Voilà de quoi manger

 A reading I greatly enjoyed was Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman. First published in 1969. The edition I read: Virago Modern Classics (London, UK), 1979.

Below are some lengthy quotes from the book surrounded by minimal context.

• Duncan is a graduate student. In the following exceprt, he talks to Marian, the main character and narrator:

“'They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.''” (96)

• This passage is about Ainsley, who shares an appartment with Marian, and her plan to seduce a man (named Leonard) only in order to get pregnant and get rid of him right after that:

“Things hadn't gone according to schedule. It appeared that Ainsley had overshot the mark. At the first encounter she had made herself into an image of such pink-gingham purity that Len had decided, after her strategic repulse of him that evening, that she would require an extra-long and careful siege. Anything too abrupt, too muscular, would frighten her away; she would have to be trapped with gentleness and caution. Consequently he had begun by asking her to lunch several times, and had progressed, at intervals of medium length, to dinners out and finally to foreign films, in one of which he had gone so far as to hold her hand. He had even invited her to his apartment once, for afternoon tea. Ainsley said later with several vigorous oaths that he had been on this occasion a model of propriety. Since by her own admission she didn't drink, she could not even pretend to permit him to get her drunk. In conversation he treated her as though she was a little girl, patiently explaining things to her and impressing her with stories about the television studio and assuring her that his interest in her was strictly that of a well-wishing older friend until she wanted to scream. And she couldn't even talk back: it was necessary for her mind to appear as vacant as her face. Her hands were tied. She had constructed her image and now she had to maintain it. To make any advances herself, or to let slip a flicker of anything resembling intelligence, would have been so out of character as to give her dumb-show irrevocably away. So she had been stewing and fussing in private, suffering Len's overly-subtle manoeuvrings with suppressed impatience and watching the all-important calendar days slide uneventfully by.” (119)

• Clara, who is Marian's friend, just gave birth. She  talks to Marian, who is visiting her at the hospital:

“' . . . I watched the whole thing, it's messy, all that blood and junk, but I've got to admit it's sort of fascinating. Especially when the little bugger sticks its head out, and you finally know after carrying the damn thing around all that time what it looks like; I get so excited waiting to see, it's like when you were little and you waited and waited and finally got to open your Christmas presents. Sometimes when I was pregnant I wished like hell we could just hatch them out of eggs, like the birds and so on; but there's really something to be said for this method.' She picked up one of the white roses, and sniffed at it. 'You really ought to try it sometime.'” (128)

• Duncan is ironing shirts and talks to Marian:

“'It's like term-papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it's a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.'” (143)

• Leonard talks to Marian about Ainsley's pregnancy:

“. . . 'God, I feel just sick about it,' he said. 'I was so shocked when she told me, god I'd just called her up to see if she'd have coffee with me, she's been sort of avoiding me ever since that night, I guess all that really shook her up, and then to have that hit you over the phone. I haven't been able to work all afternoon. I hung up right in the middle of the conversation, I don't know what she thought about that but I couldn't help it. She's such a little girl, Marian, I mean most women you'd feel what the hell, they probably deserved it, rotten bitches anyway, not that anything like that has ever happened to me before. But she's so young. The damn thing is, I can't really remember what happened that evening. We came back for coffee, and I was feeling sort of rotten and that bottle of scotch was sitting on the table and I started in on it. Of course I won't deny that I'd been angling for her, but, well, I wasn't expecting it, I mean I wasn't ready, I mean I would have been a lot more careful. What a mess. What'm I going to do?'” (156)

• Fisher, one of Duncan's roomates, talks about Alice in Wonderland at a dinner with Marian:

“' . . . I've got into Lewis Carroll, that's really more profound. The nineteenth century is very hot property these days, you know.' He threw his head back against the chair and closed his eyes; his words rose in a monotonously-intoned chant through the black thicket of his beard. 'Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis bok, that's old stuff, it's been around for a long time, I'd like to go into it a little deeper though. What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit-burrow, becoming as it were pre-natal, trying to find her role,' he licked his lips, 'her role as a Woman. Yes, well, that's clear enough. These patterns emerge. Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she's really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she's been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of 'Off with his head!' And when the Duchess makes a cleverly concealed lesbian pass at her, sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway, she's neither aware nor interested; and right after you'll recall she goes to talk with the Mock-Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitively pre-adolescent character; then there are those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the one where her neck becomes elongated and she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you'll remember, a rather destructively-phallic identity she indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. And of course there's the obsession with time, clearly a cyclical rather than a linear obsession. So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can't say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitively called maturity. She does much better though in Through the Looking Glass, where, as you'll remember...'” (193-4)

• Marian thinks about the dinner at Duncan's apartment:

“. . . She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two room-mates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.” (201)

• After Marian 'escaped,' she is back with Peter, who is her fiancé:

“. . . Now that she had seen him again, the actual Peter, solid as ever, the fears of the evening before had dwindled to foolish hysteria and the flight to Duncan had become a stupidity, an evasion; she could hardly remember what he looked like. Peter was not the enemy after all, he was just a normal human being like most other people. She wanted to touch his neck, tell him that he shouldn't get upset, that everything was going to be all right. It was Duncan that was the mutation.
But there was something about his shoulders. He must have been sitting with his arms folded. The face on the other side of that head could have belonged to anyone. And they all wore clothes of real cloth and had real bodies: those in the newspapers, those still unknown, waiting for their chance to aim from the upstairs window; you passed them on the streets every day. It was easy to see him as normal and safe in the afternoon, but that didn't alter things. The price of this version of reality was testing the other one.” (215)