I've been vacillating on whether I would attempt the 14th Canadian Challenge, given what a terrible funk I've been in for the last 14 months...). Now I've sort of backed myself in a corner, and I'll more or less have to complete a review every other day. I've read 3 novels, and I suspect I have read 10 books of poetry already, though I'll have to tabulate them somewhere else. But it will certainly be an imbalanced set of reviews. (Actually now that I think about it, Malcolm Lowry spent so much of his life in BC (and the Consul and Yvonne in fact fantasize about escaping to Canada), but it may be too much of a stretch to consider Under the Volcano a Canadian novel, even if it was mostly rewritten while he lived in BC. Too bad.)
I read Atwood's The Edible Woman many years ago. I don't think it was for my Canadian literature class, though I may be wrong. It is largely about two unmarried women who are sharing rooms in a house somewhere north of the Annex. (I seem to think she is up around Dupont, but maybe I am thinking of where their hippyish friends, Clara and Joe, live.) The narrator, Marian, is fairly conventional at the start of the novel, whereas her flatmate, Ainsley, announces fairly early on that she wants to seduce a man in order to become a single mother, which would have been almost unheard of in the mid to late 60s, when the novel is set. Marian doesn't seem entirely satisfied with her boyfriend Peter, but agrees to marry him after driving home from a very awkward party. I believe it's right around this point in the novel that the novel switches to third person perspective and Marian experiences a bit of a mental breakdown. For those that haven't read the novel, I'll add a SPOILER warning.
SPOILERS
Marian stops eating meat, which causes some awkwardness, particularly when eating out or going to parties, as vegetarianism was still fairly faddish (as indeed it srill was about a decade later when I went vegetarian). As various things upset her or trigger her, she stops eating eggs and then other kinds of foods. At some point, she finds it all but impossible to eat anything (taking it even further than the Jainists because even the vegetables had a right to be undisturbed). Clearly, this state can't be maintained for long, for obvious reasons. For whatever reason, she decides to bake a huge woman-shaped cake and feed it to Peter, since he is "devouring her" in spirit. This is typically interpreted as the point at which she fully loses any connection to her body and externalizes it in this cake. It certainly spooks him off, as the cherry on the cake of her unusual behaviour. I can't recall if he formally breaks off their engagement at that moment, but it certainly seems inevitable. It's less clear to me if she slept with this oddball, Duncan, to steel herself to break up with Peter (or even to convince herself she wasn't "worthy" of him any longer) or maybe to have something to throw in his face if he didn't drop her after the cake gambit. At any rate, after Peter leaves, she decides it's only cake and starts eating, apparently reconciling with her body. Duncan stops by in the final chapter, though it doesn't appear they will become a romantic couple, which is surely for the best.
The writing is quite amusing and sly in places, particularly when Marian focuses on her job (and co-workers!) at a market research company. I have to say I think Peter tends to get a bad rap. There is no question he is very conventional and a bit in love with his gadgets/toys (mostly cameras), but he doesn't seem to do anything particularly outrageous or demeaning to Marian. If anything, Duncan is the more overtly selfish character, though I think Atwood is positing him as sort of a transitional figure, allowing Marian to find her freedom through her connection to him. I'm probably just thinking about this too conventionally, but Ainsley's plans strike me as deeply unwise. And I found Joe and Clara to be simply too negligent in their parenting duties. So I suppose I am not really convinced by the options that Atwood seems to be proposing as an alternative to the too constricting, conventional relationship that Marian rejects. That's not to say I don't find a lot to like in The Edible Woman, but I certainly wouldn't use it as a guide (or a recipe!) to a more fulfilling life. That said, maybe Atwood should have included a cake recipe at the back of the book. Here's a whole page of sheet cake recipes to try out.
No comments:
Post a Comment