Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Edible Woman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gendered Expectations vs. Personal Identity
Consumerism and Consumption
Bodies, Pregnancy, and Food
Language, Meaning, and Alienation
Routine, Repetition, and Resistance
Summary
Analysis
The next day is Sunday, and Marian wakes up in the early afternoon. Ainsley is already awake. She lounges in the sun as Marian makes herself an egg. Marian tells Ainsley about her engagement. Though Ainsley makes her disapproval clear, Marian silences her quickly—“subconsciously,” Marian announces, “I probably wanted to marry Peter all along.” Marian goes to eat her egg, then realizes it is still undercooked.
Eggs are often used as a symbol of fertility and childbirth, so the fact that Marian makes herself an egg while she discusses her engagement to Peter—and that the egg is undercooked—suggests that Marian might be feeling more ambivalence about her future marriage than she lets on.
Themes
Ainsley begins laying out her plan with Len to Marian, marking up calendars and figuring out when it might be best to conceive. As Ainsley weighs Len’s genetics and discusses his family history, Marian feels like Ainsley is a general. Ainsley informs Marian that she plans to seduce Len in their apartment, though the idea of this congress happening just above the lady down below upsets Marian greatly.
Once again, the lady down below and Ainsley annoy each other to no end, even as they both have an almost militant approach to their beliefs about gender, sexuality, and femininity.
Themes
Marian knows that Len tends to chase younger girls because he thinks they are pure, uncorrupted by the world—until he sleeps with them, and then he blames them for corrupting themselves. Len only seems to respect women (like Clara) who are already married. Still, as Marian finishes her coffee, she decides there is no way Ainsley can really destroy Len’s life, so she chooses to keep everything to herself.
Len’s thinking corresponds to what psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud deemed the Madonna-Whore complex, in which men felt that women were irreparably, morally ruined after having sex. Freud famously said of the complex that, “where such men love they have no desire, and where such men desire they can have no love.”
Themes
Marian calls Clara to tell her the news of her engagement, and then starts doing the breakfast dishes. Peter surprises Marian while she cleans, and Marian makes Peter coffee, noting that even in his carelessness he has coordinated his outfit neatly. As Peter boasts about his plans for married life, Marian pictures that “somewhere in the vault of Seymour Surveys an invisible hand [is] wiping away [her] signature.”
On the one hand, Marian’s impending marriage will save her from a life of stamp-licking and pension-paying at Seymour Surveys. But on the other hand, Marian’s signature represents her autonomy and agency in the workplace—something her engagement to Peter is now “wiping away.”
Themes
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Peter and Marian move to the living room, suddenly awkward around each other. Peter recalls with a laugh the memory of driving his car into the hedge, and Marian feels a strange new proprietary instinct, as if Peter is suddenly something she owns. When Peter asks Marian when she wants to get married, she is surprised to hear herself defer to him—“I’d rather leave the big decisions up to you,” says Marian.
Marian’s dissociation now seems to conform to a pattern: she feels furthest from herself when she is dealing with new realizations about Peter (or her relationship to him). In these moments, Marian suddenly becomes alienated from her own body, feeling that her tears or her voice have become foreign.
Themes
