SOURCE: “You Are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 3, Fall, 1995, pp. 349-68.

In the following essay, Parker contends that eating is a political act in Atwood's novels, denoting power and control over one's body.

While literature is suffused with scenes of men eating, there is a conspicuous absence of images of women engaged in the same activity. Margaret Atwood displays a sensitive awareness of how images of women eating have been suppressed and erased. She remarks, “I think I first connected literature with eating when I was twelve and reading Ivanhoe: there was Rebecca, shut up romantically in a tower, but what did she have to eat?” (CanLit Introduction). Atwood probes the prohibitions on the public display of female appetite and the social taboos which surround women and food in terms of the politics of...