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
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“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