The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
I've been lurking since I saw this community in the spotlight, and I figured that I might as well contribute, given that this book was... well, let's just say I wasn't a fan. I posted this review of it in my LJ over the summer, complete with quotes. It's lengthy, because of the quotes and because I probably talk more than I really need to.
From amazon.ca:
[Atwood's] main character, Marian McAlpin, has a very contemporary problem. She feels alienated: constrained by her market-research job, ambivalent about her engagement to the "nicely packaged" but dull Peter, and alarmed by the prospect of her friends embarking on chaotic motherhoods. In a narrative jammed with images of food, body parts, advertising, and shiny surfaces, Marian feels like a commodity to be portioned out, wrapped up, and consumed. Acquiescing to a degree, she also rebels: she virtually stops eating, and she constantly flees from Peter in favour of the dubious alternative represented by Duncan, a bizarre student with a fetish for ironing. Vulnerable but empowered, tangled up in a world from which she is also acerbically detached, Marian is a classic Atwood heroine. The novel's ambiguous resolution, involving a woman-shaped cake that Marian solemnly decapitates and serves to her significant others, may seem heavy-handed. But it does drive home Atwood's pointed satire of an insidious consumer culture that convinces young people--and women in particular--that their identities and choices can be pulled from a shelf. That message is as relevant as ever. The Edible Woman has no best-before date.
The Edible Woman is divided into three parts - parts one and three are written in first person, and part two (the longest section of the book) is written in third person, though there isn't really any obvious reason for the change in person as far as I can tell. In fact, the parts of the book that I enjoyed the most were parts one and three, because Atwood tends to keep her distance from all of the characters - as a result, when she's writing in third person I lose all sympathy for the protagonist, Marian, because I honestly don't understand her motivations. That's my first major problem with the novel.
The character's motivations are unclear throughout. For instance, Marian's roommate decides, out of the blue, that she is going to have a baby, and though her reasoning is pretty nonsensical, Marian doesn't really question it:
"All right," I said. "Granted. But why do you want a baby, Ainsley? What are you going to do with it?"
She gave me a disgusted look. "Every woman should have at least one baby." She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. "It's even more important than sex. It fulfils your deepest femininity." [...]
"But why now?" I said, searching my mind for objections. "What about the job at the art gallery?" (40)
I mean, granted, I've known people to do some pretty stupid things throughout their lives, but... the situation is completely absurd. I don't understand why Marian wouldn't smack Ainsley upside the head, or point out how moronic the idea is, or what - 'what about your job?' made me go, "...her job? how about her entire life?", since the vast majority of people tend to realize taking care of a child isn't exactly a short-term commitment. It's not a 'plot twist' so much as a 'plot device slash what just happened and why?' moment. However Ainsley does go get herself knocked up, and only then does she realize that she can't raise her baby alone (though she justifies it, in the book, by saying that by raising her child alone, it'll end up gay if it's a boy - just... really?).
Pregnancy in general is dealt with in a very negative light in the book. Ainsley is a bit of an idiot, and caught up in ideas rather than practicalities. The other pregnant woman, Clara, is used to represent the typical "mother" figure in a normal family (she and her husband Joe are painfully dull, but seem to be Atwood's representation of 'average' married couple). Clara is pregnant with another child when we meet her at the beginning of the novel, and it seems like by being pregnant the life is sucked out of her - she's always described as tired, and her pregnancy is swallowing her up, and she is incapable of doing anything. For example:
Clara was talking a lot more, and a lot more quickly, than she usually did, and Marian found herself being surprised. During the later, more vegetable state of Clara's pregnancy she had tended to forget that Clara had a mind at all or any perceptive faculties above the merely sentient and sponge-like, since she had spent most of her time being absorbed in, or absorbed by, her tuberous abdomen (149).
