Anti-edibles: capitalism and schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Jennifer Hobgood

Typically, critics have read Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman as either an optimistic celebration of female "liberation" or a materialist-feminist protest. But Atwood's style--primarily her manipulation of a shifting narrative point of view and her use of an unbalanced, tripartite structure--reflects a more complex picture of capitalism and female subjectivity in the 1960s. By varying structural and narrative form within the novel and by using anorexia as a discursive technique, Atwood constructs states of paranoia, decomposition, and schizophrenia to emphasize the dynamic nature of the capitalist system--its exploitative disposition as well as its potential to release female desire from systemic constraint.

"[S]ee that she eat and drink as a good Christian should, comporting herself to her condition, and making the best of it."

--Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or The History of a Young Lady

Recent feminist critics of Margaret Atwood's 1969 novel The Edible Woman tend to be divided on the question of whether Marian, the novel's heroine, achieves "liberation" from the economic and power system of the early 1960s that scripts her subordination. The criticism of the novel generally turns on the meaning of the "edible-woman" (a cake shaped as a woman). Taking the cake as a consummate image for the novel, critics tend to read it as either a symbol of Marian's liberation from or as her reentry into the field of consumer capitalism. (1) To Glenys Stow, the cake "is of course, a deliberate symbol of the artificial womanhood which her world has tried to impose on her," and with the "crazy feast" at the novel's conclusion "Marian breaks out of the expected social pattern" (90). Sharon Wilson concedes that Marian "returns to [the] society" that has oppressed her, but maintains there is symbolic agency in Marian's return: "By baking, decorating, serving, and consuming the cake-woman image she has been condit ioned to project, Marian announces, to herself and others, that she is not food" (96). (2) Meanwhile, critics like Gayle Green affirm that even though "The cake lady [...] is a powerful symbol, a gesture of resistance to a system that would devour her [,...] it is difficult to see how this symbol will translate into action [...]. Marian evolves--in the terms of the novel--from prey to predator" (96, 111).

But as Robert Lecker and Darlene Kelley have pointed out, the novel's final chapter does not provide comfortable closure, for it raises more questions than it answers. (3) When readers complete the novel, when the edible woman is finally digested by Duncan and Marian, the question that seeps beyond the text is, "what now?," and the answer does seem to be one of two options--that Marian continue her career by returning to her position at Seymour Surveys or finding a similarly dead-end job (she tells Duncan that she is looking for another job) or that she get married and become a mother. These are her choices within the system. In "A Note from the Author," Margaret Atwood herself has said that the novel's "self-indulgent grotesqueries [... derive [...] from the society by which she found herself surrounded. [...] It's noteworthy that my heroine's choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning: a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it. But these were the options fo r a young woman, even a young educated woman, in Canada in the early sixties" (312-13). For this reason, I would argue that the way to solve the impasse in criticism of The Edible Woman is not to focus on the novel's final chapter, not to seek closure and stable interpretation, but to listen to the silences of a conclusion that returns readers again to the place where the heroine's troubles began. Thus, we should resist imposing final, stable meaning onto the "edible-woman" cake, and rather seek the space where the silences abound, where Marian loses the ability to speak for herself in the first person, where her body speaks through anorexia--in short, the space where she becomes not only most marginalized from dominant culture but also at the same time one of its most penetrating critics.

The Edible Woman, which spans a few months of Marian McAlpin's life, is told in three parts. In Part I, which is written in the first-person point of view, Marian becomes engaged to Peter and experiences an escalating paranoia as she is variously alienated by her work situation, co-workers, friends, and living arrangement. In Part II, the longest section of the novel, the narrative abruptly shifts into third-person point of view, and Marian gradually becomes more and more anorexic. Her anorexia nervosa is of a peculiar nature--she not only loses the ability to eat anything with a semblance of vitality but is also haunted by the idea that she herself is being consumed. At the end of Part III, Marian bakes and serves the "edible woman" to Peter as she rejects him as a marriage partner. Ultimately, Part III witnesses Marian's emergence from third-person anorectic space; she regains the ability to eat and is once more the speaker, the "I." Even though the novel's consummating act, the baked and served "edible wom an," has generally been interpreted as either an act of defiance and liberation or as an indication of her reinsertion into the economic and social machine of capitalism, it seems that Part III reverberates most uncomfortably following a Part II that, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's register of schizoanalysis, may be seen as a schizophrenic space. Deleuze and Guattari posit a broad notion of schizophrenia: "Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines [...]. Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows" (Anti-Oedipus 5). (4) Part II of The Edible Woman is such a schizophrenic space. Here, Marian's body refuses to consume anything with a semblance of vitality, the narrative voice relies wholly on the third person point of view, and the heroin e is obsessed with the maneuvers of the novel's "white rabbit," Duncan. (5) In this escapist space of alternate reality, of madness and schizophrenia, Atwood's extended allusion to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is most apparent and consequential. (6) Like Alice, Marian is displaced--immersed in a space of subjective "unreality," where the social realm is "nonsense," the ego dissipates into molecular connections with other viable creatures, and food (or lack thereof) is a vehicle for agency. This arena, in Deleuze and Guattari's terminology, is the moment between the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of desire, where a multiplicity of potential meanings is possible through schizophrenic foreclosure of capitalist hegemony.