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 walks through the grocery store aisles, tossing a can of vegetarian beans into her cart. Elevator music plays from a speaker, and Marian resents all the different tricks the store uses to try to get people to buy things. Recently, Marian has been bringing a carefully made grocery list when she comes to the store. But still, there is some randomness in choosing soap or tomato juice based on packaging alone—until she finally does end up choosing what to buy, clearly “doing precisely what some planner in [an] office had hoped and predicted.”
In her job at Seymour Surveys, Marian is that “planner in [an] office,” gauging the words and images that might make people pick one canned vegetable over another. But Marian’s anxiety here points to the gap between food’s innate purpose—as nutrition and energy—and the consumerist, artificial options of a supermarket (still only 50 years old at the time The Edible Woman was published).
Themes
As Marian picks through the produce section, she thinks back to Christmas dinner with her family. Her mother had expressed dismay that Marian left the turkey untouched on her plate, though when Marian waved it away as pre-wedding jitters, no one had asked any questions. Secretly, Marian knows her family feels relieved that she is getting married, that her college degree has not physically deformed her or turned her into a sad maiden aunt.
On the one hand, Marian feels isolated from all of her friends and co-workers; on the other hand, it now becomes clear that she feels a similar distance from her own family. Rather than actually paying attention to Marian’s specific needs, it seems her parents are more interested in external markers of success, grateful that Marian will continue to preserve patriarchal norms despite her (somewhat radical) decision to go to college.
Themes
Back in the grocery store, Marian notes the different kinds of Kleenex—“there really wasn’t a single human unpleasantness,” Marian smirks, “that they hadn’t managed to turn to their uses.” Marian hesitates between flavors of canned rice pudding, one of the last foods she can eat because it tastes so artificial.
All of the natural, human processes of “production-consumption” (eating food and making waste, for example) have—at least in Marian’s eyes—been commercialized, turn into canned rice pudding and Kleenex. Yet even as Marian hates this artificiality, she depends on it, afraid of the more natural foods that make her think of the violence necessary in order to eat them.
Themes
Marian reflects that though she sees Peter more than ever, it is almost always in large groups; since she has been “ringed,” Peter seems to want to show Marian off to his friends. Though Marian knows these are the men from Peter’s hunting days, it is hard to square those stories with these well-groomed gentlemen (whom Ainsley dismisses as “the soap men,” because at least one of them is in the soap business).
The distinction between the “nicely packaged” items at the grocery store and the ugly violence of food production is paralleled in the gap between Peter’s hunting stories and his friends’ new, shiny appearance. Again, “soap” recurs as a way of talking about Peter’s clean, sanitized approach to life.
Themes
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Wanting a break from Peter’s crowd, Marian decided to invite Clara and Joe over for dinner. As soon as she made the plan, however, Marian felt anxious—what could she serve them now that she is avoiding all meat? Eventually, Marian opts for salad and casserole. She figures if she keeps it dark enough, she can hide her uneaten meat.
Casserole is another food that makes each individual ingredient indistinguishable from the next—so in order to hide her fear of some foods, Marian is forced to participate in the dressed-up, artificial food culture she dreads.
Themes
Once she gets home, Marian begins preparing the salad. At the last minute, Marian decides to add a carrot to give the dish more color. But as Marian grates the carrot, she has a horrifying thought—carrots are roots, and to eat them, one has to pull them up from the ground. Marian feels as if, suddenly, the carrot is moving in her hands.
Previously, Marian only associated violence with meat: food that had to be hunted and killed. But now, Marian must come to terms with the fact that everything humans eat (plants, wheat, grains) was once alive—and that her own survival therefore depends on the death of other living things.
Themes
Dinner with Joe and Clara is awkward. Clara brings her kids, who immediately proceed to make all sorts of messes and bad smells (neither of which Peter is particularly forgiving about). Marian asks Joe about being a “philatelist,” but the question lands strangely. And when Joe and Peter try to bond over politics, it is immediately clear that Joe’s more left-leaning views seem “too radical” to Peter.
Even though Peter has made his preference for children clear, his refusal to deal with the physical reality of Clara and Joe’s kids does not bode well for his prospects as a father. Peter’s conservatism underscores how different he is from the other, more politically liberal figures in Marian’s life (Joe, Clara, Ainsley, and especially Duncan).
Themes
After dinner ends and Peter jokes that “we’re never going to be like that,” Marian is grateful to be alone. She goes to the fridge, noting that neither she nor Ainsley has cleaned the house in a while; the freezer needs to be defrosted, and the fridge, crowded with leftovers and odds and ends, is starting to smell. Marian hopes she will get married before the mess spreads.
When the novel began, Marian prided herself on her ability to clean consistently, maintaining a cozy home from one week to the next. But now, as Marian feels overwhelmed by the pressures of domesticity, marriage has become her cure-all, the only way she can see out of her increasingly oppressive home.
Themes
Ainsley comes home from the prenatal clinic she always goes to on Friday evenings. This time, however, there are tears in Ainsley’s eyes, as she explains that someone at the clinic lectured on the importance of father figures. Without a father figure, Ainsley fears, her baby will be homosexual—and “at the mention of the one category of men who had never shown […] interest in her,” Ainsley starts to cry.
The novel’s clearly satiric tone suggests that Ainsley’s new plan is ridiculous—as is the homophobic prejudice that motivates it. And once again, Ainsley’s ostensible radical break with the norms of patriarchy has landed her in exactly the same spot as the more traditional “office virgins,” who are just as desperate to find husbands.
Themes
