The Robber Bride

“As with such groups, there are more people present around the table than can be accounted for.”

When Tony, Charis, and Roz meet for lunch, they discuss fashion and politics but not the one thing that has kept them together for so many years: Zenia. Invoking her name might reawaken the slumbering evil; and although they would rather talk about anything else, they all know the reason they are there. Zenia’s presence will always be with them whether they mention her name or not. She is the fourth member of the group, waiting to be exorcised from their collective conscience. She is the booze at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting or the ex-spouse at a support group for divorced people, lingering at the margins and seeking purchase in the physical world.

“They’ll get a chance to try out their new toys, drum up some business. Don’t think of it as a war, think of it as a market expansion.” 

Tony’s blithe attitude toward war—the 1991 Persian Gulf War to be precise—shocks Charis for whom war is a deeply traumatic affair. Tony, however, prefers to be analytical, displaying a flippant attitude toward the United States and its military-industrial complex. Atwood is commenting on the military’s disregard for human life, its willingness to trade bodies for profit, and its relentless pursuit of new and more efficient ways to kill. Their “toys” are, in truth, deadly weapons dropped from great heights where the carnage appears as little more than a puff of smoke, like a cartoon character falling from a cliff. 

“Whereas Charis is stuck with being white. A white rabbit. Being white is getting more and more exhausting.”

Charis’s employer Shanita is mixed-race, and Charis, though curious, is timid about probing too deeply. She is plagued by white guilt over the collective sins of her entire race. She feels bland and homogenous compared to the striking Shanita, which is a form of bias in itself—that is, seeing non-white races as intrinsically mysterious and exotic. At the same time, Charis understands that this guilt trip she puts herself through is counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating. Rather than treating Shanita as a person, unique and individual, she views her through the lens of colonialism and racism: “There’s so much to expiate! It gives her anemia just to think about it” (62). 

“Maybe I’m getting hooked on blood, she thinks. Blood and violence and rage, like everyone else.” 

Roz’s obsession with murder mysteries has gotten darker and more lurid over the years: “Sex killings, sex killings; this year it’s all sex killings” (78). She longs for the “civilized” detective fiction of yore—Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes—of a single victim murdered cleanly, without gore. She notices a disturbing recent trend: The murders have gotten grislier, with the victims inevitably engaging in sexual intercourse and the underlying themes conflating death with sex, as if sex were so morally reprehensible, the only adequate penalty is death. Worse, Roz has become inured to the gore. Through Roz, Atwood makes an astute observation about the coarsening of popular culture. To modern sensibilities, murder in a secluded English estate does not even rate as murder anymore. In order to slake the thirst of contemporary audiences, murder must include multiple victims in the most sensational form possible.

“Surely she isn’t still trying; surely she isn’t still in the man-pleasing business.”

Roz’s morning routine—vitamins, creams, wipes, and the occasional spa treatment—is a quest to revive her younger self. She tells Tony that she does these things for herself, but in the privacy of her own bathroom, she wonders whether she is doing it to attract a man: an arguably un-feminist goal by Second Wave standards. Beneath her accomplished, CEO exterior, Roz worries that she still needs a man to feel complete. This bit of interior monologue summarizes one of Atwood’s central themes concerning whether feminism given women all they really need.

“He did what he thought was expected of him, and brought the official pieces of paper home to her like a cat bringing dead mice. Now it’s as if he’s given up because doesn’t know what else to bring; he’s run out of ideas.”

Roz’s eldest son Larry has graduated from college but has no direction in his life. Without a grade to earn or a paper to write, he is adrift and listless. In a wry bit of social commentary, Atwood suggests that, for some, formal education is little more than a rote exercise which doesn’t adequately prepare young adults for the world. For Larry, who is struggling with his sexuality, college has given him a purpose, but post-graduation that purpose now seems pointless.

“Maybe that’s what people mean by a national identity. The hired help in outfits. The backdrops. The props.”

As Roz critiques contemporary Toronto architecture, she ruminates on the true meaning of national identity. For her, the Alps evoke superficial images of yodelers and girls in dirndls rather than any true sense of Swiss culture. Perhaps, she thinks, that’s all there is to it: the superficial imagery and iconography. Atwood asks an important question: What unites a people under a single national banner. If Americans see themselves as descended from cowboys riding the range, Atwood wonders if that reductive imagery is enough to engender a lasting national bond.

“You are what they see. Like a renovated building, Zenia is no longer the original, she’s the end result.”

