Hmm. Interesting book. Ok, bear with me while I try to review this thing. I’m not sure I quite understood all the symbolism, so we’ll see how this goes.
The Edible Woman is the story of Marian, a “decidedly ordinary woman”, set in Canada before the Women’s Lib movement really took hold. The story revolves around Marian’s relationship with her roommate, a college-educated, liberally-thinking psychology junkie; her boyfriend/fiance, a conservative, old-fashioned kind of guy; graduate student friends who are endlessly writing term papers on obscure topics about literature; coworkers; food; and herself. That’s basically the plot in a nutshell.
As for the symbolic/feminist elements of the book…Marian, in her decided ordinaryness, seems to represent women as a social group. Atwood creates a character for every stereotype of a woman and every social role women are thought to play – the college-educated roommate with crazy ideas about motherhood and child-rearing and such things, the friend who married young and finds herself still young but suddenly the pregnant mother of two young children without any idea about how to run a household; the coworkers, including the single women getting antsy about their prosepects of marriage, the older housewives, the matronly boss; the nosy old fashioned old landlady; etc. The male characters are fewer but each also represents a stereotypical male role or personality type (though to a lesser degree than do the women of the novel, or so it seemed to me anyways). The interactions of Marian and these other female characters with the male characters are symbolic of the place of women in society, their changing social roles, and the conflicts created as women try to adapt to new social roles without being able to fully leave behind the old.
Marian, throughout the book (again, just my impressions), is dominated by the men in her life, mainly her fiance and a peculiar grad student friend/lover/not quite sure what. Marian seems to be torn between the influence of the two; when she asserts herself or her independence, her assertions usually come in the form of spontaneous and rebellious actions that beg to be interpreted as a sign of some mental disorder. Marian’s self identity is heavily influenced, nearly dominated, by these two men, and the conflict between the influence of the two is one of the main themes in the book. As her perfectly ordered, perfectly ordinary world slowly starts to seem to unravel, the new disorder in her life manifests itself in the way her relationship with food changes. She starts to identify with the food she eats – first seeing a piece of beef as a part of an unjustly slaughtered cow, then all meat as innocent animals, then eggs as possible baby chickens, then vegetables as living plants, and so on until she physically cannot eat most foods. Her struggle with her stomach and food parallels her changing social relationships, especially with her fiance and friend/lover/ish/something.
So yeah, basically, lots of implications about the place of women in society, gender roles, gender relations, that sort of thing. It would be interesting to attend a discussion group about Woman, I bet there was a lot in it that I missed completely.
Atwood’s a great writer, but I liked A Handmaid’s Tale much better. Probably because I had no trouble interpreting it.
