The Edible Woman Landscapes Essay Example

we first began the process of editing this book there has been a veritable explosion of feminist work on “the body”’.

Almost two decades have elapsed since 1990, but the continuing proliferation of scholarship based around issues relating to the body means that Frank’s assertion still rings true today. While there are multiple explanations for what Kathy Davis has termed the ‘body craze’, it is ascribable, in no small way, to the work of feminism: ‘feminism is held responsible for putting the body on the intellectual map’

Relegated to the realms of biology, the body has, until recently, been a site of cultural debate largely ignored by sociologists. Lurking in the background of social science, this ‘absent presence’ was and occasionally is, disparaged in favor of ‘the mind’.  This mind/body dichotomy has pervaded western thought for centuries. Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘Cogito ergo sum’, established dualism as a distinct philosophy; however, the tradition dates back much further and is deeply rooted in early.

Christian theology.  Cartesian dualism partitions human experience into two separate categories: the spiritual and the bodily. In this equation, the body is merely an external vessel for the rational, objective mind. Susan Bordo vividly captures this mind/body struggle in Unbearable Weight (2003): What remains the constant element is the construction of the body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, freedom…) and as undermining the best efforts of that self.

That which is not-body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization. This self/other dualism is likewise

reflected in the constructed oppositions of culture and nature, and reason and emotion. If the mind is allied with culture and reason, then it follows that the body is associated with all that is ‘other’. Historically, women have been defined by their ‘biological potentiality’, and the female reproductive system has worked to reduce women to the sum of their child-bearing parts (Morgan and Scott: 11).

If a woman is inextricably associated with the body, and the body is regarded as being somehow inferior to the mind – the carnal flesh to which the elevated mind is shackled – then woman surely is inferior. Considering this inherently sexist construction of gender, it is no surprise that the body is central to feminist debate. Margaret Sanger wrote in 1922 that ‘[n]o woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body. . . . It is for women the key to liberty’ .

The female body, as a site of oppression, has always been the means by which patriarchy exerts control over women. Medical discourse throughout the centuries has been instrumental in the construction of the female body as naturally unstable, deficient, and unruly Nineteenth-century medicine insisted women were slaves to their uterus and ovaries, semi-permanent invalids whose every ailment was the result of a reproductive disorder.

Indeed, as Williams and Bendelow explain, it was feared that the over-exertion of women’s brains would ‘atrophy the uterus’ and hinder women’s reproductive destiny (115). The early 1960s heralded the introduction of oral contraceptives, a breakthrough for women in their struggle to reclaim their bodies.  Initially, however, proof of marriage and a husband’s

written consent was mandatory for women who requested the birth control pill in Britain and the United States .

Even so, physical control over the female form was not, and is not, limited to the regulation of female reproduction. As Kate Conboy et al suggest: Just as man’s civilizing impetus transforms wildlife, land, and vegetation into territories to tame and control, so too does it render the woman a form of nature to The writings of first-century philosopher Philo Judaeus were very influential in the development of early Christian church doctrines. The long-standing tradition of the mind/body dichotomy is an area that far exceeds the limitations of this article.

Nancy Tuana provides a framework for understanding the mind/body tradition in The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature   The introduction of the oral contraceptive offered women an unprecedented amount of bodily freedom. However, it can also be argued that the arrival of the pill caused men to renounce their contraceptive responsibilities, and locked women further into male-defined sexual practices. Lara V. Marks, in Sexual Chemistry, provides a broad and in-depth study into the reception of the pill.

Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 9 #2 March 2008 78 3 apprehend, dominate, and defeat. In fact, culture has, variously, valued supposedly ‘natural’ feminine bodily characteristics (narrow waists, small feet, long hair, for example), which have required the most unnatural maintenance (corsets, foot-binding, products for straightening or de-tangling).  Femininity is supposedly the ‘natural’ essence of womanhood itself; to be feminine is to be a woman. By contrast, Conboy et al argue that femininity is just another social mechanism that is

based on male desires and used to curtail the freedom of women.

That bodies matter is axiomatic in the feminist debate – a debate that is as prevalent in academia as it is in popular culture. The manner in which female bodies are unequally and negatively imbued with meaning has incited a number of feminist authors to attempt to decode the female body, both critiquing it and liberating it from traditional, patriarchal formulations. Indeed, as Maggie Humm suggests, ‘it is in feminist fiction that new accounts of the female body, and its potential cultural representations, amount to a feminist rewriting of culture’ .

