When I began interpreting The Edible Woman I was keen to avoid making a woman-shaped dessert. I'm not sure why. Perhaps I was stubbornly avoiding it on the grounds that it would be too literal an interpretation, or that it would seem like I was 'copying' the main character, Marian, who bakes a "doll-like" cake and serves it to her fiancee as a test of his unconcious desire to consume her. So I turned to the introduction in my edition of the book, written by Margaret Atwood herself, and decided that creating an edible woman was practically obligatory. She writes,
"I'd been speculating for some time about symbolic cannibalism. Wedding cakes with sugar brides and grooms were at that time of particular interest to me." [...] "It's noteworthy that my heroine's choices remain much the same at the end of the book as they are at the begining: a career going nowhere, or mariage as an exit from it."So I'm busy working on a creation using the following quotes for inspiration, two from the begining of the book and two from the end:
"Raisins are too risky ... Many don't like them" (p.18).
"The company is layered like an ice cream sandwich, with three floors: the upper crust, the lower crust, and our department, the gooey layer in the middle." (p.19)
"Now she had a blank white body. It looked slightly obscene lying there soft and sugary and featureless on the platter. " (p.269)
"You've been trying to assimilate me. But I've made youa substitute, something you'll like much better." (p.271)