After Clara has the baby, Marian and Joe are talking about Clara at a party, and Joe says, "I worry about [Clara] a lot, you know. I think it's a lot harder for her than most other women; I think it's harder for any woman who has been to university. She gets the idea that she has a mind, her professors pay attention to what she has to say, they treat her like a thinking human being, when she gets married, her core gets invaded... [...] Her core, the centre of her personality, the thing she's built up; the image of herself, if you like. [...] Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her..." (277) Ignoring the fact that people really don't speak that way, especially when they're drunk (as Joe is), all I could think at the time was, "...what? ...really? Oh, Atwood." It was bizarre - and, yes, Atwood (especially at the end of the 1960s) was a radical feminist, but I don't think that that's much of an excuse. Joe, up until this point, has been a really nice guy; he treats his wife well, he loves his kids, he has a good job, etc. He might be dull, but he's still a good man - and then he starts to spout BS like the above, and as a reader, I was completely baffled, because I didn't see it coming at all - it didn't fit well with Joe's character.
Anyway, back to the character motivations, and how unclear they are. Near the beginning of the book, Marian goes out with her boyfriend (soon to be fiancée) Peter, a old friend, Len, and her roommate Ainsley. And she proceeds to act like a madwoman - she cries for no reason at dinner, hides under Len's bed (it's more quiet under there, she says), and then runs away down the street in the pouring rain - all of this happens without provocation. When Peter finally catches up to her he drives her home and, after flipping out on her for acting like a madwoman (rightfully so - it's absolutely absurd, the things that she does, and even though it's narrated from first person, as the reader I have no idea, why she's acting the way she is, either), he proposes to her. There is no chemistry between these characters; they have sex, but there's no love in their relationship. Marian views Peter as nice, and justifies accepting his proposal because he's a nice, steady guy who she can count on - but she doesn't really seem to love him, and he only sees her as a trophy-wife. So he proposes, and she accepts, and I'm left sitting at the end of the first part going, "...okay, then."
I would think, ordinarily, that Atwood is being too subtle for me to pick up on, until I reached the end of the book and realized that it seems more like each of Atwood's characters operates completely independently from one another, and actually has no feelings for the people around them - there aren't any friendships, or romances, or motivations for the characters to do anything. They are just 'there', and Atwood has them do things - rather than the action being character driven, it's author-driven. (However, this is something I've noticed about all of the Atwood novels I've read, and something that bothers me about her writing; I mean, if characters are supposed to be in love, I shouldn't have to read the synopsis to actually find out (which was the case when I read Oryx & Crake, and found out that Jimmy apparently loves Oryx. I was confused then too)).
Atwood also is not particularly subtle. The book is about Marian, and how she reacts to the pressures of the world around her by suddenly becoming unable to eat anything. It's essentially summarized at the end of the book in a smack-you-in-the-face-obvious symbol of a cake that she baked and decorated to look like a woman, which her ex-fiancée Peter is unable to eat, but her weird university friend Duncan digs into happily. Marian tells Peter, "You've been trying to destroy me, haven't you. You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute, something you'll like much better" (320) and gives him a fork to eat the cake, but this brings me to my second problem another issue with the book - Atwood blames all of the female character's problems on the men around them, not on the women themselves.
The women hold no accountability in the book, and I feel that this is what undermines the book's message (because it's Atwood - there has to be a message of some sort; in this book, it's pretty much that men desire to consume women, and therefore a woman should remain independent of men to avoid becoming objectified). It's pretty clear that the men are being blamed for all of the women's problems in the book - or if she's trying to imply that women who think this way are wrong, she's doing a poor job of it (IMO, obviously; there's a ton of people who thinks that she does this brilliantly). Ainsley is an absolute idiot; she gets herself knocked up, and then uses her pregnancy to try and force Len into a permanent relationship with her; she's probably the only female character whose flaws are of her doing, but then she ends up involved with another man (Duncan's roommate Fish) and is probably the only character satisfied at the end of the novel. Clara, Joe's wife, is reduced to a thoughtless, mindless, useless being, who only seems capable of holding children and popping more babies out. And the protagonist, Marian, loses any ability to think after her engagement:
My first impulse was to answer, with the evasive flippancy I'd always used before when he'd asked me serious questions about myself, "What about Groundhog Day?" But instead I heard a soft flannelly voice I barely recognized, saying, "I'd rather have you decide that. I'd rather leave the big decisions up to you." I was astounded at myself. I'd never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing was that I really meant it." (101)
Or later:
That was another nice thing about Peter. He could make that kind of decision so effortlessly. She had fallen into the habit in the last month or so of letting him choose for her (170).
