The Edible Woman Landscapes

The Female Body in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle By Sofia Sanchez-Grant1 Abstract This essay examines scholarly discourses about embodiment, and their increasing scholarly currency, in relation to two novels by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Like many of Atwood’s other works, The Edible Woman (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976) are explicitly concerned with the complexities of body image. More specifically, however, these novels usefully exemplify her attempt to demystify the female form. In the following pages, I investigate Atwood’s treatment of the mind/body dualism and analyse the ways in which she responds to, and resists, its destructive effects. Using contemporary theory, moreover, I show how Atwood deals with the concept of female space, as well as the ‘space’ of the female body itself. I also consider Atwood’s representation of the female appetite, 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 a close engagement with recent theories of embodiment, I analyse the extent to which Atwood’s fiction might dismantle culturally-encoded concepts of femininity and propose a useful corrective to traditional readings of the female body in which the re-embodiment of the self is equated to a re-embodiment of culture. Keywords: Feminism; embodiment; literature In 1990, sociologist Arthur Frank declared: ‘Bodies are in, in academia as well as in popular culture’ (131). Three years later, David Morgan and Sue Scott in their study Body Matters: Essays on the Sociology of the Body reaffirm his statement: ‘since we first began the process of editing this book there has been a veritable explosion of feminist work on “the body”’ (3). Almost two decades have elapsed since 1990, but the continuing proliferation of

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