The Edible Women by Margaret Atwood

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.