Every Body Eats: Food and the Embodiment of Power in the Novels of Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates, 1968-1972

Abstract

This work investigates the use of food and eating as a manifestation of power in the earliest novels of Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates, those published between 1968 and 1972 at the immergence of the second wave feminist movement. Specifically, this study questions the ways Atwood and Oates depict food’s impact on the physical body and what these encounters reveal about power relations. Within each novel, scenes of food and eating are depicted in ways that illustrate a body acting autonomously when the person lacks agency, and this study reveals the corporeal nature of each author’s work with food and eating that parallel second wave feminist empowerment and its focus on a woman’s agency over her body as a means of raising consciousness and symbolic revolt. Foucault’s theories on power relations and the body as a locus of power are central to this investigation, as is a phenomenological approach to reading the texts to maintain an explicit corporeal awareness while analyzing Atwood and Oates’ work. This study traces how food is used as a structural element to frame the narratives, and examines scenes of individuals, both men and women, binging, withholding, glorifying, and abusing food, in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1968) and Surfacing (1972), and Joyce Carole Oates’ Expensive People (1968), them (1969), and Wonderland (1971). The investigation concludes that each encounter with food is unhealthy, malnourishing, and often nauseating, consistently manifesting in highly charged, emotional situations where an external sense of power is lacking or threatened; in an attempt to assume some sense of control, the body responds: a corporeal embodiment of power without conscious thought.