Abstract:

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has been the focus of attention since the onset of her literary career. As a female writer, Atwood pays a continuing concern about the women condition in modern society. This thesis aims to analyze the theme of The Edible Woman through three parts.The first part introduces views on love and marriage by combining feminist theories with this book’s heroine’s experience. The second part mainly talks about female characters in The Edible Woman. The third part is how a well educated heroine facing pressure from marriage, change from can’t eating and escaping to finally eating cake humanoid with past decisions,and regains its independence and freedom of personality, realizing a transition from passive victims to active winner, which shows the author’s special writing skills and implies women should not lose themselves in a patriarchal society and provides a good reference for marriage view.
 
Key words: Margaret Atwood; The Edible Woman; women; love view

摘要：

加拿大作家玛格丽特·阿特伍德自从事写作以来一直倍受瞩目。身为女性作家，阿特伍德心系身处现代社会中的女性。本课题通过三部分分析了阿特伍德的《可以吃的女人》。第一部分通过女权主义理论和本书女主人的经历结合简要介绍了婚恋观。第二部分主要谈论了本书的女性人物。第三部分由讲述女主人公面对婚姻压力时，如何从不能进食、逃避到最后吃掉人形蛋糕，与过去决断，重获独立的人格和自由的身份，从被动的受害者转变为积极的胜利者，展示了作者独特的写作手法，也暗示女性在男权社会里不能迷失自我，对现代女性婚恋观有很好的借鉴意义。

关键词：玛格丽特·阿特伍德；《可以吃的女人》；女性；婚恋观

Introduction
Searching for self-identity is the ultimate task for people to accomplish during the development of human society. Faced with threatens from the male-dominated society, female is deprived of the power to be themselves. The female seems to be incapable of evading from the fate of being eaten. This thesis discusses how the female gradually build up their self-consciousness in the patriarchal society and then get self-realization and finally choose their own lifestyle from the two genders approach. In The Edible Woman, the author tums the line of sight towards gender relations. She makes a vivid description of women’s life from a woman’s angle: their dilemmas and choices, their perplexities and breakthroughs, their explorations and survivals, and searching for themselves.
   The heroine Marian is a woman with high education background. She serves as a customer information feedback investigator in a market research company and has a decent boyfriend who is a lawyer. It seems that she has a free and stable life, and her career and love life are going well. Nevertheless, she always gets nervous and has a deep depressed feeling inside. One day, she overhears her boyfriend Peter talking about hunting, she suddenly finds that she is always attached to her fiance and unable to escape from his control like the pery. Since then, she has suffered huge mental distress, which leads to poor appetite. Meanwhile, she acts abnormally and unreasonably. In an investigation, she meets an eccentric and decadent young man -Duncan, and comes across him again in a public washroom.