This Really Sucks

C.G.Jung's comment, "The unconscious mind of man sees correctly even when the conscious reason is blind and impotent", is indicative to Margaret Atwood's book The Edible Woman. We see how the unconscious affects a woman mind unknowingly. The mind and body have an inter connection. They work with each other even though the conscious mind may not know it.

Atwood's main character, Marian McAlpin, was ordinary. After she graduated college she started her simplistic job. Her relationships with people, friends, and her boyfriend, were purely surface. She began feeling crippled by the mundaneness of her already mapped out life. She feared the thought of being the annoying old lady in the basement. She feared living a married life with children, miserable like Carla. She feared the very thought of the "pension plan" for it symbolized the future. A future she hadn't began to question until she met Duncan. We see a shift of characteristics between Duncan and Marian. Her job is to chew up words to make it easier for people to read and understand and then test these people with her revisions. Duncan, however, treats the test as a psychological evaluation ex amplifying that one should think and question what is simplistic. This is what Marian begins to do.

She needed to escape the thoughts that resided in her unconscious mind. She feared being pinned down. We get images of this through out the book. Her thoughts of cannibalism represents her fear of consumption. Destruction. Peter erupts these feelings inside her. His proposal of marriage charged her with such irrational fear that her physical self started to react to her unconscious self. Her inability of eating animals was a major symbol of her not wanted to pin down life. This transgressed to not being able to eat vegetables, because they too seemed life like to her. One can argue that she was only able to eat pasta and beans because they are starchy and stiff. They fill her but do not pose as a threat to her for they aren't needed to live and aren't life like. She begins to act neurotic, like Duncan. We get a glimpse of his unconscious mind with his obsession of ironing things. His unconscious mind needs to straighten out and un-wrinkle. He controls this. He feels comfort in pressing out the most wrinkled items.

Another interesting character in the book is Marian's roommate Ainsley. She does not seem to repress her feelings. She knows what she wants from life and strives for it. She knows her place in life is not working with toothbrushes. She wants to be surrounded by art. She is to the Dionysian as Marian is to the Apollonian. Ainsley puts her feelings into actions. She wanted to become pregnant, she got pregnant. She wanted to find a man, she found a man. Ainsley seduces the seducers. She is not afraid to use her femininity. Marian only dreams of these things. She represses her feelings so far within that it effected her subconscious. By meeting Duncan she realizes that it is a lifetime of being dominated by Peter an society that frightens her. Duncan may be like Peter in the way that they are both egocentric and too self involved, but he accepted this. He knew it and made it work for him. Peter is handsome, neat and motivated, while Duncan is lazy and unattractive. Peter represents the normalcy of things while Duncan does not. This is a big factor in Marian's attraction to Duncan.