Throughout
this year, I have enjoyed tremendously my academic research, as well as cooking
and baking, and my writing. I also managed to give a bit of space to my
artistic side producing cards and embroidered stuff.
You can have
a glimpse of my PhD research on Margaret Atwood’s work reading here below my
review on The Edible Woman, her first
novel published in 1969. I sent the review to several magazines but none of
them accepted it as it is not a recent book. However, I think its message is
still valuable today.
I also
published some more reviews:
How The Light Gets In by Patrick Osada
Motherhood by Sheila Heti
Yayoi Kusama: The moving moment when I
went to the universe
Impressionism: The Art of Life
Rome Modern City: between tradition and
renewal
Duilio Cambellotti, Myth, Dream and reality
Three of my
poems will be published on the Blue Nib, and one on London Grip; another one was
published in an anthology of Surrey poets (Dempsey & Windle) in occasion of
the National Poetry Day 2018.
You can also
read one of my flash fiction pieces here: https://thebluenib.com/2018/11/01/lemons-carla-scarano-dantonio/
I hope you will enjoy
it all.
Negotiating with the body: The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
Virago Press, Great Britain
2009
ISBN 978-0-86068-129-8
£ 9.99
‘Mankind
cannot bear too much unreality’
The Edible Woman
Marian MacAlpin, the young
protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s novel The
Edible Woman, could well have been another victim of the deceitful world of
consumerism in which she – and we – evolve. Yet her awakening to this joyful
masquerade of advertisements is what makes the novel a bitter and timeless
social critique. Although written in the spring and summer 1965, to be finally
published in 1969, the novel still speaks meaningfully to our consumerist
society with its mesmerizing commercials and artificial cheap hedonism.
These glossy sticky layers
cover a grubby society whose relationships are revealed to be based on
artificial enforced rules, provoking confrontational and threatening
behaviours. In this hidden reality, men are predators disguised as rescuers,
and women objectified entities at their disposal, potential victims trying to
find their voices.
The obsessively present ads
and their promises are not only artificial but also delusional. They expose the
striking contradictions between the world of commercials and ordinary life. And
this poses a threat, to the characters as well as to us everyday life
consumers.
The Moose Beer commercial,
which Marian needs to pre-test for the survey agency she works for, is a most
striking example. Its stereotyped representation of the tough ‘real man’ who
spends his free time hunting and fishing in the wilderness is obviously
comical. And yet, when confronted with the men’s figures of the story, we can
sense the danger. For Marian’s fiancé Peter, a hunter and amateur photographer,
shooting an animal and ‘shooting’ a photo become synonyms; his display of guns,
rifles and knives gets mixed with his cameras. And if the well-groomed,
soap-smelling man lacks the real ‘tang of wilderness’ necessary for a
stout-hearted fellow, he also enjoys the brutal description of the killing and
gutting of a female rabbit he performed with one of his friends after a hunt.
The threat here is to become the ad in spite of oneself. A
quest for identity seems doomed in this world where
human beings are commodities, dispensable items like all other products. This
realization, the idea that being a consumer also implies being metaphorically
and literally consumed, triggers Marian’s awareness. And for a woman, the
effects can be devastating.
Similarly to today’s
commercials, ads mainly aim at selling products using women’s bodies and their
sex appeal. Through this they indirectly dictate a behaviour, a role that women
are supposed to comply with. The ads thus become a potent tool to enforce and
confirm the rules of patriarchal society and force women into pre-fabricated
roles.
As ads pervade life, Marian’s
body is used and objectified, forced to perform servant roles like pouring
drinks and serving food, or even acting in sex performances choreographed by
Peter, inspired by male magazines and commercials. This last fact is more than
relevant today, as we are not unfamiliar with its persisting existence.
Stuck in this fabricated,
limited world, Marian keeps looking for a more authentic self. When she goes
shopping, she consciously defends herself from this mentality, ‘willing herself
to buy nothing’ except what is written on her list. But at the same time, she
feels tempted by advertisements and the apparently self-assuring role they
promise.
Unable to voice her worries,
her body speaks for her, revealing her anxieties. In spite of her
easily-influenced mind, her body expresses a non-verbal language that warns her
of the traps of consumerism. Eating disorder becomes her rebellion as anorexia
takes hold of her body. The latter starts to refuse food as she feels it alive,
till cutting itself off. Food and social pressure are equally repelled: her
body rebels to the roles and rules imposed by society as it refuses to consume,
to absorb food, to ‘adjust’ to it.
The refusal of food brings
Marian to the brink of starvation and forces her to become aware, to change her
mind and repudiate the masquerade of the glossy party doll. The final baking of
a woman-shaped cake becomes an edible substitute that should satiate Peter’s
hunger and grant her freedom and survival from the oppressive rules of
consumerism and patriarchal society.
In a final act of
cannibalism, which negates as much as it reaffirms the roles of consumer and
consumed in a postmodern perspective, Marian eats the woman-shaped cake. An act
of re-appropriation and consumption to make sure the enemy is definitely
destroyed and, at the same time, absorbed.
In Marian’s negotiation with
the body – her body marked by starvation, manipulation and objectification –
she finally compromises with it, in a search for wholeness that entails
domesticity and acceptance of the basic rule of survival: eating. Still a
consumer, she becomes a more conscious one, not so easily deceived by ads. A
lesson still valuable today.
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