She’s Such a Tease: The Feminine as Burlesque Performance in Margaret Atwood’s _The Edible Woman_
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.34736Abstract
This paper proposes that the dominant imageof Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman is that of the female as prey or commodity, and that this image can also be understood as the female as burlesque performer. As her marriage looms, Marian negotiates a complex set of social instructions on how to present herself as the ideal woman. This desired image involves strategic teasing and revealing for a male spectator: Marian’s appearance, as well as her behaviour, should be calculated to satisfy, but not sate, her male audience’s appetites. Lucy, Marian’s colleague, and Ainsley, Marian’s roommate, perform their own versions of femininity within what Judith Butler has since identified as “the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality.” The cake that Marian bakes in her own image, and then consumes, demonstrates her rejection of this compulsory, commodified bawdy role. However, she searches in vain for an alternative definition of femininity—one that did not yet exist when the novel was written in the early 1960s.References
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