One author who provides an astute and tangible analysis of the female body as it exists within our culture is Margaret Atwood. 5 While not her only works to address the complexities of body image, her novels The Edible Woman (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976) are clear examples of Atwood demystifying the female form. In this essay, I investigate Atwood’s treatment of the mind/body dualism and analyze the ways in which she responds to and resists its destructive effects. More specifically, I explore how Atwood deals with the concept of female space and the ‘space’ of the female body itself.

I also mean to probe the female appetite as it appears in Atwood’s novels, taking into account its relationship to power and identity, and foregrounding the cultural meaning of eating disorders. Taken together, these subject matters demonstrate how the body ‘feeds’ identity and how a woman’s corporeal experience directly influences her cultural experience. Through these novels, Atwood dismantles the culturally-encoded concept of femininity and proposes a re-reading of the

female body; women must re-embody themselves and consequently re-embody culture.

Body and Mind The above revelation, taken from Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, typifies the dualistic logic that insists our bodies are entirely separate from our true inner selves. It is worth noting that the statement is delivered by a male character, Leonard Slank. It incites a response that suggests that his mortification stems not from the fact that desire has been based solely on the body, but rather that it has been based on his body: ‘“What did you want,” Ainsley asked sweetly, “from me? ’

Evidently, Len considers the objectification of women to be perfectly natural, but for him to be thus degraded, reduced to nothing but ‘body’, is outrageous. The mind/body dualism is central to the lives of Atwood’s female protagonists, heavily influencing their embodied experiences. Joan Foster in the Lady Oracle and Marian MacAlpin of The Edible Woman live within a phallocentric society and are, as Here, I am not suggesting that Atwood is the only author to consider women’s bodies. Neither am I suggesting that her writing is only, or predominantly, about women’s bodies.

She explores a multitude of cultural myths and philosophies in her work, adopting a wide range of generic forms. However, for the purpose of this article, discussion is limited to Atwood’s consideration of the body. Journal of International Women’s Studies Vol. 9 #2 March 2008 79 5 Humm suggests, ‘torn between unconscious feminist questions and the stereotypical answers which society provides’ (127). They are repeatedly confronted with culturally gendered distinctions that limit their existence to the corporeal.

In a conversation with her

Polish Count lover, Joan questions the binary constraints that dictate she is solely body: “You have the body of a Goddess”, the Polish Count used to say .“Do I have the head of one too? ” I replied once, archly. “Do not make such jokes”, he said. “You must believe me. Why do you refuse to believe in your own beauty? ”  If the reader is unclear about gendered dualisms, the Polish Count, who believes that for women physical abnormality is worse than idiocy, goes on to remark: ‘“Ah, but the mystery of man is of the mind . . whereas that of the woman is of the body”’.

This works to illuminate an earlier statement that Joan makes to Arthur: ‘“You’re always telling me women should become whole people through meaningful work”’. Here, after all, it is implied that women are incomplete, and will remain so, until they acquire ‘the mind’; according to the Count, of course, ‘the mind’ is thoroughly incompatible with femininity. Such a rejection is alluded to in Joan’s depiction of Diana’s statue at Ephesus.

As Goddess of, amongst other things, fertility and childbirth, the statue symbolizes the essence of femininity itself; it is, according to Molly Hite, ‘a paradigm of the patriarchally controlled female body’: She had a serene face, perched on top of a body shaped like a mound of grapes. She was draped in breasts from neck to ankle, as though afflicted with a case of yaws: little breasts at the top and bottom, big ones around the middle. The nipples were equipped with sprouts, but several of the breasts were out of order. I stood

licking my ice-cream cone, watching the goddess coldly.

Once I would have seen her as an image of myself, but not anymore. My ability to give was limited, I was not inexhaustible. I was not serene, not really. I wanted things, for myself.  By using comic analogies which firmly ground the Goddess in ‘reality, Joan’s description completely undermines the familial virtues for which the Goddess is traditionally worshipped. Her serene face is perched on top of her body rather than being a part of it, emphasizing that the body is the female’s primary site. With this in mind, Joan detaches herself from the figure, acknowledging her own limits and desires.

Her assertion is a protest against the society that situates her as a reproductive machine. For, as the food imagery and Joan’s unromantic terms suggest, to be endlessly giving, to nourish and sustain others is simply to be edible. In The Hungry Self (1994), Kim Chernin’s account of one woman’s consumption by her family resonates soundly with Joan’s narrative: ‘“I always thought of myself as having ten breasts”, a woman tells me, in her characteristically vivid way. “One for every member of the family. And a few leftovers for the neighborhood”. But now, she admits, she has begun to feel that “something is eating” at her’.