Eat, Pray, Love : Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
20 
ability to respond to the possibilities presented to her, and were based on her newfound 
awareness that her identity was connected somehow to these people in the most fundamental 
human way. It also serves as an example of Chavez and Griffin’s reconceptualization of Carri
llo 
Rowe’s (2009) “coalitional subjectivity” as "coalitional agency" which “implies that our ability 
to…empower others and ourselves necessitates seeing people, history and culture as inextricably 
bound to one another” (p. 9).
Gilbert’s friendship with 
Wayan is another example of this coalitional agency at work as 
the two women empower each other in various ways throughout Gilbert’s stay in Bali. Even 
though they come from drastically different backgrounds 
–
Gilbert, a professional writer from 
white, Western privilege; Wayan, a medicine woman from Bali and divorced, single mother with 
three children (one biological and two adopted) from a poor, third world country 
–
they are able 
to form a friendship based on the common bond of female sisterhood as well as their shared 
postmodern 
renunciation of their respective society’s expectations on them as women. Gilbert, 
at 34, was expected to be married with a “nice house” and “nice children” (Gilbert, 2006, p. 47) 
by now, but instead she has embarked on a solo journey to find what will truly make her happy.
Wayan left an abusive marriage in a highly patriarchal culture, which caused her to become a 
social outcast: “to exit a marriage in Bali leaves a person alone and unprotected in ways that are 
almost impossible 
for a Westerner to imagine” (Gilbert, 2006, p. 256). But, just as Gilbert 
confronted her identity and reframed 
her life’s circumstances into opportunities for greater 
happiness, Wayan also engaged in her own identity confrontation by leaving her marriage and 
moving away from her home.
After Gilbert finds her perspective on love and relationships transformed through her 
friendship with Wayan, she feels a great sense of gratitude and becomes determined to give back 

---

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
21 
to Wayan in some way. When Gilbert learns that Wayan and her daughter, Tutti (which means 
“everybody” in Italian), both dream of having their own home, Gilbert immediately recognizes 
the opportunity to help and ends up raising more than $18,000 from her family and friends back 
home for Wayan. Whe
n one of these friends pointed out to Gilbert that: “when you set out in the 
world to help yourself, you inevitably end up helping….
Tutti
” it is a fitting double entendre that 
recalls what Glora Anzaldúa said about individual change. She passionately argued that self-
change not only involves “going deep into the self and expanding out into the world” it is also “a 
simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society” (p. 208). St. Augustine 
also 
spoke of how feeling a sense of, and participating in, community with others brings about the 
ability to discover new truths which we can’t find on our own (Elshtain, 2003).
I
n a fitting response to such a gift, Wayan declared that the house would be “the house of 
everyone who helped Wayan. If any of these people comes to Bali, they must never stay in a 
hotel, OK?...Promise to tell them that? We call it Group House…the House for Everybody…” 
(Gilbert, 2006, p. 280). Here, we can see that Wayan also recognized her interconnectedness to 
the people who helped her, just as Gilbert did to the people who helped her along her journey.
Carrillo Rowe’s (2009) explication of the Fosses feminist subject in contrast to Gloria 
Anzaldúa’s is helpful in extracting 
a deeper meaning about how Gilbert and Wayan felt 
connected to, and empowered each other in their friendship. Carrillo Rowe (2009) offers that 
“while for the Fosses the subject emerges from within herself and rises up from her own will, for 
Anzaldúa the subject exists in ‘symbiotic relationship to all that exists.’ Thus, in the case of the 
former the vision for change is to change one's self, to ‘act in resourceful and capable ways [that] 
aren't dependent on others to accomplish our goals’ whereas agency for Anzaldúa assumes a 
collective subject
—
tha
t subjects are ‘co
-
creators of ideologies’” (p. 16). While Gilbert goes 

---