Critical Article #1 Lady killer - The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

"Come on, you're not a baby," Zenia tells Charis. "He loves your a--. Or some other body part, how would I know? Anyway, for sure it's not your soul, it's not you....Believe me, there's only one thing any man ever wants from a woman, and that's sex. How much you can get them to pay for it is the important thing."

The author of this article summerizes Atwood's novel, The Robber Bride, to be a Nietzschean fairy tale, (The definition of this is: German philosopher who reasoned that Christianity's emphasis on the afterlife makes its believers less able to cope with earthly life. He argued that the ideal human, the Übermensch, would be able to channel passions creatively instead of suppressing them. His written works include Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1892).) in which this story is a moral allgorism, in which it is a feminist fairytale, which portrays that men do not love women, but love only one thing: sex, as the above quote suggests.

The story introduces Zenia, the perfect, beautiful, Barbie-esque man stealer, or every womans' nightmare. She wishes to show that love does not truly exist. Then the three good girls: Tony, the war historian, Roz, the rich business woman, and Charis, the airhead. Each of these women are happy with their men until Zenia comes along.

Zenia comes along to prove that love does not exist between men and women, only the sexual desire. Basically, Zenia represents the truths most women don't want to face; when a man has tired of you, he will move on, and that love is every man's fantasy. The only characters exempt from such pain are Boyce, who is the only nice man in the story, who turns out to be a homosexual, and Roz's son, Larry, who ends up being Boyce's lover, and her two twin daughters. To Atwood, it seems the only nice man is a gay man, since he is not in a relationship with a woman, and therefore can never hurt her. Only Tony manages to keep her man, but not how she imagined him, and the other two, Roz and Charis lose theirs to Zenia. The message to those two girls is: "You don't need men to be happy."