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EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
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NARRATIVE ANALYSIS
In performing a narrative analysis of Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal narrative,
Eat, Pray,
Love, two themes emerge which illuminate how female identity is experienced under the
influence of postmodernism and third wave feminism. The first theme revolves around the
process of reframing and transcending identity, where we observe how Gilbert comes to
understand her identity crisis and how she chooses to confront it. The second focuses on how
she comes to reconstruct a new identity by connecting with a new awareness and understanding
of a “universal identity”
which encompasses all human beings. In both themes, we see how
stories act as vehicles for discovery and possibility, even when they
don’t
“ring true”
with what
Gilbert understood about herself and the world.
Reframing and Transcending Identity
At the beginning of Eat, Pray, Love, we are introduced to Elizabeth Gilbert: a writer in
her mid-thirties who is in the throes of a deep depression following the failure of her marriage
and subsequent “rebound” relationship with a younger man. She is desperate to change her life
and find an authentic happiness so she puts her belongings in storage and sets out on a year-long
journey billed on the book cover as a “search for everything across Italy, India and Indonesia”
(Gilbert, 2006).
During her first stop in Rome, she begins to feel the darkness of loneliness and
depression creeping into her consciousness. It is here that we begin to more deeply understand
the roots of her exigence and see evidence of her confronting her identity:
“[Loneliness] asks why I can’t get my act together, and why
I’m not at home living in a
nice house and raising nice children like any respectable woman my age should be. He
asks why, exactly, I think I deserve a vacation in Rome when I’ve made such a rubble of
EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
15
my life. He asks me why I think that running away to Italy like a college kid will make
me happy. He asks where I think I’ll end up in my old age, if I keep living this way.”
(Gilbert, 2006, p. 47).
By stating the expectations that she should have a “nice house” and “nice children” by
now, she is clearly referencing and struggling with the fixed, prescribed view of female identity
that the second wave fought to dismantle, and that postmodernism further deconstructed. And by
the fact they she has neither of these at 34, and is instead on a deeply inward journey to find new
meaning in her life, she is a living embodiment of the “self
-determined and self-
possessed”
(Walker, 1995, p. xxxiv) third wave subject. But perhaps more importantly, her self-reflection
here is evidence of what the Fosses (2011) refer to as turning to the symbolic resources of the
mind to understand her place in the world. In other words, it is in her admittance to what she is
not, that she opens herself up to what she might possibly become; a crucial foundation on which
her transformation throughout the story is built.
Further on in the text, Gilbert realizes that she must rise up from her own will as Foss and
Foss (2009) expressed, and assume responsibility for reframing her identity and generating her
own future well-being (Foss & Foss, 2011). Gilbert professes that
“the tragedies in my life have
been of a personal and largely self-created nature, not epically oppressive. I went through a
divorce and a depression, not a few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity, but
I
also had the resources (financial, artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out”
(Gilbert, 2006, p. 115). While she admits to using material conditions such as financial resources
to relieve her exigence, she also points to the symbolic resources (Foss & Foss, 2011) of her
emotions, and subsequent re-interpretation of those emotions, as an available means for solving
her issues, which is also crucial to her transformation. Gilbert goes on to express that:
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