“A Good Meal Always Makes You Feel a Little More Human”: Gendering the Cannibal and Embodying Resistance in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

Abstract: Concerned with the central conflict of metaphorical cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s novel The Edible Woman, this paper investigates the cannibalistic impulses in Peter and Marian’s relationship as well as her body’s involuntary abstinence from all things alimentary. Through a close reading of the novel’s food discourses in two key scenes, it explores how gendered power dynamics are rendered visible through the figure of the metaphorical cannibal, “a masculine-coded, voracious eater who feeds on a feminized, passive object of consumption” (Counihan, “Introduction” 3). At the same time, it also analyzes the unconscious strategies of resistance that arise in response to this: While Marian does not resist being cannibalized, her body does. In conceptualizing the feminine-coded body as an agent rather than an object to be acted upon (Probyn 16), this paper argues that Marian’s body stages her protest through an autonomous intervention, becoming unknowable—and ungovernable—even to herself.

"You’re probably representative of modern youth, rebelling against the system,” muses Duncan, the novel’s resident contrarian and Marian’s affair, “though it isn’t considered orthodox to begin with the digestive system” (Atwood 197). Set in 1960s Toronto and published at the advent of second-wave feminism, Margaret Atwood’s debut novel The Edible Woman explores the rigid societal and consumerist structures of the system in question, which protagonist Marian McAlpin quite literally cannot stomach. Newly engaged to her respectable lawyer-boyfriend Peter and stuck at a dead-end desk job, Marian anxiously navigates two kinds of consumption that threaten to unravel her “abnormally normal” life (211): first, that she feels her autonomous sense of self being cannibalized by her fiancé, and second, that her body, casting an ever-wider net, starts to empathize with and subsequently reject any type of food that has once been alive. The narrative culminates in Marian’s and Peter’s confrontation, in which she presents him with a cake in the shape of a woman—the freshly baked substitute for her own metaphorical cannibalization.