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
When Marian arrives at the laundromat, it takes her a second to find Duncan. Once she locates him, he is dour; he protests that he does not need to be rescued, nor does he have any interest in rescuing Marian. To change the topic, Marian agrees at last to sleep with Duncan. Duncan at first suggests that they have sex right in the middle of the laundromat, but eventually agrees to find a motel. Duncan asks Marian to hold his chocolate bar while he digs out a few dollars in cash.
Even as Duncan toys with classic, gendered fairytale tropes (like the idea of a heroic rescue), he is also staunchly unromantic in his suggestion that he and Marian should have sex in the laundromat. By mocking these ideals in this dilapidated, mundane place, Duncan implicitly gives the lie to the fantasy Peter tries (through his pictures and his parties) so desperately to preserve.
Themes
Duncan and Marian walk for a long time. The first motel they stop into looks rundown, but the owner still insists that it isn’t “that sort of place.” Discouraged, the pair continues to walk until they find an even shabbier place. The clerk there lets them in, amused by the late hour and Marian’s clothing. Once inside, Marian takes off her shoes, her feet numb with cold. Duncan is distracted by a seashell-shaped ashtray with a “Made in Japan” sticker on the back.
The pretty, picture-perfect party Marian went to was really all about cheap products and easy consumption (like the potato chips and beer bottles). So though the run-down motel and “Made in Japan” sticker might depress someone else, Marian and Duncan seem to take comfort in the straightforward, transactional nature of this place.
Themes
Feeling desperate, Marian orders Duncan to take his clothes off, and he does so with such speed that it makes her imagine that his entire outfit had a single zipper. Then Marian starts to undress, asking Duncan to zip her out of her girdle. “A real one!” Duncan exclaims. “I’ve seen them in the ads but I never got that far in real life.” As Marian and Duncan lie down, he sniffs her neck, commenting that she smells “funny.”
The lines between flesh and product have been completely tangled now—Marian imagines Duncan’s skin with a zipper, while Duncan cannot focus on Marian’s real-life undergarments because he is so distracted by the memory of girdle ads (much like the ones that haunt Marian). Sex—supposedly about human contact—is, between this strange couple, really about different visions of products colliding.
Themes
Half an hour later, Duncan gives up, pronouncing himself “incorruptible.” As he goes to get a cigarette, Marian panics, feeling that getting this strange, shapeless man to respond to her is the most important thing she will ever do in her life. And then suddenly Duncan is on top of her, ordering Marian to lie down with a smile. Duncan nuzzles his face into Marian’s shoulder, his nose like the “muzzle of an animal, curious, and only slightly friendly.”
When Duncan and Marian have sex, it is certainly not more tender or passionate than when Marian and Peter do (though unlike Peter, Duncan seems to struggle with some measure of erectile dysfunction). But though both Peter and Duncan have a slightly predatory approach, Peter is a hunter, guarded by machines—while Duncan’s “curiosity” is more “animal,” still “only slightly friendly,” but at least less mechanized.
Themes
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