University of Cape Town – ELL3009S

Laura Barnard

22 August 2016

‘Creative De(con)struction’:

Truth and Schizophrenia in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (1993)

“The twins remain true to their principles, they do not flinch. They opt for women in every single role.”

–  How Roz’s girls cast their own retelling of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ on pg.352

“Fiction has become a vehicle of recovering memories that have been effaced by the conquerors of history: where documents no longer exist, imagination provides new witnesses.”

– Marina Warner in her essay ‘Myth & Faerie: Rewritings and Recoveries’ in the collection Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture(2004: 446)

“You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing.”

– Title of a satirical 50’s desk calendar by Ed Polish and Darren Wotz

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is only a ‘retelling’ of the Brothers Grimm’s tale ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ in the sense that James Joyce’s Ulysses can be called a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey. They’ve got quite a bit to do with each other, for sure, but all the parallels you could draw between the sums of their stories essentially dilly-dally around the basic insight that what’s more important for the reader’s sake is to recognize how, and to what purpose, the transition is effected between the two genres of narrative at either end of the adaptation process. For Joyce, the journey from ancient myth to the quotidian novel is one of immense, beautifully confusing bathos – Olympus definitively brought down to Earth – while for Atwood, the story becomes history and the fable becomes relatable via an investigation of what in reality proper can be deemed pure fiction. Zenia is not of the world, seemingly, because although she may actually have left a factual past in her wake, she possesses the fantastic superpower of being able to negotiate and fabricate almost all of its details so as to recast herself as the heroic figure or unrecognized victim of all her interactions. As such, she always appears as a kind of fictional incursion into the ‘reality’ of the otherwise supposedly ordinary lives of Tony, Charis and Roz. As the Robber Bride of the title, Zenia’s defining theft is not that of each of the three heroines’ men but of their respective potentials for leading uneventful lives. She makes things happen to them. Without Zenia, Tony, Charis and Roz would not independently develop enough as characters to deserve the extended attention of either novelist or reader. Thus, the figure of the free-radical, self-creating, chaos-cultivating ‘dark lady’ is here, in a sense, emblematic of how Evil impels the presence and response of Good, even how fiction structures reality.  Through this extra-dimensional method, The Robber Bride must now be read as a genre- and gender-bending investigation of the underlying ethics of storytelling, with ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ as just a catalyst for a new dream – or nightmare – of unbounded irrationality. And so we can begin not ‘once’ but ‘always’ upon a time.

To consider and criticize The Robber Bride based just on the accuracy of its particularized adaptation of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ would be to do the book, and the task of literary critique, a significant disservice. We can moan however much we like about whether Warner Bros. should have included more scenes from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix in David Yates’s cinematic version, for example, but in the absence of any original ‘authority’ in the composition of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’[1]– besides the Grimms’ proprietorial role – the challenge of adaptation for a contemporary writer like Atwood might be said to become the opposite one of pushing her text to the furthest limit of dissimilarity with its original, if for no other reason then just to see how far its meaning stretches. As such, on a superficial reading, the fairy tale has very little in common with the novel at all. Almost none of the plot elements are shared and the general theme of the former – the predatory/carnivorous nature of unknown men vis-à-vis young/innocent damsels – can be squarely set against the presiding concern of the latter – the terror a shapeshifting villainess can equally inflict on well-intended women and their susceptible partners. But Atwood herself hints at a productive means of reconciling these differences by including a momentary discussion of another version of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’’s transformation into ‘The Robber Bride’ within the novel itself. As quoted in the first of this essay’s epigraphs, a few pages into the section called ‘The Robber Bride’ within The Robber Bride, Roz’s daughters listen to Tony’s reading of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and demand all the characters be recast as women so as to appease their innocently perverse instinct for political correctness. Thus, in a kind of mise-en-abyme sidebar for confused fans of the fairy tale, Atwood declares her novel purposefully anti-Manichean. This is no dialectic of the sexes, in other words, but a war of one against all, with Zenia as an equal-opportunity cannibal of the three primary couples’ peace of mind. This non-essentialist attitude concerning gender on Atwood’s part can be further evidenced in her interview for The Paris Review, conducted just before she began writing The Robber Bride:

 “I don’t believe in the male point of view any more than I believe in the female point of view. There are a good many of both, though it’s true that there are some thoughts and attitudes that are unlikely to be held by men on the one hand or women on the other.”

