The Robber Bride

Tony’s father’s involvement in World War II is limited—as mockingly pointed out by his wife—but he retains a souvenir from his experience: a German Luger pistol taken from a dead German soldier. Although he seems inclined to never discuss his war experience ever again, he keeps the Luger as a memento and a confirmation that his trauma, the death and carnage he witnessed on the battlefield, was real and not a bad dream. Tony inherits the Luger and keeps it hidden, never intending to use it, but its presence looms over her, informing her fascination with war. It is a symbol of killing and of the human capacity for violence, something with which Tony has a perverse and dispassionate obsession. Although she never uses it against anyone, she carries it with her to Zenia’s hotel room, seriously contemplating murder.

Charis likewise considers murder, if only for a moment, but the moment passes, and never does Atwood suggest that she has the capacity for murder in her. Tony, however, surrounded by the academic study of war, seems primed for it. The Luger is a potent symbol of violence and of how the trauma of violence can be generational.

Atwood has found the ideal structure for a character study of three women: three separate narrative strands, each rich with detail about her main protagonists. It works because she presents her readers with fully formed, fully motivated characters whose actions are contextualized and do not occur in a vacuum. The other advantage is that, like Akira Kurosawa’s influential film, Rashomon, which tells its story from multiple perspectives but without a singular narrative “truth,” The Robber Bride presents its enigmatic antagonist from three different perspectives. Without a unifying lens through which to view Zenia, her true nature is anybody’s guess. It is unclear whose perception is accurate: Tony’s, Charis’s, or Roz’s. Zenia remains a mystery, all the clues to her life and her motivations conflicting and unreliable. Keeping Zenia mysterious is vital to the narrative because her purpose is to be whoever or whatever her victim needs her to be at that moment. The structure suits Atwood’s purpose, giving readers a villain who slips through their fingers like water.