When Zenia saunters into The Toxique, Roz notices some cosmetic embellishments: a nose job, breast implants, and dyed hair. Loathe to judge since she has made a few improvements herself over the years, Roz muses on the nature of perception and identity. Zenia, like herself, is the sum total of her physical attributes, altered or original. What the outside world sees is the authentic self, she thinks, on a journey of self-improvement. Despite her antipathy toward Zenia, Roz sees similarities between them—namely, their emphasis on physical appearance. For Roz, this is how she has learned to navigate the male-dominated world of business.

“Yet history is not a true palindrome, thinks Tony. We can’t really run it backwards and end up at a clean start.”

Tony ponders how history is written—not at the time of its enaction, but years or centuries later. Historians run the tape backward, reversing time to create as accurate a picture as they can of events that happened too long ago to truly understand. This method, however, cannot create a true, holistic picture; too many unseen obstacles can interfere with a contemporary understanding of history. These obstacles include a lack of testimony from the losing side, missing artifacts, and a predetermination bias based on knowing the outcome. At best, historians create “patchy waxworks” with gaps that may never be filled in.

“Tony was relieved, because Zenia’s contempt was a work of art. It was so nearly absolute; it was a great privilege to find yourself excluded from it.”

In college, Zenia gains Tony’s trust by pretending to include her in her very exclusive inner circle. Tony’s self-esteem is low, and so to even touch the hem of Zenia’s garment is a social step up from anything she’s experienced before. Zenia doles out withering criticism right and left, and Tony, feeling she’s escaped it this time has gained one more day of select social status. For Tony, one more day is all she needs.

“These are perilous waters. But why? They’re only talking.”

Tony finds herself in uncharted territory. Her “friendship” with Zenia is moving forward more quickly than the methodical Tony would prefer. Still, she cannot deny the lure of being a part of a popular crowd. Tony feels the wariness of being in a whirlwind romance in which everything seems to move too fast, including sex and commitment. This is undoubtedly all part of Zenia’s master strategy: to throw Tony off balance and draw her in with simple conversation that is far more than it appears. Zenia will rope Tony in and deliver the knockout punch before she even knows what hit her.

“But Griff missed all that. He only got into it at D-Day. (It meaning the danger, the killing; not the training, the waiting, the fooling around). He was there for the landing, the advance, the easy bit, says Anthea. The winning.”

Tony’s parents’ marriage is marked by veiled hostility, and one of Anthea’s favorite targets is her husband’s military service. Through no fault of his own, he misses the worst of the action on the battlefield, and Anthea, whose parents were both killed in a German blitz over London, copes with the tragedy by mocking her husband. She is so scarred by the loss that she becomes trapped in a game of who-suffered-the-most. The only way for her to rationalize her loss is to belittle Griff’s sacrifice, a passive aggressive strategy that seeks only to garner sympathy at the expense of her husband’s dignity. 

“The study of history has steeled her to violent death; she is well armoured.”

Tony recounts her entire backstory to Zenia without an inkling of emotion. Studying war, Tony realizes, has disconnected her from the emotional gravity of death, including the deaths of her parents. She sees this ability to look objectively at death without flinching as a virtue rather than a fault. What she’s missing, however, is the fact that death, while inevitable, is still tragic and terrifying, and her stoicism in the face of it is really just denial of her own humanity.

“Winning intoxicates you, and numbs you to the suffering of others.”

After Zenia returns and reclaims West, snatching him out from under Tony’s nose, Tony sees the betrayal in a military context, as she tends to do. Zenia has won this battle, and to the victor goes the spoils. She sees West as a victim not a willing participant, and Zenia’s triumph is the only way she can process the event, as if Zenia is a victorious army celebrating on the battlefield amid the cries of the dying.

“Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat.”

For Charis, her body is only the physical vessel of her soul, and despite her best intentions, healthy diet, yoga, and meditation, her body betrays her sometimes. She is torn between her spirit half and her physical half, much as she would like to minimize the importance of the latter. When she sees Zenia and Larry entering a hotel together, she is so focused on her spirit-body dichotomy and what her intuition is trying to tell her, she cannot make the obvious, ethical choice to tell Roz.

“What’s left, if you take away love? Just brutality. Just shame. Just ferocity. Just pain.”

