Throughout The Edible Woman, eggs represent various characters’ anxieties about childbirth. When the narrative begins, Marian makes herself a soft-boiled egg every morning, symbolically suggesting in this ritualized repetition that child-bearing is a similarly routine, inescapable path for women. After Marian comes into close contact with her friends Clara and Ainsley’s pregnancies, however, she starts to find eggs less appetizing and more revolting. First, Len Slank reacts to news of Ainsley’s pregnancy with a horrifying egg-themed story from his childhood: his mother served him eggs for breakfast, and “there was a little chicken inside of it, it wasn’t born yet […] there was a little beak and claws and everything.” By linking Ainsley’s pregnant stomach to this tale of the “little chicken,” Len reframes eggs (and the gestation they represent, in the novel and elsewhere) as violent and grotesque. From then on, Marian cannot eat eggs at all, feeling nauseous as the yellow yolks spill onto plates and bowls. Instead of embracing these symbols of fertility, Marian begins to dread them, much as she finds herself horrified by Clara’s out-of-control pregnant belly or Ainsley’s sudden, pregnancy-driven desperation for a husband.
However, after Marian leaves her own engagement party and confesses her sense of crisis to her lover Duncan, she decides to reclaim eggs for herself, baking them into the woman-shaped cake that gives the novel its title. In turning eggs into a different kind of creative symbol—using them to make edible art instead of to signify the gestation of human life—Marian regains some of her own sense of agency, rejecting childbirth (at least in the near term) in favor of a beautiful and “delicious” cake.
Eggs Quotes in The Edible Woman
The alarm clock startled me out of a dream in which I had looked down and seen my feet beginning to dissolve, like melting jelly, and had put on a pair of rubber boots just in time only to find that the ends of my fingers were turning transparent. I had started towards the mirror to see what was happening to my face, but at that point I woke up. I don't usually remember my dreams.
“She made me do it,” he muttered. “My own mother. We were having eggs for breakfast and I opened mine and there was, I swear there was a little chicken inside it, it wasn't born yet, I didn't want to touch it but she didn't see, she didn't see what was really there, she said Don't be silly, it looks like an ordinary egg but it wasn't it wasn't and she made me eat it. And I know, I know there was a little beak and little claws and everything…” He shuddered violently. “Horrible. Horrible, I can't stand it.”
[… When Marian] opened her soft-boiled egg and saw the yolk looking up at her with its one significant and accusing yellow eye, she found her mouth closing together like a frightened sea-anemone. It's living; it's alive, the muscles in her throat said, and tightened.
“You look delicious,” she told [the cake]. “Very appetizing. And that’s what will happen to you; that’s what you get for being food.” […]
She went into the kitchen and returned, bearing the platter in front of her, carefully and with reverence, as though she was carrying something sacred in a procession, an icon or the crown on a cushion in a play. She knelt, setting the platter on the coffee table in front of Peter.
“You've been trying to destroy me, haven't you,” she said. “You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute, something you'll like much better. This is what you really wanted all along, isn't it? I'll get you a fork.”
Eggs Symbol Timeline in The Edible Woman
