Alice and the Animals: The Edible Woman and Early Poems

Abstract

On one level, Atwood’s first published novel, The Edible Woman, is a ‘realistic’ and often comic account of a young woman’s rather prosaic life in Toronto. Marian MacAlpin attends her job at ‘Seymour Surveys’, a marketing research firm; she lives with a roommate, Ainsley; she becomes engaged to a very proper young man, Peter; she meets a second, less proper young man, Duncan; she becomes disenchanted with the first; she stops eating; she breaks off her engagement; she begins to eat; she ends with no lover, no job, no roommate, but with a remarkably healthy appetite. Readers, however, should not be deceived by what appears to be a simple plot. Atwood’s novels are never on one level; they are often, like The Edible Woman, quite elaborate detective stories in which the reader must become the detective, and Atwood herself, as she indicates in Murder in the Dark, is the criminal: ‘… that’s me in the dark. I have designs on you. I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh.… Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always he’ (Murder in the Dark, 30).