Eat, Pray, Love : Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity

---

 
Eat, Pray, Love: Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity
Emily Scherberth 
California State University, Northridge 
 

---

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
2 
ABSTRACT 
When Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal memoir, 
Eat, Pray, Love, was published in 2006, it was met 
with tremendous critical and popular success, and eventually became an international bestseller 
as well as a feature film that grossed nearly $200M
1
worldwide. But the book is also worthy of 
scholarly attention for its depiction of how female identity is confronted and reconstructed in 
postmodern society, under the influence of third wave feminism
. Gilbert’s personal narrative 
also reveals the power of stories to present us with new possibilities for recreating our identities. 
Therefore, this paper will examine the following research questions: How does Eat, Pray, Love 
reflect the impact of postmodernism and third wave feminist thought on female identity? And 
how do 
Gilbert’s
interpretations and choices in her personal narrative present other women with 
new possibilities for ways of thinking and being in the world? 
 
 
1
IMDB.com (2010) retrieved from 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0879870/
 

---

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
3 
 
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new 
landscapes but in having new eyes.
” 
 
—
Marcel Proust
INTRODUCTION 
For the individual subject, the epistemological, ontological and axiological environment 
created by postmodernism has resulted in a disruptive and fractured experience of the world. The 
postmodern subject is forced, then, to confront “modern narratives that would otherwise maintain 
a unitary understanding of self and other in society” (Westgate, 2009, p. 774). Without one 
singular story to believe in, many individuals are left to explore their own personal narratives, 
turning inward for clues about both who they are and who they will become. For women 
specifically, this can have a positive and expansive effect on female identity. As Natalie Fenton 
(2000) offers, postmode
rnism has ushered in “an unprecedented opportunity for women to forgo 
fixed identities and explore fluid subjectivities” (p. 723).
Through Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal narrative
, Eat, Pray Love, we see how these 
ideological forces serve as a catalyst for the confrontation and exploration of her own identity.
At the beginning of the book, she acknowledges that, at age 34, 
her life doesn’t look like it 
should, and that she wasn’t sure she even wanted that particular life in the first place. 
She 
expresses th
at: “I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life—
so why 
did I feel like none of it resembled me? Why did I feel so overwhelmed with duty, tired of being 
the primary breadwinner and the housekeeper and the social coordinator and the dog-walker and 
the wife and the soon-to-be mother, and
—
somewhere in my stolen moments
—a writer…?” 
(Gilbert, 2006, p. 11). These questions, prompted by the dissolution of her failed, childless 
marriage, became the catalyst for her to set out to reconstruct a more authentic identity, and how 
to achieve happiness in her own way, without having to fulfill society’s or other people’s 

---