Penelope is a central character in Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey.” She is the wife of Odysseus and the queen of Ithaca. She’s known for her beauty, intelligence, and loyalty. She cleverly delays suitors by weaving a shroud for her father-in-law and keeps them at bay for 20 years. Penelope symbolizes patience, wifely virtue, and a symbol of feminine constancy in the face of adversity. Her story centres around her waiting for Odysseus to return, facing multiple suitors, and her strategic wit in avoiding marriage. Penelope’s character highlights her role as both a symbol of fidelity and a shrewd, resourceful woman.

In Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” Penelope’s character is reimagined and expanded upon. Atwood re-focalizes the story of Odysseus from Penelope’s perspective, she supplements the ancient sources by imagining Penelope’s girlhood in Sparta eclipsed by the beautiful Helen; the circumstances of her marriage; and above all those twenty-long years of devotion to an absent husband in a house besieged by hordes of suitors.

 Adrienne Rich defines re-visioning as “The act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction- is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”. In the novel Penelope, she is no longer a passive figure in the background of the narrative but a central character with her voice and agency. Atwood’s Penelope is aware of her complicity in the oppressive social structures of her time, and she questions her role in the traditional narrative. She revises the story, presenting herself as a more complex and self-aware figure who is not content to merely wait for her husband’s return. Right from the beginning, speaking from the vantage point of the afterlife, Penelope criticizes the ‘official version’ of her story as ‘a stick to beat other women with’.

 For the first time, the maids have a voice: Atwood presents their story as the chorus line of a Broadway musical. She insistently and compellingly presents their experience of fraternizing with the suitors as rape and their subsequent hanging as unjustifiable — and she indicates Penelope’s responsibility for their deaths. It is certainly significant that The Penelopiad ends not with Penelope but with the maids. They deliver to Odysseus a taunt, ironically labelled a love song, called ‘We’re Walking Behind You’.

In the introduction to the novel Atwood writes that  ‘I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids’ (xv) and she transfers that unease to Penelope, by having the maids not only roundly criticize Odysseus for hanging them but also explicitly hold Penelope responsible for not preventing their deaths.

Just like how Divakaruni presents Draupadi’s story from her perspective without altering the mythology, Atwood too, presents the story of Penelope and the 12 maids from their perspective without changing the myth. We are given a deeper insight into how they felt and what they thought. Before departing to Troy, Odysseus jokes about cutting Penelope into pieces if she slept with another man in his absence, while he was free to do anything he wishes. The main reason she stayed loyal was because she was afraid/frightened that the joke would become a reality. In this way, Atwood’s reimagining of Penelope’s story and giving voice to the 12 maids challenges the traditional narrative and aligns with Rich’s concept of re-vision.

Hélène Cixous’s concept of “écriture féminine” encourages the exploration of feminine writing that defies traditional patriarchal structures. In “The Penelopiad,” Atwood utilizes a chorus of maids who interject their perspectives and emotions into the narrative. The first chorus line begins with their story “we are the maids, the ones you killed, the ones you failed” and the last chorus ends with them haunting Odysseus and Penelope in the underworld…” we had no voice, we had no name…now we follow you, we find you now, we call to you…”. The chorus reflects Cixous’s concept, creating a feminist space within the text. It is through their collective storytelling that they reclaim their agency and power.

Intersectionality, as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, examines how multiple aspects of identity intersect to create unique forms of oppression. In “The Penelopiad,” Penelope’s experiences as a woman intersect with her experiences as a queen, a mother, and a wife.  Lines like “the difficulty is that I have no mouth through which I can speak….I have no listeners…I shouldn.t complain…consummation of a marriage was supposed to be a sanctioned rape..” etc highlight how these intersections shape Penelope’s experiences and her limited agency. The chorus in the novel also highlights the intersectionality of the maids’ identities as both women and servants, underscoring how their vulnerability and oppression multiply within the narrative.

Foucault’s concept of panopticism, a system of constant surveillance and discipline, can be applied to the patriarchal control over women in “The Penelopiad.” Penelope is under the watchful eye of the suitors and societal expectations, which restrict her freedom and expression. She lives in a society where her actions are observed, and her chastity is policed- for instance during the wedding night- a gatekeeper is posted to keep the bride(Penelope) from rushing out in horror and to also prevent her friends/maids from breaking the door and rescuing her if they heard a scream, even the slaves were not exempt from the surveillance and discipline- ” male slaves were not supposed to sleep with female ones, not without permission” further demonstrating the constraints of gendered power and surveillance.

Epistemic injustice, a concept introduced by Miranda Fricker, addresses the wrongs done to individuals when their testimony is not given the credibility and respect it deserves due to their social identity. This can be seen in the chorus line- the trial of Odysseus, as videotaped by the maids- where  Odysseus is tried for the murder of the maids and the way the charge by the maids is taken lightly and dismissed. The twenty-first-century judge refuses to sentence Odysseus on grounds of the case being some 2000 years out of date. But, the maids invoke the furies and demand for retribution and this underscores the need to rectify this injustice by recognizing the voices and stories of the oppressed groups.

Thus, Atwood constructs a narrative that challenges the male-centred narrative and empowers the silenced women in the story. The chorus, language, and form of the novel serve as vehicles for this subversion, enabling Penelope and her fellow women to reclaim their voices and agency. In doing so, Atwood demonstrates how literature can be a powerful tool for dismantling oppressive structures and rewriting history from a feminist perspective.

Bibliography:

Primary source:

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Toronto, Knopf Canada, 2005.

Secondary source:

  • Rich, A. (1972). When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision. College English, 34(1), 18-30.
  • Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books.
  • Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167.
  • Cixous, H. (1975). The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1(4), 875-893. “Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2012 Edition).” Web.archive.org, 2 Dec. 2013, web.archive.org/web/20131202051820/plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/feminism-epistemology/#standpoint. Accessed 30 Sept. 2023.

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