You are what you eat: the politics of eating in the novels of Margaret Atwood

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Emma Parker

All the heroines interpret the world in terms of food and negotiate their way through life using food. For women, eating and non-eating articulate that which is ideologically unspeakable. Food functions as a muted form of female self-expression but, more than that, it also becomes a medium of experience. Food imagery saturates the novels and becomes the dominant metaphor the heroines use to describe people, landscape, and emotion. As Sally Cline has pointed out, women appropriate food as a language because traditionally they have always been associated with food (3). In addition, food is one of the few resources available to women. As a consumer surveyor, Marion is constantly submerged in a food environment, and the other heroines have the major responsibility for cooking and shopping. Women control food, Cline insists, because they cannot control their lives (1). Given the patriarchal nature of language and its inability to accommodate female experience, it is unsurprising that women choose an alternative, non-verbal form of communication. The failure of language, the inadequacy of words as a mode of communication, is a recurrent theme in Atwood's work.

The significance of the politics of eating in Atwood's fiction is endorsed by images of orality. Extraordinary emphasis is placed on the mouth. Traditionally, as Rosalind Coward has shown, the mouth has been a site of vulnerability for women (Part II). In Bodily Harm Jake penetrates and polices Rennie's mouth as with every other area of her life and body: "You have a dirty mouth, Jake said. It needs to be washed out with a tongue" (117). The power of the male mouth compared to the exploited nature of the female mouth is illustrated by Rennie's memory of being followed by Mexican men making sucking noises. In Lady Oracle the way in which Joan's mother always draws a bigger mouth around her own with lipstick mirrors her desire for power in the same way as her attempt to control what goes into her daughter's mouth. While Atwood demonstrates how women have been controlled through their mouths, she also presents the female mouth as a locus of potential strength. The mouth itself, like its uses, is a potential source of power. In Cat's Eye, before she meets Cordelia, Elaine feels comfortable with her mouth. She and her brother "practise burping at will, or we put our mouths against the inside of our arms and blow to make farting noises, or we fill our mouths with water and see how far we can spit" (68). However, when she is bullied by Cordelia, Elaine starts to develop a problem with her mouth. Her emotional distress is expressed physically through her mouth via sickness. But just as her powerlessness is expressed through her mouth, so too is her rebellion. As the balance of power between the two girls changes, Elaine develops a "mean mouth":

I have a mean mouth.

I have such a mean mouth that I become known for it. I don't use it unless provoked, but then I open my mean mouth and short, devastating comments come out of it. . . . The person I used my mean mouth on the most was Cordelia. (234-35)