Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
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Katarina Labudova
Abstract
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood exposes a dangerous protagonist, Zenia, who is metaphorically introduced through images of drinking blood and eating raw meat. Her victims, Tony, Charis, and Roz, are associated with nurturing and nourishing foods: they eat together to comfort each other. Sarah Sceats’s, Fiona Tolan’s, and Jean Wyatt’s studies on feminism and female bonding in the novel have influenced this article, though it also questions the established opposition between the villainess Zenia and her victims: Zenia’s dark appetites are their own tastes for blood, revenge, and power. Zenia acts as a liberating and empowering ingredient. This article discusses the link between storytelling and cooking. I suggest that Zenia’s creative story-telling forces the women to acknowledge the darker dimension of their repressed fragments and past. Thus, they become independent and creative storytellers and cooks, just like Zenia.
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©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Tellabilities – Diatopic/Diachronic: Where and When a Story Is Worth Telling and Where and When It Is Not
- Paradox in the Woods: The Twin Destiny of Elves and Men in the Forests of Beleriand
- History, Time, and Lived Experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997)
- Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
- Alice Munro and ‘Alternate Realities’
- Book Reviews
- Coleridge and Communication
- Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture
- Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 65 (2017)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- Tellabilities – Diatopic/Diachronic: Where and When a Story Is Worth Telling and Where and When It Is Not
- Paradox in the Woods: The Twin Destiny of Elves and Men in the Forests of Beleriand
- History, Time, and Lived Experience in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1997)
- Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
- Alice Munro and ‘Alternate Realities’
- Book Reviews
- Coleridge and Communication
- Fake Identity? The Impostor Narrative in North American Culture
- Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 65 (2017)
