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Millie
Emmy is the typist for Seymour Surveys and one of the “office virgins” (as Ainsley calls them) whom Marian works with. Emmy is depicted as being sickly; her skin is always flaking off, she is always picking at her nails, and her hair seems limp and unkempt. Marian pities Emmy, who is desperate for male attention but awkward and sometimes difficult to be around.
Emmy Quotes in The Edible Woman
The The Edible Woman quotes below are all either spoken by Emmy or refer to Emmy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 19 Quotes
But now she could see the roll of fat pushed up across Mrs. Gundridge’s back by the top of her corset, the ham-like bulge of thigh […] and the others too, similar in structure but with varying proportions and textures of bumpy permanence and dune-like contours of breast and waist and hip; their fluidity sustained somewhere within by bones, without by a carapace of clothing and makeup. What peculiar creatures they were; in the continual flux between the outside and the inside, taking things in, giving them out, chewing, words, potato chips, burps, grease, hair, babies, milk, excrement, cookies, vomit, coffee, tomato juice, blood, tea, sweat, liquor, tears, and garbage…
[…] She was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Emmy Character Timeline in The Edible Woman
The timeline below shows where the character Emmy appears in The Edible Woman. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...coffee with the three other young women in her office—elegant Lucy, athletic Millie, and sickly Emmy. Sometimes Ainsley joins them, though she looks down on the other girls, joking that they...
(full context)
Chapter 13
...for lunch. The girls put on their coats and head outside into the cold (which Emmy remarks is making her skin flake off).
(full context)
...(though she still wants to keep it from everyone else at work). Lucy, Millie, and Emmy are intensely eager to learn how Marian has gotten this man to marry her. When...
(full context)
Chapter 27
...in makes the “office virgins” even more dour, though Marian fears Lucy and Millie and Emmy will not be any happier when they see Trevor and Fish, the party’s only bachelors....
(full context)
