Corporeal Conflict: Unmaking and Making the Self in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

Abstract

The classical canons of literature create and consider the construction of women as objects of beauty and desire, who are motivated by no concern for themselves, inherently weak and impoverished. This study seeks an alternative narrative structure to such cultural constructions by exploring how Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) portrays and represents the female body in connection with female agency and power by writing against classical representations. Accordingly, this study employs recent theorists who blend feminist perspectives with theories based on the body including Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo and Kim Chernin along with feminist literary critics including Simone de Beauvoir and Linda Hutcheon. By incorporating feminist theory and body politics together with literary criticism, this study presents a discourse of resistance and the potentiality of a new meeting point for shared experience and a common knowledge. In this regard, Atwood’s The Edible Woman suggests that there is agency and power to be attained through the knowledge of our bodies. As a counter-narrative, The Edible Woman promotes a resistance to dominant cultural and social constructions that proceed to objectify and undervalue the female body. Atwood’s novel attempts to bring a credibility and a value to knowledge to which we gain through our corporeal experience. What emerges from this perception is that corporeal knowledge appears to be essential to be able to acquire an understanding of our existence as well as to be read as a means to resistance.