Situating Canada: The Shifting Perspective of the Postcolonial Other in Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride

Abstract

Margaret Atwood published her eighth novel, The Robber Bride, in 1993; it marks a moment when postmodernism and post-colonialism that have always been discernible in Atwood's work came to fore in critical dialog. (1) The Robber Bride is a novel concerned with place and with origins. Many of characters have complicated ethnic and cultural histories, reflecting something of increasingly multicultural composition of contemporary Canada. But this multiculturalism is always in tension in novel with traditionally White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism of British colonial Canada. Consequently, question where do you come from? recurs throughout novel, and Atwood reads it as an aggressive rather than a neutral question: seeking to distinguish insiders from outsiders. In this article I examine this tension between insiders and outsiders--which is effectively classic tension between self and other--and I suggest that The Robber Bride articulates a peculiarly Canadian view of postcolonial Canada is caught between two opposing power positions. It is ex-colonial nation (that is, colonial other to Britain's colonizing self), and it is also undeniably a First World nation, with a position of privilege and power in world (and therefore is First World self to Third World other). This unstable division continues even within borders of Canada, as Donna Bennett points out: both French and English Canada, while they may be postcolonial to a dominant Other, have played, and continue to play, role of imperial power to Native (Bennett 2004, 115). This article examines Canada's dual power position, and much of argument is framed by an examination of parallel experience of ambiguous power positions faced by white feminists addressing problems of Third World women. Both topics--feminism and nationalism--are connected by a quest for power and a quest for identity. I demonstrate that Atwood's examination of women's power is frequently employed as a metaphor for Canada's experience as a postcolonial nation. Identity in The Robber Bride is frequently shifting, and by this, I argue, Atwood attempts to reflect what she sees to be shifting identity of Canada itself. In novel and nation, boundary between self and other--between colonizer and colonized--is fluid and uncertain. In The Robber Bride, Atwood articulates a common late-twentieth-century interest in postcolonial discourse, but she translates prevalent postcolonial ideas of difference and otherness to fit her own understanding. The split voice of a racially divided culture becomes, in this novel, separation of narratorial focus into three separate speaking subjects. For each of three (white) protagonists, Tony, Roz, and Charis, there is a detailed history; for each woman, origins are of fundamental importance. Post-colonialism in this novel is largely read through experiences of white women, which may seem to undermine potency of examination, but this allows Atwood to challenge Canada on some of its assumptions of postcolonial innocence by examining, in abstract, manner in which First World self responds to presence of Further to this, Atwood interacts with many of issues thrown up by postcolonial thinking in her depiction of shape-shifting Zenia. This character's instability--demonstrated by her compulsive re-reading of her own origins--creates a powerful depiction of the other woman. Most frequently read in terms of sexuality and greed (most notably by Coral Howells and Atwood herself, as discussed below), Zenia's otherness, when considered through lens of post-colonialism, becomes simply a metaphorical figure of the other. By examining interaction of each of three protagonists with this alien other, The Robber Bride plays out a number of tensions, including exoticism and orientalism, currently being articulated by postcolonial theorists. …