Domination of Woman in the Selected Novel of Margaret Eleanor Atwood

I. INTRODUCTION

In the present buyer society, conventional way to deal with the gender and gender personality are never again normal in the utilization and general conduct, it is consistently been one of the conspicuous factors and divisions in utilization. As a persuading account regarding self-awareness, The Edible Woman appears, how female lack of involvement and submersion in the customary spouse and mother jobs can represent a genuine danger to the very survival of oneself, and how woman and her pictures are formed, reshaped and reoriented by man and for man. The novel centers around the personality emergency of Marian MacAlpin in the male hawkish society with customer culture that tries to render women to consumable item. She comes to understand that the man centric culture has transformed her into an edible article and she is being eaten up step by step. Beauvoir composes that a "woman's destiny is bound up with that of transient things‖ (567) Margaret Eleanor Atwood is an eminent and respected Canadian female novelist who is known as a feminist commentator and social dissident. In spite of the fact that Margaret Atwood denies to be a Feminist, she accepts that women are oppressed in Western society. Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer born on November 18, 1939 in Ottawa, Canada. The globally realized author has composed award winning verse, short-stories and novels, including The Circle Game (1966), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), The Blind Assassin (2000), Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Tent (2006). Atwood's way of life as a Canadian author has consistently been essential to her, and she made gigantic progress disregarding the genuine handicap displayed by her craving to be known as a Canadian writer. One of the main Canadian writers of her age, Atwood has gathered worldwide approval as an artist, novelist, short story writer, critic, and author of children's books. She has now distributed more than 30 books of section and exposition and translations of her works have showed up in more than 20 dialects. A most loved among scholastics and the general perusing open alike, Atwood has been regarded with various artistic honours and selections. She has won the Governor recorded for the esteemed Booker Prize multiple times. The last time was in 1996 for her novel Alias Grace.

The Edible Woman, as in her most popular novel Surfacing (1972) and in The Handmaid's Tale (1986), is the issue of the woman who can't acknowledge the jobs given to her by a male-dominated society. Marian isn't intentionally a revolutionary, nor does she consider herself irregular in her hopes and expectations. Her job, her method for living, and her friends are on the whole customary. She has no cognizant conviction that her encounters and her college education had arranged her for something more throughout everyday life, and she doesn't discover Peter in any capacity objectionable. On the off chance that he can be requesting, he is likewise solid, conceivably fruitful, everything which she supposes she should need. Marian is, nonetheless, unfit to make the following sensible stride in the life for which society has arranged her. Her failure to eat is the consequence of her powerlessness, truly, to stomach the kind of life her family and friends anticipate that her should live. The food imagery is additionally significant in light of the fact that it shows the separating that Marian does with her. Atwood does not give elective conceivable outcomes. Toward the finish of the novel, there is no proposal of what Marian will do straightaway or what kind of life she may start to lead. The significant inquiry for Atwood is consistently whether her heroes can declare their uniqueness and start the way toward finding their identity. Through Marian MacAlpin's fairly wretched endeavor at turning into an independent woman, the author outlines the common feminist perspective on a male-dominated world in which woman is consigned to the job of unfortunate casualty. Albeit Marian is absolutely no prototype legend in the strictest feeling of the term, she in any case figures out how to split away from the requirements of her pedantic foundation and achieves a component of optimistic freedom. Another significant theme in the novel is gender equality. The way Atwood shows this is through Marian's association with Peter. She goes from having an equivalent position in the relationship, to quitting any preteens of everything to him. It was shown that Peter should settle on every one of the decisions, and that Peter was the predominant one. Marian changes that toward the finish of the novel. The truly ends up independent, and develops hugely to tell everybody that women have should as much a privilege as any other individual. The job of women as mothers is tested in the novel, "The Edible Woman". Clara is "traditional" mother as in she is hitched and remains at home with her young greater part of the residential work notwithstanding profiting for the family. Clara alludes to her children as "drains" and "barnacles' and ponders resoundingly how anybody can love their children before they are really individuals. Clara dropped out of college to marry Joe and feels disdain towards the loss of her character and places this unhappiness on the shoulders of her children. An integral part of a customer society Marian is looked with a decision of being edible to her better half and stays single as an individual and attests her. Subsequently, she picks the later and hence will not be the edible woman. It is through a progression of chasing pictures, an arrangement of dream-like hallucination which flicker through the psyche of Marian. The novel displays a multi-coloured image of her life. To make the image all the more genuine, Marian is displayed as an ideal foil to her friends, where in attributable to her coming into contact with them, she adapts tremendously of women's issues. The Edible Woman is a fruitful comic novel which offers continually the joy of astonishment and confusion through the mind and sheer surprise of its striking yet important pictures, through the alarming yet some way or another consistent inversions of aim and activity by its characters, and through inversions of ordinary expectations concerning how individuals should talk, feel, and carry on. It trains us in specific substances of the world we live in, giving both the satisfaction of recognition and the shock of novelty and joining them as it transforms the natural into the novel. Atwood recommends that in ordinary society, women are edible. They are gobbled up by their male partners. Marian acknowledges this and chooses that on the off chance that she should be eaten, at that point she will assume responsibility for her own life and eat herself. The target of this novel is to introduce female showdown to social expectations and demands, which is indivisibly connected with the female body. Dietary problems in Atwood's works are consequently utilized as symbols of women's bodies' reactions to social pressure. Atwood is skeptical about social change. Nothing in her novels proposes that society is perceiving the need of women for self-acknowledgment, in spite of the fact that her novels are clear demands for such change. Simultaneously, her hero comes to an instinctive comprehension of herself and of her own needs. Marian Mac Alpin endures her preliminaries, and the novel finishes up with her statement of her own character.

