The Robber Bride

Charis is the most spiritual member of the group. Often perceived as naïve and out-of-touch by the other two protagonists, Charis sees the world idealistically, as opposed to Tony and Roz. She desperately wants the soul of the world to be filled with light and positivity rather than the darkness she experienced as a child. A victim of physical and sexual abuse, Charis finds solace in alternate religious practices which include crystals, meditation, and auras. These beliefs are grounded in some reality, however. As a girl on her grandmother’s farm, she witnesses her grandmother’s uncanny healing power, which she perceives as a radiant light. She herself sees auras, and she accurately foretells Zenia’s death. She even notices an aura of energy bursting from Zenia’s cremation urn as it mysteriously splits apart.

For Charis, being close to nature is the closest she can get to God, or whatever form God may take. She is an old soul, eschewing all things modern for a holistic, natural lifestyle. She grows her own vegetables, raises chickens, and lives on an island away from the hurly burly of 20th century Toronto. She is fully aware that Tony finds her spirituality weird and illogical, but Charis likewise finds Tony’s fascination with war and death ultimately destructive to her soul.

While all three women have vulnerabilities that Zenia exploits, Charis’s open-mindedness and generous spirit present the easiest opening for Zenia, who readily invites herself into Charis’s life. Were it not for Charis’s pregnancy, Zenia might be living under her roof indefinitely. Her charity also accounts for the presence of Billy in her life, a man on the run from the law who evokes in Charis a protective instinct. As a survivor of abuse, she sees it as her moral duty to protect others. Charis’s obsession with only seeing goodness prevents her from acknowledging her own dark impulses. When her anger towards Zenia pushes her to contemplate violence, she must attribute those impulses to Karen, her long ago discarded identity. Karen was abused and rendered incapable of love, and therefore all negative energy must stem from Karen, not Charis. The only way for Charis to acknowledge both her darkness and her light is to expunge Karen from her soul, an act of will that only Zenia seems capable of invoking in her.

If Atwood’s three women are archetypal, then Roz is the alpha female: the savvy businesswoman and deal maker who understands money and how to make more of it. Roz’s backstory gives glimpses of the woman she will become; she learns poker from her “uncles,” bets at the racetrack with her father, and masters the inner workings of his company from the ground up. Growing up fatherless for much of her youth, Roz has only the female “roomers” in her mother’s boarding house for role models. From Mrs. Morley, she acquires her love of makeup and fashion; from Miss Hines, she acquires her fascination with detective stories, which, years later, results in her hiring a detective to tail Zenia. As a child of poverty, Roz finally gets a taste of the good life when her father’s profits from looting rare artifacts finally begin to roll in. Once she experiences wealth, she will not go back to privation, building her company’s profits even during a recession and assuaging any guilt over her wealth by donating generously to charity. 

Roz’s weak spot is Mitch, a lawyer and serial adulterer who, despite his numerous affairs, always finds a welcoming, if angry, Roz waiting for him. Love is blind, Atwood suggests by this relationship, and love forgives, always hoping for a return on one’s emotional investment. When Mitch returns after cohabitating with Zenia, only then does Roz find the strength to cut him loose. Although Mitch is Zenia’s ammunition, Zenia’s overall strategy is built on Roz’s low self-esteem and her feelings of separation from not belonging to any particular group. As a girl, she doesn’t fit in with the Catholic school kids or, later, with the privileged Jewish kids—although as an adult, she continues to speak to God, questioning him and bargaining with him. Always feeling like an outsider instills in Roz a brashness and a feigned confidence to push her way into any situation with the assumption that she belongs there. It’s a skill that serves her well in the dog-eat-dog world of business but fails her when confronting Zenia, who reduces everyone around her to quivering sycophants. Roz desperately wants to see her father as a hero, and that desperation, coupled with her feelings of not belonging, create fertile ground for Zenia’s duplicity.

Zenia is a mystery, with no verifiable past or family background. Her identity is fluid depending on the situation and her needs at any given moment. Her assorted backstories include investigative reporter, cancer patient, firsthand witness to global political events, and beatnik. She claims to have reported from war-torn regions across the world, a story that is debunked upon closer examination. She is variously a Russian sex worker, an escapee of the Holocaust, or a Romani woman. Parts or none of these stories may be true, but that’s not the point. Solving the mystery of Zenia’s identity won’t change her narrative role as a devious force of malice who weasels her way into three lives and changes them forever. While she unquestionably leaves disaster in her wake—a broken West, a possibly deported and arrested Billy, and a dead Mitch—she also unwittingly establishes a bond between three women who would most likely never socialize after college. They travel in widely different spheres and share almost none of the same interests, but Zenia is the nuclear force that holds them together years after her presumed death. Atwood suggests that, in the end, Zenia is little more than a drug runner and an opportunist, seducing men and befriending women solely for material gain—or simply because she can—only to toss them aside when she’s milked them dry. Zenia is less a fully formed character and more of an antagonistic force, and as such, no fuller dimensions are necessary. It is enough that Zenia appears, destroys lives, and then recedes into the shadows, lurking until she is ready to strike again. Ironically, even after putting Tony, Charis, and Roz through the emotional wringer, they still grieve her death, lamenting her malevolent impulses but admiring her cunning and power.

The importance of Charis’s grandmother cannot be overstated. She is the only light for young Karen in an otherwise dismal childhood. Charis is without a father, and her mother suffers from mental illness, beating her cruelly. Part of her mother’s anger toward her daughter stems from Karen’s eerie ability to perceive things beyond the reality of her five senses, but once she spends a summer at her grandmother’s farm, she finds a nonjudgmental atmosphere and a sense of where those abilities came from. Her grandmother’s fatalism, which attributes everything to the cycles of nature, her strange healing ability, her rituals with the Bible, and her deep connection to the earth all resonate profoundly with Karen. Her grandmother is a fitting mother for Karen at the time.

Her time on the farm is a mixed blessing, however, and Karen’s life is shaped by both positive affirmation and the difficult reality of death. Karen cannot abide killing, and her grandmother’s nonchalance about killing her pigs for food traumatizes her into becoming a vegetarian. Her grandmother doesn’t shrink from death the way Karen does; she shrugs it off, stoically accepting it as all part of life. In the character of the grandmother, Atwood implies that individuals’ lives, perspectives, and belief systems are informed by the positive and negative influences of guardians, and that both are necessary to create a fully-formed person.

While Atwood gives all three men backstories, their true narrative purpose is to give Zenia a target. While all three enter the story from distinctly different places and come to very different ends, by the time Zenia is done with them, they are all putty in her hands, molded and shaped to her specifications, and then crushed between her manicured fingers. West, Billy, and Mitch have almost no agency nor will to resist the evil manipulations of Zenia. Pre-Zenia, all three are independent men, each with his own path. At first, West appears to be the dominant one in his relationship with Zenia, but after she dumps him for being “boring,” he becomes so fragile and delicate, Tony must care for him like a piece of valuable china. Billy is young and nervous, which gives Zenia plenty of room to toy with him, though Billy is suspicious of Zenia’s story from the outset, betting Charis that she’d find no surgery scars anywhere on Zenia’s body. Mitch would seem the hardest to manipulate. A high-powered attorney who travels in well-heeled circles, Mitch is nevertheless no match for Zenia, and he pays the ultimate price for his obsession. In the characters of West, Billy, and Mitch, Atwood implies that men are ruled primarily by their sexual desires, and that in the presence of temptation, they lose all rational thought and are transformed into hormone-crazed teenagers.