Yet Marian’s apparent normality is a large part of the trouble, for there is no visible manifestation of her problem with food. She does not develop a tumor, for example, or appear alarmingly frail to any of the other characters in the book, nor does she gain weight. As the adage goes, seeing is believing; not seeing, therefore, leaves one at risk of not being believed, although Marian offers no explanation whatsoever for why she can’t eat, so is in no danger of being discredited. The reader only ever knows that, to Marian, the problem is quite real. Yet without any detail regarding symptoms, the reader also has no clue if the problem is biological or psychological.
A “refusal of her mouth to eat,” it’s called at one point; the blame for her disability placed on “whatever it was that had been making these decisions, not her mind certainly.” Her jaw fails to open, she cannot lift her fork, she is hungry but finds she cannot take a bite—Marian has been diagnosed by successive decades of readers as vegan, anorexic, nervous, allergic, hysterical, and a victim of our hyperconsumerist environment.
It might be more to the point to diagnose her, simply, as a proto-Everywoman—and Atwood a visionary. Recently, ailments remarkably similar to Marian’s have become quite common among relatively young North American women—including well-educated upper-middle class whites. A 2014 study2 found around 11 percent of the population worldwide—three-quarters of them women, with twenty-five to forty-five million living in the US—diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), for example, a diagnosis often bestowed upon patients with symptoms and concerns as vague as Marian’s. Alongside dozens of other autoimmune diseases—many with food aversions of unknown biological or psychological provenance—IBS has, in the nearly fifty years since Atwood first envisioned something like it, become a modern epidemic.
Marian’s troubles arise one night at dinner with her fiancé Peter when she can’t finish a steak. Her standard diet of TV dinners, packaged puddings, and boil-in-the-bag entrees often leaves her craving something freshly made, so she rarely leaves leftovers when she goes out. Yet she can neither clean her plate, nor offer any reasonable explanation to Peter for her sudden disinterest in the meal. Although she keeps up appearances in the coming days, her difficulties only worsen.
“The day after the filet, she had been unable to eat a pork chop,” Atwood writes. All meat is out. Soon Marian finds she can no longer stomach a growing list of foods: next is dairy, and shortly after that, vegetables. Her primary concerns are social, for she continues attending parties and dinners, but resorts to hiding food whenever she finds she cannot finish it. The third-person narrative voice further confounds readers seeking details of the protagonist’s digestive troubles, and it becomes difficult to trust Marian’s description of events as accurate.
The novel ends tidily, in a too-neat domestic scene in which Marian symbolically offers herself up for consumption but, rejected, ends up consuming herself. Deeply rooted social norms—like that convenience food is harmless, for example, or that single women crave marriage to eligible bachelors—now overcome like that, Marian is cured. She can eat again and, newly single, can offer her symbolic self up for other men to eat, too. Marian is back on the market, as it were: Atwood’s joke about Marian’s re-entry into consumer society.
It reads false and, as we will soon see, it is false, at least for the millions of women in North America who suffer ailments resembling Marian’s. Yet on all other fronts, the book is unusually prescient, even for an Atwood novel. For The Edible Woman is not only a story about consumerism, about the body’s need to eat as biological phenomenon and as cultural metaphor. It is a story about broken political economies and their impact on the physical self.
Take the difficulty in diagnosing Marian, for example, which comes from her seemingly normal existence. She works in advertising—ahem, “market research”—and intends to marry a good-looking young lawyer. Obviously she is surrounded by brands, and thinks about how they might fit into her life for a good part of every day. She considers ads, and whether she likes them, even outside of the office: she has internalized her role as a consumer so thoroughly that she is apt to have a product for dinner that she worked on during the week. Her friends are having children—both in and outside of wedlock (although those who start outside of it quickly want in). Her future, in other words, seems clearly planned.