And on and on. It's absolutely ridiculous, especially since Marian then turns around and blames Peter for wanting to "assimilate" her, when she clearly has put up no fight. She has made the decision, just as much as Peter did, to stop thinking and act like she has no mind, and yet Atwood places the onus solely on Peter. (I mean, really, damn him for being born a man! ~*~Obviously~*~ that must be why he's the bad guy!) It's like a child who wants to be an adult without the responsibilities; Atwood's female characters are women who (Atwood) wants to be recognized in their own right, without actually having any of their stupid actions attributed to them.
My other complaints about the novel are minor - while Atwood sometimes lets her poet-side get away a little too much (it feels like she's trying too hard to come across as poetic), some of her imagery and metaphor works wonderfully. Other times, not so much - but at least there were a few times where I was pulled out of the novel to think, "wow, that's nice" rather that "...what the hell?".
Unfortunately, while the ideas of the book are interesting, they are poorly executed - or rather, Atwood doesn't seem capable of pushing her idea far enough to make it plausible; she tends to overshoot her point. Because her characters don't have clear motives, it is hard for me, as the reader, to connect with any of the characters, and I feel that part of writing (and reading) is being able to empathize with the characters; if I don't care about the characters, I have no reason (except for a masochistic promise to myself :P ) to finish the book. Also, the book was ruined by the not-so-subtle symbol at the end; I sat there for a good few minutes, wondering if there was another, less-obvious meaning that I was just missing, but I couldn't think of one.
If she had left off the horrible symbolism, and left things a little more vague, and for the love of God, had characters that I cared about (since unsympathetic characters don't necessarily mean characters I don't want to follow; like I said above, though, that's an issue I've had in most of the Atwood novels I've read. I just don't care about the characters because they kind of float along, but don't come across as actually having any meaningful way of interacting with each other or the world around them) I probably would have liked this book a whole lot better than I did.
tl:dr: I dislike Atwood's characterizations, approaches to being a feminist, and the fact that she couldn't be more obvious if she tried.
From amazon.ca:
[Atwood's] main character, Marian McAlpin, has a very contemporary problem. She feels alienated: constrained by her market-research job, ambivalent about her engagement to the "nicely packaged" but dull Peter, and alarmed by the prospect of her friends embarking on chaotic motherhoods. In a narrative jammed with images of food, body parts, advertising, and shiny surfaces, Marian feels like a commodity to be portioned out, wrapped up, and consumed. Acquiescing to a degree, she also rebels: she virtually stops eating, and she constantly flees from Peter in favour of the dubious alternative represented by Duncan, a bizarre student with a fetish for ironing. Vulnerable but empowered, tangled up in a world from which she is also acerbically detached, Marian is a classic Atwood heroine. The novel's ambiguous resolution, involving a woman-shaped cake that Marian solemnly decapitates and serves to her significant others, may seem heavy-handed. But it does drive home Atwood's pointed satire of an insidious consumer culture that convinces young people--and women in particular--that their identities and choices can be pulled from a shelf. That message is as relevant as ever. The Edible Woman has no best-before date.
The Edible Woman is divided into three parts - parts one and three are written in first person, and part two (the longest section of the book) is written in third person, though there isn't really any obvious reason for the change in person as far as I can tell. In fact, the parts of the book that I enjoyed the most were parts one and three, because Atwood tends to keep her distance from all of the characters - as a result, when she's writing in third person I lose all sympathy for the protagonist, Marian, because I honestly don't understand her motivations. That's my first major problem with the novel.
The character's motivations are unclear throughout. For instance, Marian's roommate decides, out of the blue, that she is going to have a baby, and though her reasoning is pretty nonsensical, Marian doesn't really question it:
"All right," I said. "Granted. But why do you want a baby, Ainsley? What are you going to do with it?"
She gave me a disgusted look. "Every woman should have at least one baby." She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hair dryer. "It's even more important than sex. It fulfils your deepest femininity." [...]
