An Eco-feminist Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman

Margaret Atwood is one of the most famous and influential Canadian contemporary writers. As a responsible woman writer, she not only shows great concern for women's fate but has a deep affection for nature. Therefore, the destiny of women and nature and their intimate connection become the most important theme of her works. In her first novel TheEdible Woman, she brings ecological themes together with feminist issues: the novel not only presents women's living situation, their spiritual process of being lost, the mentality of their ultimate self-awareness and self-reconstruction in the patriarchal society, but also displays humans'serious damages to nature, and appeals people to love and get on well with nature. Her writings about women and nature reflect her eco-feminist consciousness.This thesis aims to reinterpret The Edible Woman(1969) through the viewpoint of eco-feminist criticism and reveal the ecological meaning, the feminist consciousness and the relationship between living things which include human beings, animals and plants. The adoption of eco-feminist literary criticism has broadened the investigative perspective and helped to gain a more comprehensive understanding of this novel. The main body of this thesis is composed of three chapters.In Chapter One, the author will focus on the identification of women and nature. It points out that woman is interconnected with nature by their symbolic links, by women's intimate connection with the animals and by their common maternity. Woman has the quality of nature and nature has the quality of woman. Woman and nature have some intrinsic affinity for their same physical function—reproduction and nurture. In the novel, the heroines love nature and identify with nature.Chapter Two mainly discusses man's domination over women and nature in the patriarchal society. It exposes humans'alienation to nature by exposing their destruction to environment and slaughtering of animals. It also reveals women's problems and traditional women's marginal status in the male-dominated world, displays the heroines'physical and spiritual agony which result in their psychological fragmentation—self-split and self-reconstruction. Moreover, this chapter probes into the heroines'mind to find out the deep roots for their self-split and points out that in the male-dominated society, women and nature are both in the"other"position and reduce to"prey"together due to the prevalence of consumerism. The male acts as the consumer, while nature and the female as the consumed.Chapter Three probes into Atwood's ideal of establishing a kind of harmony within a person and between male and female, between humans and nature. In The Edible Woman,Marian breaks away from Peter by creating him a"cake lady"as a substitute of herself, she regains her identity and realizes her personal harmony. Duncan gets on well with Marian and encourages her to struggle for independence, their relationship shows a harmony between male and female. It is in the snow field that Marian regains her identity, nature gives her enough strength and courage to step out of confusion. Therefore, the exploration of ideal relationship among nature, woman and man can be fulfilled.As conquerors, humans implement their power over nature and also over human society, it results in natural crisis and human sufferings. Atwood opposes anthropocentrism, the main ideological root, and warns people that although humans have triumphed over nature superficially and temporarily, they are destined to receive the revenge from nature in one way or another someday. By examining situations of women and nature in The Edible Woman, this thesis hopes to call for human beings to reflect upon the crisis of technology society and to think about how to balance the relationships between men and women, between human beings and nature.