Unfortunately Peter, her good-looking, young, lawyer-fiancé, has no positive interpersonal attributes. He is dismissive of Marian, and the sex they have is perfunctory and passionless. He enjoys hunting and then describing the animals he has killed over dinner. He is a bore, and a bit of a letch, but it is unclear how much of this Marian can perceive, because her behavior is either predictable for a character of that time period—she deflects to him more and more over the course of the book—or inconsistently written, which is unlikely, since Atwood tends to create characters with rich interior selves. The reader experiences the friction between the two potential explanations for Marian’s submissiveness through a simmering rage, an experience common to gender-minded readers of works written before the second wave of feminism. At the time, of course, marriage represented one of the only paths to financial security for women, aside from being born rich. (Women in the US couldn’t have credit cards in their own names until 1974, for example.) So readers won’t be surprised that Marian pursues marriage, even with a partner she acknowledges—although only occasionally, and via interior monologue—is imperfect. After all, financial security is necessary to lead the well-branded life she clearly desires. Marriage, therefore, is not something Marian finds negotiable.
Yet something is wrong. That Marian’s entire life trajectory is thrown into question when her consumptive issues arise is one clue that the book is about far more than mere consumption, but the New York Times missed it in its 1970 review:
As her wedding day approaches, Marian quite literally begins to lose her ability to consume things. First she rejects steak, finally she cannot even stomach salad. A case of bridal jitters, says a married friend. Or, as I think the author means us to half-seriously see it, a piece of truth-telling dementia that is a symbolic answer to lying sanity. Not to eat or be eaten up like a confection of calculated flavors might be her heroine’s unconscious aim and Miss Atwood’s symbolic sense.3
The thesis that “consumerism” is the entirety of the problem that Atwood means to point out likely held a certain logic—maybe even an unwashed allure—when the review was published. (A tried-and-true revolutionary of the 1960s recently told me that, by the 1970s, he had believed capitalism was over. It seemed clear to him and his colleagues, he said, that culture had reached peak consumerism. Then he laughed.) The onset of Marian’s ailment, however, isn’t a reaction to food itself, nor the infiltration of ads, brands, sales pitches, and jingles into her world. Her revulsion is triggered instead by an awareness of how it all works together, a glimpse at the man behind the curtain and what he’s preparing for her back there.
Marian is not, in other words, symbolically over-satiated by the “confection of calculated flavors” on offer. Here, her body prepares to reject beef for the first time:
Watching [Peter] operating on the steak like that, carving a straight slice and then dividing it into neat cubes, made her think of the diagram of the planned cow at the front of one of her cookbooks: the cow with lines on it and labels to show you from which part of the cow all the different cuts were taken. What they were eating now was from some part of the back, she thought: cut on the dotted line. She could see rows of butchers somewhere in a large room, a butcher school, sitting at tables, clothed in spotless white, each with a pair of kindergarten scissors, cutting out steaks and ribs and roasts from the stacks of brown-paper cow-shapes before them. The cow in the book, she recalled, was drawn with eyes and horns, and an udder. It stood there quite naturally, not at all disturbed by the peculiar markings painted on its hide.
She cannot finish her steak, and it’s not because she’s already full, symbolically or otherwise.
The “Planned Cow,” she later calls that steak, and soon adds the Planned Pig and Planned Sheep to her growing list of food restrictions. What rankles her is not solely that meat is flesh: it is that an entire system is devoted to keeping her from realizing that meat is flesh, a well-regimented design incorporating safety scissors, clean uniforms, and dotted lines, all in place to ease and conceal the elaborate machinery that turns living bodies into food. Consumption is not distressing her, nor the culture that facilitates it. Instead, she is repulsed by the economic and political system that create them—marked more by the factory, the uniforms, and the workers than the presentation of cows as meals.