"But why now?" I said, searching my mind for objections. "What about the job at the art gallery?" (40)
I mean, granted, I've known people to do some pretty stupid things throughout their lives, but... the situation is completely absurd. I don't understand why Marian wouldn't smack Ainsley upside the head, or point out how moronic the idea is, or what - 'what about your job?' made me go, "...her job? how about her entire life?", since the vast majority of people tend to realize taking care of a child isn't exactly a short-term commitment. It's not a 'plot twist' so much as a 'plot device slash what just happened and why?' moment. However Ainsley does go get herself knocked up, and only then does she realize that she can't raise her baby alone (though she justifies it, in the book, by saying that by raising her child alone, it'll end up gay if it's a boy - just... really?).
Pregnancy in general is dealt with in a very negative light in the book. Ainsley is a bit of an idiot, and caught up in ideas rather than practicalities. The other pregnant woman, Clara, is used to represent the typical "mother" figure in a normal family (she and her husband Joe are painfully dull, but seem to be Atwood's representation of 'average' married couple). Clara is pregnant with another child when we meet her at the beginning of the novel, and it seems like by being pregnant the life is sucked out of her - she's always described as tired, and her pregnancy is swallowing her up, and she is incapable of doing anything. For example:
Clara was talking a lot more, and a lot more quickly, than she usually did, and Marian found herself being surprised. During the later, more vegetable state of Clara's pregnancy she had tended to forget that Clara had a mind at all or any perceptive faculties above the merely sentient and sponge-like, since she had spent most of her time being absorbed in, or absorbed by, her tuberous abdomen (149).
After Clara has the baby, Marian and Joe are talking about Clara at a party, and Joe says, "I worry about [Clara] a lot, you know. I think it's a lot harder for her than most other women; I think it's harder for any woman who has been to university. She gets the idea that she has a mind, her professors pay attention to what she has to say, they treat her like a thinking human being, when she gets married, her core gets invaded... [...] Her core, the centre of her personality, the thing she's built up; the image of herself, if you like. [...] Her feminine role and her core are really in opposition, her feminine role demands passivity from her..." (277) Ignoring the fact that people really don't speak that way, especially when they're drunk (as Joe is), all I could think at the time was, "...what? ...really? Oh, Atwood." It was bizarre - and, yes, Atwood (especially at the end of the 1960s) was a radical feminist, but I don't think that that's much of an excuse. Joe, up until this point, has been a really nice guy; he treats his wife well, he loves his kids, he has a good job, etc. He might be dull, but he's still a good man - and then he starts to spout BS like the above, and as a reader, I was completely baffled, because I didn't see it coming at all - it didn't fit well with Joe's character.
Anyway, back to the character motivations, and how unclear they are. Near the beginning of the book, Marian goes out with her boyfriend (soon to be fiancée) Peter, a old friend, Len, and her roommate Ainsley. And she proceeds to act like a madwoman - she cries for no reason at dinner, hides under Len's bed (it's more quiet under there, she says), and then runs away down the street in the pouring rain - all of this happens without provocation. When Peter finally catches up to her he drives her home and, after flipping out on her for acting like a madwoman (rightfully so - it's absolutely absurd, the things that she does, and even though it's narrated from first person, as the reader I have no idea, why she's acting the way she is, either), he proposes to her. There is no chemistry between these characters; they have sex, but there's no love in their relationship. Marian views Peter as nice, and justifies accepting his proposal because he's a nice, steady guy who she can count on - but she doesn't really seem to love him, and he only sees her as a trophy-wife. So he proposes, and she accepts, and I'm left sitting at the end of the first part going, "...okay, then."
I would think, ordinarily, that Atwood is being too subtle for me to pick up on, until I reached the end of the book and realized that it seems more like each of Atwood's characters operates completely independently from one another, and actually has no feelings for the people around them - there aren't any friendships, or romances, or motivations for the characters to do anything. They are just 'there', and Atwood has them do things - rather than the action being character driven, it's author-driven. (However, this is something I've noticed about all of the Atwood novels I've read, and something that bothers me about her writing; I mean, if characters are supposed to be in love, I shouldn't have to read the synopsis to actually find out (which was the case when I read Oryx & Crake, and found out that Jimmy apparently loves Oryx. I was confused then too)).
