Reconstructing

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
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:
“I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life – whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” (Gilbert, 2006, p. 177)
By choosing her thoughts, her interpretations and her actions, Gilbert is exemplifying what Foss and Foss’ (2011) describe as a key strategy for change in their paradigm of constructed potentiality, which asserts that “if individuals are experiencing negative feelings as a result of an exigence they choose to perceive, the strategy of interpretation can be used to make another choice about what to perceive, how to interpret that perception, and how to frame that interpretation symbolically to transform those feelings” (p. 214). Here, Gilbert is choosing to perceive her exigence as one of her own self-doing. She is accepting responsibility and engaging her own power to “choose her thoughts,” and is reframing her experiences from “curses” into “opportunities.” As Alice Walker (2006) offered, “though life as we know it has fallen into the pit, each of us has the knowledge of how to live life differently that no one taught us, and that we can find this knowledge and put it to use” (p. 42) – here, Gilbert is finding her own knowledge about how to live differently from within these new interpretations of herself and her circumstances.
In witnessing Gilbert’s identity transformation through her use of symbolic means, her readers are presented with a framework they can apply to their own lives as well. As Arthur Frank (1995) argues, “in stories, the teller not only recovers her voice; she becomes a witness to the conditions that rob others of their voices…when any person recovers his voice, many people
begin to speak through that story” (p. xii). This notion is further explored by Gloria Anzaldúa who suggested that we should “imagine the text as altar—as an interactive site of healing that is remade through each loving encounter with readers over time and across space—invit[ing] us to engage as readers and writers with one another within the register of the sacred” (Carrillo Rowe, 2009, p. 18). So in sharing her story, Gilbert creates an interactive altar of healing that other women can visit and learn from as they follow her journey.