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Chapter 12
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
Marian sits at her desk and works half-heartedly on a survey about razor blades; the story is now, for the first time, being told through third-person narration. To stave off her boredom, Marian imagines an elaborate story where the razor blades are used to grant magical wishes. But she is pulled out of her reverie by turmoil in the office; everyone is running around in a state of panic because they did not get enough responses to a sanitary-napkin survey.
The shift to the third person here shows, on a structural level, just how extreme Marian’s feelings of dissociation have become; she is so alienated from herself that she can no longer even narrate her life as her own. This literary remove is then echoed in Marian’s ability to fantasize about razor blades while her co-workers panic nearby.
Themes
Marian tunes out her co-workers’ whispered conversations. It is time for lunch, and she is hungry, though she cannot tell if she is actually hungry or merely aware of the time. Finally, Marian suggests to the “office virgins” that they should go for lunch. The girls put on their coats and head outside into the cold (which Emmy remarks is making her skin flake off).
Though Marian felt an intense “hunger” with Duncan, in most of her life, she feels completely separated from her own biological instincts to the point that she can no longer separate the desire to eat from the routine she has built around doing so.
Themes
Lucy wants to go to a more expensive place than usual—probably, Marian thinks, because Lucy is wearing a nice new dress. Once they sit down, Lucy scans the other customers, eagerly looking for an eligible bachelor. Her strategic thinking makes Marian think vaguely of a fisherman hoping the fish will bite. When the waitress comes, Marian is surprised to realize she’s no longer hungry.
Just as Marian’s earlier reference to Lucy’s “glittering” eyes made Lucy sound vaguely predatory, the comparison of Lucy to a fisherman suggests that men are not the only people who can (metaphorically) hunt in courtship. Marian’s inability to discern her own appetite continues to speak to her sense of dissociation.
Themes
When Lucy asks about Peter, Marian decides to finally tell the “office virgins” about the engagement (though she still wants to keep it from everyone else at work). Lucy, Millie, and Emmy are intensely eager to learn how Marian has gotten this man to marry her. When Marian honestly tells them she doesn’t know, this frustrates the “office virgins,” who see her as putting on false bridal modesty.
Just like Marian’s frustration at Ainsley’s behavior with Len prevented the two of them from growing closer, the “office virgins” now feel forced to compete with Marian, too stressed about fulfilling gendered expectations to actually bond with each other.
Themes
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Back at the office, Peter calls to cancel the dinner he had planned with Marian. Though Marian is annoyed, she can feel that the “office virgins” are listening to her conversation, so she responds as sweetly as she can. Then, Joe Bates calls, informing Marian that Clara has at last had the baby. Clara must feel relieved; in the final weeks of her pregnancy, she had seemed despairing, joking that “maybe it isn’t a baby at all but a kind of parasitic growth.”
Again, Marian’s feelings about Peter seem to have less to do with their interpersonal relationship and more to do with how she wants to be perceived by those around her. Clara’s “parasitic growth” comment echoes Marian’s earlier insight that Clara’s pregnancies had taken her over, subjugating Clara’s interior identity to her bodily processes.
Themes
Marian hangs up the phone. On the one hand, the day feels endless, but Marian also knows that her late March wedding day is fast approaching. Somewhere, Marian knows her family is already attending to the wedding arrangements, picking out flowers and inviting relatives. But for now, this workday is just another day to get through, distinguishable from the rest only because it is more immediate.
If every day follows the same tedious pattern, the same repeated routines, how can one moment ever feel different from the next? Therefore, just as Marian has struggled with feeling that language and bodily life are losing their meaning, she now feels time warp and deform.
Themes
Mrs. Bogue comes in with more bad news: the Underwear Man, a prank caller who uses Seymour Surveys’s name when he talks to housewives, has been making more fake calls. The Underwear Man asks prying questions about ladies’ undergarments, but his voice sounds so official that the housewives always believe him at first. Then, when they finally realize that the Underwear Man is lying to them, the housewives are outraged, calling Seymour Surveys to complain.
The Underwear Man seems to straddle the two worlds Marian spends time in: the proper, conventional world of Peter and Seymour Surveys, and the more lascivious, plain-spoken world that Duncan represents. But by using the norms of polite society to ask these crude questions, the case of the Underwear Man suggests that the line between the two arenas is not as clear as it might initially seem.
Themes
The workday finishes, and Marian heads home. As she rides the elevator, she tries to picture the Underwear Man, so respectable even in his derangement. Does he wear a suit and tie? Is he an otherwise normal person who has gone mad because of all the scandalizing advertisements for girdles? Or maybe, Marian thinks, the Underwear Man is really Peter—the “true self” that lay beneath his well-polished exterior.
The girdle ads return here, as Marian thinks about how much of societal consumerism hinges on the commodification and objectification of women. In this essential moment, as Marian considers that Peter might be the Underwear Man in disguise, she also wonders if all the propriety Peter exhibits in daily life is really his cover for something more sexual and sinister.
Themes