And, concerning gender’s affects on literature,

“I tend to side with creative freedom. Everyone should write as she or he feels impelled. Then let’s judge the results, not the picture of the author on the backflap.” (1990)

In other words, today, there is no Man or Woman, there are only many men and many women, as well as people like Zenia who seem to transcend labels entirely, and all of them should be defined by their “results” (their actions)[2]more than who they, or anyone else, think(s) they are to begin with. For all Zenia’s obvious identifications with the witch-like figure of evil incarnate, she is, more than anything, an artificial woman, or, as Roz thinks, “[t]he Rubber Broad is more like it – her and those pneumatic tits.” (352) She is not a woman because, as Lacan put it, ‘Woman doesn’t exist’. She constructs herself, physically and emotionally, as a sublime object of desire, and everyone in the novel falls for her because she plays her part perfectly.[3]By merely ‘changing the pronoun’ of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, Atwood thus reimagines it entirely, letting one character’s unknowable motives determine the rest of the cast’s identities in reaction to her will-to-power. Ironically, this effect is only possible because Atwood grounds her adaptation in a set time and place and brings the abstract quality of the fairy tale down into the considerations of the material world. In short, Zenia is Real, all too Real.

While fairy tales are ultimately always communal products, the novel is of course the bourgeois humanist literary form par excellence – written by individuals, read by individuals and grounded in the observation of idiosyncrasies. Transmuting a text from one form to the other makes the expansion of personal detail within it quite inevitable. As Fredric Jameson puts it, discussing Vladimir Propp’s attempts to schematize the former medium:

The anthropomorphic figure … necessarily resists and is irreducible to the formalization which was always the ideal of such analysis. We need to take seriously the more naïve objection to such “scientific” ideals: namely that stories are always about people and that it is perverse, even for purposes of analysis, to seek to eliminate the very anthropomorphism which uniquely characterizes narrative as such. (1981: 123)

The wholesale anonymity and communicability of fairy tales therefore means that – in the wake of more ‘scientific’, ‘analytical’ times – the anthropomorphism so indispensable to narrative as such retreats into the private and lengthy sanctuary of the novel. Since the world is now an information economy, and we buy stories almost entirely for solo enjoyment, the more we feel we know certain characters, the more real they appear to us and the more we feel we’re getting our money’s worth in reading about them. But simultaneously, the ideology of the global neoliberal economy that emerged triumphant from the Cold War (at almost exactly the moment in which The Robber Bride is set) dictated the end of fixed identities and settled communities along with the destruction of financial regulation and all barriers to international trade. Now everyone could live the American Dream and be defined only by the whims of their desires.[4]Thus, ‘character’ itself became somewhat looser and more susceptible than ever to being branded and commoditized. The novel, which had always prided itself on depicting the rounded ‘self’ better than any other medium, now had to grapple once again with the notion that deep individuality could be merely a convenient illusion.[5]Margaret Atwood, for her part, seems to participate in this historical turn in The Robber Bride by depicting Zenia, the only character with complete agency, as the ideal Third-Wave feminist neoliberal subject – rootless, free-floating, prosperous, pandering and a near-perfect saleswoman. And not only is she herself untethered by any commitments to the past, present or future, but she has the effect of vanquishing, or ‘deterritorializing’ (to borrow Deleuze’s term), almost all of the settled, ‘arranged’ relationships[6]she comes into contact with, and for no perceivable reason other than that it seems to sicken her to see people putting up with their own complacency. So after running out on West with all their savings and leaving Tony to take him in, she returns years later to fall upon their hospitality again and teaches them the lesson that their charity as a couple should not be entirely indiscriminate, thus strengthening their bond. And by ‘stealing’ Billy from Charis, Zenia punctures the latter’s illusions about her draft-dodging partner’s fidelity. Lastly, with Roz, she single-handedly destroys the bourgeois security of her marriage to Mitch, which entirely functioned on the premise that Mitch’s many affairs would never threaten their domestic content. Zenia arrives always as the ultimate Other Woman and her prevailing falseness works to negate all the other little lies in her friends’ lives. Tony, Charis and Roz, being remnants of the solidarity politics of the late Sixties, are suitably bamboozled by such a recurring agent of truth: ““The Other Woman will soon be with us,” the feminists used to say. But how long will it take, thinks Roz, and why hasn’t it happened yet?” (471) Atwood seems to suggest that perhaps it has. It’s Tony, Charis and Roz who are still living in the past, unable to realize till the end of the novel how Zenia’s ‘evil’ actually does more good than harm. She has forced them to live more honestly and brought them together as regular friends, and surely such ‘results’ matter more than the ignoble acts that were their cause? And for all the suffering Zenia wreaks, is not the book a far more intelligent, entertaining read for her anarchic presence in it? In Zenia’s case, in other words, the less both the trio and we actually know about her the better for all involved.

