The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood’s 1969 novel about patriarchy and consumerism, follows a strange affair between a conformist young woman named Marian and a droll, unconventional English PhD student named Duncan. As Marian prepares for her upcoming wedding to her boyfriend Peter and dodges her friends Clara and Ainsley’s pregnancies, she feels increasingly alienated from the words and customs her society has defined for itself. The novel depicts this alienation structurally; soon after Marian gets engaged, the story shifts from her first-person narration to a third-person narrator, with Marian linguistically dissociating from herself. In other words, Marian’s understanding of her own identity is deeply tied to language—so when Marian loses her sense of herself, she also loses control over words.
Tellingly, Duncan—who is constantly debating obscure texts and convoluted literary theories with his PhD student roommates Trevor and Fish—struggles with a similar problem. The more he works to produce some new idea about language, the more Duncan feels that “words […] are beginning to lose their meanings.” And indeed, Duncan and Marian find that words often confuse meaning rather than establishing it, obscuring their truest thoughts and feelings instead of articulating them. As the novel uses words to tell Marian’s story, therefore, Atwood also casts doubt on her medium itself; The Edible Woman suggests that in a society so concerned with conformity and consumerism, no written narrative can be truly reliable because no words can ever have stable, reliable, meaning.
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Language, Meaning, and Alienation ThemeTracker
Language, Meaning, and Alienation Quotes in The Edible Woman
It wasn't only the feeling of being subject to rules I had no interest in and no part in making: you get adjusted to that at school. It was a kind of superstitious panic about the fact that I had actually signed my name, had put my signature to a magic document which seemed to bind me to a future so far ahead I couldn't think about it. Somewhere in front of me a self was waiting, preformed, a self who had worked during innumerable years for Seymour Surveys and was now receiving her reward. A pension. I foresaw a bleak room with a plug-in electric heater. […] I thought of my signature going into a file and the file going into a cabinet and the cabinet being shut away in a vault somewhere and locked.
[Ainsley] gave me a disgusted look. “Every woman should have at least one baby.” She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. “It's even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest femininity.” Ainsley is fond of paperback books by anthropologists about primitive cultures: there are several of them bogged down among the clothes on her floor. At her college they make you take courses in it.
“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!
“Ainsley behaved herself properly, why couldn't you? The trouble with you is,” he said savagely, “you're just rejecting your femininity.” […]
He glanced quickly over at me, his eyes narrowed as though he was taking aim. Then he gritted his teeth together and stepped murderously hard on the accelerator. […] At the suddenly increased speed the car skidded, turned two-and-a-quarter times round, slithered backward down over someone’s inclined lawn, and came to a bone-jolting stop. I heard something snap.
“You maniac!” I wailed when I had ricocheted off the glove compartment and realized I wasn't dead. “You'll get us all killed!” I must have been thinking of myself as plural.
“Once I went to the zoo and there was a cage with a frenzied armadillo in it going around in figure-eights […] They say all caged animals get that way when they're caged, it's a form of psychosis, and even if you set the animals free after they go like that they'll just run around in the same pattern. You read and read the material and after you've read the twentieth article you can't make any sense out of it anymore, and then you start thinking about the number of books that are published in any given year, in any given month, in any given week, and that's just too much. Words,” he said, looking in my direction finally but with his eyes strangely unfocused, as though he was really looking at a point several inches beneath my skin, “are beginning to lose their meanings.”
She could feel time eddying and curling almost visibly around her feet, rising around her, lifting her body in the office chair and bearing her, slowly and circuitously but with the inevitability of water moving downhill, towards the distant, not-so-distant-any-more day they had agreed on—in late March?—that would end this phase and begin another. Somewhere else, arrangements were being gradually made; the relatives were beginning to organize their forces and energies; it was all being taken care of, there was nothing for her to do. […] Now there was this day to get through: a landmark to be passed on the shore, a tree not much different from any of the others that could be distinguished from the rest only by being here rather than further back or further on, with no other purpose than to measure the distance traveled.
“It's like term papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it's a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.”
“Well, and then you can iron them again, can't you?” Marian said soothingly. “If they stayed neat you wouldn't have anything to do.”
“Maybe I do something worthwhile for a change,” [Duncan] said. […] “Production-consumption. You begin to wonder whether it isn't just a question of making one kind of garbage into another kind. The human mind was the last to be commercialized but they're doing a good job of it now.”
She watched the capable hands holding the knife and fork, slicing precisely with an exact adjustment of pressures. How skillfully he did it: no tearing, no ragged edges. And yet it was a violent action, cutting; and violence in connection with Peter seemed incongruous to her. Like the Moose Beer commercials, which had begun to appear everywhere […] The fisherman wading in the street, scooping the trout into his net was too tidy: he looked as though his hair had just been combed, a few strands glued neatly to his forehead to show he was wind-blown. And the fish also was unreal; it had no slime, no teeth, no smell; it was a clever toy, metal and enamel.
[…] She looked down at her half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood-red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed.
But now she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge’s back by the top of her corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh […] and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanence and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip; their fluidity sustained somewhere within by bones, without by a carapace of clothing and makeup. What peculiar creatures they were; in the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage…
[…] She was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.
Of course Duncan was making what they called “demands,” if only on her time and attention; but at least he wasn’t threatening her with some intangible gift in return. His complete self-centeredness was reassuring in a peculiar way. Thus, when he would murmur, with his lips touching her cheek, “You know, I don’t even like you very much,” it didn’t disturb her at all because she didn’t have to answer. But when Peter, with his mouth in approximately the same position, would whisper “I love you” and wait for the echo, she had to exert herself.
When at last all the clamps and rollers and pins were in place, and her head resembled a mutant hedgehog with a covering of rounded hairy appendages instead of spikes, she was led away and installed under a dryer and switched on. She looked sideways down the assembly-line of women seated in identical mauve chairs under identical whirring mushroom-shaped machines. All that was visible was a row of strange creatures with legs of various shapes and hands that held magazines and heads that were metal domes. Inert; totally inert. Was this what she was being pushed towards, this compound of the simply vegetable and the simply mechanical? An electric mushroom.
“Marian, what have you got there?” [Ainsley] walked over to see. “It's a woman—a woman made of cake!” She gave Marian a strange look.
Marian chewed and swallowed. “Have some,” she said, “it's really good. I made it this afternoon.”
Ainsley's mouth opened and closed, fishlike, as though she was trying to take down the full implication of what she saw. “Marian!” she exclaimed at last, with horror. “You're rejecting your femininity!”
[…] Marian looked back at her platter. The woman laid there, still smiling glassily, her legs gone. “Nonsense,” she said. “It's only a cake.” She plunged her fork into the carcass, neatly severing the body from the head.
I had just begun on the windows when the phone rang. It was Duncan. I was surprised; I had more or less forgotten about him. […]
I was irritated with him for not wanting to discuss what I was going to do myself. Now that I was thinking of myself in the first-person singular again I found my own situation much more interesting than his.
