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For me, with music, it isn’t a question of whether I like it; it’s a question of how I like it.  I think that part of the reason I can think like that is because I sort of feel like entertainment isn’t the only function music can serve.  I think that a lot of times when people have a gut “I don’t like this” reaction to music, what they really mean is that they aren’t entertained by it.  So now, any time I listen to new music, I try really hard to get past that point of “This is entertaining / this isn’t entertaining” and figure out how I like it.  Because I’m pretty convinced I can like anything, given enough listenings.

Kind of the same with visual art.  Especially if you’re pretty much an ameteur and everything is a “study.” (<--me :) )  You're really lucky if your work is satisfying quickly.  I used to get scared, in a way, of sitting down to work when I had the urge -- I couldn't get past this "what if it's no good?" feeling.  Now I pretty much accept that it's going to be no good pretty quickly.  My solution has been to work through the no-goodness.  If it sucks, change it.  If it still sucks, change it again.  If it still sucks, change three or four things.  For me that's kind of what art is -- changing something over and over again until I find the sweet spot that stays my hand.  Until I have this epiphany -- "Oh -- that’s where I was going with this!”

Well.  Alright.  I very, very rarely know where I’m going.  But I can usually figure out when to stop.

The idea of stereotypical gender reversal in TRB, as suggested by the title, gets even more interesting when viewed in tandem with the war theme. For thousands of years, war has by and large been the domain of men. Women for the most part have been thought of as weak and fragile and thus unsuitable for war, or else served as part of the loot, part of the spoils of war.

In TRB, things are very different. Tony, Roz, and Charis are waging a war with Zenia. They, the women, are the warriors, the warees, and their men are the loot that Zenia is after. She does not want them because she loves them or cares about them; she wants them only to prove to herself (and possibly their women) that she can get them if she wants, when she wants, for as long as she wants.

The three women, too, view their lovers as fragile, in danger.  They, the women, must be the strong ones, fight Zenia, fight the war, and keep from the men the knowledge that in their opinion is too much for the poor fragile things to handle.  This is especially true in Tony’s case, since of the three she is the only one who did not lose her lover to Zenia permanently.

*to be continued*

In The Robber Bride: What do we *really* know about Zenia?, I made three lists: what know about Zenia for absolute fact, what we think we know or are invited to believe based on secondary accounts, and what we know we don’t know about her. In the “what we think we know” list, I suggested that Zenia’s apparent need to continually woo and “rob” other women’s lovers may be meant to show us that Zenia does not feel in control of her world–that she does what she does in order to prove to herself that she can exert control, over men, no less. Over men who are supposedly inaccessible, at that!

*to be continued*

War comes up a lot in TRB. The first character we meet, Tony, has always been fascinated by them and studies them for a living. The three main characters are World War II babies, and their childhoods were shaped in part by fathers who were involved in the war. The story itself takes place at the beginning of the first Gulf War.

These are the literal wars involved. Could it be that these literal wars are intended to draw our attention to other, more figurative wars going on in the story?

Many of the reviews I’ve read of the book talk about its focus on the “War of the Sexes,” which is interesting to me, because I didn’t get that when I read it. When I think of the war of the sexes, I think about men and women at odds with one another, of conflicts both overt and allusive between the two genders, and although certainly there is an element of that in TRB, it doesn’t seem to me to be the main focus. It’s more background noise. What I see in the forefront is a woman who appears to be working both sides of the game, and three others crying foul.

(more…)

Some background literature relevant to The Robber Bride:

The Robber Bride gets its name from a Grimm Fairy Tale called “The Robber Bridegroom.” In it, a young maiden is engaged to a seemingly perfect suitor, who, it turns out, makes a habit of marrying young women and then taking them back to his den where he kills them, chops them up, and eats them. In The Robber Bride, Roz’s five-year-old twin daughters go through a phase in which they insist that all the characters in the stories that are read to them must be female. When Tony reads them “The Robber Bridegroom,” the girls insist that the villain be The Robber Bride instead. Try reading the story yourself, reversing the genders in your head.

Atwood also wrote a poem called “The Loneliness of the Military Historian.” (In The Robber Bride, Tony is a military historian; as a petite woman of unassuming appearance, many of her colleagues see this as an inappropriate field of study for her.) She said in an interview about the book that she had wanted to write a female military historian for a long time.

