Abstract
On one level, Atwood’s first published novel, The Edible Woman, is a ‘realistic’ and often comic account of a young woman’s rather prosaic life in Toronto. Marian MacAlpin attends her job at ‘Seymour Surveys’, a marketing research firm; she lives with a roommate, Ainsley; she becomes engaged to a very proper young man, Peter; she meets a second, less proper young man, Duncan; she becomes disenchanted with the first; she stops eating; she breaks off her engagement; she begins to eat; she ends with no lover, no job, no roommate, but with a remarkably healthy appetite. Readers, however, should not be deceived by what appears to be a simple plot. Atwood’s novels are never on one level; they are often, like The Edible Woman, quite elaborate detective stories in which the reader must become the detective, and Atwood herself, as she indicates in Murder in the Dark, is the criminal: ‘… that’s me in the dark. I have designs on you. I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh.… Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always he’ (Murder in the Dark, 30).
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Notes
Nina Auerbach, Romantic Imprisonment: Women and Other Glorified Outcasts (New York, Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 133.
Sherrill Grace, Violent Duality: A Study of Margaret Atwood (Montreal, Vehicule Press, 1980), p. 59.
Robert Lecker, ‘Janus Through the Looking Glass: Atwood’s First Three Novels’, The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), pp. 179–80.
Catherine McLay, ‘The Dark Voyage: The Edible Woman as Romance’, The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, eds Arnold E. Davidson and Cathy N. Davidson (Toronto, Anansi Press, 1981), p. 138.
Kim Chernin, The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (New York, Harper & Row, 1981), p. 71.
Linda Sandler, ‘Interview with Margaret Atwood’, The Malahat Review, 4 (January, 1977), p. 19.
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© 1987 Barbara Hill Rigney
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Rigney, B.H. (1987). Alice and the Animals: The Edible Woman and Early Poems. In: Margaret Atwood. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18846-8_2
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