Patriarchy insists that the hallmark of an ideal woman is slenderness and a beautiful physique. Women often try to conform to the patriarchal standards, by deliberate undereating and also by undergoing various cosmetic surgeries. Women resort to various eating habits in order to be a part of the media and film industry. Both Fay Weldon and Margaret Atwood endeavour to examine the ‘sexual politics’ associated with gender images and how women imprison their bodies into an ideal image trap. The heroines of Weldon and Atwood, in the novels,The Fat Woman’s Joke andThe Edible Woman, resist the commodification of the female body, in their own ways- one by excessive eating and the other by restricted intake of food. For them, the body becomes a means by which they can assert their individuality and not a manipulated identity, as defined by the phallocratic culture.

The purpose of my paper is to scrutinize closely the concept of social satire, revealing and

Today we live in a world full of various temptations and sensations leading us away from ourselves. We change our Self in order to comply with society and in the process we become the Other. This paper explores how Margaret Atwood perceives the search for one’s identity and the pressure of societal roles that lead to this loss of identity. The main character in the novel The Edible Woman, Marian, goes on a conflicting journey during which she rejects herself, muses about her environment and her role in it, and tries to grasp her essence, which has become elusive. Atwood uses food imagery to portray Marian’s inner battles. In this paper we explore the implications that this food imagery has both on Marian and the contemporary reader. Atwood argues that this book is “protofeminist”, yet from the prism of contemporaneity it can be read as feminist. However, the scope of this novel stretches to other concepts relevant to the present day: obsession with ‘size zero’, following the latest trends, living in the fast lane, etc.; these concepts are depicted through metaphorical extensions such as cannibalism and fertility. Atwood masterfully sets the stage where she explores how these concepts influence an individual to the extent where one uses mimicry to fit the regulations of a capitalistic society, thus becoming almost the same but not quite (Homi Bhabha, 1984), i.e. colonization of the Self leading to an unfulfilled Other. Keywords: postcolonial discourse, cannibalism, fertility, food symbolism, the Other

This paper offers a critical analysis of Leanne O'Sullivan's debut collection Waiting for My Clothes, in particular focusing on its recurrent themes of anorexia and bulimia. Leanne O'Sullivan is part of a new generation of Irish poets, located at the crossroads of tradition and modernity. In its critique of the so-called beauty myth, Waiting for My Clothes takes the reader to a New Ireland where the anxiety for national definitions has lost part of its force in favour of the progressive internalisation of Irish life. However, this paper will concentrate on O'Sullivan's examination of the religious dimension of anorexic patterns, an aspect that presents her as heiress of the influence exerted by Catholicism in the conceptualisations of femininity in Ireland.

In Margaret Atwood’s fiction and poetry, wounded female bodies are a frequently used metaphor for the central characters’ severe identity crises. Atwood’s female protagonists or lyric personae fight marginalization and victimization and often struggle to position themselves in patriarchal society. In order to maintain the illusion of a stable identity, the characters often disavow parts of themselves and surrender to a subversive memory that plays all sorts of tricks on them. However, these “abject” aspects (J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror) cannot be repressed and keep returning, threatening the women’s only seemingly unified selves: In Surfacing, for example, the protagonist suffers from emotional numbness after an abortion. In The Edible Woman, the protagonist’s crisis results in severe eating disorders and in Cat’s Eye and The Robber Bride the central characters’ conflicts are externalized and projected onto haunting ghost-like trickster figures.In this paper, I will look at variou...