Sexual Power Politics: A Post- Modern Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Toni Morrison’s Sula

Sexual Power Politics: A Post- Modern Reading of Margaret Atwood’s

The Edible Woman and Toni Morrison’s Sula

Rincy.S,

M. Phil Research Scholar,

Nirmala College for Women,

Coimbatore.

There was a strange discrepancy between the reality of our lives as women and the image to which we were trying to conform, the image which I came to call the feminine mystique… I wondered if other women faced this schizophrenic split, and what it meant. – Freidan.

Nothing could serve a better introduction to Margaret Atwood’s trend setting first novel, The Edible Woman than the above quoted words by Betty Freiden whose book, and                 The Feminine Mystique (1963) registered the first signs of the contemporary women’s movement in its resistance to social myths of feminity. The two novels under discussion that i.e. Atwood’s The Edible Women and Toni Morrison’s Sula figured women who embark on their individual quests for selfhood which are precipitated by different attitudes towards the human condition. Nevertheless, theirs is a formidable struggle during the course of which they flourish and evolve into prototypes for psychic wholeness and individual autonomy.

Atwood presents three women characters in the novel that are different in their perceptions of women’s biological destiny and motherhood. The protagonist of the novel Marian prefers to move in the set direction of standards of life obedient to the society. Sensitised  as she is to the social script of gender relation and feminine expectations, she seems to have little consciousness of her own body either in terms of maternal urges are erotic pleasures. To her, pregnant women and fat ageing women appear grotesque and disgusting. On the other hand, a friends Clara and Ainsly celebrate women’s biological destiny though their approaches to motherhood are parodic images of the maternal principle. Clara represents woman’s passive fulfillment or her biological destiny though her attitude is savagely unmaternal. “Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock” (36).

Ainsly has an intellectual approach to maternity as she embarks on it as a social project with the aim of becoming a single parent. Her programme is academic and theoretical. “Every woman should have at least one body. She sounded like a voice on the radio saying that every woman should have at least one electric hairdryer. It’s even more important than sex. It fulfills your deepest feminity” (41).With this project in mind, Ainsly pursues. Leonard Slank, a notorious womaniser. Atwood purposely reverses traditional seduction plot in order exposes the dynamics of the sexual game in all its duplicity. However, when he sees Ainsly pregnant he considers her as an Earth Mother figure and recoils from her “goddamn fertility worship” (214).

Marian, the protagonist has no identity worth calling her own, except that she is employed and has a steady, dominating boyfriend Peter. Peter continues to use her for his own benefit and prefers her to be a silent booster of his ego. Marian becomes conscious of his measured stares and looks. Her visualization of herself as a camera in his hands stretches further and further to a point when she watches Peter eating. “. . . The capable hands holding the knife and fork, slicing precisely with and exact adjustment of pressures. How skillfully he did it; no tearing, no raged edges. And yet it was a violent action, cutting . . .” (154).  It strikes Marian that Peter treats her in as civilized a way as he handles the streak on his plate devouring it with relish and style. It is this fear which makes her give up food altogether.

Her eating disorder should be interpreted in the context of a challenge to the discourses of both feminity and adulthood. Marian’s case would appear to be a thought disorder where the body’s refusal to eat forms part of a discourse of hysterical protest. The cannibalism motif which carries through to the end with the cake is a sign of hallucinatory displacement where metaphor inscribes Marian’s unconscious fear of a point where she can eat nothing at all.

She gradually begins to hallucinate her emotional conflict in images of bodily dissolution and is haunted by hallucinations of fragmentation. Following her own way of metaphorical thinking, Marian discovers a way to solve her ontological problem, “some way she could know what was real: a test simple and direct as litmus paper” (267). The test is the cake which she takes and then ices in the shape of woman. Gazing at it she says “You look delicious. . . . And that’s what will happened to you; that’s what you get foe being food” (270).

When offered the cake, Peter flees from her and disguised hostility into the arms of Lucy, one of Marian’s office friends. Peter has wanted an ‘edible woman’ all along. Marian starts eating the cake when Ainsly exclaims “ Marian! You are rejecting your feminity!” This is confirmed by Marian’ as plugging her fork into the carcass, neatly severing the body from the body” (273). This action is a parody  of vampire slaying and it causes the impression that the feminine image had been draining Marian’s life blood but will have the power to do so no more.

 Toni Morrison considers in the novel Sula the effect of racism upon black identity formation and the effect of racism and sexism on the identify formation of the black female. In Sula men are immature, and trust worthy and anonymous as suggested by their names- Green (native), Boy Boy (infantile), Deweys (anonymous) and they abandon their women. The women are given empowering names. They support the beleaguered men either sexually, emotionally or financially. The novel is about the friendship between two black girls- Nel and Sula- growing to womenhood that serves as a periscope through which the tremendous contradictions of life are viewed.

 Neither of the two female characters- Nel and Sula- is complete in herself. Morrison suggests that to attain an ideal and holistic personality that embodied in Sula has to be wedded to the safe conventional part represented by Nel. Morrison’s most articulate statement regarding the degradation of the female comes in a passage that appears after the first meeting of Nel and Sula. “ Because each had discovered years  before they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be” (52).

Nel and Sula live in world in which women must survive without men. Christian says “Their broken friendship is a measure of their broken lives, lives that are cramped from the very start. As counterpoints, all the other women in this book (Sula) must either fit themselves into the place life has set for them are defy it with tragic circumstances proportionate to their degree of non- accommodation” (27-28).

Both Atwood’s The Edible Women and Toni Morrison’s Sula are similar in that the central characters in both the novels negate the prevalent male- oriented system by rendering it absurd. Marian’s act of offering an ‘imitation (the cake) often imitation’ (her feminine body) and Sula’s act of total dejection of societal values reveal a postmodernist refusal of the speculative terms of representation available to them within a patriarchal society.

Work Cited:

Atwood, Margaret. The Edible Woman. New York : Fawcett Popular Library Books, 1969. Print.

Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticsm : Perspective on Black Women Writers. New York : Pergamon Press, 1985. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. London : Pan, 1973. Print.

Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions : Revisiting the Postmodern. London : Routledge, 1989. Print.