The Politics of Eating in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1965) vividly describes the hostile relation between food and women caused by capitalism and patriarchy, and leads to a grotesque conclusion which subverts the unilateral power structure between men and women. Women have inscribed pains upon their bodies due to the oppressive cultural codes under which they live and revealed through numerous painful symptoms. Women have survived by adapting their bodies to meet patriarchal demands, or by erasing their inner consciousness. In the process, women have built a negative relation with food, the consumption of food being a central representations of social desire. Atwood criticizes consumption-based capitalism which is founded on the exploitation of the other makes this worse and creates a new diseases called eating disorder. The most extreme form of eating disorder, anorexia can be discussed in terms of the axis of power control over gender. This present paper argues eating ideology introduced to block social desire of women leads to feminine self-negation as a virtual form of a cannibalism resulting in self-destruction. In addition, this study attempts to criticize the process of formation of eating-control ideology and its effectiveness, and the possibility of subverting this unbalanced power relation.