66 pages • 2 hours read
The Robber Bride
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Themes
The Power of a Common Enemy to Create Unlikely Allies
By all accounts, Tony, Charis, and Roz are very different women—they have different interests, different career paths, and different views of the world. Tony is a solitary and introverted academic. Charis would rather till her garden and meditate than examine the world around her. Roz’s life revolves around business, profits, and hobnobbing with the social elite. In most tales, these three paths would never cross, much less run congruently for 20 years, but their shared trauma is a unifying force that holds them together despite their considerable differences. In addition to uniting disparate personalities, a common enemy can provide a tangible sense of power and even comfort when facing uncertainty: “Instead of believing that bad things happen for no reason, enemies give us a sense of control, allowing us to attribute bad things to a clear cause that can be understood, contained, and controlled” (Rathje, Steve. “Do We Need a Common Enemy?” Psychology Today, 17 December 2018).
Tony, Charis, and Roz experience a great deal of uncertainty in their lives. In college, Tony focuses on her studies to compensate for her social anxiety. As Charis deals with her past trauma, she navigates totally new ground with Billy, her first love and a fugitive to boot. Roz is dealing with Mitch’s affairs as well as an economic recession that threatens her company. In the midst of all this upheaval comes Zenia, a physical embodiment of malevolence and a perfect target for Tony, Charis, and Roz’s collective anxiety. It is much easier to contain and control a single woman than global economic forces or the persistent pain of sexual abuse.
Zenia, however, proves a formidable foe, and Atwood presents her as a superhuman flesh-and-blood demon who, like a mirror, reflects all of these women’s pain back at them. This is precisely what it takes to forge the strong bonds of friendship between three such unlikely allies: a sense of shared pain—the underlying common thread all humans share despite their differences—that can only be mitigated by uniting against a common enemy. Trauma is best dealt with not alone, as each woman attempts to do, but in the supportive embrace of a community. Zenia, in spite of her evil ways, illuminates this fundamental truth for these women.
The Human Capacity for Self-Deception
One of Zenia’s many talents is her ability to know exactly what her victim wants to hear. Tony wants a hip friend who can help her out of her shell and show her a world beyond the classroom. Charis, because of her deep empathy for any wounded thing, wants someone more damaged than herself to care for. Roz wants to be more than a craven capitalist by using her wealth for justice and equity. In all three cases, Zenia intuits exactly what these women want and need, and she constructs the perfect identity with the perfect rallying cry to snare each of them. Tony may be forgiven for her naiveté since she is Zenia’s first victim, but Charis and Roz are both aware of Zenia’s deceptions, and yet they willingly open their doors to her. Zenia is like a vampire who can only enter a house when invited, so she must use her considerable wiles to distract and deceive.
Zenia’s lies would have no effect, however, without the willing participation of her victims. Both Charis and Roz convince themselves that Zenia must have changed. After Zenia cobbles together yet another story of hardship, this one tailored for Roz’s sympathies, Roz falls for it: “How badly Roz has misjudged Zenia! Now she sees her in a new light, a bleak light, a lonely, rainy light; in the midst of it Zenia struggles on, buffeted by men, blown by the winds of fate” (404). Zenia understands all too well the human desire to have one’s hopes validated no matter the plausibility of the story.
Tony, perhaps the most cynical of the bunch, allows Zenia back into her home and into West’s company, despite her misgivings. Roz approaches Zenia with the wariness of a high-stakes business merger, but she is still taken in by her web of lies—lies that could have been debunked fairly easily—because Zenia told her what she wanted to hear. Contemporary examples abound, as individuals often seek out sources of information that confirm their biases, whether that information is verifiably false.
The Ambivalence Toward Modern Feminism
In the characters of Tony, Charis, and Roz, Atwood presents three women who are in many ways more independent than the men in their lives. They are all self-sufficient career women who follow their own passions. Yet Atwood suggests that, for all its empowerment and glass ceiling shattering, feminism is a double-edged sword. Roz looks at her board of directors, once a group of fiery, gender equality warriors now retrofitted in ‘80s business suits keeping a close eye on the bottom line. When Zenia transforms the magazine, WiseWomanWorld, from a platform for women’s issues and serious journalism to a glossy fashion magazine featuring articles on sex advice and makeup tips, the board offers no resistance. Even Roz cannot deny the rising profits, and so she allows Zenia to have her way. How easily, Atwood implies, do individuals sacrifice their principles for comfort.
Furthermore, although her three protagonists are all women, their Achilles Heel is without exception their men. Tony’s love for West, Charis’s love for Billy, and, most pointedly, Roz’s love for Mitch who continues to betray her, all suggest a codependency that many feminists would decry. Ironically, the most authentic feminist of the group may be Zenia. She has total agency over her life, she exercises her feminine power without restraint, and she has no shame or inhibitions about her sexuality. She moves through a man’s world easily, using her unique gifts, morally questionable though they may be, to get what she wants. In the end, however, she must die—perhaps because of her evil deeds but also because of her audacity in the face of a patriarchal society.
The Objective Contradictions of Religious Mythology
Religion, organized or otherwise, plays a role in at least two of the protagonists’ lives. Charis sees the world through the lens of her spirituality, which is not an organized religion but a loose affiliation of alternate beliefs and practices that include mediation, yoga, herbal remedies, and creative visualization. Despite its lack of formal structure, Charis’s belief system is very much a religion. It requires faith, it demands ritual, it defies rational thought, and it offers hope and guidance for the travails of this life and beyond. Roz, though not religious as an adult, is indoctrinated in the Catholic faith as a girl. Under the tutelage of nuns, she learns a strict and arbitrary moral code. Later, she studies the practices of Judaism.
Those religious belief systems are difficult to shake, and even as an adult she speaks to God, an admission that although she doesn’t practice regularly, she acknowledges his existence. However, as a girl, Roz questions many of the tenets of Catholicism, including one of the bedrocks of the faith: “Roz wasn’t sure why getting crucified was such a favour to everyone but apparently it was” (361). Much of the dogma preached by the nuns seems irrational on its face, but Roz is confronted by the voice of authority, the Church, versus her own inner logic, which continues to nag at her.
Atwood pokes satirical fun at the blind faith so many have in stories that are objectively irrational, involving miracles, resurrection, and virgin birth. The natural skepticism of a child can see through the wizard’s curtain while adults cling to their faith against all odds. Charis’s faith is questionable by objective standards as well. Tony is openly skeptical while Roz tolerates it somewhat condescendingly. Many rational minds would see healing light and precognition as parlor tricks at best. Yet Atwood, while viewing organized religion with skepticism, leaves open the possibility for alternate beliefs. Charis’s grandmother heals an injured neighbor with some kind of spiritual magic; Charis foresees Zenia’s death in a vision; and her “random” Bible passages correspond to real life events. Whatever the view of religious faith—objectively absurd or simply possible—religion in many forms runs like a consistent thread through Atwood’s narrative and the lives of her characters.
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By Margaret Atwood
