Once, she is a Romanian Gypsy, next, an illegitimate child of a White Russian woman, or a Jewish child miraculously saved from the Nazis. There is no record of her ever being born, she changes the story of her life and even her appearance as it suits her immediate interests. She appears and disappears as she wishes, including making herself dead and resurrecting, and nobody knows her motives, her story. She carries a number of the traditional attributes of a witch, an evil stepmother, an evil godmother, or an evil stepsister, with a modern varnish of dark sexual desirability. (30) This message is certainly the driving force in The Robber Bride (1994): at the level of the novel, there would be no story without Zenia at the level of the characters, the lives of Tony, Charis and Roz, the three central female characters would be ordinary-pointless from the story-telling perspective-without Zenia.1 In her, the general theme of the mobilising function of the evil female character acquires a concrete shape. I'm the plot, babe, and don't ever forget it. The stepmother claims: 'I stir things up, I get things moving' (29), and what is possibly the evil female characters' collective voice concludes: You can wipe your feet on me, twist my motives around all you like, you can dump millstones on my head and drown me in the river, but you can't get me out of the story. Atwood addressed the mobilising role of bad fairy-tale females already in the playful short fiction 'Unpopular Gals' (Good Bones, 1993), in which the stepsister, the witch and the stepmother (for once) get their turns to speak.
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