r leave all the big decisions up to you(p.87) to the wedding plans.Marians engagement identifies her main impediment to an integrated personality: her excessive passivity. At work, she does things that are not part of her job. At home, she lets Ainsley and the landlady intimidate her. She even cleans the tub for Ainsley so the landlady will not get mad. She lets Peter tell what to do and when to do it. For example; she agrees to make love in the tub even through she finds it uncomfortable. Once Marian accepts Peters proposal, her personality splits; a division, which Atwood shows through Marians switch from first person to third person.As Marians personality dissolves, so does her appetite. Her passive and irrational behaviour leads her to start rejecting certain foods starting with meat, then eggs and finally vegetables. Marian begins to have a pre-occupation with the action of eating. As Marian notices the way Peter is cutting his meat she observes: She watched the capable hands holding the knife and fork, slicing precisely with an exact adjustment of pressures. Watching him operate on the steak like that, carving a straight slice then dividing it into neat cubes, made her think of the diagram of the planned cow at the front of one of her cookbooks: the cow with lines on it and labels to show you from which part of the cow all the different cuts were taken. She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a cow that had once moved and ate and was killed. She set down her knife and fork. 'God,' she thought to herself, 'I hope this isn't permanent; I'll starve to death!' (p.152)Her engagement to Peter makes her identify with the things being consumed, an identification, which draws her to a secret relationship with the gaunt Ducan. This relationship further splits her personality. Atwood symbolises her personality split with two dolls from Marians childhood. One half of her is repre...
