The Edible Woman

3.5/5

Read it for a uni class on Atwood. To be honest, I liked parts of it, and I love Atwood's writing style, but this book wasn't for me. It was a vey taxing read, with parts that made me feel awful.

Where to start? I liked the parts with Duncan the most. Marian seemed the most herself with him, and she wasn't afraid to speak her mind or to ask for things she wants. He was also a very interesting character. I also enjoyed the ending, that is why I gave a half star more.

The parts where she was thinking about food and eating really disturbed me, as I am easily influenced and was afraid something would be so graphic that would make me not eat that thing ever again. So I think if someone has an actual eating disorder, this book would be very triggering.

Overall, it wasn't the worst, but I strongly prefer Atwood's short stories, and this was a book that I wouldn't have read on my own accord, if it wasn't for the class.

There's a deeper message here about destroying yourself to meet the unvoiced but supposed expectations of one's life, but I just didn't like it. It felt very dated. If you're happy with most of your life, but don't like your relationship, end it! Don't be a pansy, Marian.

And what's funny is that for the first half of this book I really identified with Marian as a pragmatist, an over-thinker, someone who is competent and fine with things how they are. Even with the anxiety as she's train-wrecking into the conclusion of this relationship! But then it wrapped up so quickly and maybe I'm not the best at metaphor, but I didn't get it.

I'm also struggling to articulate my irritation with Ainsley's character, because yes, it's fine if you want to be a single parent, if you want to do it on your own, but tricking someone into impregnating you, declaring you don't want him to marry you even though he didn't ask, then changing your mind and demanding the guy marry you because 1960s "literature" declares that boys raised by single mothers = instant homosexuality, and that's a big fat thumbs-down from me. Even though Ainsley and Duncan — two of the most unlikeable people in this book — are the only one who ever voiced what they wanted or expected, and everyone else just acted as though there was a "proper" way of doing things, and you've done "it" wrong, whatever "it" is. So like, there's reason to like them, but I still don't.

Published in 1969, The Edible Woman is Margaret Atwood's first novel.

As a vegan, I was curious to read this book because it features a protagonist, Marian, who discovers one day that she can no longer eat meat. While at a fancy restaurant with her fiancé...

She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and at and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it.

Unfortunately for Marian, she could not stop thinking of animals every time she looked down at her plate. Beef soon gave way to pork and then to chicken...

“I'm turning into a vegetarian,” she was thinking sadly, “one of those cranks; I'll have to start eating lunch at Health Bars.”

As one might guess from the title, consumption is the dominant theme of this novel, not just consumption of animals but the many products that define modern society. Marian works for a market research firm, creating and administering surveys on behalf of consumer brands. She is both a consumer and observer of those who consume (and one who is consumed by a male-dominated culture).

Everything we might construe to be normal about society in the late 1960s, Atwood is questioning and ridiculing, and for good reason. Consider a work lunch with her colleagues when Marian gazes around the restaurant to take in a scene that is both dated and, in our mad rush of modern society, still quite relevant:

...stolid, breadfaced businessmen most of them, gobbling their food and swilling a few drinks to get the interruption of lunch over with as soon and as numbly as possible so they could get back to the office and make some money and get that over with as soon as possible and get back through the rush-hour traffic to their homes and wives and dinners and to get those over with as soon as possible too.

In the late 1960s (as is today), to consume animals is to be a normal member of society. Once you stop eating animals, you find yourself standing off somewhere on the outside of society looking in.

But Marian, despite her best efforts otherwise, remains an outsider. She views clothing as “costumes” and children as “its,” and a trip to the beauty parlor is compared, hilariously so, to undergoing a surgical operation (without anesthesia).

There are so many fascinating aspects of this novel, like the switching from first person to third and then back again. And Marian's roommate, who is trying to trick a man into impregnating her so she can be a single parent. And the graduate students who provide momentary escapes from adult society.

For Atwood, feminism and food are so finely woven together that it takes a magnifying glass to see the many ways that animals and women have suffered in a patriarchal society.

How does Marian rectify this desire to both fit in and not remain fully in? By taking a degree of control over consumption. By creating that thing that is consumed, by her fiancee, who says after eating, “It was delicious.”

“It” again.

This is not some dystopian future, it is our dystopian past. A past that remains all too present.

NOTE: This review was first posted on www.EcoLitBooks.com.