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www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the beginning; a career going nowhere, or marriage as an exit from it. But these were the option for a young woman, even a young educated woman, in Canada in the early sixties”(76). Atwood suggests that in conventional society, women are edible. They are swallowed up by their male counterparts. Marian accepts this and decides that if she must be eaten, then she will take control of her own life and eat herself. The objective of this novel is to present female confrontation to social expectations and demands, which is inseparably associated with the female body. Eating disorders in Atwood’s works are therefore employed as symbols of women’s bodies’ responses to social pressure. Even before Marian returns to first-person selfhood, she sees that there might be a way out, that becoming trapped by a repressive or unsatisfying role need not be the end of the matter. In order to do that, they first have to realize that any act of patriarchal surveillance and control is learned, cultural, and ideological process that can and must be dismantled. Atwood is urging women to assert their right to eat and re-inhabit their own bodies: Trough this novel, Marian examines and rejects the roles presented to her by society and also rejects domination of social conventions in order to achieve self –identity and self –knowledge and selfawareness. In the last part which is only five pages long Marian comments: “I was thinking of myself in the first person singular again.” (278) This suggests that the narrator has been Marian all the time, but during the engagement she had distanced her former self into the third person narration. The cancellation of the wedding and the engagement changes the narration and perspective: Before devouring the cake, Marian talks to her creation: You look delicious (…) Very appetizing .And that’s what happen to you; That’s what you get for being food(…) she felt a certain pity for her creature but she was powerless now to anything about it .her fate had been decided .(270) The cake and Marian are delicious edibles, made for other people’s pleasure, not their own. The fate of cake and a bride are decided upon and determined beforehand. They will be consumed and eaten. At work, Marian is assigned the task of gathering responses for a survey about a new type of beer. While walking from house to house asking people their opinions, she meets Duncan, an English graduate student who intrigues her with his atypical and eccentric answers. The self absorbed English graduate also functions as another mirror image for Marian’s anxieties and bodily extinction. To sum up, the novel reflects the constant theme of lack of distinct identity. In this case the character demonstrates the large quantities of strength necessary to protect her own individuality, which was slowly degenerating all because of the communities in which she lived. In the novel Margaret Atwood represents the inner strength that she believes is in all women. By recognizing the hardships that daily activities bring, the necessity for all women to be able to stand up for themselves is emphasized. Finally, women cannot give in to the distorted preconceptions that they must be gentle, soft-spoken and submissive. Vol. II. Issue. III 238 September 2011
www.the-criterion.com The Criterion: An International Journal in English ISSN 0976-8165 Works cited: Bordo, Susan. 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body.London: University of California Press, Ltd. Lyons, Brooke. , 1992. Using other people’s Dreadful Childhoods. In Ingersoll, EG (ed) Margaret Atwood. Conversation, London: Virago, 221-33 Goldblat, Patricia F. Reconstructing Margaret Atwood’s Protagonists. “World Literature Today”, Volume: 73.Issue: 2 Martin, Emily. “The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction”,Boston: Beacon Press, c1987. Orbach, Susie. Fat is a Feminist Issue and its Sequel. London: Arrow Books. 1998. Waugh, P. Feminine Fiction: Revisiting the postmodern .London: Routledge.1989. Vol. II. Issue. III 239 September 2011
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