The Creative Word in Atwood’s The Robber Bride: Towards New Female Identities

Abstract

Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is a very complex novel, questioning the stereotypes concerning female identity and the patriarchal definition of the feminine Self. Through the diverse acts of re-naming themselves, the three female characters of the novel challenge the ‘scientistic terms’, as Panikkar puts it, of the male worldview. The stable categories of the patriarchal language are not adequate to represent the multiplicity of the identity and spiritual world of women. Atwood’s creative word is able to open the intimate world of these women in order to envisage fluid boundaries between the genders and delineate new possibilities for male/female relationships for future generations.

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