Nonfiction food writer Michael Pollan describes a similar scene in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. At the meat counter in your local supermarket, he suggests, “you encounter a species only slightly harder to identify” than in the produce aisle, where foods tend to retain something of their original form. “[T]he creaturely character of the species on display does seem to be fading,” he notes, as more and more the animals on offer for consumption “come subdivided into boneless and bloodless geometrical cuts.”4
The Planned Cow. The Planned Pig. The Planned Sheep. Who is behind them? What Marian’s body begins to reject is the contraption that offers them up. The friendly face of industrialism hides not only the assembly line from the consumer (Marian), but also from the consumed (the cow, who seems perfectly content with its role in the proceedings, however short-lived it may be). Of course, these two roles are fungible: “Every time she walked into the supermarket and heard the lilting sounds coming from the concealed loudspeakers she remembered an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them,” Atwood writes. “But just because [Marian] knew what they were up to didn’t mean she was immune. These days, if she wasn’t careful, she found herself pushing the cart like a somnambulist, eyes fixed, swaying slightly, her hands twitching with the impulse to reach out and grab anything with a bright label.”
Therefore it’s not totally wrong when Marian’s married friend attributes her stomach troubles to wedding jitters—the “piece of truth-telling dementia” noted in the Times. For marriage is simply another stage of the assembly line’s conveyor belt to which Marian feels strapped. The Edible Woman also predicted correctly that feminist sci-fi of the era to come would liken hell to a reasonably happy marriage to a businessman or tenured professor, replete with kids and a dog. Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975) draws such a comparison; I, Vampire by Jody Scott (1984) contains a harrowing nightmare sequence in which a morally ambiguous character’s death results in an afterlife of baking, child-rearing, and hubby-coddling. (It is how we know the bloodthirsty lesbian has met her demise.) As she plans her wedded life, Marian may well be seeing the pathway open up on a dystopic Stepford Wife future. (Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives was published only three years after The Edible Woman.)
Yet Marian isn’t balking exclusively at marriage itself, or even just marriage to charmless Peter. At one point following their engagement, she finds him acting inscrutably, and she imagines he must have purchased a marriage guidebook, to match the camera and legal manuals on his coffee table. “It would be according to his brand of logic to go out and buy a book on marriage, now that he was going to get married; one with easy-to-follow diagrams,” she thinks. She uses loving words, but soon her body is rejecting her placement on this assembly line, too.
What triggers Marian’s illness is her glimpse of the elaborate system she feeds into and from, a multi-use machine with a myriad of moving parts, all of which push different aspects of her life toward a single end-goal. Her every move, consumables inclusive, has been predetermined, and her clothing, relationships, and even reproductive goals (she is annoyed to discover) selected for her in advance. It makes Marian sick. Atwood doesn’t name the system her protagonist glimpses, but we now know it’s called capitalism.
Rachel is a mid-twenties pharmaceutical graduate student in Kansas with three dogs, three cats, and a fantastically attractive boyfriend named Alexey. Rachel is quite pretty herself, with long dark hair, clear skin, deep dark eyes, and a strong, sincere smile. Like Marian, Rachel’s planning to marry soon, but she’s been having some digestive issues, and managing them is taking up a lot of her time.
Luckily her boyfriend is patient and supportive, even when their dinners together make her outrageously ill. “Alexey and I have found some really good frozen pizzas,” Rachel writes in a 2009 post on her blog. “[W]e split a pizza one to two times a week and by split I mean he has two thirds of the pizza and I eat the rest. . . . In the past, I have gotten some heartburn from it and definitely a ton of gas build up, but it’s never made me sick. Last night was the first time it did.”5
Her story, instructive in its detail, continues. “Immediately after I finished the last piece,” Rachel writes:
my stomach felt extremely bloated. I had to stand up it hurt so bad. When I tried to sit down, I literally felt like my stomach was going to explode. . . . Then out of nowhere came the urgency, so I ran up to the bathroom. . . . The feeling of needing to get to a restroom with no time to spare is horrible, and experiencing it out of nowhere in a crowded place or somewhere you can’t leave quickly is terrifying.
