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
As soon as Marian gets home, Peter calls her, enraged at her disappearance. After Marian left, Peter explained, he and Lucy searched everywhere for her in his car; “it’s nice to know,” Peter says, “there are some considerate women left around.” Overwhelmed, Marian asks Peter to come over at 2:30, as she would rather explain and apologize in-person than over the phone. Peter agrees, and Marian goes to make a shopping list, but she quits halfway through—“she knew what she wanted.”
Peter’s taunting of Marian here, as he compares her to Lucy, recalls the moment earlier in the novel where he encouraged Marian to be more like Ainsley, who accepted her own “femininity.” But rather than feeling confused and angry, as she did the last time Peter made such a remark, Marian feels a new clarity—a sense of “what she wants,” rather than a desire to defer to Peter’s wishes.
Themes
At the grocery store, Marian gets all the ingredients for a cake: eggs, flour, lemons, chocolate, food-coloring, everything brand new. Then she returns home, washing the dishes she will need for her baking. With a light touch, Marian cracks and separates the eggs, whisking the air into them. While the cake bakes, Marian makes several different colors of icing. The cake-making is strangely soothing and pleasurable; it has been a long time since Marian baked.
There are two vital things to note in this sequence. First, in making this cake, Marian blends the natural foods she has come to fear (like symbolic eggs) with artificial products like icing and food-coloring. And second, this is perhaps the first time in the novel that Marian feels truly creative—she bakes without a recipe, finding strength and pleasure in her own ability to invent as she goes.
Themes
As the cake cools, Marian goes to the bathroom, pulling her hair out of its swirled updo. Then Marian begins to operate on the cake, cutting it and reassembling it until it is in the shape of a woman’s body. “It looked slightly obscene,” Marian notes, “lying there soft and sugary and featureless on the platter.” So Marian decorates it, adding first a bathing suit and then more and more ruffles until the figure has on a kind of pink party dress.
Now, it is clear that this cake is the “edible woman” that gives the novel its title. And in a slightly magical, absurdist twist, Marian literalizes the symbolic conflations she has been struggling with throughout the narrative—just as talk of Clara’s “feminine role” made Marian think of maraschino cherries, she now turns the sugary artificiality of femininity into a fake woman made of cake.
Themes
Still, the figure looks strange without eyes and hair, so Marian adds green eyes and an elaborate hairstyle much like the one she just had for Peter’s party. When the cake-woman is done, Marian steps back to admire her handiwork. “You look delicious,” Marian tells her cake, “and that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food.”
Marian has identified with food for a while, but perhaps never more than in this moment; after feeling like Peter’s prey for so long, beautifying herself only to be photographed and consumed, Marian now sees herself in this “delicious,” vulnerable, woman-shaped cake.
Themes
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Peter arrives. When he walks in the door, Marian immediately feels silly—how could she ever be frightened of this man? But when Peter sits on the couch, his arms angled like those people in the newspapers, Marian has a moment of clarity. “You’ve been trying to destroy me,” Marian announces, placing the woman-shaped cake in front of Peter. “You’ve been trying to assimilate me. But I’ve made you a substitute.”
In this exchange, perhaps the most vital of the entire novel, Marian states the story’s central critique outright: in trying to “assimilate” Marian to the forces of patriarchy and consumerism and conformity, Peter (and the society he represents) have also been “destroying” her. But if what Peter wants is something sugary and consumable and stereotypical, then this cake must prove a satisfying “substitute”—and thus this gesture allows Marian to express her frustration, not just with gendered norms but with sugary foods and unrealistic advertisements and exhausting routines.
Themes
Peter leaves quickly, not wanting to talk or even stay for a cup of tea. Suddenly, Marian is ravenous. She takes a fork and digs into the woman-shaped cake, starting with the feet. As she eats, Marian pictures Peter with a stuffed lion in his arms and a revolver around his shoulder. She reflects that Peter will definitely find success in his life.
Just moments after refusing to be “destroyed” by expectations of marriage and consumerism, Marian’s appetite returns to her—suggesting that she no longer sees herself as a stuffed lion, prey for “hunters” like Peter. And though Marian is realistic about the scope of this rebellion (i.e., she knows Peter will go on to have a successful life), Marian is also deeply healed and nourished by it.
Themes
Ainsley arrives, looking somehow much more haggard and much more pregnant in only 24 hours’ time. Fischer Smythe is with her. When Ainsley sees what Marian is doing, she is horrified, despite the fact that Marian assures her of the cake’s deliciousness. “You’re rejecting your femininity!” Ainsley accuses. But Marian just laughs it off. “Nonsense,” Marian says, plunging her fork into the cake-woman’s neck. “It’s only a cake.”
The contrast here is stark: Ainsley has settled into the very patriarchal norms she claimed to buck, getting engaged to a suddenly formal Fish (or “Fischer Smythe”) and looking haggard and worn-down as a result. But even as Ainsley accuses Marian of “rejecting” the very standards that make Ainsley so miserable, Marian pushes back—this is “only a cake,” after all, something made creatively and then eaten deliciously. In other words, as Marian now plunges her fork into this soft, shapely thing, she seems to have shifted her views on “production-consumption”; under the right circumstances, that cycle can be tasty and fulfilling.
Themes
