Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride

At one point in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride, the twin daughters of one of the three main point-of-view characters insist that their bedtime story - The Robber Bridegroom - be changed because they want all the characters to be women. Not just the hero, but also the villain, and the villain's victims.

This of course is Atwood pointing out to her readers that the book they are reading is in fact such a role reversal. Oh, there are male characters, but they are all secondary, all adjuncts to the lives of the women who are the real story - Tony (Antoinette), Roz (Rosalind) and Charis (formerly Karen) and (though we never see anything from her viewpoint) Zenia. They are fathers, uncles, lovers, husbands, sons, employees - and all we see of them is the role they play in the lives of women. It's a longstanding pattern in fiction - one gender has all the agency, the full lives, the rounded characters, is the centre of the story, the other exists only through their relation to one of the important characters. Of course, we're used to seeing the stories be about men, while the women are only there to move the men's story along.

The novel itself is based on the folk tale of the robber bridegroom, a tale akin to the Bluebeard tale, of a man who proposes to young women and then kidnaps and kills them. In The Robber Bride, the eponymous villain is Zenia, a manipulative femme fatale who spins tales about herself and has a penchant for seducing men in relationships with other women, devouring their souls, then leaving or betraying them. Tony, Charis and Roz are three women, college acquaintances, who are drawn together by Zenia who, at different times, has seduced a man loved by each of them. One she either betrays or corrupts (depending on how much the reader chooses to believe of what she says), one commits suicide after she casts him aside and later fakes her own death, and one survives, wounded but perhaps wiser, to return to the woman who loves him.

At the core of the story is the friendship that grows between these women as, one after another, their lives are thrown into turmoil by Zenia's manipulations and they find the only people they can turn to are other women who have been victims. The novel fills in the life stories of these three women, each in her own way wounded by her childhood experiences, making them vulnerable as adults to Zenia's schemes and lies. Yet these women are also survivors, and it is their strengths that enable them to survive.

The theme of duplicity and duality runs through the novel in many ways, not all of them malignant. Just as Zenia constantly rewrites her life stories to take advantage of others' weaknesses, so do Tony, Karen and Roz rewrite themselves, to become more who they wish to be. In childhood, each deals with secrets and mysteries, stories and lies, in their own families. Tony, left handed mirror-writer, suspects she is the surviving half of a mirror twin pair; Charis has a repressed alternate personality created as a result of childhood abuse; Roz is the mother of twins. Each of them has kept secrets and told lies in and about their relationships with the men Zenia took from them. And in various ways, Zenia is a dark mirror to each of them.

At the end of the novel, Tony asks: "Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it the other way around: Are we in any way like her?" The question may be one for all of us to consider.