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, Marian goes to the hospital to visit Clara. Marian is hungry, having skipped lunch in order to leave work early and come here. Now, Marian and Clara will have 30 whole minutes to talk to each other, though Marian frets they might not have 30 minutes’ worth of things to say.
It is vital to catch how Marian begins to find excuses to distance herself from food, as alienated from her own body as she feels from Clara and her other friends.
Themes
Surprisingly, Clara is in a good mood when Marian arrives. Though Clara hates being pregnant, she loves giving birth, and she tells Marian that she should “try it sometime.” Absentmindedly, Marian notices that the walls of the hospital are the same color as the walls in the office, and she almost expects to hear the familiar Seymour typewriters clacking.
Atwood plays with horror tropes here, with Marian feeling as if the confining office is the same space as the confining hospital room where Clara gives birth. Indeed, this novel was published just one year after the famous film Rosemary’s Baby was released, which similarly explored pregnancy and femininity as sources of potential terror.
Themes
Clara is talking fast, surprising Marian with her mental acuity; after all, during Clara’s pregnancy, she had seemed so “absorbed in, or absorbed by, her abdomen.” Now, however, Clara complains about her eldest son (who still likes to hoard his own excrement) and the women in the next hospital room, who are always trying to one-up each other with medical drama.
The dissociation that Marian is experiencing now in fact parallels Clara’s own sense of alienation from her body during pregnancy, when her abdomen seemed to “absorb” her rather than merely be an extension of herself.
Themes
Clara then asks Marian about Peter, signaling her approval even though she doesn’t know him very well. Clara reflects that no one really knows each other before marriage. Clara hadn’t known that Joe was a secret philatelist, for example—though when Marian looks shocked, Clara explains that a philatelist is merely someone who collects stamps. After Marian leaves the hospital room, she wonders if she was right in sensing some concern on Clara’s face, though concern about what, Marian has no idea.
The novel’s prurient interest in the word “philatelist” (and Clara’s implication that there is something secretive about Joe’s passion) parallels Marian’s anxiety that Peter might secretly be the Underwear Man who torments Seymour’s Surveys. Stamps provide comic relief, signaling the absurd repetitions of modern life.
Themes
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That night, Marian had planned to go to dinner with Peter; they even had a long conversation about what they might eat together. But then, shockingly, Duncan called her at the office, sounding nervous. Duncan explained why he called: he had ironed everything at his house, and he was desperate to iron more things, so he hoped Marian would bring him some of her laundry as a distraction.
Ironing would seem like an unavoidable task, another thing like cooking or dishwashing necessary to turn one day into the next. So it is shocking to Marian—and maybe to readers—that Duncan, seemingly so unconventional, finds comfort in these housekeeping routines, much like Marian did at the start of the narrative.
Themes
Marian agreed to bring Duncan laundry, and she plans to head there right after her visit with Clara. On her way out of the hospital, Marian passes a masked doctor with a sinister-looking stethoscope around his neck. Something about the doctor’s face looks vaguely familiar, frightening Marian. But then Marian notices that he is going bald—and, relieved, she reminds herself that she doesn’t know any balding men.
Joe is a philatelist, and Peter might be the Underwear Man—so who’s to say that this doctor isn’t also someone in disguise? For a moment, then, Marian imagines this doctor as another one of the men in her life whose respectable appearances mask something darker and more complicated.
Themes
