The Edible Woman

“’It’s even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity.’”

When Ainsley announces that she plans to become pregnant, she argues that having a child fulfills a woman’s biological and social purpose. Her understanding of femininity as being linked with having a child come from her studies in psychology. Ainsley’s character represents the contradiction between traditional feminine roles and progressive femininity in that she desires to fulfill the expectation of having a child but plans to raise the child on her own.

“It was satisfying to be the only one who knew where I really was.”

While at Len’s apartment with Ainsley and Peter, Marian has the impulse to hide under Len’s bed and put distance between herself and the others. It is the night that Marian realizes that she and Peter are in a more serious relationship than she ever intended; this quote signifies Marian’s unwillingness to be stuck in a particular role or location.

“I had broken out; from what, or into what, I didn’t know. Though I wasn’t at all certain why I had been acting this way, I had at least acted.”

After running away from Peter for the second time on the night they go out with Len, Marian convinces herself that by physically running away from Peter she is running away from their relationship. Her realization that she and Peter are a serious couple earlier in the evening makes her feel dependent on him; by running, Marian attempts to assert her right to choose whether she wants to be in this relationship.

“He sounded as though he’d just bought a shiny new car. I gave him a tender chrome-plated smile; that is, I meant the smile to express tenderness, but my mouth felt stiff and bright and somehow expensive.”

After her engagement is finalized, Marian feels herself to be objectified by Peter’s proprietary affection. In this quote, Atwood emphasizes the novel’s theme of Consumerism and Identity by connecting Marian’s new identity as an engaged woman with words such as “chrome-plated” and “expensive.” Marian’s acceptance of the proposal turns her into an object of consumption for Peter’s benefit.

“As soon as the surprise-effect had worn off, the conversation became as remote and impersonal, on both sides, as the razorblade questionnaires: enquiries about the wedding, the future apartment, the possible china and glassware, what would be bought and worn.”

After Marian tells the office virgins of her engagement to Peter, she struggles with the inauthenticity of their responses and interest. This quote reflects the novel’s theme of Consumerism and Identity, as Marian’s new identity as an engaged woman is directly linked with the marketing questionnaires and household items she and the office virgins work with through Seymour Surveys.

“She knew he would not readily believe that Ainsley, who seemed as young and inexperienced as a button mushroom, was in reality a scheming superfemale carrying out a foul plot against him, using him in effect as an inexpensive substitute for artificial insemination with a devastating lack of concern for his individuality.”

Marian feels guilty about not warning Len of Ainsley’s plans to seduce him to impregnate her, but she does not believe that warning Len would be productive. The language used to describe Ainsley in this quote, such as “scheming superfemale,” and the parallels drawn to artificial insemination depersonalize Len by making him an object for Ainsley’s desires. This objectification of a man exemplifies Ainsley’s role in the novel as a challenge to traditional feminine values.

“’I got tired of being afraid I’d walk in there some morning and wouldn’t be able to see my own reflection in it.’”

Spoken by Duncan as he irons Marian’s shirts, this quote foreshadows Marian’s own fear of mirrors and her reflection as symbols of identity disintegration by the end of the novel. The difference between a masculine and feminine fear for identity rests in the fact that this statement by Duncan is an exaggeration of his aggressive need to smash a mirror from frustration. In contrast, Marian does not smash any mirror but rather runs or hides from them.

“’You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’”

Duncan tells Marian that she is merely another distraction for his academic anxieties after she reveals that she has become engaged to Peter. Duncan does not intend for Marian to assume that their relationship is emotionally meaningful to him. Marian is relieved by this answer, as it allows her to keep a sense of autonomy around Duncan.

“These days however he would focus his eyes on her face, concentrating on her as though is he looked hard enough he would be able to see through her flesh and her skull and into the workings of her brain.”

While at dinner with Peter and immediately preceding her realization that her steak came from a living being, Marian notices that Peter is watching her again. This new habit unnerves her, as she cannot be sure what it is Peter is looking for. Marian’s character prefers to hide her emotions and keep her inner world concealed; as their marriage draws closer, the prospect of being known by Peter is directly linked to Marian’s new inability to eat certain foods.

“But now it was suddenly there in front of her with no intervening paper, it was flesh and blood, rare, and she had been devouring it. Gorging herself on it.”

Marian’s revelation that the steak she is eating at dinner with Peter came from a living being is the first time Marian's body refuses to eat a specific kind of food. This quote follows a series of violent images provoked by Peter’s use of a knife to cut his steak and continues using that same imagery to emphasize Marian’s fear and repulsion at consuming something that was once living.

“The quiet fear, that came nearer to the surface now as she scanned the pages—she was in the ‘Salads’ section—was that this thing, this refusal of her mouth to eat, was malignant; that it would spread; that slowly the circle now dividing the non-devourable from the devourable would become smaller and smaller, that the objects available to her would be excluded one by one.”