Returning to ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, it is clear now that what both the story and Zenia seem to impart to us is the inherent power of storytelling itself, or the personal power that seems to come with being a convincing storyteller. It’s particularly telling in the Grimm story that the heroine, after escaping the cannibals’ den and going through with her wedding’s festivities, brings her bridegroom to justice, not by merely reporting the facts of her sojourn in the forest, but by telling the entire preceding story to the gathered guests whilst continually insisting “Darling, it was only a dream” (1819), before pulling out the severed finger like the final reveal of a magic trick. The strength of her performance, in context and under the deliberate pretense of fiction (even though we know the story to be ‘true’, having just read it ourselves), combines with the shock of the real at the finger’s reveal, to jolt the bridegroom – like Claudius reacting to ‘The Mousetrap’ in Hamlet– into confirming the tale by rushing to escape the reception, thus ensuring his, and his whole band’s, summary execution. Atwood seems to play with this trope of the ‘leftover piece of the real’ by bookending The Robber Bride with two very different funeral scenes: the first in which the presence of the canister supposedly filled with Zenia’s ashes belies the fact that Zenia’s not actually dead and will reappear later, and the second where, having actually been the ones to find Zenia’s dead body, Tony, Charis and Roz privately empty a canister with Zenia’s actual ashes into the waters of Toronto Bay, and strangely feel ‘grateful’ for the disruptions she effected while she was alive. Furthermore, both of her mysterious ‘deaths’ inspire the trio to commune and connect through continuing to tell stories to each other, first by meeting regularly at the Toxique, then by gathering in Tony’s kitchen on the novel’s last page. In this way, Zenia can perhaps be termed an agent of fiction[7]; not only does she manipulate and seduce all and sundry by treating her own existence as an infinitely malleable story, but she directly inspires her friends and the novel itself to regale the details that have collectively amounted to the present. Tony, as a historian of conflict, leads the narrative to some extent because in this pursuit she’s in essence just doing her job, though reapplying her methods of analysis to the timeline of her own life. For all three heroines however, the return of Zenia incites a separate, subjective procedure of the return-of-the-repressed, working on a rigid ‘rule of threes’. We read how each of them experiences Zenia’s return, then we watch how each of them remembers how they fell victim to her in the first place, before reaching even further back, into their childhoods, so as to understand how the weaknesses she so adeptly preyed upon came about in the first place, and lastly returning to the present for each of their separate confrontations with her undead semblance. In every case, Zenia is revealed as the counter-trauma to each of the trio’s initial histories of pain. The implication seems to be that the past is itself a kind of trauma, or at least something that a malevolent force like Zenia can always use to incapacitate one with sympathy. Thus, ironically, it is because each of the central trio has a definite past that they cannot definitively learn never to trust Zenia. They assume her existence requires that she have some kind of an origin story, like them, and they always think their stories and themselves special enough to be the ones finally receiving it. But Zenia, as we have said, is a character from either a fairy tale or the future inserted into an otherwise realistic novel, and thus she bears no allegiance to the facts of the present or the past. Though she does eventually die, to all intents and purposes she is a timeless individual who hardly ages, emerges from nowhere in particular and runs away with the story of her friends’ lives. The moral of her story, of the novel as a whole, could then be said to be simply ‘make things happen or else have things happen to you’. In storytelling terms, we could go further and say this advice becomes ‘imagine the strangest possible occurrences because reality will surprise you no matter what.’ Certainly this vision of the morality fiction can actually represent seems to suit our anarchic times far better than any foreclosed fairy tale ever could. In brief, finally, Atwood preaches that she, the contemporary novelist, shouldn’t preach.

