When one reads a title like ‘The Edible Woman’, a lot of things come to mind. Reading the title injected thoughts of cannibalism in my head. Just like the common English saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman published in 1969 is about women and their relationships with men, society, and food.In the book, Atwood discusses a young woman’s rebellion against a modern, male-dominated world, the story line is about a female protagonist, Marian McAlpin, who struggles between the roles that society has imposed upon her and her personal self definition; and food becomes the symbol of that struggle and her eventual rebellion.According to Andrew Brown’s review of The Edible Woman, the novel is about identity and society, about love and expectation. He goes on to say that circumstances shape what society expects of us and how we, in turn, choose to act. Our expectations of life shape our behaviour and our behaviour changes our expectations.
