You are what you eat: the politics of eating in the novels of Margaret Atwood

The cannibalistic nature of relationships in Life Before Man is epitomized by the lifeboat game played at Elizabeth's dinner party. Everyone is stranded in a lifeboat which has a limited supply of food, so someone has to be thrown overboard. To avoid this fate, each person has to justify his or her existence. Nate gives up and jumps overboard voluntarily, but Elizabeth, who threatens to drag others in if she is ejected, thinks the losers should not be thrown overboard but kept and eaten by the others. The strongest sustain themselves by eating the weakest. The monstrous nature of relationships based on this ethic is exemplified by Lesje's dinosaur fantasies. The voracity of the dinosaurs' appetite is strikingly similar to the more covert cannibalistic tendencies expressed by men and women. Knowledge of the dinosaur's extinction creates a subtle sense of foreboding for the human race when men and women treat each other as meat in a fight for survival. The most disturbing image of women as food is created by Atwood's parallel between the way dead flesh is devoured by insects in the museum and the way women's bodies are devoured by the male gaze in society:

In mammology, where the bones are real, they don't use dental picks. They have a freezer full of dead carcasses, camels, mooses, bats, and when they're ready to assemble the skeleton they strip most of the meat off and put the bones into the Bug Room, where carnivorous insects eat the shreds of flesh remaining. The Bug Room smells of rotting meat. Outside the door, several pictures of naked women are Scotch-taped to filing cabinets. (220)

In The Handmaid's Tale Offred recalls her mother telling her that Hitler put the Jews in "ovens." She does not understand that they were gassed and thinks they were cooked and eaten, which, she decides later in life, "in a way I suppose they had been" (155). By referring to the atrocities committed against the Jews, Atwood explicitly links eating with politics and symbolic cannibalism with megalomania and tyranny. In Cat's Eye Elaine learns that the historical identification of women with food is socially endorsed and celebrated through art. In her art-history course, she notices the constant re-emergence of certain themes and images:

plates of fruit and cuts of meat, with or without lobsters. Lobsters are a favourite, because of the colour.

Naked women.

There is considerable overlap. . . . The naked women are presented in the same manner as the plates of meat and dead lobsters, with the same attention to the play of candlelight on the skin, the same lusciousness, the same sensuous and richly rendered detail, the same painterly delight in tactility. (Richly rendered, I write, Painterly delight in tactility.) They appear served up. (326)

Throughout the novels women are constantly seen, and are taught to see themselves, as food. While this constitutes an unequivocal symbol of powerlessness, Atwood illustrates how women can use their bodies as objects of resistance against the system of oppression designed to control those bodies. Offred's persistent presentation of herself as food is a sign of her powerlessness, but she also uses the image of her body as food in a subversive manner. Conscious of the sexual frustration of the Guardians, as she passes them she sways her hips as if "teasing a dog with a bone held out of reach." This gives her a slight sense of power over those who have power over her. "I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there" (32). Even as she capitulates to the image of herself as food and the control this represents, she finds a way of subverting that control. What is a form of control and degradation becomes a form of power. Offred never overtly challenges the system that subordinates her by refusing the status of food, but she tacitly subverts it by using its own instrument of power against it. Her complicity is a survival tactic. She never glorifies her position of powerlessness, but explores alternative forms of power within, but not recognized by, the status quo.