As Zenia torments Charis with the “reality” of male-female relationships—men are all “rapists” at heart, she claims—Charis is forced to confront her own naiveté about herself and about Billy. She is convinced she and Billy share a deep, spiritual love, the kind not tainted by the grubbiness of physical contact. Zenia argues that Billy wants sex and nothing more. Charis—Zenia refers to her as “Karen” during this exchange, a deft rhetorical dig—is torn between what she wants to be true and what she fears may be true. The only way for her to rationalize her own truth is to contemplate the alternative, a brutish choice that contradicts her entire spiritual worldview. 

“She stays away from men, because men and sex are too difficult for her, they are too snarled up with rage and shame and hatred and loss…”

After the birth of August, Charis tends to her own mental and spiritual health, free from the entanglements of men. Charis has never known a healthy relationship, and Zenia’s psychological manipulations have given Charis major trust issues. Her own past adds to the “snarl,” her sexual abuse polluting any sense of healthy, gratifying sex. She confuses the primal sexual urge with violence. While she may miss the company of a partner, remaining free of romantic involvement is precisely the therapy she needs.

“She will forgive, she will forget. Well anyway, forgive, because what you can or can’t forget isn’t under your control.”

Mitch tells Roz that the only real purpose of their lunch date is to spend time together, something he’s been wanting more of recently. Roz laps up these emotional “scraps,” aware of her tenuous hold on her husband. She strikes a careful balance between forgiveness and skepticism. While she still loves Mitch, a feeling beyond her control and beyond rational thought in some ways, she cannot forget his past transgressions; nor is she oblivious to the reality that, given the opportunity, he will likely cheat on her again. For Roz, this balance is a delicate calculus: How many affairs is too many, she wonders, before love isn’t enough.

“Roz hesitates, unwilling to believe. But this is what she’s longed for always—an eyewitness, someone involved but impartial, who could assure her that her father really was what he was rumoured to be: a hero.”

Again, Zenia works her manipulative magic, this time on Roz, skeptic though she is. Somehow, she knows that Roz’s father is her weak spot; Roz fears that he may be a war criminal rather than the paragon of courage she secretly hopes. With this knowledge, Zenia concocts a tale of near escape from Nazis, in which she is saved only by the beneficence of Roz’s father and his noble compatriots. In spite of her trepidation, Roz falls for it completely, a testament to Zenia’s consummate skill as a con artist.

“If it was a bad sin she would scrub the toilet, even if it had just been done. God liked well-scrubbed toilets.”

In this short interior monologue, Atwood comments on the absurdity of religion and a child’s willingness to place her faith in that absurdity. Roz, praying for the safe return of her father, bargains with God in the only context she understands: the indoctrination she received in Catholic school, which espouses the simplistic equation that hard work equals a happy God. On its surface, she exposes the old adage—cleanliness is next to Godliness—for its inherent hollowness. 

“She was Catholic, as a matter of fact. But two of her four grandparents were Jewish, so she was classified as a mischling, first degree. A mixture. Did you know they had degrees?”

 Atwood has a gift for highlighting absurdities in human culture. Part of Zenia’s elaborate lie to Roz concerns her own heritage, not so coincidentally the same cultural blend as Roz. Human beings have a need, it seems, to categorize and compartmentalize each other, judging their worth by percentage of purity, like a pedigreed dog. Zenia’s feigned discomfort with the term, combined with her hybrid status, is the perfect cover for her to gain Roz’s trust.

“Zenia has stolen something from him, the one thing he always kept safe before, from all women, even from Roz. Call it his soul.”

 As Mitch pleads for Roz to take him back, she sees a once proud and dignified man on his knees begging for mercy. This is uncharacteristic behavior for Mitch who normally treats Roz “like a rest stop” (420). While Roz’s self-esteem finally kicks in and she issues an ultimatum, a part of her pities the shell of a man that used to be her husband. She recognizes Zenia’s true crime: She is a thief who steals men’s self-worth. In her hands, they become lap dogs she uses and discards for her own amusement. Even Roz, who claims little in the way of spirituality, must concede that Mitch’s spirit has been sucked dry, leaving him a soulless zombie.

“Tony isn’t sure how they’ve come by their confidence, their straight-ahead level gazes, their humorous but remorseless mouths. They have none of the timidity that used to be so built in, for women.”

Tony marvels at the generational change in Charis and Roz’s daughters. They are self-confident—if a bit sassy at times—speaking up for themselves and challenging parental authority. This is something Tony’s generation, especially the girls, would never have done. As an historian, she takes the long view, hoping that their current, teenage bluster will translate to adult success because, in the moment, having spirited teens is extremely challenging, and Tony is grateful that she is the itinerant godmother rather than the full-time mother.