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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Edible Woman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gendered Expectations vs. Personal Identity
Consumerism and Consumption
Bodies, Pregnancy, and Food
Language, Meaning, and Alienation
Routine, Repetition, and Resistance
Summary
Analysis
Out on a dinner date with Peter, Marian stares at her spoon, gazing down at her reflection in the curved metal. Across the table, Peter looks exceptionally handsome—as Ainsley says, “nicely packaged.” He is also so decisive, quick to order at restaurants and bars. Marian wonders why the lights are so low, then reflects that it is probably because chewing and swallowing can be very unattractive activities.
Even as Marian can appreciate the effort Peter puts into grooming every surface of himself and his belongings, her reflections on the ugliness of chewing suggest that glossy “packaging” can never quite conceal the brutal, animal act that is “consumption” (as Duncan might frame it).
Themes
As Peter lectures Marian about the importance of strict discipline in child-rearing, Marian digs into her steak, hungry. When Marian looks up, Peter is watching her. Marian wonders if Peter has bought a book on marriage, an instruction manual like the ones he has for his cameras. Indeed, Peter seems to be sizing her up, trying to find “the springs of the machine” in her brain.
Since photography, Peter’s post-law-school passion, is so often conflated with his love for hunting, Marian implicitly sees herself being sized up as a target—almost as much a cut of meat as the steak on her plate.
Themes
Marian watches Peter slice and chew his steak, struck by how “violent” the gesture is. The Moose Beer commercials pop, unbidden, into Marian’s mind; she thinks of hunters and fishermen and a young boy she’d read about in this morning’s papers who had killed nine people with a rifle in a fit of insanity. Marian then pictures the butcher that killed the cow, slicing this once-alive animal into different cuts of meat.
Suddenly, Marian sees the steak in front of her as flesh and blood, and she is disgusted with her own consumption. Though she tries to calm herself down, reminding herself that everyone eats meat, Marian’s stomach closes. As Peter finishes his dinner, Marian panics: “I hope it’s not permanent,” she thinks, “I’ll starve to death!”
Having seen herself as Peter’s prey, it is perhaps no wonder than Marian begins to identify too deeply with her steak. This panicked refusal of food, which foreshadows the disgust Marian will begin to feel in later weeks, speaks to her inability to distinguish the boundaries between herself and the people and things around her. Yet even in this moment of distress, Marian still tries her best to eat—after all, she is a born consumer, and if she refuses food, she will certainly “starve.”
Themes
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