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Chapter 4
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
While Marian and Ainsley walk to the subway on their way home, Ainsley laments Clara’s fate—“she lets herself be treated like a thing!” Marian knows that Clara dreamed of going back to school after the first two pregnancies, but now she feels locked into her life as a housewife. When Marian gets back to her apartment, she decides to call Len Slank. They make a plan to get drinks, and Len (having heard about Ainsley from Clara) asks about Marian’s new roommate, joking that she’s probably “too old” for him.
Ainsley’s grammar here is telling: even though she sees Clara’s unhappiness at having lost touch with the academic life she once led, Ainsley places all the blame for Clara’s objectification on Clara herself (“she lets herself be treated”). Len’s casual joke about Ainsley’s age speaks to the casual misogyny that Marian has become accustomed to.
Themes
Marian hangs up the phone and Ainsley asks more questions about Len. Then she makes her big announcement—she is planning to get pregnant. Though Ainsley has no interest in getting married (she does not want to end up like Clara and Joe), she feels that being pregnant is the only way for a woman to fulfill her “deepest femininity.”
Thus far, Ainsley has seemed to represent a more modern type of woman, embodying many of the second-wave feminist ideals popular in the mid-1960s (when the novel was published). But now, Ainsley’s sudden focus on childbearing as the only way to prove one’s “femininity” speaks to the way that even a more ostensibly radical character like Ainsley has internalized gender norms and stereotypes.
Themes
Marian, always practical, immediately starts thinking about the apartment: will she have to move out when Ainsley gets pregnant (and bring all of her heavy furniture with her)? And what would the lady down below do if she found out Ainsley was going to have a baby out of wedlock? Marian keeps these questions to herself, but she does ask Ainsley who she expects the father to be. Someone with good genes, Ainsley says, to stop the human race from “degenerating” like it already is.
Marian’s focus on housing logistics here is almost comical—Marian is so committed to routine that she cannot take in the weight of Ainsley’s remarks because she is too focused on the furniture. Interestingly, the contrast between the lady down below’s model of womanhood, which emphasizes marriage, and Ainsley’s, which emphasizes sex and childbirth, is now less stark than it seemed just a few chapters ago. Finally, Ainsley’s casual nod to eugenicist thinking points to a sinister, calculated approach to conception, one Atwood takes on more intentionally in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale.
Themes
