Cooking and Eating Your Own Stories: (Metaphorical) Cannibalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride
-
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.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret (1982). Second Words: Selected Critical Prose. Toronto: Anansi.Search in Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret (1994 [1993]). The Robber Bride. London: Virago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Atwood, Margaret (2004 [1991]). Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. London: Virago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Brown, Jennifer (2012). Cannibalism in Literature and Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
DiMarco, Danette (2011). “Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Antonia Bird’s Ravenous.” College Literature 38.4, 134–154.10.1353/lit.2011.0038Search in Google Scholar
Guest, Kirsten (2001). Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity. New York, NY: State University of New York Press.10.1515/9780791490013Search in Google Scholar
Howells, Coral Ann (2000). “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” Reignard Nischik, ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. New York, NY: Camden House, 139–157.Search in Google Scholar
Isla, Duncan (1999). “The Wendigo Myth in The Robber Bride.” British Journal of Canadian Studies 14.1, 73–84.Search in Google Scholar
Kilgour, Maggie (1990). From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy of Metaphors of Incorporation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.10.1515/9781400860784Search in Google Scholar
Potts, Donna (1999). “‘The Old Maps are Dissolving’: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Studies in Women’s Literature 18, 281–298.10.2307/464450Search in Google Scholar
Root, Deborah (1996). Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Search in Google Scholar
Sceats, Sarah (2000). Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511485381Search in Google Scholar
Tolan, Fiona (2007). “Sucking the Blood Out of Second Wave Feminism: Postfeminist Vampirism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Gothic Studies 9.2, 45–57.10.7227/GS.9.2.6Search in Google Scholar
Wallraven, Miriam (2014). “‘To Make History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy’: The Narrative Construction of Cultural History.” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 62.2, 131–148.10.1515/zaa-2014-0017Search in Google Scholar
Wilson, Sharon Rose (1993). Margaret Atwood’s Fairy–tale Sexual Politics. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi and ECW Press.Search in Google Scholar
Wilson, Sharon Rose (2008). Myths and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction: From Atwood to Morrison. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Search in Google Scholar
Wilson, Sharon Rose (2010). “Magical Realism in The Robber Bride and Other Texts”. J. Brooks Bouson, ed. Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. London and New York, NY: Continuum, 23–36.Search in Google Scholar
Wyatt, Jean (1998). “‘I Want To Be You’: Envy, the Lacanian Double, and Feminist Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17. 1, 37–64.10.2307/464324Search in Google Scholar
©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- 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)
Articles in the same Issue
- 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)
