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Rewriting Female Gothic: Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride

This paper, dealing with Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, examines not only the process by which the three secluded pasts of Tony, Charis and Roz are revealed through Zenia, a female gothic double who appears as an intruder and performs as the robber bride, but also rewriting ‘Female Gothic’. Although Atwood follows the tradition of gothic literature to deal with the victimized women and suffered women by the patriarchy, she crosses the limit of female gothic by creating the female bad character, Zenia as model of the new woman subject, who is contrary to gothic literature. To begin with, this paper examines the characters as victims of the comtemporary power system and analyzes the processes of their overcoming the system and achieving new identities. Because the characters pasts include mistreatment and sexual abuse by their parents when they were young, they try to repress their real identities. After meeting the new woman, Zenia, however, they recognize that she is their second ego and double. Also, they can see the truth of their fractured identities through her. Atwood demonstrates the possibilities of ending women’s mind and body’s colonization and changing the gender hierarchy, and making the true female community after they are aware of their depressed self, stop thinking of themselves as victims, and recognize their subjectivity.