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چکیده
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The present study seeks to investigate the significance of nutrition in the process of narrativization of identity in Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle and its effects upon the female character of the novel. Joan Foster, the protagonist of the novel, suffers from obesity from her early childhood and has to cope with several psychological consequences as she grows into an author and becomes an adult. Based on the findings of the British social critic Susie Orbach (1946) who discusses women's relation to food and obesity in her 1978 book, Fat is a Feminist Issue, Joan, like many of Orbach's study cases, seems to have built an uncertain relationship to food from the very early stages of her life which has in turn problematized the way she eats and has led her towards obesity. Living in a capitalist society in which the traces of sexism can also be found, food is both made accessible and labeled as unallowable for Joan as a woman and thus once she turns to food as a way of expressing her discontent with her surroundings and with the society she lives in, she gets fat and is forced into feeling guilty and giving up to the culture. Therefore, she loses lots of weight and turns into what the society has always asked her to look like, however her shattered identity would not recover and she manifests it in the novels and poems she writes as an author.
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