The Female Body In Margaret Atwood's An Insatiable Emptiness

It has been common to see the female body used as an advertisement for many ideas and tangible items. Without the owners having much of a say, the female body has sold ideas, diets and even itself. The female body has been morphed into an ideal, and that ideal into a creature that is supposed to represent innocence, fragility, youth, obedience, passivity, and sex. It could even be said to be a curse for those who come to inherit it by birth or surgery. Within Margaret Atwood's essay “The Female Body” and Evelyn Lau's personal account “An Insatiable Emptiness” , the reader can identify some aspects of how a woman is cursed to have been born in a feminine body. Within the context of Western Culture, both Lau and Atwood give voice to the issue

Opening the essay with poking fun at herself and her own body, Atwood describes her body as “badly behaved”(211), “outrageous”(211), and “vulgar”(211) was a classic example of Atwood's satirical style. She makes fun of the way it functions and its imperfections. Within this first paragraph, Atwood uses a first person point of view that we do not in any of the other paragraphs in this essay. By giving a clear opinion within the introduction, Atwood manages to capture the reader's attention. She continues to hold the reader's attention by flipping from a very objective and critical point of view to a more subjective and empathetic point of view throughout the rest of the essay. She tells a story of a husband and a wife in the fourth section of her essay, which the reader can assume has a bit of personal truth behind it. The scene is set around the idea of getting their child a doll that represents the unattainable ideal societal image. By getting the doll, Atwood's female character states they avoid having their daughter “...long to turn into one.” (212). In addition, that character points out that “repression breeds sublimation”(212) warning that by keeping the child from the doll that she will long after what she cannot have. And if that were to occur, the child might even force herself to try to become the doll. The husband agrees reluctantly and the child is given her toy, which we found

The main character is that a bulimic teen, whom seems to want to believe that she is in control of her situation. On can assume that the character was to represent Lau in her teenage years and in early adulthood. “I went through months of throwing up once or twice a day, then brief periods when I did not throw up at all, when I seemed to have broken the pattern. Surely this meant I was in control. But by the time I turned 18, the months of not throwing up had diminished to weeks, and when I was vomiting I was doing it four, five, six times a day. I had become addicted to the sensation”(Lau 157) she explained within the first page. To be able to take pleasure in what she was doing her mind went from stopping her from throwing up to actually encouraging her to commit the deed. And despite of her attempts to emphasize how proud she is of her body, it seems filled with insincerity. One can later see how she admits to self loathing. She describes that once puberty had enveloped her feminine figure, it became “...a vessel filled with secret and terrible workings...”(Lau 158) . She fancied striving for a more “transparent”, “clean” physique. And though she had once thought of starving herself in order to achieve her ideal form, she says “...I craved food...” (158). Even if she continued to binge and purge, Lau describes how she gained curves and how that fully disgusted