The Edible Woman | Style

The Edible Woman Style

Point of View

One of the most obvious style techniques that Atwood uses in The Edible Woman is her unusual use of point of view, or the perspective from which the story is told. Atwood begins the story with a first-person narrator, Marian McAlpin, telling the story from her own perspective, almost sounding as if she were talking to herself.

However, immediately following Marian's engagement to Peter, Atwood changes the narrator, and for the entire second part of the book, the story is told from a third-person point of view. This distances the reader from Marian, just as Marian begins distancing her mind from her body. Darlene Kelly says in "Either Way, I Stand Condemned" that Marian "seems always out of touch with reality, even with who she is . . . this estrangement from herself corresponds perfectly to her use of a detached, third-person voice." In the last two chapters of...
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