Book Review: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (Bottom of the TBR Pile Challenge)
Summary:
It’s the 1960s in Canada, and Marian McAlpin is working writing and analyzing surveys for a marketing research firm. She has a feminist roommate she doesn’t quite understand, and hangs out with the three office virgins for lunch. Her boyfriend is comfortable and familiar. When he proposes to her, the office virgins think she’s hit the jackpot, her roommate questions why she’s following the norm, and her married and very pregnant friend seems hesitant about her fiancee. None of this really bothers Marian, though. What does bother her is that, ever since her engagement, there are more and more things she simply can’t eat. First meat then eggs then even vegetables! She thinks of herself causing them suffering, and she just can’t stomach them. What will happen to her if there’s eventually nothing left for her to eat?
Review:
I’m a fan of a few Margaret Atwood books, and the concept of this book intrigued me. Since I run the Mental Illness Advocacy Reading Challenge, I was also wondering if this might actually be a new take on anorexia. Unfortunately, Marian is not really anorexic, it’s more of an elaborate, overdone metaphor. Perhaps the plot is simply dated, but the interesting concept, when fleshed-out, comes out rather ho-hum.
The novel is divided into three parts, with Marian using first-person narration for the first and third parts, with third person narration taking over for the second. This is meant to demonstrate how Marian is losing herself and not feeling her own identity. It’s an interesting writing device, and one of the things I enjoyed more in the book. It certainly is jarring to suddenly go from first to third person when talking about the main character, and it sets the tone quite well.
It’s impossible to read this book and not feel the 1960s in it. Marian is in a culture where women work but only until marriage, where women attending college is still seen as a waste by some, and where there is a small counter-cultural movement that seems odd to the mainstream characters and feels a bit like a caricature to the modern reader. However, the fact that Marian feels so trapped in her engagement, which could certainly still be the case in the 1960s, doesn’t ring as true, given the people surrounding Marian. Her roommate is counter-cultural, her three office friends claim to want a man but clearly aren’t afraid of aging alone and won’t settle. Her married friend shares household and child rearing with her husband, at least 50/50. It’s hard to empathize with Marian, when it seems that her trap is all of her own making in her own mind. She kind of careens around like aimless, violent, driftwood, refusing to take any agency for herself, her situation, or how she lets her fiancee treat her. It’s all puzzling and difficult to relate to.
The Marian-cannot-eat-plot is definitely not developed as anorexia. Marian at first stops eating certain meats because she empathizes with the animals the meat came from. As a vegetarian, I had trouble seeing this as a real problem and fully understood where Marian was coming from. Eventually, she starts to perceive herself as causing pain when eating a dead plant, bread, etc… The book presents both empathizing with animals and plants as equally pathologic, which is certainly not true. Marian’s affliction actually reminded me a bit of orthorexia nervosa (becoming unhealthily obsessed with healthy eating, source) but the book itself presents eliminating any food from your diet as pathologic. Either Marian eats like everyone else or she is going off the deep-end. There is no moderate in-between.
What the Marian-cannot-eat-plot is actually used for is as a metaphor for how Marian’s fiancee (or her relationship with him) is supposedly consuming her. The more entwined with her fiancee she becomes in society’s eyes, the closer the wedding comes, the less Marian is able to consume, because she herself is being consumed. This would be quite eloquent if Marian’s fiancee or her relationship with him was actually harmful or consuming, but it certainly does not come across that way in what we see of it in the book.
Marian presents herself to her boyfriend then fiancee as a mainstream person, and he treats her that way. He does one thing that’s kind of off-the-rocker (crashes his car into a hedge) but so does she on the same night (runs away in the middle of dinner, across people’s backyards, for no apparent reason and hides under a bed while having drinks with three other people at a friend’s house). The only thing that he does that could possibly be read as a bit cruel is when she dresses up for a party he states that he wishes she would dress that way more often. It’s not a partner’s place to tell the other how they should dress, but it’s also ok to express when you like something your partner is wearing. Personally I thought the fiancee really meant the latter but just struggled with appropriately expressing it, and Marian herself never expresses any wants or desires directly to him on how they interact, what they wear, what they eat, how they decorate, etc…, so how could he possibly know? In addition to never expressing herself to her fiancee, Marian also cheats on him, so how exactly the fiancee ends up the one being demonized in the conclusion of the book is a bit beyond me. He’s bad because he wanted to marry her? Okay…… The whole thing reads as a bit heavy-handed second-wave feminism to me, honestly. Marriage seems to be presented in the book as something that consumes women, no matter if they choose it or are forced into it by society. It is not presented as a valid choice if a woman is able, within her society and culture, to make her own choices.
In spite of these plot and character issues, the book is still an engaging read with an interesting writing style. I was caught up in the story, even if I didn’t really like the ideas within it.
Overall, this is a well-written book with some interesting narrative voice choices that did not age well. It is definitely a work of the 1960s with some second-wave feminism ideas that might not sit well with modern readers. Recommended to those interested in in a literary take on second-wave feminism’s perception of marriage.
3 out of 5 stars
Source: Better World Books
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This work by Amanda Nevius is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Opinions of a Wolf 
This book always reminds me of that Star Trek Next Gen episode when they eat the cake made to look like Troi.
I actually just started watching STNG. (I grew up watching OS and Enterprise). I’ll have to hunt up that episode and compare!
I didn’t love The Handmaid’s Tale, but I’d like to give Atwood more of a try. I’m not sure I’ll do so with this book though, since the conclusion seems like it could be really frustrating. I’m far more a fan of feminism as the belief that women should be able to do whatever they want, than as a belief that men are bad and we should try to maintain complete independence from them.
I loved The Handmaid’s Tale but I definitely think Atwood’s books sway between loved it and meh. She’s not a writer whose books I consistently love, although she is a writer who I consistently respect.
I’d recommend trying out the MaddAddam trilogy next. Each of the books in the trilogy demonstrates a different Atwood style, so if you’re going to like Atwood, you’ll like at least one of them.
I always say my feminism is about men and women having the right to make their own choices, and those choices aren’t dictated to us due to our gender. So I definitely agree that the idea that a particular choice is automatically wrong for all women rubs me the wrong way.
Maybe it needs looking at in the context of the period. I think possibly the idea was that given the time period a fully equal marriage would not be possible, no matter how much they tried for it, because the wider society would still expect her to be subordinate – consumption was inevitable. It’s a lot simpler than a position that would be taken nowadays, because misogyny was cruder and more obvious. It is very second-wave. Even the emphasis on the symbolism of consumption, rather than having her face direct misogyny, seems very second-wave. I always enjoy reading it purely because of how well it’s written and the amount of humour.