This article analyzes Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman, focusing on the way photographs are used in the narrative to draw attention to conflicts. In the novel, Atwood effectively utilizes the associative connection between photography and hunting – a connection which has long been established in the discourse and terminology of photography. Marian's relationship to her own portrait and her reluctance to be photographed highlights the problematic nature of commercial photographs and the way their depiction of women maintains and promotes the myth of femininity. The situation in which Peter attempts to take Marian's picture reflects the circumstances of traditional photography and its gender relations, inasmuch as the photographer is male and his subject is female. This paper provides a close reading of key passages in the novel, using the rarely discussed history of pornographic photography and its effects on the rhetoric of commercial photographs, based on the works of Annette Kuhn and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.
Katinka Krausz (Fri,) studied this question.