“It’s only a cake.” Alienation and Consumption in Plath’s The Bell Jar and Atwood’s The Edible Woman

The North American fiction of the latter half of the 20th century was largely concerned with the rise of consumerist capitalism. Simultaneously, critics such as Susan Bordo (1993) explored the diet culture within the context of consumerism. This paper explores the intersection of consumerism, gender oppression, and alienation in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963). Using Marxist feminist literary theory, this essay examines how these contemporaneous works critique 1950s and 60s consumerist society by symbolizing female oppression through food and consumption. The novels’ protagonists engage in patterns of bingeing and starvation, illustrating the alienation of women’s minds and bodies within capitalist and patriarchal systems. By analyzing these patterns as metaphors for cultural expectations and rebellion, this study highlights how Atwood and Plath interrogate the commodification of women and their bodies. These narratives, rooted in the early days of second-wave feminism, provide a qualitative lens through which the role of disordered eating is used as a critique of societal norms in postmodern North American literature. Ultimately, this essay contends that the authors use food and consumption as vehicles to critique the alienating effects of consumer capitalism on women, offering insights into the relationship between gender, body, and societal structures. Although Plath’s and Atwood’s novels have both been heavily analyzed, the comparison between these two authors is through the lens of eating patterns and Marxist feminism. The juxtaposition of these two novels and the seemingly opposing eating patterns illustrated is meant to contribute to a larger understanding of the paramount position food and eating has for American 50s- and 60s literature and consumerist criticism.