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Chapter 17
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
In only a few weeks, all sorts of food have become inedible to Marian—not only beef but also pork and mutton. Marian is leafing through a cookbook glumly when Len calls her. A couple days earlier, Ainsley’s pregnancy test came back positive, and Marian assumes (correctly) that Len is calling her to tell her the bad news. Len asks to come over, and Marian, still trying to stay out of the situation, agrees.
The fact that Marian loses the ability to eat all meat links back to her vision of herself as prey—captured by Peter, or by the patriarchal system he represents, or by the institution of marriage itself. Just as Marian had to mediate between Ainsley and the lady down below, she now has to take on a similar function with Len, once more subsuming her own needs to the needs of those around her.
Themes
The doorbell rings and Len arrives. Right away, he launches into his speech: he can’t marry Ainsley, but he feels terrible for corrupting such “a little girl.” Reluctantly, Marian tells Len he doesn’t need to worry so much; after all, Ainsley planned all of this. It takes Len a while to believe Marian—and as the truth sinks in, Len whirls on her, accusing Marian of betraying him by not telling him sooner about “the little slut.” Before the fight can escalate more, Ainsley rushes up the stairs, holding bags of baby supplies.
The true ugliness of Len’s sexist Madonna-Whore complex raises its head here: Ainsley can only be “a little girl” (in which case he probably should never have been involved with her in the first place) or a “little slut.” In other words, there is no room in Len’s schema for Ainsley to be “big,” a grown woman capable of making her own decisions and containing her own contradictions.
Themes
Len now attacks Ainsley, livid at her for being college-educated instead of “sweet and innocent” like he assumed. Len is outraged that Ainsley has used him for his body, insisting that he must now be involved as the baby’s father (even though Ainsley protests that she is happy to raise the baby on her own). Ainsley also accuses Len of having a classic case of “uterus envy.”
“Penis envy,” like the Madonna-Whore complex, was another one of Sigmund Freud’s essential theories. In flipping the idea of penis envy on its head (and citing feminist psychoanalysis theories of “womb envy” from the 1930s), Ainsley thinks she is resisting patriarchal norms—but in fact, she is merely repeating these same inequities, asserting gender differences as absolute and essentialized.
Themes
In a panic, Len recalls a breakfast from his youth, when his mother served him eggs for breakfast. When Len opened his egg, he was shocked to see a little chicken inside it, unborn but defined and “horrible.” Marian loathes this story, but Ainsley immediately coos over Len, as if he has just described a great trauma. The next morning, when Marian soft boils an egg, she sees the yolk as an eye, frightening and alive. Marian sighs, crossing “one more item off the list.”
Eggs have already appeared in the novel as a symbol of fertility, frequently signaling Marian’s anxiety about childbirth. But here, that symbolism is cemented: Len turns eggs and the gestation they represent into something scary and almost violent, akin to the butchered cow Marian imagined in the last chapter. And as Marian pictures the egg as the child in Ainsley’s belly—or the child she, Marian, might soon conceive with Peter—that food, too, turns from something sustaining into something terrifying.
Themes
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