SOURCE: “Figuring Anorexia: Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman,” in Literature Interpretation Theory, Vol. 6, No. 3-4, 1995, pp. 299-311.

In the following essay, Brain theorizes that Atwood uses anorexia in her novel as a means to explore women's strategies for developing alternative languages.

In her novel The Edible Woman, written in 1965 and published in 1969, Margaret Atwood prefigures contemporary debate about the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Though the word anorexia is never used in the text, Atwood examines the condition and its meanings with a sophistication rarely equalled in subsequent discussions of the illness. Atwood uses anorexia to address issues of gender, language, sexual politics and social dislocation.

I will begin by setting the social context out of which The Edible Woman came, as well as examining the medical and psychoanalytic discourses on anorexia that it anticipates. I will then argue that Atwood uses anorexia in The Edible Woman to explore...