The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s writings help us
understand the basic human desires, which are far away from the violence, or
specifically physical violence, her works rather focus on the impact of causal behaviour on the lives of the people. This is a novel based on the life of a
lady named Marian who is about to get married. At the same time she starts to
realize a void, it takes a while for her to recognize the reasons for it, she
starts looking for the reasons about her conditioning towards certain types
behaviour and then making decisions which suite the best for her.
Marian is an employee in a market
research company. She is getting ready to marry her fiance, Peter. He hardly
ever considers her opinion, but this aspect is shown in quite a subtle manner
which makes it difficult to recognize something odd happening. Peter wants to
marry Marian because she is sensible of the women he knows, he himself seems to
not be aware of the actions he does to Marian, those are just the indirect
projection of his inner accepted ideals, he is interested in Marian because he
believes that she doesn't has her opinion of her own and won't try to take over
his life, as she would easily believe in what he believes.
This is seen when Peter often placed
a plate on the bare back of Marian, restricting her from moving which signifies
the way she is always tied softly and restricting her to a larger extent, it
also signifies the acceptability and readiness she shows to stay obliged
towards Peter’s actions. There comes a point in Marian’s life where she starts
behaving oddly, and without realising it one day on a dinner date with Peter,
she runs away without informing him, he chases her with his car and takes her
to her apartment, he tries to find out the problem with her, but he gets no
response. The narration in this section of the book is in the third person
perspective thus, we don’t get to know the reasons for Marian’s change in
behaviour. A couple of similar events
happen where she tries to physically run away. Later on, when with dinner with
Peter, she looks at the way he handles food and the perfect manner in which he
cuts the streak with knife and savers it with the fork, from that day she loses
her interest to relish on any type of meat and eventually as the novel
progresses she loses her interest to eat any type of food. This resorts to the
idea of cannibalism where she feels that Peter will eventually devour her.
During this time she developes a friendship with a person named Duncan, she
tries to reveal her feelings about her life without expecting him to understand
her. There are several other characters in this novel such as the office
virgins, who seem perfectly engrossed in hunting for husbands, while Clara who
is depicted as a friend of Marian seems to have achieved all the so called
necessary things but, she is seldom happy and finds emptiness and has nothing
left of herself apart from her husband and three children, while her own self
has completely disappeared. Atwood has painted contrasting personalities
through the characters of Clara and the office virgins and tried to show the
plight of women in every possible situation, the office virgins are desperately
waiting for their future husbands but what are they waiting for is the plight
and emptiness faced by Clara. Ainsley who is a roommate to Mariam, is portrayed
opposite to the other women characters, she exploits a male for her desires,
this focuses on the attitude of a modern woman and the way eventually the
terminology of ‘Feminism’ being misused.
Later, in the novel marian gets pale
and weak because of the many number of days of going without food, in the end
she breaks up her engagement with Peter and bakes a cake with the shape of a
lady and offers it to Peter to make him realize where the problem lied, and
then devours on it. Eating here is a metaphor for power, it means power and not
powerlessness. Body is metaphor for food. And Marian tried to protest against
the system which victimised her by not eating, which means that she tried to
alienate herself from her physical body, as body becomes the site of subjection
for women.
The novel showcases the view of the
world where Marian leaves a perfectly comfortable life with an amazing partner,
but for her it is a realization of getting into something she never wanted to
actually happen. While reading the novel one feels that she might get into a
relationship with Duncan and that might be the compensation for her break up
with Peter, but in the end she stays single, because there is no happy ending
happening without some eloping. We are not used to see an ending which is happy
and there are no couples, especially if it is a woman who lives alone.
Atwood depicts women who is
preserved in as narcissistic while the entire marriage market considers majorly
the beauty of the women which is highly priced and rewarded. In a patriarchal
society if any women looks into a mirror and finds herself beautiful, without
seconding any opinion from masculine life, is dangerous, because she has used
her own thoughts, and her own beliefs, and hence, she has to be punished or
corrected.
This novel focuses on the fact that
even though women are perceived to be independent and working and managing
their lives on their own, the patriarchy has not ended the nature of
exploitation it has just evolved, the nature of the term injustice has changed
but the consequences are the same, what has changed is the way women protest
against all the odds. People, and even women themselves consider marriage to be
an ultimate goal. Atwood, through this novel has focused on the way women do
eventually realize the void and rebel their way out of it.