The Robber Bride is a long way from ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, but since stories actually ‘happen’ – which is just to say they come from the historical world – this is mostly because Margaret Atwood is a few hundred years away from the Grimms, and the contemporary Canadian novel is eons away from the traditional German fairy tale. What they share, however, are the default human motifs of death, trauma and storytelling and, as we have seen, little else is seemingly needed in an original story to justify its adaptation for the present day. What then makes the novel a Postmodern Fairy Tale, and worthy of study, is its foregoing of the original’s closure. “Zenia is history” (553), of course, by its end, but the point of her living presence in the book seems to be, again as we have seen, to represent the very possibilities of fiction to change our lives according to our desires, not an externally-imposed moral law. Character is forged by action and ethics are beholden to outcomes, but it is through storytelling and fiction that the outcomes of history are preserved in the first place, as well as how better results – happier endings – can be imagined into the future. It is thus via the manipulation of the narratives of the past that both Atwood and Zenia, in life and literature, mould the present into an entirely different future. This radical act, the self-incarnation of the non-deterministic freedom of the present, is then set as an example to all the book’s readers. There is still so much to play with, Atwood intimates, there is still so much we have left to say.

Word Count: 2782

Reference List:

Atwood, Margaret. 2009. The Robber Bride. London: Virago Press

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. 1819. The Robber Bridegroom. Available: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm040.html[August 23, 2016]

Jameson. Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Kristeva, Julia. 2002. ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ in The Portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press.

Morris, Mary. 1990. ‘Margaret Atwood, The Art of Fiction No. 121.’ The Paris Review. Available:  http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2262/the-art-of-fiction-no-121-margaret-atwood[August 23, 2016]

Seem, Mark. 2015. ‘Introduction’to Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. London: Bloomsbury.

Warner, Marina. 2004. Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature & Culture. London: Vintage.

[1]As well as the absence of an interpellated fan community to dispute the efficacy of Atwood’s appropriation of the original’s entirely malleable details. Because Fairy Tales belong instead to everyone, no strict accounting is really necessary for the extent of inspiration ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ afforded Atwood’s novel but it’s nonetheless interesting to question how ‘postmodern’ such a resumption of a preceding text can be when said text was nigh-on written to be ripped apart and reformulated.

[2]Hence Atwood’s implicit critique of religious logic in the section in which Sister Cecilia explains Christian morality to a young Roz: “[A] bad deed remained bad, she said, even if the result was good. There were lots of bad deeds that turned out to have good results, because God was a mystery, which meant he switched things around, but humans weren’t in control of that, they were only in control of their own hearts.” (391) But were they?

[3]“Zenia has never been almost, even at her most fraudulent. Her fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total.” (42) and “The whole world is booby-trapped. [Zenia] is the booby.” (459) and even death does not seem to wither her…

[4]From a psychoanalytic perspective, this change was presaged on the other side of the political spectrum by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their bestseller Anti-Oedipus (1969). As Mark Seem explains in his recent Introduction, “[t]he first task of the revolutionary, [Deleuze and Guattari claim], is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs.” (2015: 7)

[5]“Nobody is monarch of anything any more. It’s all out of control.” (345), “But nobody’s symmetrical.” (360) and, as Zenia herself says, “Nobody has any rights except what they can get!” (428)

Other examples off the top of my head of late 20th-century novels which conspicuously deal with the hollowing out of the self in the face of global capital include Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, Martin Amis’s Money and so on and so forth.

[6]As in ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, arranged relationships are seen here as inherent traps, only survivable through pre-planning, luck, the help of a mysterious woman and the convincing power of storytelling.

[7]This description of Zenia, along with its recurring corollaries here, in many ways matches Julia Kristeva’s nebulous definition of the figure of the ‘foreigner’ in both fiction and reality: “The image of hatred and of the other, a foreigner is neither the romantic victim of our clannish indolence nor the intruder responsible for all the ills of the polis. Neither the apocalypse on the move nor the instant adversary to be eliminated for the sake of appeasing the group. Strangely the foreigner lives within us: [s]he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.” (2002: 265)