ABSTRACT
The fairytale tower looms large in Atwood’s fictional oeuvre. Early references to imprisonment in Rapunzel’s tower appear in Survival (209-10) and, just a few years later, Lady Oracle engages very explicitly with the Rapunzel motif and, more subtly, with Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”. The tower represents a problematic symbol of the imprisonment of the woman writer by a male-centred literary tradition and this motif of imprisonment and escape finds a powerful new expression in Atwood’s later novels. This chapter will focus on how, in Atwood’s later writing, the tower is reconstructed for a new and different purpose and, as is often the case in Atwood’s work, the relationship between prisoner, prison guard, and rescuer is not as stable as it might seem. Zenia in The Robber Bride is a conduit for all of the Bildungsromane that women might write about their own lives, and she also proves adept at filling in the gaps of other characters’ life stories. Her wilfully misleading and deceptive narrative strategies refute any last vestige of faith in the teleology prized by earlier versions of the Bildungsroman. In the shadow of her malevolent power, Rapunzel’s tower is turned into a retreat, a fortress against Zenia’s manipulation, where a defence against Zenia is executed with military strategy.
