Meat-eating and psychological fragmentation are related in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman to the main character’s struggle with patriarchal social expectations.  The main character, Marian, struggles against the restrictive expectations of her family and her fiancé, Peter, though she continually tries to convince herself that she is happy with the roles that they push her into.  In denying her desires, Marian initiates a battle of wills with her body, which stops accepting first meat, then vegetables, and eventually all food.  Marian’s relationship with her own body is complicated still more as she becomes increasingly distanced from it.  Marian begins talking about herself in the third person in part two of the novel, and speaks of her body as a separate entity.  Furthermore, she begins to speak of her own actions, even walking up the stairs or using her hands, as the actions of her body, independent of her own will.  

     All of these changes can be examined and explained with the use of feminist-vegetarian theory as it is explained in books such as Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, as well as through sociological studies such as Dr. David Livingstone Smith’s examination of dehumanization Less than Human.  I demonstrate, through the use of these and other sources, how Marian uses the secondary character Duncan as a prosthetic self to help her navigate and escape the limitations of patriarchal oppression which she faces throughout the book.