I’m plotting my sinister crime, my hands are reaching for your neck or perhaps, by mistake, your thigh.… Just remember this, when the scream at last has ended and you’ve turned on the lights: by the rules of the game, I must always he’ ( Murder in the Dark, 30). Duncan serves as a counterpoint to Peter, whose non-conformity to traditional masculinity draws attention to how much Peter resembles a typical, average man. Atwood’s novels are never on one level they are often, like The Edible Woman, quite elaborate detective stories in which the reader must become the detective, and Atwood herself, as she indicates in Murder in the Dark, is the criminal: ‘… that’s me in the dark. Readers, however, should not be deceived by what appears to be a simple plot. Marian MacAlpin attends her job at ‘Seymour Surveys’, a marketing research firm she lives with a roommate, Ainsley she becomes engaged to a very proper young man, Peter she meets a second, less proper young man, Duncan she becomes disenchanted with the first she stops eating she breaks off her engagement she begins to eat she ends with no lover, no job, no roommate, but with a remarkably healthy appetite. The story ends with the non-committal, abusive Duncan sitting down to enjoy the baked effigy of Marian with her.On one level, Atwood’s first published novel, The Edible Woman, is a ‘realistic’ and often comic account of a young woman’s rather prosaic life in Toronto. Marian then bakes a cake in the shape of herself for her fiancée Peter to eat and when he refuses to consume it, she sits down and eats it herself, thus accepting that she is more comfortable being a slutty free agent rather than a bride. Her roommate Ainsley convinces Marian to throw a party and when Marion becomes all dolled up, her lover Duncan tells her she is ugly and then steals her away to a motel for a night of lousy sex. She develops an aversion to meat, then eggs, the vegetables. In her mind, she feels that she is being eaten alive by men. Psychologically she starts to believe that sexually exciting yet controlling Duncan is slowly consuming her, in the same way that he consumes food. After stealing a kiss from Duncan, the two go to dinner, where Marian first starts to develop her aversion to food. After Marian accepts her own marriage proposal from her dull yet professionally polished fiancée Peter, she gets to know the much more intelligent, yet sexist Duncan in a Laundromat.

She lives with her roommate Ainsley who succeeds in tricking her evasive boyfriend Len into thinking she is pregnant so that he will propose. In 1969, the sexually frustrated Marian McAlpine has a job as a market researcher in Toronto, Canada. The Edible Woman is about a young marketer who identifies sex and love with food and becomes anorexic.

The edible woman duncan