Reconstructing

Eat, Pray, Love: Confronting and Reconstructing Female Identity
Emily Scherberth

California State University, Northridge

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 $200M¹ 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/

“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, postmodernism 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 that: “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
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.