The Robber Bride: Zenia

Sydney Bushnell

Women Studies 317

The Robber Bride Blog Entry

13. William Blake said of Milton's Paradise Lost that Milton often seemed to be of the devil's part without knowing it. Does Atwood have a sneaking sympathy for Zenia? Do you?

            Zenia is such a frustrating character to listen to and read about through the eyes of the three women of the novel. She knows exactly how to draw people into her web like a sneaky spider draws in its prey. Especially after knowing initially that Zenia has wronged each of these characters and then hearing how it is played out and how Zenia came to enter their lives. As a reader, you can empathize how each woman was drawn into the trap by the different story that Zenia gives each of them. As a reader, I extremely dislike her and what she does to these women, even though they let her. She’s not a good person at all, in my opinion. But then you have to think about where she started and what in her life led her to be this way. Though she gives a different story to each woman, you have to wonder if any of it was true. Was she set to be a prostitute because of her mom, did her parents get taken away to die. And I think about how even though Charis, Roz, and Tony all had part of their lives ruined by this woman, they still have their homes. Tony has West. Roz and Charis both have their children. They have a home and real jobs. What does Zenia have? She has to rely on using men and stealing from people or blackmailing people the majority of the time. Not that everyone’s life goal is to settle down in one place and have a family or a spouse. But Zenia has no home base, no one in her life that she can rely on no matter what. She is utterly alone. She uses people over and over again, yes. But there is no constant in her life at all. Everything changes all the time. It sounds utterly exhausting to me. I don’t like Zenia, but I feel bad for her. And I think Atwood maybe wants the reader to feel this way at the end of it all. I’m exhausted just having read the story and mentally trying to picture what all these women went through. I feel like it would have been a very challenging and trying life that Zenia lived. From beginning to end.

Lenox Poems

Sydney Bushnell

Blog: Lennox Poems

Lenox Poems I: Longest Sneezing Fit Day 977

            Lenox writes about day 977 of 978 consistent days of sneezing for the Guinness World Record holder. In the beginning of the piece she says essentially: it’s not that I don’t want to stop sneezing over and over, and then ends the poem with: but if I didn’t sneeze constantly every day for three years, and if I stopped, who would be counting each ordinary breath and who would bless me? Yes, sneezing constantly for four years would be AWFUL, but in the other sense, she gets to appreciate literally every breath that she takes and sneezes. And maybe she doesn’t appreciate the sneezing, but she’s appreciating the breath that keeps her living, that also keeps her sneezing. And the fact that she is thinking about this on the second to last day before she stops sneezing. The poem almost read like that was her last day of life. Like after she stopped sneezing and stopped appreciating the breaths, and stopped being blessed, that there was no life. Now, I doubt the woman who this happened to actually died after the three years of sneezing, but it wouldn’t be impossible. I just like the imagery behind appreciating each breath and being blessed for it.

           

Paper Topic: 

            Also, in regards to my paper topic, I hadn’t written out what I wanted to write about because I wasn’t sure if I’d want to write about The Robber Bride, but I decided that I do want to write about The Robber Bride and I want to write about the significance of villains and women in it. That’s not necessarily a thesis. But it would be something like analyzing how Margaret Atwood addresses the ideas of women being the villains and why they aren’t generally but the importance of equality in men and women both in the bad and the good.

Persepolis

              Marji always had a close relationship with her family throughout the story, even when she was in Austria (excluding the time when she was alone on the street for a couple months). No matter how far gone she seemed to be, they always knew how to bring her back. For instance, when she came back from Austria and she was deeply depressed, they always stood by her side reminding her of who she was and why that was important. And all the while she was in Austria, when she was doing things that she knew wouldn’t impress her parents, the thought of them usually grounded her back to her roots. When she told the one man in Austria that she was French, not Iranian, the thought of what her grandmother would think of her saying that made her yell out how she was proud to be Iranian when the girls were making fun of her. She always had her family in her mind. When drinking and parties were outlawed in Iran, her parents continued to have them and to drink alcohol and play games. They said they needed this for their survival. So many things were taken away from them after the war began, they needed something to keep them alive and to keep them happy. Which is why it was worth the risk of getting caught having parties, because if they didn’t have them, they will have given in to just about all of the restrictions that had been put on them, that they wouldn’t hardly have their own identity anymore. Their family did what they needed to do to stay sane.

                  I didn’t understand what the title Persepolis had to do with the novel at first. And I’m still not exactly sure that what I think about the title is correct. I didn’t even know where the name “Persepolis” came from until I was reading the book in the middle school classroom here in Pullman that I am teaching in, one of the students came up to me and asked what I was reading. I showed him, I think the graphic novel part of it interested him, but when he saw the title he said “Oh, Persepolis, that’s like the Old Persian country”. And then I asked him what he meant, because the book took place in Iran and then in Austria. He then explained to me that Persepolis means city of Persians and that it was in part of where Iran is now. He knew a lot about this because his family came from Saudi Arabia so they learned more about there than I had ever learned about it. And then it made sense why in the novel, she said she spoke Persian, which I didn’t really know that was a language in Iran, realizing how little I knew about Iran in general. I thought about the idea of Old Persia. In the novel, Marji and her family are always talking about how restricted they are because of what is new, and how they wish things were as they were before. When their city was probably originally all alike, a city of Persians, now with new government and war bringing in new ideas and new restrictions. They only wanted to go back to how it was for them, with everything was comfortable and normal. I think that is at least part of why the novel is titled Persepolis.