Several weeks pass after Marian is unable to eat her steak while out to dinner. She has been increasingly unable to eat different kinds of meat and grows distrustful of what other food groups her body might decide to revolt against. Marian experiences a loss of control of her body that reflects her loss of agency and identity while engaged to Peter.

“For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be—or, no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocate by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.”

At the office Christmas party, Marian experiences a dissonance between her identity and that of the women around her after noting how similar all their bodies essentially are. This quote displays how Marian links physical appearance to identity and femininity to a “sargasso-sea,” which implies the influx of feminine currents of identity from multiple women.

“She was becoming more and more irritated by her body’s decision to reject certain foods. She had tried to reason with it, and accused it of having frivolous whims, had coaxed it and tempted it, but it was adamant; and if she used force it rebelled.”

As her wedding date approaches, Marian begins to treat her body as an entity separate from her will, as it rejects the foods she wishes she could eat. That she attempts to “reason with” her body suggests that she considers her body sentient and capable of making its own decisions separate from her own and that she is under the control of those decisions. This increases Marian’s feelings of dissonance and lack of autonomy, which are already felt from her engagement to Peter.

“He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present: the only comment he had ever made about the time after her marriage implied that he supposed he would have to dig up another substitute. She found his lack of interest comforting, though she didn’t want to know why.”

Marian spends more time with Duncan as her wedding approaches. While on a trip to the museum, Marian reflects that Duncan’s lack of concern for her emotions or relationship is soothing to her. Duncan’s self-interest absolves Marian from having to share her feelings with him; it also allows her to evade examining her own emotions, as she is not obligated to share them with anyone. In this way, Marian feels she is holding on to her autonomous identity.

“She had been justifying whatever had been happening with Duncan (whatever had been happening?) on the grounds that it was, according to her standards, perfectly innocent.”

While visiting the museum with Duncan, Marian must confront the reality of her undefined relationship with him after he proposes they begin having sex. Marian has thus far kept his presence in her life a secret from Peter. She must now make a definitive choice about her own actions, which challenges the months she has recently spent allowing Peter and Duncan to decide things for her.

“In this way the process of artistic creation was itself an imitation of Nature, of the thing in nature that was most important to the survival of Mankind. I mean birth; birth. But what do we have nowadays?”

Duncan and his roommates have Marian over for dinner. Fish, a literary scholar studying theories behind birth rates, speaks about connecting creativity to the ability of women to give birth. Both Duncan’s roommates offer their opinions on the function of women’s bodies in society as an example of their perceived academic and patriarchal privilege.

“It was waking up in the morning one day and finding she had already changed without being aware of it that she dreaded.”

Marian visits Clara in the hopes that telling Clara about her struggles with eating will help her to figure out what to do next. However, seeing Clara and her children prompts Marian to realize that she is truly afraid of not making the choices in her life that will protect her sense of autonomy. Marian prefers a state of motion and change rather than the predictable stasis of Clara’s life.

“All at once she was afraid that she was dissolving, coming apart layer by layer like a piece of cardboard in a gutter puddle.”

Marian’s grip on her identity and sense of self begins to disintegrate in her anxiety over attending Peter’s party. While taking a bath, she notices the discrepancies between her reflection in the taps and faucet, prompting her to feel as if she has lost hold of the boundaries of herself.

“What was it that lay beneath the surface these pieces were floating on, holding them all together?”

Marian’s outfit for Peter’s party is so unlike what she normally wears that she questions the tangibility of her identity when she sees her reflection in a mirror. This quote coincides with the novel’s themes of Consumerism and Identity, as the material items people wear are often taken to be representative of their identity, yet these items are in constant flux. Marian seeks to understand identity as unchanging.

“Once he pulled the trigger she would be stopped, fixed indissolubly in that gesture, that single stance, unable to move or change.”

At Peter’s party, Marian fears for her identity as a married woman. She does not want to become stuck in the role of a wife and mother without room to grow, experience, and change. Peter’s photography becomes a symbol of this threat, as she believes that if he pulls the “trigger” of the camera to capture her image, she will be forced to stay within an unchanging role for the rest of her married life.

“Whatever decision she had made had been forgotten, if indeed she had ever decided anything.”

Marian wakes the morning after having sex with Duncan disappointed that she does not feel more independent. Rather than feeling like she asserted her right to choose her future and partner, Marian realizes she must still directly confront Peter about their engagement, or their relationship will remain as it is.

“What she really wanted, she realized, had been reduced to safety.”

In her disappointment over Duncan’s lack of enthusiasm after they had sex, Marian becomes desperate for someone to continue making choices for her and keep her company. All her actions, including her body’s new eating habits, suddenly appear to her as a sign of her desire to feel safe.

“‘You’ve been trying to destroy me, haven't’ you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been trying to assimilate me.’”

To rediscover what her independent femininity means to her, Marian bakes Peter a cake shaped and decorated to be a woman. When presenting it to him she makes this statement, which symbolizes her fears of being consumed in marriage and unable to change.