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.