The Edible Woman features different thoughts of cannibalism, suppression, obligation to carry on in a decided manner and the mission to get oneself.

The most overwhelming component all through the novel is cannibalism. Marian imagines that she is being devoured by her boyfriend as she expends food. At the point when sex turns into the mechanism of utilization, she feels got in a sex job trap and needs to break out of or else she would lose her identity and self-respect. Through this, Atwood delineates how Women are constantly treated as articles for somebody's pleasure.  Workplace environment for women: Prior women were not given equivalent job openings when contrasted with men. They had a constrained degree for working. They needed to work under/beneath men; this speaks to suppression. There were contrasts in their compensation rate. Women were oppressed in the work environment. Despite their capacities to work, their insight and readiness to prosper they were never empowered. Venturing up was beside unimaginable. Women were liable to different principles. The absolute first issue that Marian needs to face was at her work place, Seymour Surveys Company. The company has three-level framework, she couldn't work at the upper floor as just men works there neither one of the she could work at the lower floor as just spouses and old women works there. She winds up caught at the centre purpose of the office structure. "I couldn't end up one of the men upstairs; I couldn't turn into a machine individual or one of the questionnaire-production women, as that would be a stage down. I may possibly transform into Mrs. Bogue or her aide, however to the extent I could see that would take quite a while, and I didn't know I might want it in any case.‖

From the start pregnancy is displayed as a demonstration of traitorousness to the company in light of the fact that prior there were no rights for working women. The woman needed to leave her place of employment in the event that she gets pregnant. "Mrs. Bogue grimaced marginally: she sees pregnancy as a demonstration of unfaithfulness to the company."

Marriage is considered as a major concern. Each woman is relied upon to get married in a particular age and have babies. Married life is considered as a perfect life for a woman. Unmarried Woman should have an infant else; the infant is considered as an ill-conceived child. As Ainsley is against marriage and chooses to have an infant, Marian" hopes this is only an impulse she could get over" "I've never been senseless about marriage the way Ainsley is. She's against it on Principle, and life isn't by Principles yet by changes." While leading market research study, Marian meets a man for taking his interview, she is irritated by his remark " you should be at home with some big strong man to take care of you‖.

THEIR APPEARANCE

Marian's connections are acquainted and she presents individuals with one another. Dwindle proposes and Marian acknowledges, giving over her obligation to him, however she appears to be mindful with Duncan and starts to experience difficulty eating food. She additionally envisions her body parts are vanishing. She bakes a cake-woman for Peter, who will not participate in it. Ainsley educators her how to put on a false smile and a fancy red dress. Marian moves once more, winding up established again in all actuality and she watches Duncan eat the cake.

1. Atwood, Margaret (1977). "An Album of Photographs". Malahat Review 41: pp. 65-88. 2. Christ, Carol P. (1976). "Margaret Atwood: Surfacing of Women's Spiritual Quest and Vision" Signe 2 (Winter 1976): pp. 316-30 3. Dvorak, M., ed. (1998). The Handmaid‘s Tale: Margaret Atwood Paris: Ellipses. 4. McCombs, Judith, ed. (1988). Critical Essay on Margaret Atwood. Boston, Mass: Hall. 5. Gayle Green (1987). ―Margaret Atwood‘s The Edible Woman: Rebelling against the System, Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality (Edinburgh: Pan American) p. 117. 6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ Edible_Woman 7. Atwood, Margaret (2009). The Edible Woman. Virago Press, 2009. Print. 8. Royanian, Shamsoddin: Metaphor of Body in Margaret Atwood‟s The Edible Woman. 9. The Criterion (2011). An International Journal In English. 10. Beauvoir, Simone de. (2011). The second Sex. A new translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. London: Vintage, 2011.Print 11. Upadhyay, Mukti (2012). Feminist Approach with reference of Margaret Atwood‟s Novel. International Journal of Recent Research and Review, vol.1, March 2012. 12. Sankha Maji (2015). ―Reconstructing Feminine Identity: A Critical Study Of Margaret Atwood‘s The Edible Woman‖, International Journal of Development Research Vol. 5, Issue, 07, pp. 5178-5179, July, 2015 13. S. Padmaja (2016). ―Politics of Body in Margaret Atwood‟s The Edible Woman and Lady Oracle‖, Language in India, Vol. 16: 11 November 2016

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