The Edible Woman

Summary (from the publisher): Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancée and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn't count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach ... The Edible Woman is a funny, engaging novel about emotional cannibalism, men and women, and the desire to be consumed.

 

Review: Set in Toronto in the 1960s, Atwood's earliest published novel follows Marian, a college educated working girl. Marian has a decent job and a decent boyfriend and her life is plodding along at a normal and ordinary clip. However, she didn't count on her body rebelling against the path in life laid out before her when she becomes engaged. Slowly, she loses the ability to eat more and more foods and feels increasingly stymied by the two options before her: her dead-end job or her marriage.

 

The references to food begin early on in this novel, when Marian is preoccupied with not getting enough to eat for breakfast. Upon arriving at work, she describes the humidity inside the office by commenting on the fan that merely stirs "the air around like a spoon in soup" (17) and her office building itself as "layered like an ice-cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle" (19). Marian is hurried away by a coworker to assist in a taste test of canned rice pudding and later enjoys lunch out with coworkers. After she becomes engaged, the book shifts from first to third person narration in part two, a clever device that mirrors Marian's growing lack of control over her future now that she has paired herself to a man. Simultaneously, her references to food now become preoccupied with her inability to eat an increasingly large assortment of foods. Slowly, nearly all the foods she used to enjoy begin to sicken her. Rice pudding she begins to see "as a collection of small cocoons. Cocoons with miniature living creatures inside" (203). She becomes unable to even clean the dishes she uses to eat, letting them sit in the kitchen sink until they develop a "grey slippery-looking growth reminiscent of algae in ponds" (216).

 

The crux of the issue for Marian resides in her lack of viable choices. She knows she has few options to advance at work and will never be allowed a top job on the floor upstairs, which is reserved for men. When she envisions herself growing old as an employee at her current job, she states, "I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. A pension. Perhaps I would have a hearing aid, like one of my great-aunts who had never married. I would talk to myself; children would throw snowballs at me. I told myself not to be silly, the world would probably blow up between now and then" (21).

 

Yet the alternative of marriage and a family seems to horrify Marian too.  She dutifully makes note of his sensible qualities: "She was glad he had hobbies: he would be less likely to get heart failure after retiring" (170). In short, she speaks of her fiancée Peter as a practical solution to a problem rather than a partnership she finds joy in. She views her married friend Clara as being lost in marriage and motherhood; Clara "had subsided into a grim but inert fatalism. Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock" (36). Meanwhile, there's the option presented by Marian's roommate Ainsley, who boldly decides to have a child on her own, while unmarried, a courageous choice for the 1960s. The ever judgmental and ever watchful landlady, only ever referred to as "the lady down below" only underscores the problems inherent with this plan; Marian knows that single motherhood will make her a social pariah.

 

Only with her improbable friend Duncan can Marian escape from the rigid social confines allowed to her as a woman. Duncan, in meditating on Alice in Wonderland, seems to reveal deeper understanding of Marian's plight than he expresses directly to her, describing the character of Alice by saying, "one sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them" (194). Truly, all of the side characters in this novel are superbly well done, adding humor and depth to a story that was ahead of its time, a sort of proto-feminist work, according to the author herself. Although Marian does seem to come back from the brink, Atwood says in the introduction that "it's noteworthy that my heroine's choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning: a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it."

 

Thematically, the book reminded me greatly of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and the (much lesser known) coming of age tale Gloria by Keith Maillard. In terms of Atwood's other novels, the mental breakdown and partial loss of stability on the part of Marian reminded me in some ways of her novel, Surfacing. Like all of Atwood's work, this novel was well done and features strongly outlined characters, unique turns of phrase, and feminist themes that are common to many of her novels.

 

Stars: 4.5

 

Related Title:

• Gloria by Keith Maillard