Reconnecting with the Past: Personal Hauntings in Margaret Atwood's the Robber Bride

In her 1987 review of Beloved, Margaret Atwood notes that Toni Morrison blends into her novel a particular folkloric tradition about dead returning from grave when they are summoned. To further illuminate this tradition, Atwood explains that of living,--and, perhaps, thoughts and feelings surrounding past issues connected to departed--keep dead alive; and Beloved, as incarnation of Sethe's dead daughter, functions as a catalyst for revelations as well as self-revelations. Through Beloved, Atwood argues, stories of central characters are revealed (Review 35). In her latest novel, Atwood draws from a similar folkloric tradition and narrative strategy to give added meaning and depth to another contemporary ghost story already imbued with a multiplicity of layers, ranging from biblical and folkloric to metaphysical, psychological, and Eastern philosophical. Drawing from these various rich traditions and perspectives, The Robber Bride becomes a creation or rather a recreation of a ghost story in which three central protagonists--Roz, Tony, and Charis--unconsciously summon through their passions a trickster-like woman from their past back into their lives. In addition to providing templates for heroines' reunion with a troublesome woman from their past, folktale traditions within novel also demonstrate that life is grounded in patterns that are far from coincidental. Thus, Zenia's physical reemergence into lives of protagonists represents an event that psychologist Carl Jung would dub synchronistic, a purposeful and meaningful union between an inner unconscious knowledge, desire, or passion and a physical event or manifestation (Jacobi 357). While The Robber Bride provides a demonstration of synchronicity throughout, it is primarily grounded in one central sychronistic event--Zenia's reunion with heroines. Several years prior to opening of novel, Zenia, a woman who attended college with Roz, Tony, and Charis, feigns her death in order to assume a new identity and to evade responsibility for tragedies that she inflicted upon protagonists. At opening of novel, Zenia returns to Toronto and entangles her life into lives of protagonists who come to recognize that their reunion is hardly mark of coincidence. Rather, protagonists learn not only that they unconsciously summon and will Zenia back into their lives because they have many unresolved issues with her, but also that Zenia's return aids them in their individuation processes; that is, process by which protagonists begin to recognize and understand previously unconscious elements of their psyches. The key to further understanding significance of this particular ghost story, Zenia, and personal transformations that she triggers in three protagonists can be found in an interview with Atwood in which she discusses Surfacing and her fascination with psychological aspects of ghost stories. Although there are a variety of ghostly narratives to fashion a novel around, Atwood admits that she is particularly intrigued with tales in which the ghost that one sees is in fact a fragment of one's own self which has split off (Gibson 29). In Surfacing: Apocalyptic Ghost Story, Keith Garebian observes that ghosts protagonist beholds in Atwood's first novel are ultimately projections of a distressed mind (2). From a Jungian perspective, ghosts as projections of an afflicted mind or as fragments of one's psyche can be represented as or dark side of one's nature that is often repressed or rejected. In Approaching Unconscious,Jung argues more specifically that the shadow cast by conscious mind of individual contains hidden, repressed, and unfavorable aspects of personality (94). While she symbolizes a conglomeration of many folkloric and biblical traditions, Zenia also most dramatically represents physical manifestation of an unconscious element, shadow, or split-off aspect of protagonists' psyches. …