The Female Body in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay examines scholarly discourses about embodiment, and their increasing scholarly currency, in relation to two novels by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. Like many of Atwood's other works, The Edible Woman (1969) and Lady Oracle (1976) zare explicitly concerned with complexities of body image. More specifically, however, these novels usefully exemplify her attempt to demystify female form. In following pages, I investigate Atwood's treatment of mind/body dualism and analyse ways in which she responds to, and resists, its destructive effects. Using contemporary theory, moreover, I show how Atwood deals with concept of female space, as well as 'space' of female body itself. I also consider Atwood's representation of female appetite, taking into account its relationship to power and identity, and foregrounding cultural meaning of eating disorders. Taken together, these subject matters demonstrate how body 'feeds' identity and how a woman's corporeal experience directly influences her cultural experience. Through a close engagement with recent theories of embodiment, I analyse extent to which Atwood's fiction might dismantle culturally-encoded concepts of femininity and propose a useful corrective to traditional readings of female body in which re-embodiment of self is equated to a re-embodiment of culture. Keywords: Feminism; embodiment; literature ********** In 1990, sociologist Arthur Frank declared: 'Bodies are in, in academia as well as in popular culture' (131). Three years later, David Morgan and Sue Scott in their study Body Matters: Essays on Sociology of Body reaffirm his statement: 'since we first began process of editing this book there has been a veritable explosion of feminist work on the body' (3). Almost two decades have elapsed since 1990, but continuing proliferation of scholarship based around issues relating to body means that Frank's assertion still rings true today. While there are multiple explanations for what Kathy Davis has termed 'body craze', it is ascribable, in no small way, to work of feminism: 'feminism is held responsible for putting body on intellectual map' (1). Relegated to realms of biology, body has, until recently, been a site of cultural debate largely ignored by sociologists. Lurking in background of social science, this 'absent presence' was, and occasionally is, disparaged in favour of 'the mind'. (2) This mind/body dichotomy has pervaded western thought for centuries. Descartes' famous dictum, 'Cogito ergo sum', established dualism as a distinct philosophy; however, tradition dates back much further and is deeply rooted in early Christian theology. (3) Cartesian dualism partitions human experience into two separate categories: spiritual and bodily. In this equation, body is merely an external vessel for rational, objective mind. Susan Bordo vividly captures this mind/body struggle in Unbearable Weight (2003): [W]hat remains constant element ... is construction of body as something apart from true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, freedom ...) and as undermining best efforts of that self. That which is not-body is highest, best, noblest, closest to God; that which is body is albatross, heavy drag on self-realization. (5) This self/other dualism is likewise reflected in constructed oppositions of culture and nature, and reason and emotion. If mind is allied with culture and reason, then it follows that body is associated with all that is 'other'. Historically, women have been defined by their 'biological potentiality', and female reproductive system has worked to reduce women to sum of their child-beating parts (Morgan and Scott: 11). If woman is inextricably associated with body, and body is regarded as being somehow inferior to mind--the carnal flesh to which elevated mind is shackled--then woman surely is inferior. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".