Woman, food and redefining her-self: A feminist reading of Fay Weldon's The Fat Woman's Joke, Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate

Date

2024-6

Author

Erentuğ, Merve

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This dissertation focuses on the connections between Fay Weldon’s The Fat Woman’s Joke, Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate through an analysis of woman’s position and role in patriarchal societies, the metaphoric consumption of woman and finally woman’s resistance. In these novels, woman as a gender category, as the opposite of man and thus as defined by the oppositional masculinist logic is questioned and problematized with the possibility of liberating ‘female’ from patriarchal bounds. The heroines struggle to liberate themselves from the definitions and restrictions of patriarchy in order to find and express their true selves. Food, in terms of eating and cooking, home and kitchen as feminine spaces and the female body are used to subvert the notion of woman’s definition and limitation by man, thus leading to woman’s representation of herself by herself. This dissertation will discuss how eating, cooking and food related activities in the selected novels become means of subverting the gendered domestic roles, deconstructing ‘woman’ as well as the male defined spaces and the socially predefined body to express a self that denies male definition and that becomes a subject in her own right. Using theories of space and body as the conceptual framework, this study aims to provide a feminist reading with the claim that, Esther in The Fat Woman’s Joke, Marian in The Edible Woman and Tita in Like Water for Chocolate, juxtapose the metaphor of consumption, by rejecting the hierarchical masculinist logic and by redefining themselves.

Subject Keywords

Space, Body, Food, Magical realism, Feminism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109852

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis