Margaret Atwoods The Penelopiad - Essay Example

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a revision of Homer’s Odyssey narrated through the voice of Penelope. This work can be considered not only as a revision, but as a certain reply to The Odyssey. Atwood uses her version of The Odyssey to demonstrate the double-standard that existed between men and women. She interprets the male-oriented myths created by men and undermines the obligation of a gender hierarchy. Introduction Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is her own revision of Homer’s Odyssey narrated through the voice of Penelope. In modern literature “revision” means a literary work in which canonical texts are used and reimagined by a writer. Thus, a classic work of literature underlies a new work and is integral to the interpretation of this work. In this play Homeric poetry and the epic cycle are used to create a new and different piece with recognizable material. The revision therefore appears here as …not so much a simple rewriting, but a ‘writing back’… looking again and finding what one sees as inadequate. It carries in its wake a host of attendant verbs, all with undertones of rejection: rewrite, rework, and retell (Graziosi & Greenwood 11). The events are described by Penelope, speaking from beyond the grave as she conveys her life story in the form of a confession. Penelope’s is not the only narration in the play. Her story is recurrently interrupted by the voices of her twelve executed maids, nameless slave women who said nothing in Homer’s The Odyssey, and whose execution is an insignificant element in the epic tale of Odysseus’s homecoming. The play can consequently be seen not only as a revision, but as a certain reply to The Odyssey, involving a character who, as all women in Ancient Greece, was normally banned from any important events. Atwood calls this a “re-vision”, i.e. seeing something again (Atwood 174). The Plot The opening scene takes place in Hades, the land of the dead, the ancient Greek underworld. In this dark area beneath the earth, Penelope and her maids exist as spirits several thousand years after their deaths. The play also takes the reader to Sparta, where Penelope’s parents look for an appropriate husband for her, to Odysseus’ home in Ithaca after their wedding, to Odysseus’ ship during his long journey home from Troy, and after all, to a contemporary court of justice, where Odysseus is tried for slaughtering the suitors and Penelope’s maids. Set in modern day Hades, the play tells Homer’s well-known epic from the perspective of Penelope as she expresses her daily thoughts and life in the afterworld, and gives a retrospective account of her former life in ancient Greece and her long wait for the homecoming of Odysseus at their palace in Ithaca during his twenty year epic journey and adventure. Atwood describes Penelope’s difficult childhood, as the daughter of a egotistic father, Icarus of Sparta, and a careless Naiad mother. The writer is shows how it left a deleterious mark upon Penelope, and influenced later challenges, for example, alone raising her son, Telemachus, governing Ithaca, and dealing with the huge number of aggressive suitors who occupy her palace in Odysseus’ absence. While Penelope does her best to preserve the resources and honor of her domain her maids, whom she considers as sisters, represent the greatest source of support and stability. Later in the play they become the chorus of her story, while her cousin Helen of Troy symbolizes the greatest source of interference in Penelope’s past and present life. Odysseus’ execution of both Penelope’s lazy suitors and her supposedly disloyal maids upon his homecoming at the end of the story is portrayed by Penelope as an event of treachery and bloodshed. The Penelopiad highlights several topics. Most important are gender and class issues which go unchallenged in The Odyssey: the physical and sexual exploitation of servant girls, male violence against women, and also, more shamefully, women’s betrayals of other women (Howells 13). The Style Penelope has a very free, straightforward, somewhat immature, irregular style of expressing herself, which is softened by irony and self-irony. Penelope is shown with openness and irony, as a simple, humble woman, but the author clearly hints at her active intellect and self-awareness. Atwood wants the readers to empathize with her. She does so by sharing with the reader some confidential facts, for example, Odysseus’s habit of telling stories in bed, the specificity of dinners in her new home. She offers some ironic moments, for example, different adaptations of the tales told in The Odyssey. This includes Penelope hiding her face in front of her father not from humility, but as not to burst out laughing his pretense, and the “true” version of Odysseus’s journeys, such as not coming upon Sirens, but Sicilian courtesans. By these means Atwood creates a very intimate vision, which brings the audience very close to Penelope and makes it empathize with her. Feminism Though Atwood accepts the male-controlled and male-centric atmosphere of The Odyssey, Atwood she excellently explores the feminine aspect of the Palace of Ithaka, as well as of Hades where Penelope, Helen-of-Troy, and the slaughtered maids now all dwell. Atwood sophisticatedly uses her version of The Odyssey to demonstrate the double-standard that existed between men and women. It concerns not only the oral tradition of Homer’s tale, but whole ancient classical world. As it was stated above, Penelope offers the reader her own version of truth. Atwood analyzes two distinctive myths: the Homeric myth of “faithful Penelope” and traditional myths about women as obedient and domestic beings. The author focuses on the contradictions created by these gender stereotypes as utilizes the “gaps” in Homer’s description. Penelope enthusiastically parodies male myths of heroism and mentions disrespectfully the gods “diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat” (Atwood 135). Her revolutionary description represents Atwood’s revision of The Odyssey, and through the ironic manner mythic experience is removed from the supernatural. Odysseus’s quests with monsters and temptresses are downgraded through popular rumor and gossip to the level of anecdotes. One of the examples is the episode with Circe: Odysseus was the guest of a goddess on an enchanted isle, said some; she’d turned his men into pigs—not a hard job in my view—but had turned them back into men because she’d fallen in love with him and was feeding him unheard-of delicacies prepared by her own immortal hands, and the two of them made love deliriously every night; no, said others, it was just an expensive whorehouse, and he was sponging off the Madam (Atwood 83). Atwood pays considerable attention to the aspects of cultural life and belief in ancient Greece as illustrated in The Odyssey, while acknowledging the gap between that world and the contemporary epoch. It is both a commemoration and a subversion of myth in an amazing revisioning process, as Atwood entangles mythic patterns in a distinguishable network of present-day human relations. Conclusion Homer’s The Odyssey is one of the most extensively analyzed works of Western literature. It has been the focus of study of many researchers in various disciplines. Particularly during the mid-twentieth century and subsequently, it has offered an object of investigation for feminist scholars and progressive women writers. Homer’s imposition of male dominance and his account of women in a secondary role has been the target of feminist writers since the mid-twentieth century. The Odyssey has already been condemned for being a male-oriented narrative, and its text has already been rewritten by some women writers. Atwood as well decided to write against this male-oriented tale but also within it, finding it both constraining and empowering. She changed the epic’s male-oriented discourse by changing the dominant male voice into the marginalized female voice, claiming its right on communication. Thus, Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a revision of a classical work, which displaces the male voice and offers a female perspective, re-creating the tale from Penelope’s point of view. All through the novel the writer questions one of the most fundamental features of human beings: their story-telling. She interprets the male-oriented myths created by men and undermines the obligation of a gender hierarchy – something that is perceptible in Homer, who established a cultural separation of the masculine and the feminine. References Atwood, M, The Penelopiade. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005 Atwood, M. “A Conversation with Margaret Atwood” in B. Mendez-Egle and J.M. Haule (eds.), Margaret Atwood: Reflection and Reality. Edinburg, Texas: Pan American University Print Shop, 1987 Graziosi, B., Greenwood, E. Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 Howells, C.A. “Five Ways of Looking at ‘The Penelopiad’. Sydney Studies in English, Vol.32(2006), p. 5-18(14) Read More