The Portrayal of Marriage and the Female Body in The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract

This bachelor thesis researches the notions of marriage and the female body in Margaret Atwood's novels The Edible Woman and The Handmaid's Tale. Though these novels belong to two very different genres, as The Edible Woman narrates literary realism and The Handmaid’s Tale describes life in a futuristic dystopia, they both reflect on the idea that a woman's role in a twentieth-century marriage is unequal to that of the man and that this caused by the fact that women do not have autonomy over their own bodies.