Rachel goes into some detail regarding diarrhea and nausea—she’s got a fear of vomiting that makes the latter particularly unpleasant—and expresses gratitude that she was not only able to get through that pizza night without throwing up, “but also that I only had to take GasX.” Other brands whose products she cites would be immediately recognizable to her readers, many of whom suffer similar symptoms (“Pepto” and Immodium are her go-tos), as would the cycle of illness she describes:
I hate it so much when foods I’ve eaten for months with no problems suddenly cause me to have an episode. I had just said to my mom earlier that day that I thought I was finally regaining control of my life and not living it in fear of what food was going to hurt me and make me sick again. All I ate today was cereal because I didn’t want to get sick again. I am so sick of cereal. Just when I think I’m in the control, my body steps in to remind me how much of a joke that really is.
Rachel’s tale of pizza-related torment was published four decades after The Edible Woman was released. Although her story has much in common with Marian’s, the only thing she mentions reading on her blog is her own blog, which she uses to catalogue her IBS. It isn’t a platform for self-pity, however; her blog offers the public service of community building. Commenters regularly leave notes on this post, about pizza and IBS, as well as on her other posts, which may be about diet, drug regimen, the social anxiety of living with this particular disease, planning a wedding with a chronic illness, or plain old poop. Rachel’s been blogging approximately once a month for seven years, and her readers often leave notes to thank her for writing, or briefly describe their own similar stories. (“Reading your blog post, it honestly sounded as if I was reading one of my own journal entries,” one writes.) Commenters frequently note how desperately they have been searching for stories that reflect their own experiences. (One example: “My sister has been dealing with this for the past 2 years and people really have no idea just how much of an issue it really is. It totally changes your life!”)
However, irritable bowel syndrome is hardly rare. A relatively common diagnosis given folks that experience discomfort in the large intestine, including cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, gas, diarrhea, and constipation, it’s something of a catch-all diagnosis, bestowed upon sufferers with symptoms but no recognizable disease (although IBS does often evolve into something more clearly defined, like ulcerative colitis). You may not even know if your friends have it: as may be surmised, propriety keeps the diagnosis from coming up in most polite conversations. Internet discussions, therefore, which offer both a degree of anonymity to sufferers and, presumably, the comfort of writing from a controlled environment, do not infrequently result from Rachel’s posts, although her blog is not the only one to tackl
e IBS, nor the only one to do so from a personal narrative standpoint. Others offer insight into recipes, drug regimens, new treatment options, fitness routines, legal advice, or other aspects of living with IBS. (There is, for example, a YouTube channel devoted to toilet jokes from someone going by Positive vIBS.) There are, in fact, countless blogs by people who suffer a range of gastrointestinal disorders and autoimmune disease—Ali on the Run looks at marathon training with Crohn’s, for example, while ChronicBabe covers a wide range of chronic illnesses.
Reading such blogs offers a glimpse into the suffering of what the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association (AARDA) estimates to be one in five Americans afflicted with autoimmune conditions. The primary struggle of the afflicted (like Marian’s) is to understand why their bodies have betrayed them, and to do so, input from other sufferers is required. Even the least talented writers have dedicated readers and commenters, so community seems to be forged not around talent, but out of sheer desperation. Most blogs are kept by women, who make up approximately 75 percent of the diagnoses of autoimmune disease worldwide. From a labor perspective, we should note that the keepers of such sites probably aren’t getting paid for blogging, or are at best offsetting site update fees (in the tens to low hundreds of dollars per year) with ads, so most of the work of blogging could be described as the unpaid emotional labor of creating resources for a community that cannot find sufficient help anywhere else. Whether or not bloggers have day jobs may also be relevant—it is notoriously difficult to have the most common autoimmune diseases officially recognized as disabilities and receive social service benefits, despite the inability of sufferers to consistently meet the demands of day jobs. Let’s situate this, too, in the context of a capitalist—as opposed to consumerist—society. The work Rachel and other health bloggers do fills a medical need for patient-focused lifestyle and wellness conversations currently untended to by privately funded, profit-driven healthcare systems, who consistently defund support groups, online chat spaces, and counseling services that could provide similar.
Body Horror Page 11
