The Pleasures and Dangers of Storytelling in Margaret Atwood's the Robber Bride

In an undated note, found in Atwood collection at University of Toronto, Margaret Atwood queries source of following quotation or song lyric: Ask a woman where she's going and she'll tell you who she's been (Margaret Atwood Collection, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. University of Toronto. 27:1). Atwood's interest in this line chimes with her frequent association between female identity and past selves; movement in this line from a progressive, hopeful (and, significantly, unrealised) geographical metaphor for selfhood and a role-playing, past-centred notion of selfhood is deeply resonant with what Atwood engages with in much of her fiction, particularly in Lady Oracle (1976), Cat's Eye (1988) and Robber Bride (1993). It is clear to see why this quotation would have struck a chord with Atwood as it illuminates a very Atwoodian strategy for writing a woman's life. As a prescription, it reflects power of play as a device in forging of female identities in Atwood's fiction, perhaps most noticeably in Robber Bride where character of Zenia's powers of story-telling privilege careful maintenance of simultaneous, creative identities over any cohesive subjectivity or linear trajectory of progress. In telling her life story over and over, Zenia alters her history to meet individual needs of other characters in novel--Charis, Roz, and Tony. narrative structure of novel is shaped around way in which Zenia mirrors each character's anxieties and confusion about their personal and cultural origins and fills in gaps in their individual life narratives. In telling stories that they want or need to hear, Zenia manipulates her way into other characters' life narratives. It is her role as an interloper--played so adeptly by Zenia--that renders her such a powerful and dangerous presence in novel. For example, Tony, who imagines herself to be a twin the other half of which had died (The Robber Bride. 1993, London: Virago, 1994: 137), comes to see Zenia as missing component in her life history, a partner in twinning suggested in Tony's ambidexterity: will be Zenia's right hand, because Zenia is certainly Tony's left one (169). But Zenia's supposed completion of Tony is not, as latter imagines it will be, a positive thing. Central to this interest in split or multiple selfhood and identity is a revisitation of Atwood's preoccupation with role of language and narrative in fashioning and preservation of identity. For Tony, is a synonym for narrative and she sounds a warning note about its inherent unreliability in opening pages: History is a construct, she tells her students. Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary (4). In Chapter 6, Tony concludes that, War is what happens when language fails (39), and later insists that Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep neighbours at a distance (62). This can be read as a restatement of narrator's suspicion of dangers and vicissitudes of language in Atwood's earlier novel Surfacing (1972): Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole (140). Similarly, fact that The story of Zenia is insubstantial, ownerless, a rumour only (461) is what ultimately makes Zenia so dangerous to other characters in novel. …