Lastly, read the poem “She,” by Rabindranath Tagore, and tell me it isn’t about Zenia and her lovers.

The main difficulty with Zenia is that we only learn about her from the viewpoints of Roz, Charis, and Tony. And given what Zenia has done to all three women, none of their accounts can really be considered objective or reliable.

This is important because, by the time we get to the end of the book, almost everything we think we know about Zenia has been implied–Atwood gives us very little concrete information about her. Certainly, we know that Zenia lies. She tells a different story about her childhood and upbringing to each of the three women, carefully designed in each case to elicit that particular woman’s sympathies. She shows up in Charis’s yoga class with a black eye that she claimed to have gotten while living with (Tony’s husband) West; later Charis learns that at that time West had not seen Zenia in a year and a half.

In fact, the fact that she lies is nearly the only concrete thing that we know about Zenia. Well; there may be a few other things we know:

* She lies. To everyone.

* She exploits people to get what she needs / wants, both implicitly through carefully crafted deception and explicitly through what is essentially blackmail.

* She seems to need a lot of money and engages in deceptive and otherwise morally questionable behavior.

* At some point after college, she had breast implants and a nose job.

* At the end of the book, she ends up dead in the hotel fountain (presumably having fallen to her death from her balcony).

What else do we have to go on? Only what she says–which can never be taken at face value–and what we are invited to imply from the accounts of the three women upon whom she has inflicted serious emotional damage.

For the record, I think it’s important to note the judgments that Atwood seems to want us to make about Zenia’s character. We are supposed to see her as

* sexually experienced, aggressive, powerful, and promiscuous. In short: a slut.

* having an inferiority complex. Hence continually feeling the need to make up tragic stories about herself and her life in order to impress (and gain sympathy from) others, and to target and “steal” the lovers of women she knew in college.

* feeling out of control.  Hence the need to attract and control men, especially men that are “off limits”–almost as if she needs a challenge to prove to herself that she is in control.  Of whoever she wants.
* hedonistic and impulsive. Hence the sudden appearances and disappearances, and intricate (and not-so-intricate) plots to exhort money from others.

* antisocial in the sense that she shows little or no concern for the well-being or happiness of other people.

Some of these might be true (whatever “truth” about a character in a work of fiction means). Some may be red herrings. My point is, it’s all speculation and implication.

What we don’t know about Zenia could fill the LA phone book. Some particularly interesting things about her that we don’t know include

* her last name (for crying out loud).

* her nationality and heritage.

* pretty much anything about her childhood and upbringing.

* what she was really doing during the time she didn’t spend seducing West, Billy, or Mitch.

* why she targeted West, Billy, and Mitch in the first place.

* why she faked her death.

* how she ended up actually dead at the end of the book.

Questions, questions…

Here’s a brief setup of the “The Robber Bride.”

Three women (Tony, Charis, and Roz) have become bound to one another by the deception and betrayal they have all suffered at different points in their lives at the hands of a fourth woman, Zenia, whose funeral they attended together five years ago. All four went to college together in the sixties in Toronto, Canada, where Tony, Charis, and Roz still live.

The story begins roughly thirty years later. First, we learn a little about the current lives and interests of each of the three women (Tony, Charis, and Roz). We learn that Charis and Roz have lost men because of Zenia, though it’s not clear how, and that Tony nearly lost her husband West in the same way. One day, while the three are having lunch together, Zenia walks into the same restaurant, alive and well. All three panic.

We then get backstory of each of the three women in turn, including how and when she knew Zenia, how she lost her husband (live-in boyfriend in Charis’s case) to Zenia, and the story of her childhood, adolescence, family, and courtship of said husband / boyfriend.

In all three tales, Zenia is revealed to be devious, deceptive, and manipulative. She lies, quite skillfully, to gain the friendship, trust and admiration of each of the three, making up stories that she knows will resonate with and elicit sympathy from whoever she happens to be conning at the time. She cheats, steals, and blackmails to get what she wants, from whoever she wants.

