For Marian, cameras come to symbolize how Peter—and more broadly, marriage as an institution—are trying to trap and possess her. Peter is fascinated by cameras, having discovered in photography a more peaceful hobby that can replace his bachelor hunting trips with Trigger. Though Marian initially supports this hobby, even buying Peter a book on photography for Christmas, she gradually begins to see something more sinister in Peter’s love of capturing life via still images. At drinks with Leonard Slank, for example, Peter conflates his picture-taking habits with his hunting skills, using the word “shots” to describe both gunshots and camera shots. From this moment on, Marian sees cameras as suspect and (increasingly) terrifying.
In the novel’s climactic scene, when Peter walks around taking photos at his engagement party, Marian panics, as if being photographed will turn her into one of the frozen advertisements framed on Peter’s walls. “She could not let him catch her this time,” Marian thinks, doing her best to avoid the camera lens. “Once he pulled that trigger she would be stopped, fixed indissolubly in that gesture, that single stance, unable to move or change.” After all, cameras are all about turning nuanced, moving life into a fixed image. And just as Marian fears being photographed, she fears that this picture-perfect stagnancy (being “unable to move or change”) is all that lies in store for her should she become Peter’s wife.
Cameras Quotes in The Edible Woman
“One shot, right through the heart. The rest of them got away. I picked it up and Trigger said, ‘You know how to gut them, you just slit her down the belly and give her a good hard shake and all the guts’ll fall out.’ So I whipped out my knife, good knife, German steel, and slit the belly and took her by the hind legs […] God it was funny. Lucky thing Trigger and me had the old cameras along, we got some good shots of the whole mess.”
After a while I noticed with mild curiosity that a large drop of something wet had materialized on the table near my hand. I poked it with my finger and smudged it around a little before I realized with horror that it was a tear. I must be crying then!
“Was that one of me?” she asked. She smiled at [Peter] in conciliation. She sensed her face as vastly spreading and papery and slightly dilapidated: a huge billboard smile, peeling away in flaps and patches, the metal surface beneath showing through […]
In the living room Peter was calling above the noise “Come on now, let's get a group portrait. Everybody altogether.” She had to hurry. Now there was the living room to negotiate. She would have to become less visible.
[…] She could not let him capture her this time. Once he pulled the trigger she would be stopped, fixed indissolubly in that gesture, that single stance, unable to move or change.
Cameras Symbol Timeline in The Edible Woman
