5 A modern fairy tale

“Genius is an infinite capacity for causing pain.”

With the usual wit and in her unsurpassed manner Atwood dissects the oldest topic of "sex wars". As always she is satirical and harsh. The plot itself is not that special: gorgeous femme fatale, a gold digger Zenia appears in lives of three women to steal their beloved men. To "eat' them. And to be honest, these men are easy prey. For the predators like Zenia. The whole story is based on a German fairy tale (not exactly those stories made into cartoons by Disney but the original, gloomy ones, full of blood and violence). So, she appears, lures them, tricks them into an affair and then throws them away like trash. Men of “the Robber Bride” are depicted as totally witless, practically deprived of any brains or willpower, paralyzed or hypnotized by the Evil Queen – Zenia. Men, who are by nature predators, the stronger sex, falling for her. Is Zenia devil or an angel saving women from unworthy men?
‘The Robber Bride” could be a melodramatic love story ; the plot reminds of Mario Vargas Iiosa and his “Bad Girl” – another gold digger femme fatale story, where the main character is obsessed with a woman, constantly breaking his heart, and there are no obvious reasons for this obsession, reader never gets to know anything about this woman apart from her beauty and as usual sex appeal. How could you convince reader to believe in such a story? There is no depth in the characters, no development. Only flat, static sadistic and selfish nature of that woman and same flatness in the main character,who blindly loving her.
Then what makes Atwood’s story stand out? The tone of course. The modern retelling of a classic fairy tale in a satiric way. ‘Adventurer lives by his wits, adventuress by her tits’. She is not trying to convince reader that there is a miracle of love: Zenia’s tits and nose are simply fake, not miraculous. She deliberately seduces them, lures them into her traps. And the best bait is not her tits, it is her lies. All the magic is done by simply telling people what they want to hear. Giving men what they always want – chance to save you. To play “a hero”, “a knight”. Zenia is Attila in those modern sex wars. A genius, a strategist.