Coming to terms with Zenia means accepting their own potential for hostility, anger, and rage, and integrating it into themselves. Palumbo, Zenia exists as the negative these women define themselves in contrast to:Īs the lost twin of Tony, Charis, and Roz, Zenia enacts the return of the repressed, and is the repository of their submerged aggression and anger. Who she really is is not important what matters is the effect she has on the three main characters, three women who are all struggling with repressed emotions in some way. We never get to know her because she shows a different version of herself every time she speaks she adjusts to whom is listening to her and plays on their respective weaknesses and desires. However, Zenia is not a straightforward fairytale villain. The result is a fascinating emotional whirlwind of a novel full of revenge and frustration, with Zenia at its roaring centre. Instead of a robber bridegroom, we have the almost mythical figure of Zenia, a femme fatale who lures boyfriends and husbands away from their women, wraps them around her little finger and leads them to their doom. In The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood has written a retelling of an old brothers Grimm fairytale, with the genders of its main players reversed: instead of helpless young ladies, it’s the men who are hunted. When she asked them, the twins would give her looks of deep contempt. All of their stuffed animals were female, too. If Roz slipped up and said “he,” they would correct her: She! She! they would insist. Winnie the Pooh was female, Piglet was female, Peter Rabbit was female. They’d decided that all the characters in every story had to be female. “She remembers one phase, when were, what? Four, five, six, seven? It went on for a while.
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