The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

[kibethsbark]

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.

Comments

[lone_she_wolf]

Ugh, the whole 'Being a single mother will make him Gay' was an immediate turn off for me. There are lots of single mothers out there. Not all of their sons are gay. It's not even a factor.

Seems like a very large anti-family, anti-pregnancy message for working women. Because somehow getting married and having a kid now means you can't be looked at as an intelligent being.

[kibethsbark]

Yeah - I remember at the time I had to put the book down for a while because it was just... so aggravating. And while I think/hope it was tongue-in-cheek, it was a poor use of the idea (particularly since Ainsley then uses it as an excuse to try and force the guy she tricked into having sex with her into marriage, which just makes her a horrible person.)

[schuylerlola211]

I love Margaret Atwood, I really do, despite a lot of people not really liking her at all.

But I agree with you: The Edible Woman is just...bad. Not a good novel at all.

[kibethsbark]

I have a love/hate relationship with Atwood - I liked the ideas behind the Handmaid's Tale but at some points I found her writing a little distracting (weird metaphors and whatnot), and I enjoyed some aspects of Oryx & Crake (Crake was a great character), but I feel like sometimes she gets to be too much.

But yeah, The Edible Woman was just... not good. I felt that even the next book she wrote, Surfacing, was a marked improvement (at least until the very end of the novel... but hey, no one's perfect!)

[archangelremiel]

What bothers me is that apparently you lose the right to think for yourself when you become engaged. That's just a load of crap.

[lone_she_wolf]

As I said, it sounds like an anti-marriage, anti-motherhood novel that implies these things will take away your independence and your appearance of having intellectual free thought.

[kibethsbark]

Yeah - and it was strange to read, especially since there didn't seem to be any reason for it. I might have been more convinced if Marian had been the type of character to let everyone make decisions for her before she got engaged, but I didn't think that a ring = complete personality change.

[archangelremiel]

It also sounds a bit like she was afraid of love as well as marriage, because when you're in love with someone, you do occasionally have to compromise, but learning to think of someone else's feelings hardly takes away from your own. Seeing that from the outside but never having experienced it from the inside might have influenced her decisions. (because from this it seems like the author never experienced love before she wrote this.)

[kibethsbark]

I agree completely - there isn't any situation in the book where a married/attached woman is happy (or if she is happy, she's a moron), and often times the single women were portrayed as being stupid because they wanted to be married (there were three women who Marian worked with in her office who were all single, and all portrayed as shallow and insecure because they lacked a male figure in their life).

I'd like to say that the fact that this book was published in 1969 makes the ideas... better? More reasonable? At least make sense given the point in feminist thought that they're coming from? But... I just can't bring myself to think that way, because that doesn't make them any less fundamentally flawed.

[surrey_sucks]

I 100% agree. I hate Margaret Atwood, but The Handmaid's Tale was actually a great book.