Moral choice at risk in Atwood’s `The Robber Bride’

THE ROBBER BRIDE, by Margaret Atwood, Nan A. Talese-Doubleday, 542 pages, $23.50.

To delight, as William Blake would venture, is what Margaret Atwood aims to do for her readers, and in her newest novel, “The Robber Bride,” she indeed delights, inspires, engages, and surprises us in the best tradition of storytelling. Born in 1939 in Ottawa and growing up in the wilderness, daughter of a forest entomologist, Atwood began writing at age 6 and has published more than 25 volumes of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. At a recent address to a booksellers convention, Atwood said that it had occurred to her to ask, “Where have all the Lady Macbeths gone?” The answer, “Gone to Ophelias, every one,” led her to seek to return to women moral choice. If women want to be men’s equals, she says, we must admit our capacity for evil as well as for good.

To prove it, the award-winning author of “The Edible Woman,” “Surfacing” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” enthralls us in her brilliant, darkly funny, bittersweet tale of three women and their men, all of whom fall prey to the feminine wiles and machinations of Zenia, a “friend” from college who morally assaults each couple in the manner of the fairy tale, “The Robber Bridegroom.” In Atwood’s Grimm-based story, we see a “Bluebeard” kind of a seductive temptress who destroys men. More importantly here, she also destroys the egos, hearts and lives of their women.

Zenia the beautiful, Zenia the sexy, Zenia the siren, Zenia the entrancing vixen, is a psychic vampire invited into their lives, their loves, their souls, where she teases and taunts, seduces and betrays. She is, of course, an illusion, the archetypal Jezebel, but her destructive capabilities are only too real.

The story begins on an ominous Scorpio day when Tony, a history professor who specializes in “spontaneous massacres”; Charis, a New Age psychic wannabe; and Roz, a stereotypical rich, aggressive business owner who thinks money will buy her anything, meet at an “artistic” restaurant, The Toxique, where they are horrified to discover that Zenia, their mutual enemy, is alive. They had joyfully attended her funeral five years earlier. Imagine their sense of fear and danger to see a mortal enemy come back from the dead looking younger and sexier — thanks to plastic surgery — and out for more psychological carnage.

These emotionally scarred yet fatally ironic women attempt to learn how Zenia managed to survive a bomb blast in Beirut and why she has continued to haunt them since college, reveling in her game: She befriends them long enough to get financial and-or emotional support and to seduce their lovers into betrayal and abandonment.

Each of the women has developed a “dual nature” that emerges to free her from childhood trauma. Each in turn reveals her inner truths, her soul to Zenia, only to see her mock their pain by inventing more heart-wrenching life stories than theirs. Their trust in her secure, Zenia then knows whom and what they love most, and is able to inflict psychic wounds that cut to the core of each woman’s sense of self-identity and self-worth. Attempting to protect their men, the women are drawn into activities that are more and more dangerous for their own self-images as well as their reputations.

It is perhaps Zenia’s “malign vitality” that makes her invincible, seemingly immortal. Atwood tells us that “waves of ill will flow out of her like cosmic radiation.” Something this evil cannot be stopped by the three women without their becoming evil too. She is a serial love-thief, living by seduction and betrayal. Like a marauding shark, Zenia seems to feed on the misery of others. Yet there are also moments of brilliant comedy in this ironic tour de force.

This book is like Zenia, whose identity is not fixed, but is fluid, changing with the circumstances. Zenia and her victims are enticing. Atwood uses an epigram from Jessamyn West to suggest her purpose: “A rattlesnake that doesn’t bite teaches you nothing.” Surely these women learn more from the evil Zenia than they ever could from someone good, trustworthy, a friend. As Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway says, “It’s enemies one wants.”

Linda L. Labin is an associate professor of English at Husson College.