Identity In The Robber Bride And Alias Grace

In the process of subverting the old concept of identity the patriarchal society strongly advocate and then force to embed into people’s mind for the consolidation of governance, which as a result, gradually stereotypes the images of men and women, the concept of self and other, and by extension, the dominator and the dominated, Atwood in her novels has come up with a new perspective to treat identity in such a rapidly changing times—a hybrid notion of identity. As Haj Yazdiha has noted in his essay, hybridity, especially with the globalization, has unavoidably showed its appearance in every aspect of our life, ranging from food to music, “from existential to material,” from “political to economic” (31). Criticizing the essentialized identity

I thus in this part, would like to contend that in the course of searching for their hybrid identities, the female protagonists in the two novels have experienced three stages of psychological transformation—denying the split self, potential desiring for and thus being haunted by this split self, and acknowledging the split self which finally leads to a harmonious and hybrid state of identity within each of the female protagonists. All three female protagonists in The Robber Bride, Tony, Charis, and Roz, have suffered an identity crisis of themselves within which their seemingly stable and unitary identities are split into two opposite selves, the negative and dark side of one’s inner self and the obedient outer self which perfectly complies to what the whole society as well as they themselves demand and expect to be. This inner self is firstly denied by the three characters, then haunts the three women by being “project[ed] onto Zenia” (Tolan 466), and finally hybridizes with the outer