Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman. Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.
The Edible Woman: Introduction
A concise biography of Margaret Atwood plus historical and literary context for The Edible Woman.
The Edible Woman: Plot Summary
A quick-reference summary: The Edible Woman on a single page.
The Edible Woman: Detailed Summary & Analysis
In-depth summary and analysis of every chapter of The Edible Woman. Visual theme-tracking, too.
The Edible Woman: Themes
Explanations, analysis, and visualizations of The Edible Woman's themes.
The Edible Woman: Quotes
The Edible Woman's important quotes, sortable by theme, character, or chapter.
The Edible Woman: Characters
Description, analysis, and timelines for The Edible Woman's characters.
The Edible Woman: Symbols
Explanations of The Edible Woman's symbols, and tracking of where they appear.
The Edible Woman: Theme Wheel
An interactive data visualization of The Edible Woman's plot and themes.
Brief Biography of Margaret Atwood
Growing up primarily in Toronto, Canada, Margaret Atwood always knew she wanted to be a writer. She went on to earn degrees in English literature from both the University of Toronto and Radcliffe College, before beginning to publish poetry professionally. The Edible Woman was Atwood’s first novel. Around this time, she also married her husband Jim Polk, whom she would divorce five years later. Atwood then went on to publish a new piece of fiction every few years, including the Booker-Prize winning novel The Blind Assassin (2000) and her landmark feminist work The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which imagines a dystopian society where women are valued solely on their fertility. In both her work and her personal life, Atwood is known for her activism on various issues, particularly surrounding women’s rights and the environment. Today, Atwood continues to write and teach at several universities across Canada and the United States. She lived with writer Graeme Gibson, a fellow Canadian, until his death in 2019.
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Historical Context of The Edible Woman
Atwood wrote The Edible Woman at the height of second-wave feminism, a movement catalyzed in large measure by landmark texts like Simone DeBeauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. Friedan’s text in particular emphasized the ways society’s emphasis on marriage and childbirth could feel restrictive to women, becoming a rallying cry for housewives across the United States and beyond. As birth control became more readily accessible—and as more women got college degrees, like both Atwood herself and the novel’s protagonist Marian—feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem began to lead new discussions about sex and sexual violation, harassment, women’s rights in the workplace, and childcare. Second-wave feminist activism spanned the 1960s and 1970s, a pivotal period in history that also saw the rise of the Civil Rights Movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.
Other Books Related to The Edible Woman
Stylistically, Atwood has cited several more fantastical writers as essential to her work. Edgar Allen Poe was an early influence on Atwood’s writing, while she credits mid-century writers like Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) and John Wyndham (The Chrysalids) with inspiring some of the more speculative elements of her fiction. In terms of content, however, Atwood positions The Edible Woman as a work of “proto-feminism,” placing it in line with books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and other older texts, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Importantly, The Edible Woman also seems at one moment to directly allude to Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a more explicitly feminist (and anti-colonial) response to Jane Eyre.
Key Facts about The Edible Woman
- Full Title: The Edible Woman
- When Written: Mid-1960s
- Where Written: Montreal, Vancouver, and Alberta
- When Published: 1969
- Literary Period: Postmodern
- Genre: Novel
- Setting: Various locations in a major unnamed city (widely considered to be Toronto)
- Climax: As her engagement approaches and her life spirals out of control, Marian McAlpin finds herself empathizing too much with food to consume any of it.
- Antagonist: Peter Wollander
- Point of View: The narrative begins in Marian’s first-person perspective. It shifts to the third person as she dissociates from herself before returning to first-person at the end.
Extra Credit for The Edible Woman
Adapting Atwood. After the landmark success of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale television adaptation, various efforts have been made to get a TV version of The Edible Woman off the ground. Though a group of producers began adapting the television show in 2019, it has yet to make it to air.
Canada Calling. Though Atwood never names the city of Toronto in The Edible Woman, she makes it clear with various locational clues (like frequent references to the city’s Great Lakes-centric geography). But Atwood’s love of Canada extends beyond just her home city. Indeed, Atwood has lived all over the country—from Vancouver to Montreal to Canada’s unforgiving northern wilderness—and Canada’s climate and politics are often a central thread in Atwood’s work.
