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Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1985 ) pp. Noelle Caskey, ‘Interpreting Anorexia Nervosa’, in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. It will be evident that The Edible Woman is not really about shopping in the sense of buying and selling but about packaging and consumer choice. This is the territory explored by Rachel Bowlby in Shopping with Freud (London: Routledge, 1993). Page references will be to this edition and included in the text.

117–32.īetty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963) (London: Gollancz, 1965 ). in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. Toril Moi, ‘Feminist, Female, Feminine,’ repr. The Edible Woman, her first novel, appeared in 1969 at the beginning of ‘second wave’ feminism, whereas the savage little fable ‘The Female Body’ written 20 years later (after Bodily Harm, The Handmaid’s Tale and a woman artist’s paintings of the female body in Cat’s Eye) belongs to the explicitly political context of feminism in the early 1990s, laying out the implications of patriarchal myths and fantasies about women with diagrammatic simplicity.

In this chapter I shall trace Atwood’s exploration of sexual power politics through social myths of femininity and representations of the female body in two texts which mark very different stages in her writing career and in the history of feminism.

392) and although in The Robber Bride the tables are turned through a combination of feminine witchcraft and female solidarity, the answer to that question remains ambiguous. The same speaker also ponders the question: ‘Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?’ (p. These words, thought but not spoken by a rejected wife in a spirit of pained incredulity and warning (‘There were some things she has the sense not to say, however’) highlight the dimensions of artifice and fantasy involved in representations of the female body, while they also suggest the erotic appeal projected through an illusion of glamour.