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
After lunch, Marian is licking and stamping a bunch of envelopes when Mrs. Bogue—the head of the department—interrupts her. Mrs. Bogue’s overly-friendly manner immediately puts Marian on guard. Indeed, Mrs. Bogue wants Marian to conduct survey interviews with seven or eight men this weekend, even though that is not part of her job description. Marian pushes back, but Mrs. Bogue is insistent.
The satiric, gently comic image of Marian continually licking and stamping envelopes shows just how ridiculously repetitive her daily life can feel. Mrs. Bogue’s false sweetness, like the chemical taste of the canned rice pudding, is just one more artificial facet of Marian’s fake-feeling workplace.
Themes
Marian calls the phone number she will use to conduct the survey. It’s a commercial for Moose Beer, which presents itself as “for any real man, on a real man’s holiday.” Marian looks through the planned advertisements for Moose, which feature handsome men on hunting trips. Marian admires the campaign, which she knows aims to make middle-aged men with potbellies identify with these wilderness adventurers.
Marian astutely understands advertising as a way to distract mid-century city dwellers from the mundane disappointments of their lives, promising exotic hunts instead of potbellies and evenings at home. Also worth noting: hunting, with its connotations of masculine virility and violence, quickly becomes an important motif in the story.
Themes
Peter calls Marian at the office, telling her he will need to cancel their dinner. Glumly, Peter announces that Trigger—his last unmarried college friend—is getting married. Marian knows this is “a natural disaster,” as it means the final nail in the coffin for Peter’s bachelor drinking trips. Still, even as she is sympathetic, Marian does not want Peter to think she is “getting ideas.”
Marian feels trapped between the life of a housewife and a boring, dead-end job. But here, Peter’s reaction to his friend Trigger getting married suggests that he feels similarly hamstrung, as if he, too, must choose a domestic future for himself even if he dreams of something else.
Themes
Lucy comes over to Marian’s desk, asking for help with a note from a customer who found a fly in her cereal. Marian helps Lucy, fending off her friend’s sideways questions about Marian’s plans for the evening. Fortunately, Marian’s friend Clara calls, inviting Marian and Ainsley to dinner. As Marian leaves the office for the day, she sees the “office virgins” getting ready for their weekends: “their six eyes glittered in the mirrors.”
First, the fly in the cereal suggests that there is something more sinister underneath the packaged advertisements Seymour Surveys helps to create. Second, the “glitter[ing]” eyes that Marian sees as she leaves the office hint at something almost predatory, showing the calculated anxiety beneath the “office virgins’” desire to fit in and find husbands.
Themes
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