Atwood also is not particularly subtle. The book is about Marian, and how she reacts to the pressures of the world around her by suddenly becoming unable to eat anything. It's essentially summarized at the end of the book in a smack-you-in-the-face-obvious symbol of a cake that she baked and decorated to look like a woman, which her ex-fiancée Peter is unable to eat, but her weird university friend Duncan digs into happily. Marian tells Peter, "You've been trying to destroy me, haven't you. You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made you a substitute, something you'll like much better" (320) and gives him a fork to eat the cake, but this brings me to my second problem another issue with the book - Atwood blames all of the female character's problems on the men around them, not on the women themselves.
The women hold no accountability in the book, and I feel that this is what undermines the book's message (because it's Atwood - there has to be a message of some sort; in this book, it's pretty much that men desire to consume women, and therefore a woman should remain independent of men to avoid becoming objectified). It's pretty clear that the men are being blamed for all of the women's problems in the book - or if she's trying to imply that women who think this way are wrong, she's doing a poor job of it (IMO, obviously; there's a ton of people who thinks that she does this brilliantly). Ainsley is an absolute idiot; she gets herself knocked up, and then uses her pregnancy to try and force Len into a permanent relationship with her; she's probably the only female character whose flaws are of her doing, but then she ends up involved with another man (Duncan's roommate Fish) and is probably the only character satisfied at the end of the novel. Clara, Joe's wife, is reduced to a thoughtless, mindless, useless being, who only seems capable of holding children and popping more babies out. And the protagonist, Marian, loses any ability to think after her engagement:
My first impulse was to answer, with the evasive flippancy I'd always used before when he'd asked me serious questions about myself, "What about Groundhog Day?" But instead I heard a soft flannelly voice I barely recognized, saying, "I'd rather have you decide that. I'd rather leave the big decisions up to you." I was astounded at myself. I'd never said anything remotely like that to him before. The funny thing was that I really meant it." (101)
Or later:
That was another nice thing about Peter. He could make that kind of decision so effortlessly. She had fallen into the habit in the last month or so of letting him choose for her (170).
And on and on. It's absolutely ridiculous, especially since Marian then turns around and blames Peter for wanting to "assimilate" her, when she clearly has put up no fight. She has made the decision, just as much as Peter did, to stop thinking and act like she has no mind, and yet Atwood places the onus solely on Peter. (I mean, really, damn him for being born a man! ~*~Obviously~*~ that must be why he's the bad guy!) It's like a child who wants to be an adult without the responsibilities; Atwood's female characters are women who (Atwood) wants to be recognized in their own right, without actually having any of their stupid actions attributed to them.
My other complaints about the novel are minor - while Atwood sometimes lets her poet-side get away a little too much (it feels like she's trying too hard to come across as poetic), some of her imagery and metaphor works wonderfully. Other times, not so much - but at least there were a few times where I was pulled out of the novel to think, "wow, that's nice" rather that "...what the hell?".
Unfortunately, while the ideas of the book are interesting, they are poorly executed - or rather, Atwood doesn't seem capable of pushing her idea far enough to make it plausible; she tends to overshoot her point. Because her characters don't have clear motives, it is hard for me, as the reader, to connect with any of the characters, and I feel that part of writing (and reading) is being able to empathize with the characters; if I don't care about the characters, I have no reason (except for a masochistic promise to myself :P ) to finish the book. Also, the book was ruined by the not-so-subtle symbol at the end; I sat there for a good few minutes, wondering if there was another, less-obvious meaning that I was just missing, but I couldn't think of one.
If she had left off the horrible symbolism, and left things a little more vague, and for the love of God, had characters that I cared about (since unsympathetic characters don't necessarily mean characters I don't want to follow; like I said above, though, that's an issue I've had in most of the Atwood novels I've read. I just don't care about the characters because they kind of float along, but don't come across as actually having any meaningful way of interacting with each other or the world around them) I probably would have liked this book a whole lot better than I did.
tl:dr: I dislike Atwood's characterizations, approaches to being a feminist, and the fact that she couldn't be more obvious if she tried.