end. Do you consider that a happy or an unhappy ending, given the context the novel provides for that ending?

10. Why might Atwood have changed the narrative voice domination in the separate sections of the novel? When does the first person "I" surface, and when does it disappear?

Margaret Atwood's first published novel, The Edible Woman, introduced readers to many of the themes that she elaborates in her later fiction. The feminist dimensions of Marian McAlpin's struggle to define her own identity within the conventionalized and artificial context of contemporary mass society were immediately recognized by critics, for Marian progresses from docile amiability in the pursuit of marriage and security, to hyperbolic repudiation of male parasitism.

The mordant satirical bite of the novel includes other frequent Atwood targets. The female identity crisis Marian suffers reflects the cultural assumptions of a society that not only dictates traditional roles but also replaces individuality with plastic inauthenticity; no one can achieve real identity in the deadening atmosphere of such technocratic societies. Marian's job creating inane surveys for a marketing firm highlights the intrusiveness of consumer culture and its self-interested emphasis upon image rather than substance; reality is intentionally obscured, and the resulting inability to penetrate surfaces one knows intuitively to be false causes a schism in the contemporary psyche which breeds the alienation and confusion that overcome Atwood's protagonist. Despite clever packaging, Marian becomes increasingly repulsed by the voracious animal appetite driving human consumption and its wanton exploitation of the planet's other living species. But she herself invites the author's satiric eye when her preoccupation leads to a self-destructive refusal to eat just about anything. It is toward restoration of balance in her view of herself as an organism in a competitive universe that the narrative moves her.

1965-1969: Forty women in Canada are reported to have died because of illegal attempts to end their pregnancies.

1968: The McGill Student Society publishes "The Birth Control Handbook" although the distribution of information on birth control is illegal in Canada. It becomes an underground bestseller.

1969: The House of Commons in Canada passes an Omnibus Bill covering birth control. The dissemination of birth control information is decriminalized.

1991: A federal law that would legalize abortions in Canada is defeated although it is legal in some provinces.

1992: The number of abortions in Canada exceeds 100,000.

1969: The Montreal Movement is founded.

1990: A young man shoots and kills fourteen young women in Montreal, stating, "You are all feminists."

1993: The Canadian federal government sets up a panel on violence against women.

1973: A farm wife is denied half-interest in the farm that she and her husband built together. Her work is seen simply as the fulfillment of her wifely duties.

1984: The Canadian Royal Commission on Equality in Employment makes recommendations for sweeping changes in this area but later tables its report.

1970: In Canada, almost 52 percent of families with children headed by single mothers are poor.

1984: The percentage of poor, single-mother families rises to 62 percent.

Today: The percentage of poor, single-mother families stands at 50 percent.

1970: Women make up 37 percent of full-time undergraduate students in Canadian universities.

1983: Women make up 56 percent of full-time undergraduate students in Canadian universities.

1989: Twenty-five Canadian universities have women's studies programs.

1991: York University in Canada admits its first students into a Ph.D. program in women's studies.

Atwood's self-conscious literary sensibility and training make her very aware of the traditional forms she adapts for her own uses, and in this case she pointedly labels The Edible Woman "an anti-comedy": the protagonist's success lies in not marrying the supposed hero after all, since he actually represents the restrictive societal controls that comic lovers traditionally escape.

Atwood's fondness for intertextual dialogue between her own work and that of a precursor fiction surfaces here in the inclusion of a lengthy discussion of Alice in Wonderland offered by Duncan's graduate student friend Fish. Alice's experience in a world where the everyday has been rendered absurd invites obvious analogy to Marian's passage beyond the looking glass of convention that has regulated her life. But by putting such analysis into the mouth of the pedantic Fish she exposes the political uses of literary criticism wherein many a female story falls prey to male appropriation and distortion. With his phallocentrism evident in his explicitly Freudian approach to Carroll's text, Fish transforms the established interpretation of Alice as a girl suffering a sexual identity crisis into a more narrowly prescriptive cautionary tale of thwarted female maturation. Alice, he asserts, repudiates the models of responsible femininity she is offered and instead goes off with the Mock Turtle in regressive preadolescent indifference to her proper adult identity. Despite its pretense of intellectual detachment, such a reading offers Marian one more form of the coercion toward "normality" she has been studiously resisting in her own maturation story. But while Fish's analysis represents one pole against which the central narrative struggles to liberate itself, a retreat into Wonderland infantilism proves equally undesirable and forms the other pole defining Marian's options: She faces the real-life challenge of defining a viable avenue toward adult womanhood that will not crush her spirit. Marian has a very difficult time moving beyond what Atwood considers the circularity of her own situation; her victory over some of the conflicts of her life remains at best incomplete at novel's end.

