"You are rejecting your femininity!": Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and the female relationship to food

Abstract

The Canadian author Margaret Atwood has often employed her female characters and their relationship with food as a means through which to condemn what women suffer. Nonetheless, it was in her first novel The Edible Woman (1969) in which she took this idea to the extreme and used the eating disorder that the protagonist suffers, beginning with anorexia and ending with a type of cannibalism as she is incapable of consuming food, to denounce the social pressure and loss of identity that women endure. In this article I argue that the rejection the protagonist feels towards food, especially that which derives from living animals, can be studied from the perspective of animal studies and Carol J. Adams concept of the absent referent (1990).