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Chapter 23
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
Suddenly, it is the day of Peter’s engagement party. Peter has suggested to Marian that she should buy a new dress and do her hair elaborately, and Marian has agreed. But the process seems almost medical, making Marian feel as if she is being experimented on. Indeed, when she looks at all the other women in the salon, she is shocked to see that they are “totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this combination of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical?” The finished hairdo is far more elaborate and artificial than Marian is comfortable with.
Marian has been feeling more and more alienated from her body—and now, sitting with these other women at the salon, she wonders if this dissociation is the norm. After all, these women have turned their faces and hairdos and bodies into blank slates, experimenting with different products and machines in the same pursuit of patriarchal beauty standards. And as she begins to think this way, Marian starts to see this beautification as a kind of death—all she can be is “vegetable,” vulnerable to being eaten alive, or something “mechanical,” never alive to begin with.
Themes
Marian returns home just in time to see Ainsley and Len in the middle of a giant fight (though Ainsley is still calm enough to compliment Marian’s new hair). Ainsley and Len are arguing over who seduced who, as Ainsley desperately tries to get Len to agree to act as the baby’s father. Marian tries to shush them, fearful of the lady down below. When Len, furious, cries out “SCREW the lady down below,” the idea is so absurd that it makes both Ainsley and Marian giggle.
Now, as the novel leans tonally into satire, the absurdity of this entire situation becomes clear: Len’s moral outrage is as ridiculous as the lady down below’s hypocrisy, while Ainsley’s supposed passion about her future child is quickly forgotten when she sees Marian’s fancy new hair.
Themes
Not wanting to be laughed at, Len runs down the stairs, with Ainsley (and then Marian) close behind. Hearing the commotion, the lady down below comes out of her house, with her daughter and several friends at her side. Sensing that he has an audience, Len takes his chance for revenge on Ainsley and Marian. “All you clawed scaly bloody predatory whoring fucking bitches can go straight to hell!” Len shouts. “All of you! Underneath you’re all the same!” Marian notes that even through the cursing, Len enunciates well.
Though Len is sexually promiscuous, and the lady down below is chaste and conventional, their meeting on the stairs here symbolically shows how these two sets of gendered expectations are actually deeply aligned. Len’s comments also hint that he loathes the idea of womanhood itself, as he accuses all women of being “the same” and chastises them for their “bloody” bodies (a dig, ostensibly, at the process of menstruation). And tellingly, the fact that Len enunciates all of this well suggests that this kind of masculine rage is actually inextricably linked to the polite manners Len normally maintains in his daily life.
Themes
