A Feminist and Cultural Reconstruction of the Self: Rereading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Abstract

Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia occupies a unique place in modern literature. The novel has been translated into many languages and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for more than two years. A memoir that records the personal life of the author, the text explores spirituality, cultural differences and the energising experience of emerging from a painful divorce and an equally traumatic rebound relationship. Gilbert travels to Italy, India and Indonesia, spending her time equally among the three places. Each place represents a different stage of healing: pleasure, prayer and equilibrium. The novel emerged into a scenario in which self-help literature was on the rise. This paper examines how the journey undertaken by Gilbert is an assertive attempt to reconstruct her fragmented female identity. The paper scrutinizes how the new identity is forged through influential cultural factors layered along the tripartite structure. Each destination is not a place to visit but rather a deliberate attempt to venture into a new redemptive scheme, designed to reconstruct the self. Eat Pray Love remains a cultural touchstone, due to the fusion of diverse elements into one: the feminist overtones of the novel, the cultural implications embedded in the text that reproduce and expand the original version into infinite possibilities, the exotic lure of Oriental lifestyles that hold promises of rejuvenation and the fantasy associated with travelling to new places. Read closely, the text emerges as a deliberate projection of self-mythology.