Atwood says that the idea for The Robber Bride (1993) came from two chance remarks: one, that women can't be con artists (patently false); and two, a friend's little girls wanted all the characters in their bedtime stories to be female, even the villains. These ideas came together in the longest of Atwood’s rewritten folk tales, in this case, “The Robber Bridegroom.”
I suggest this further inspiration. What if Cordelia, the bully from Cat's Eye, based on Atwood’s lived experience, grew up and continued to torture her so-called friends? Each of the three main characters has a weakness that the fourth, Zenia, exploits.
Tony is an orphan, abandoned by her mom and then later by her father's suicide. She studies war, perhaps in order to understand the war that brought her parents together and later pushed them apart.
Karen’s father was never in the picture and her mother also abandoned her, due to mental illness. She is raped by her uncle and disbelieved by her aunt (aunts rarely come off well). She becomes Charis, and pursues peace, but not the political kind, even though she harbors a draft dodger.
Roz's father was absent for a long time but came back from the war suspiciously rich.
The four women meet in college, where Zenia steals West from Tony. Later she steals Billy from Charis, and finally steals Mitch from Roz. (I’m not sure why Atwood says that Zenia steals two of the three men; though Tony gets West back, he’s still been stolen.)
Hence the length of this book; it really could be three novels. So why group them together? To show how the three victims unite in their hatred of the manhunter, and their care for each other? To show three facets of Atwood herself, and maybe a fourth?
She claimed she wanted to show female friendship, and she does. But what she also shows is that every woman is at least two women. She starts the memoir with this idea and calls it The Book of Lives, plural, for that reason. Tony is a mild-mannered academic but she is also her mirror left-hand self, a fierce warrior. Charis appears to be a New Age yoga teacher but under her flaky facade is the violent Karen, seeking revenge on her uncle. And Roz has been both Catholic and Jewish, both poor and rich, a chameleon shifting between worlds. And all of them harbor at one time or another the desire to murder Zenia. It’s a fascinating read, watching each character in turn give in to Zenia’s charms, then get wise.
But what’s missing is Zenia’s point of view. In Cat’s Eye, the balance of power is reversed: bullied Elaine later befriends Cordelia, and watches her deteriorate. Elaine realizes that Cordelia bullied because she herself was a victim of her oldest sister. No such compassion or even explanation is forthcoming in Zenia’s case. All we have is her multiple origin stories, which can’t all be true. Is she a straw woman, just plain evil through and through, for our three heroines to knock down? Atwood does hint at redemption later, in a 2012 story called “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth.” Stay tuned!
No comments:
Post a Comment