The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

[clementine]

This one is certainly not exciting or plot-driven, but I find Atwood's writing just spellbinding. This book reminded me of Cat's Eye in a lot of ways: the preoccupation with time and its passing, the middle-aged women looking back at their lives, the focus on childhood. God, Margaret Atwood writes childhood so well, so painfully. I saw the parallels between Tony, Charis, and Roz - their cold mothers, their childhood tragedies, their bizarre rituals as coping mechanisms, their dysfunctional relationships with men. If taken as purely realistic fiction then I think the character of Zenia breaks down: she is simply too evil and too motiveless to make sense. But if we embrace the hints of supernaturalism, I think Zenia makes sense as something altogether more than a human woman. She's a shapeshifter, able to find each woman's vulnerability with minimal effort.

When we watched Rosemary's Baby in a class I took on horror during undergrad, my professor said something that stuck with me: that even if you remove the supernatural and allegorical elements from the film, it's still terrifying, because it's about a woman's complete loss of bodily autonomy. I think the same is true for this book: take Zenia out of the picture, and it's still bleak and disturbing. It's a book about women struggling to shed their broken childhoods, whose relationships with men are by and large unhealthy - these things are true regardless of Zenia's (possibly demonic) influence.

There's a lot more than can be said here - about friendship forged through mutual adversity, about motherhood and daughterhood as trauma, about female characters as archetypes, about how women navigate male-dominated spaces. (Only Charis seems to bypass this in her professional life.) It's a slow burner, and I understand why it wouldn't appeal - but Margaret Atwood can frequently enchant me with her writing even when the narrative itself is not particularly thrilling.