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
It’s the Christmas party at Marian’s office, and Mrs. Grot is handing out a seemingly endless stream of finger sandwiches: jelly, ham, and egg salad. Marian can only stomach the jelly. All of the women have agreed to bring an item for the potluck, and so there is way too much food, all of it with names like “Orange-Pineapple Delight” or “Luscious Fruit Sponge.”
Marian’s inability to eat either the meat or egg sandwich reminds readers that her aversions are not momentary; once she endows a food with frightening meaning, she permanently loses a taste for it.
Themes
Everyone at the party still seems haunted by the chaotic day before, when a storm delayed the results from a survey about tomato juice. Marian does her best to tune out this nervous chatter, instead loading up on dessert after dessert. As she does, she takes in “all that abundance, […] those coagulations of fat and sweet.” In one corner, Lucy is telling a story about a girl she knows who just stopped washing one day—she wouldn’t clean her clothes or even take a bath.
The ridiculously named “coagulations of fat and sweet” here satirize the canned, preserved foods so popular in mid-century America (from Jell-O to mayonnaise to the artificial rice pudding Marian loathes). The girl who stopped washing clearly reminds Marian of herself and her own refusal of food. These twinned oddities open a central question: is this a shared madness, or a kind of resistance (maybe even subconsciously) against a conformist, consumerist, patriarchal society?
Themes
With this story in the back of her mind, Marian looks around the office at these women who, separated from their typewriters, look to her just like the housewives they interview. Critically, Marian stares at her colleagues’ bodies, noting the “continual flux between the inside and the outside,” as they eat potato chips and expel words and burps. Marian wishes for a man, Peter, anything to help her from being sucked into this “sargasso-sea of femininity” around her.
Marian links Duncan’s pessimistic view of the world—everything is “production-consumption,” making things “outside” and digesting them “inside”—to her own anxieties around gendered expectation. Even if Peter seems threatening in some contexts, then, he also provides Marian with meaning and a clear path of action. Finally, the reference to the “sargasso-sea” is especially important; just three years earlier, author Jean Rhys had released her seminal feminist novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which Atwood is likely referencing here.
Themes
Mrs. Bogue gathers the room to make an announcement—Marian is getting married! Marian is upset and confused, unsure which one of the “office virgins” let news of her engagement slip. Though all Marian’s colleagues congratulate her, Marian knows Mrs. Bogue always fires newlyweds, believing them to be easily distracted. Marian excuses herself and rushes out of the office, grateful for the cold street air.
Over and over again, the extent of Marian’s isolation becomes clear—just as Ainsley proves selfish and Clara proves unreliable, the “office virgins” are untrustworthy, sharing Marian’s engagement news despite her explicit request that they keep it private.
Themes
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But Marian does not want to go home to her apartment, where Ainsley will be knitting something for the baby, and where all of her Christmas presents are gathering dust. As she walks, the snow gathering around her ankles, Marian thinks about the gift she got for Peter: a book about cameras. Marian stares at a frozen-over fountain, hoping she does not end up like that girl who refused to wash.
Again, cameras recur as a symbol of the trapped, frozen feeling that domestic life instills in Marian. Here, that metaphor is underscored by the iced-over fountain, made solid by the winter cold. At the same time, however, Marian seems to fear that the only way out of this frozen future is by becoming like the girl who refuses to wash, an outcast from society.
Themes
Duncan greets Marian. Though she had no way of knowing he would be here, she is not surprised. The pair sit on a park bench, Marian burrowing her face into Duncan’s warm winter coat. “You took a long time,” Duncan whispers as they embrace, “I’ve been expecting you.” Marian gets up to go.
In terms of genre and structure, Duncan’s appearance here raises a question: is this still realism? Or if, as Duncan and Marian have discussed, language is beginning to lose its meaning, should readers also question the words of the novel itself, wondering if Duncan is really here or if his arrival now is also a kind of slippage of reality?
Themes