Published in 1971, Atwood's poetry collection entitled Power Politics offers another study in the decay of a relationship amid the various miscommunications and misunderstandings that plague them. The female speaker of the poems, initially relishing her self-proclaimed victim status, gradually moves beyond such defeatism by deconstructing the myths that distort the ways men and women see one another.

Margaret Atwood wrote two screenplay versions of The Edible Woman for Minotaur Films in 1970 and for Windfall Ltd. in 1971.

Dave Carley wrote a play adapted from Margaret Atwood's novel The Edible Woman. The play premiered with the 2000 summer season in both Canada and the United States.

Sources

Atwood, Margaret, “Great Unexpectations: An Autobiographical Foreword,” Margaret Atwood: Visions and Forms. Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro, eds. Carbondale:
So. Illinois UP, 1988.

Atwood, Margaret, "Margaret Atwood, Writing Philosophy," Waterstone's Poetry Lecture Series delivered at Hay On Wye, Wales, June 1995, taken from "Canadian Poets" on the Canadian Poetry website, University of Toronto, 2000, www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry (last accessed March, 2001).

Atwood, Margaret, The Edible Woman, First published 1969. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1989.

Avant, John Alfred, Review, in Library Journal, Vol. 95, No. 16, September 15, 1970, p. 2934.

Bedell, Geraldine, "Nothing but the Truth Writing between the Lines," in Independent on Sunday, September 1, 1996, p. 17.

Cameron, Elspeth, “Famininity, or Parody of Autonomy: Anorexia Nervosa and The Edible Woman,” Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer 1985): 45-69.

Carrington, Ildiko de Papp, Margaret Atwood and Her Works, Toronto: ECW Press, 1985.

Davey, Frank, “An Unneeded Biography,” Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics, Vancouver: Talon Books, 1984.

Deutsch, Andre, Review, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3527, October 2, 1969, p. 1122.

Easton, Elizabeth, Review, in Saturday Review, Vol. 53, October 3, 1970, p. 40.

Giobbi, Giuliana, "No Bread Will Feed My Hungry Soul: Anorexic Heroines in Female Fiction—from Examples of Emily Brönte as Mirrored by Anita Brookner, Gianna Schelotto and Alessandra Arachi," in Journal of European Studies, Vol. 27, No. 105, March, 1997, pp. 73-92.

Goldblatt, Patricia F., "Reconstructing Margaret Atwood's Protagonists," in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, Spring 1999, p. 275.

Harkness, David L., "Alice in Toronto: The Carrollian Intertext in The Edible Woman," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 37, Spring 1989, pp. 103-11.

Kelly, Darlene, "Either Way, I Stand Condemned," in English Studies in Canada, Vol. 21, No. 3, Sept. 1995, pp. 320-32.

MacLulich, T. D., "Atwood's Adult Fairy Tale: Levi Strauss, Bettelheim, and The Edible Woman," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 11, Summer 1978, pp. 111-29.

Marshall, Tom, "Atwood Under and Above Water," in Harsh and Lovely Land: The Major Canadian Poets and the Making of a Canadian Tradition, University of British Columbia Press, 1979, pp. 154-61.

Parker, Emma, "You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood," in Information Access Company, Hofstra University, 1995.

Sandler, Linda, in Catherine McLay’s “The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance,” The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson, eds. Toronto: Anansi, 1981.

Stedmond, John, Review, in Canadian Forum, Vol. 49, February 1970, p. 267.

Taylor, Rupert J., "A Battle Not Yet Won (Women's Rights Past and Present)," in Canada and the World Backgrounds, Vol. 60, January 1, 1995, p. 4.

VanSpanckeren, Kathryn, and Jan Garden Castro, eds., “A Margaret Atwood Chronology,” Margaret Atwood: Visions and Forms, Carbondale: So. Illinois UP, 1988.

For Further Study
Dodson, Danita J., "An Interview with Margaret Atwood," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 38, No. 2, Winter 1997, p. 96.
This discussion of Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale explores her views on feminism, postcolonialism, and utopianism.

Patton, Marilyn, "Lady Oracle: The Politics of the Body," in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1991, pp. 29–48.
Patton claims that Atwood's work is often analyzed primarily with psychological interpretations. Patton prefers to look at Atwood's stories in terms of politics.