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Chapter 5
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
That night, Marian dreams that her feet are dissolving into jelly and her fingers are turning transparent. She wakes to her alarm and puts on an outfit suitable for work (heels, a skirt, and a formal blouse). Then, Marian heads off into the city, looking for a middle-class neighborhood where she can try to find men willing to answer the beer questionnaire. Marian at last finds a suitable district, with a mix of shabby houses and recently redone ones; on the corner, there is a new apartment building. Marian resolves to end her quest here, where she hopes there will be air-conditioning.
If Marian began the narrative feeling “stolid,” this dream hints at the interior collapse and dissociation still to come. And now, it becomes clear that Marian’s commitment to routine is a way to stave off this feeling of transparency, her way of proving to herself that she cannot disappear. It is also worth noting Marian’s focus on A/C; even comfortable air, the novel suggests, is something to be bought and sold.
Themes
The first house Marian tries is a bust: though the man who answers invites Marian in, he is only interested in giving her a lecture about the sin of drinking and shoving some Temperance pamphlets at her. After a few more flops, Marian finds a perfect candidate, a middle-aged man with a “brick-red” face. When Marian asks him to rate his beer consumption on a scale of one to 10, he picks nine. Privately, Marian notes that no one ever identifies themselves as a 10.
The complete pervasiveness of societal consumerism now becomes clear: Marian is trying to sell alcohol, and in much the same way, this first couple is trying to sell Temperance (with the pamphlets functioning almost as ads). The description of the “brick-red” face signals that this man is a heavy drinker.
Themes
Observing that the man seems to have already drunk some beer this morning, Marian begins to ask him the survey questions. When Marian plays the T.V. ad for the man, he responds well, and the survey wraps up quickly. But as Marian is leaving, the man lurches towards her, offering to accompany her on the rest of her surveys. Nervously, Marian gives him the Temperance pamphlets and scurries away.
Implicitly, Marian has to acknowledge that her work might be harmful—should she really be selling more beer to men like this one, who already seems to drink too much? Moreover, the way that this man lunges at Marian suggests an ugly (but not uncommon) commodification of women, as if Marian was on offer along with the beer.
Themes
Marian gets through the rest of her interviews and heads to the apartment building. She knocks on the first-floor apartment, which is labeled Six (even though Marian thinks it should be labeled One). It takes a while for someone to open the door, but finally a deathly pale, skinny young man lets Marian in. At first, she assumes he is a teenager—but when the pale man tells her his parents are dead, Marian asks him more questions, eventually learning that he is 26. The man seems unusually quiet and stoic. Still, he tells Marian that he is a six out of 10 on the beer-drinking scale, so she decides to continue with the survey.
Even in the way it is numbered, the pale man’s apartment immediately represents an inversion of the consistent, careful order that defines most of Marian’s life. And while Marian does her best to shove down any unpleasant thoughts or stories, the pale man seems comfortable leading with tragedy, calmly informing Marian of his parents’ deaths.
Themes
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Marian takes in the apartment, which is covered in thick treatises and loose papers. Marian tries to sit, but the pale man warns her that his roommates Trevor and Fish will be angry if she moves any of their stuff; Marian wonders if Trevor and Fish are real, or if they are the pale man’s imaginary friends. The pale man suggests that they should go into his bedroom, and though it makes her uneasy, Marian agrees.
Marian has already spoken of the careful balance she and Ainsley maintain, cleaning the apartment and staying out of each other’s way. Now, the pale man’s apartment provides a funhouse mirror look on post-university life; Trevor and Fish seem to share none of the caution or cleanliness that Marian so values in her own roommate situation.
Themes
Marian begins the survey, starting with the free association portion, where she asks the pale man to think about phrases like “deep-down manly flavor” and “hearty healthy taste.” The pale man has surprisingly strong associations with each word, citing literary texts by Shakespeare and the Grimm brothers to back himself up. At the end of the questions, the man tells Marian that he doesn’t drink beer at all.
In this important exchange, the pale man reveals the long cultural history of masculine norms, tying this contemporary commercial back to canonical texts by Shakespeare and Grimms’ fairy tales. But as he does so, the pale man also gently points to the absurdity of phrases like “deep-down manly flavor”—a bizarreness that is only magnified when the man reveals he never drank beer anyway.
Themes
Before Marian can get frustrated, Trevor and Fish arrive. Marian goes to see herself out. As she leaves, she hears one of the roommates offer the pale man—Duncan, apparently—a beer. Duncan explains that he was just tricking Marian and, when she gets annoyed, he asks her why she has a job he associates more with “fat sloppy housewives.” After Marian leaves, she realizes she cannot read any of the notes she took.
The pale man’s rejection here of social norms (lying about his beer drinking, using rude phrases like “fat sloppy housewives”) is both frustrating and, it seems, enticing to Marian. The fact that Marian cannot read her notes—her own handwriting—foreshadows the anxiety Marian and others will start to feel, believing language to be unreliable.
Themes
