Zenia’s function as the freudian Id in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride

Abstract

Published in 1993, Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride and its divisive main antagonist, Zenia, continue to inspire lively critical discussion. Despite Atwood’s reservations about interpretations rooted in gender binaries, the existing research has primarily focused on Zenia’s status as a woman while overlooking frameworks like Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, especially his theory of the id, the ego, and the super-ego. Because of this, the thesis aims to demonstrate how Zenia aligns with the Freudian id and examine what this reveals about her function in the novel. The introduction provides a background on the previous reception of The Robber Bride, a brief summary of the novel, and an overview of Atwood’s views on feminist readings of her works. The literature review outlines the three main approaches to analysing Zenia in the previous scholarship and discusses the central concepts of Freud’s psychoanalytic model of the mind. The first three subsections of the empirical study examine excerpts from the novel to provide proof of Zenia functioning as the Freudian id, followed by a comparison of the findings of the id approach to those of previous interpretations of Zenia in the fourth subsection. The conclusion summarises the findings of the thesis.

Keywords: Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride, Canadian literature, Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis