Eat, Pray, Love : Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity

EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
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expectations for what that happiness should look like. She turns outward to the possibilities 
presented to her by other people, religions and cultures, along her journey - all which ironically 
prompt her to look inward to find the answers. Through this inward journey she comes to 
reframe the exigence of her identity crisis, her personal definition of happiness and eventually 
reconstructs an identity that gives her life new meaning and purpose. 
Through a narrative analysis, this paper will explore how Eat, Pray, Love reflects the 
impact of postmodernism and third wave feminist influences on female identity, how women 
confront and reconstruct their identities in response to a personal crisis, how framing and 
interpretation of their crisis influences different choices for action, and how women are presented 
with new identity possibilities as well as new ways of thinking and being in the world. 
LITERATURE REVIEW 
In order to provide an understanding for the larger historical and cultural contexts in 
which Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert, 2006) was created, I first explore the dominant characteristics of 
postmodernism, and its influence on individual subjectivity, which reveals the external forces 
placed on women in the early 2000s 
when Gilbert’s narrative takes place
. Next, I will show how 
third wave feminist thought more specifically shapes the individual female subject as well as 
how she might navigate an identity crisis. I then discuss recent research on the ways in which 
people can reconstruct their reality and identity in the face of a crisis or other perceived 
exigence, which provides a bridge for how Gilbert reconstructs a new identity at the end of her 
narrative. 
The Postmodern Subject 
Defining the dominant beliefs of the postmodern period can be quite problematic, 
because the very nature of postmodernism is to reject dominant beliefs, authority and definitions.

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EAT, PRAY, LOVE: CONFRONTING AND RECONSTRUCTING FEMALE IDENTITY
5 
As Westgate (2009) explains, postmodernists have, at the very least, “settled on three ideas: most 
oppose a totalizing view of reality, objective knowledge construction, and the possibility for 
neutral values” (p. 772). This epistemolo
gical, ontological and axiological environment has 
created a disruptive and fractured experience for the individual subject, leaving her to set out on 
a journey of perpetual self-discovery. Fenton (2000) observed that this can be viewed as a 
positive devel
opment for women specifically, as postmodernism can be “an unprecedented 
opportunity for women to forgo fixed identities and explore fluid subjectivities” (p. 723). 
In creating these fluid subjectivities, postmodernism is expanding the very idea of what it 
means to be a woman. As Butler (1990) argues, this fluidity presents multiple possibilities for 
identity, and as Fenton (2000) continues, “enables a reconceptualizing of identity and a 
deconstruction of the universal category ‘woman’”
(p. 725). Therefore, due to its detailed 
exploration of female identity through the personal narrative of its author and main character, 
Eat, Pray, Love
, is a text worthy of scholarly attention for its illumination of the female subject’s 
identity confrontation in the face of postmodernism. 
The Female Subject in the Third Wave 
Prior to postmodernism and third wave feminism, the possibilities for female identity 
were limited. With the introduction of the birth control pill, and as a result of the equal 
opportunities fought for by the second wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, women 
are now able to delay motherhood, have careers and seek identities outside of “mother” and 
“wife.” As Kearney (1979) explains, the goals of the second wave were “focused primarily on 
needed social structural changes and did not emphasize change in sex roles on an interpersonal 
level” (p. 28) 
- issues that the third wave has handily taken up. 

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