Zenia is also beautiful. Not just pretty; exotically, exquisitely, enchantingly beautiful. Men are attracted to her as a matter of course, and when she finds one that she wants and sets her sights on him, sooner or later he becomes absolutely and irreparably enthralled with her, taken in by her lies and manipulation, throwing away everything for his love for her.

And sooner or later, Zenia never fails to throw him away. She is The Robber Bride; she uses her wits and feminine wiles to snatch men away from the women they love, turns them inside out, sucks them dry, and tosses aside the empty husks when she’s finished with them. At least, that is how we are invited to view the situation…

I have to admit that I’m a little ambivalent about Margaret Atwood’s work. When I try to explain to people how I think that you can think a work of art is “good” or “skillful” or whatever without liking it (and conversely, that you can like something while knowing fully that it’s crap), Atwood is the example I think of. I don’t particularly like her writing–it isn’t fun and it doesn’t entertain me. In fact, a lot of it depresses me and deals with stuff I’d rather not think about. But it’s good, strong, compelling writing, and for that reason I enjoy reading her and sometimes can’t tear myself away.

There are several common threads I see in the five books of hers that I’ve read (Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, Surfacing, The Blind Assassin, & The Robber Bride). Firstly, all five books deal explicitly with the lives and worlds of women (and girls), specifically as such, in a way that goes beyond the mere fact that the main characters are female. All the stories highlight the patterns of interaction that occur between women & girls in social situations, particularly the scaley underbelly of which (in my purely annecdotal opinion) men for the most part remain blissfully ignorant. I think there’s some serious social commentary going on here but I’m going to save that for later.

Secondly, they all deal to a greater or lesser extent with patterns of interaction between women and men, from the points of view of the women in the stories. A lot of emphasis is placed on the implicit power dynamics that underly various kinds of male-femal relationships (father-daughter, husband- wife, boyfriend-girlfriend, uncle-niece, adulterer-mistress, teacher-student…the list goes on) and how that effects behavior, sometimes in surprising way.

Thirdly, they focus on personal history and how the things people experience earlier in life (particularly during childhood) impact their later (particularly adult) lives. All five books employ some form of flashback-writing, and most (not really true of Surfacing) alternate back and forth between the Present and the Past. She does a lot of playing with what we as readers know about the characters and their histories– she tends to give us glimpses of important past events early-on, just enough to let us known that there’s something there to wonder about. In that sense, her stories tend to unfold into the past as well as the future–the real story often seems to be how the characters’ pasts influenced their futures.

So after “The Secret History,” I embarked on another overly-serious drama/social commentary-heavy piece of fiction by Margaret Atwood. I’ve now read five of her books: Cat’s Eye (1989), The Handmaid’s Tail (1986), Surfacing (1973), The Blind Assassin (2000), & most recently, The Robber Bride (1993). I want to dissect The Robber Bride a little, but for several reasons I’m hesitant to do it.

First, Atwood is a heavy-weight. She is well-recognized as a gifted and insightful poet and novelist, and plenty of people who know a lot more about writing and literature than I do have had a lot to say about her work. Second, Atwood has written I think twenty-three books now, of which I’ve only read five, many (all?) of which are steeped in social commentary. When you’re dealing with someone who is clearly such a masterful writer and known for the richness and complexity of her work, and the work is built around (or at least relies heavily on) social issues which are in and of themselves incredibly complex and politicized, it’s hard to say with any conviction that you really know what’s going in any one piece without having looked at more than 5/23rds of her work and maybe thought more about issues themselves.

But I think I’m going to take a shot at it anyway. To be fair, I’m going to try to do at least a little research into Atwood herself and her career at large to see if it will help me understand her work better, and also to read some commentary on The Robber Bride and some of her other work.

So that’s kind of an introduction–next up, what I know already, and what I can glean quickly through a Google search.

This is a follow-up to a January post, which you can find here.

In January I posted some thoughts on menstrual suppression — basically women using oral contraceptives to suppress their periods. The idea is that if you skip the placebo week in the pack and go straight to the active pills in a new pack, you don’t get a period. Barr Pharmaceuticals basically made “official” what many women have been doing on their own for years.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am not a pharmacist. I am not a researcher. No one should make a decision about what chemicals s/he does or does not put in his/her body based on anything written here. I do talk to such people, however; what I’m doing here is recording what I’ve learned from them.