Eating and Gender Politics in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

Food and eating are essential elements in works of Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood, two significant female writers of the twentieth century. Both utilize eating disorders to intervene in the discursive construction of a healthy gendered body and to problematize the mainstream values of body proportions and body management. By delving into eating politics in Woolf’s and Atwood’s novels, this thesis addresses the problematics of gender and sees if eating or not eating serves as effective bodily resistance to sexist oppression. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach including psychoanalytic, sociologist, and feminist accounts of orality, eating and body, and their relation to self-formation and social order, this thesis investigates how one’s eating politics reflects social normalization of a gendered body and explores the potential and pitfalls of eating disorders as a means of self-empowerment in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman. In addition to an Irigarayian reading of the political meaning in bodily textuality, the thesis addresses the double bind between self-assertion and self-destruction seen on disorderly eaters. Through comparing diverse eating politics and the respective critiques of social hierarchy and patriarchal commodification in postwar London and in Canadian consumer society in the 1960s, the thesis further attempts to envision a survival agenda in Mrs. Dalloway and The Edible Woman.