2. The Edible Woman and her Eggs
Eggs are an essential part of the iconic ‘full English’ breakfast. They are known to be versatile when cooked with, they have a hard shell and soft centre and are fragile. Eggs that are fertilised can bring new life, triggering an ultra-protective maternal instinct.
Margaret Atwood’s The
Edible Woman –
Protagonist Marian’s friend, Len, learns of his pending fatherhood, which triggers a highly emotional response. Marian describes him as ‘hysterical’, as he explains that ‘she made me do it…my own mother’ (Atwood 160). The enigmatic and apparent unforgivable act by his mother was to force him to eat his breakfast of eggs, in which he ‘swear[s] there was a chicken inside’, unborn and with ‘a little beak and little claws and everything’ (160). This causes ‘his shoulders…to heave convulsively’ (160), and pregnant Ainsley to adopt a mothering role, giving ‘a maternal coo of concern’ (160). His rejection of the egg is presented as a comical and surreal image, as he regresses into child-like behaviour. Len’s fear of the unfertilised breakfast egg mirrors his fear of Ainsley’s fertilised egg and his subsequent fatherhood role.
It is Len’s admittance of his fear and disgust of an egg
that causes Marian’s similar disgust.
She slowly loses her ability to eat because she begins to view the food as living, and is therefore battling with a moral dilemma. She struggles with a tension between her mind and body; it is her ‘throat [that] sa[ys]’ the soft-boiled egg before her is ‘alive’ and it reacts by ‘tighten[ing]’ (Atwood 161) to ensure she does not consume it. Her corporeal reaction creates a distance from her ‘conscious mind’ as she ‘was used to the procedure’ (161) of her bodily rejection of food. This edible hen’s egg shares a relationship with human, unfertilised eggs in the womb through the anthropomorphism of the yolk ‘looking up at her with its one significant and accusing yellow eye’ (161). I argue that the egg represents Marian’s unconscious anxiety of becoming a mother, which was a likely consequence in her near future due to her being engaged. She believes the process of childbirth and her maternity is ‘suddenly much too close’ (129); I believe this denotes her confusion around her female identity, exemplified when the narrative structure changes from the direct, personal first-person to the distant, reported third-person. Women have been taught that the ultimate feminine role is to become a mother, explained by Marian’s friend Ainsley as ‘[having a baby] fulfils your deepest femininity’ (Atwood 41). The human-like qualities of the usually edible egg and its connotations of a minute human egg suggest cannibalism, which could explain her repulsion of it. Her unconscious mind has a great focus on the idea of maternity, shown through the manifestations of edible eggs eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner, metaphors of characters with a ‘shell’ (160) and indications of birds and ‘hatch[ing]…out of eggs’ (128). Some women, feeling overwhelmed with their maternal situation, ‘quell unexpressed anger with food’ (Cline 26). Marian however, reacts oppositely by not eating.
Balut, an Indonesian street food, is an ‘embryonic duck egg…eaten boiled’, and contains a duck in ‘the fetal stage’ (Magat 64). This bears a resemblance to Len’s childhood egg, which he believes has a beak and claws. To a Western audience, this food is highly unusual and may evoke horror.
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1 Omlet. “A cracked egg
that you shouldn’t incubate.” Omlet, 2015, www.omlet.co.uk/guide/incubation/finding_eggs/choosing_eggs.
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