The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a narration of the events that make up the backdrop of Odysseus’s adventurous journey to Troy and back. The narration is multilayered, owing to the several narrators in the novel, namely, Penelope, the maids as chorus, and Atwood, the novelist. The purpose of this paper is to explore the themes of memory and nostalgia from the vantage point of these multiple layers of narrative in The Penelopiad.
The story of Penelope, the quintessential figure of wifely fidelity and wit, echoes from the other side of the river Styx, where she is liberated from all the restrictions of her previous existence as a woman, daughter, wife, and mortal. Her story presents to us a different picture of the past, not one that she longs for, but one that she wishes to restore by telling her own version of it. She remembers her victimization by the patriarchal system, first by her father and then by her husband. Her memory of the past, a narrative of counter nostalgia, thus challenges and demystifies the patriarchal collective memory as it is preserved in myths and heroes.
Her voice is not, however, the only one the reader hears in the novel. Atwood’s introduction calls attention to the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus on his return to his Ithaca home for their promiscuity with the suitors. As Penelope’s story unfolds, presenting a completely different and innocent picture of the maids, as a chorus they also tell their stories, which culminate in a rereading of The Odyssey as an epic of the eradication of matriarchy and reinstating of patriarchy. Theirs is thus a story of nostalgia for what is lost and suppressed along with their undeserved deaths.
Finally, Atwood’s narrative techniques highlight another level of memory. By employing a chorus that mocks and/or doubles the voice of the narrator, Atwood carries an ancient literary tradition to the present. In addition, the chorus lines include a variety of literary conventions ranging from rope jumping rhymes to popular tunes, from idylls to sea shanties, from ballads to drama, from court records to love songs. Such literary variety, a mark of postmodern literature, points towards a nostalgia for a fusion of the old and new, testifying to a yearning for a pre-historic wholeness human beings are supposed to have lived in once.
All of these narrators deal with two different versions of the past: For the patriarchal heroic past they feel nothing but scorn whereas for an earlier yet erased past, a lost pre-patriarchal unity, they feel a strong nostalgia.

The mythological stories are timeless and universal across cultures. They are passed from one generation to another by retelling them in either rationalising or contemporising them. Mythopoeia has become a modern narrative technique in Literature that creates or rewrites the myth. Some of the finest writers of the world like Margaret Atwood, Chinua Achebe, Chitra Banerjee, Girish Karnad, Shashi Deshpande, Amish Tripati retold the myths, recreated new feminine myths and disrupted the hierarchy of patriarchal narratives. The revisionist mythmaking of Chitra Divakaruni’s The Palace of Illusions, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, and Amit Tripati’s Sita explore the patriarchal universe and the binaries in the society. This paper endeavours to probe into the mythopoeia through which the silenced female characters of the world’s greatest epics speak through. It also analyses the heroic identity attributed to Draupadi, Penelope and Sita by the writers.

Margaret Atwood, the esteemed Canadian author whose most famous work is probably her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale, published a similar work-this time a novella-titled The Penelopiad. Both texts deal with the ways women are exploited and abused by men. The Penelopiad, as its title suggests, revises the plot of Homer's Odyssey to emphasize not the role of Odysseus, the epic hero, but the role of Penelope, his long-suffering wife. While Odysseus is away from home-first for ten years fighting in the war at Troy, and then for another ten years trying to make his way back to Ithaca-Penelope must supervise the kingdom and raise their infant son, Telemachus, as he grows into manhood. During the later years of her attempt to rule, she must fend off the attentions of numerous young "suitors." These men pester her relentlessly, consuming her food and living in or near her palace as they try to convince her that Odysseus is dead and that she should choose one of them to replace him. Eventually Odysseus does make it home and, with the help of the now-grown Telemachus, he slaughters all the suitors and resumes his roles as the rightful king of Ithaca and the rightful husband of Penelope. Practically everyone in The Penelopiad faces crises of various sorts-personal, political, social, and sexual, not only during their lives but even after their deaths.

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to weave a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.

RESUMEN
La novela de Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005), celebra en apariencia la agencia de Penélope frente al mítico personaje femenino de la versión de Homero. Sin embargo, las doce doncellas asesinadas se convierten en las verdaderas protagonistas del libro al sugerirse la posibilidad de lo que Janice Raymond denomina gyn/affection: un vínculo entre mujeres basado en la lógica de la emoción que, en la revisión de Atwood, conecta con la abyección de Kristeva, lo siniestro y lo fantástico, y sirve como efecto catártico no sólo para las doncellas sino también para el lector. Este ensayo pretende cuestionar el empoderamiento de la Penélope de Atwood y celebrar, de este modo, el papel de las doncellas como receptáculo emocional. En ellas los aspectos marginales de género y clase se funden para tejer un poderoso tapiz metafórico de géneros literarios populares, tradicionalmente etiquetados como femeninos que, al sumergirse dentro del orden semiótico, solidifican una ecléctica pero compacta tradición alternativa de escritura de mujeres y creación de mitos.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad was first published in 2005 as part of the Cannongate Myth Series which commissioned authors to retell a myth in ‘a contemporary and memorable way.’ In an introduction to the project, myths are defined as ‘universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.’ In the fractured, multiple narratives of The Penelopiad, Atwood collapses, what she perceives to be the culturally constructed gendered tension between written and oral texts. Here, Penelope and her twelve hanged maids are constructed as female authors who, in their alternate myths, present wildly different accounts of female lived experience in ancient Greece. These, in turn, are allowed to play out with the canonical version of patriarchal myth represented in the source text of The Odyssey. Atwood’s construction of female authorship enacts a transformation and manipulation of The Odyssey that contests the myth of The Penelopiad’s commission and the gendered hierarchy of the cultural text itself. Myths are presented as narratives that are especially open to manipulation and the imposition of new and often ideologically motivated meanings and values that are not ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ but contingent on the new socio-historical context into which they are transposed.

In contrast, Ursula le Guin’s Lavinia, does not deconstruct the gendered tensions she perceives as present in her source text from the outset, rather she utilises this perceived tension to produce an over-reading of The Aeneid. Here, Lavinia is constructed as a frustrated female author who feels trapped by the limitations of her representation in a patriarchally dominant text. Through the use of temporally fractured narratives and slippages of focalization, Le Guin transforms Lavinia into a female storytelling figure that is an equal to her male creator and is shown to surpass, contest and transgress the confines of her patriarchal construction as a silent caricature of femininity. Le Guin utilizes the myth of Lavinia to represent the canonical text, and its interpretation, as a product of chance survivals and accidents of history. In doing so she suggests that it is the value that we place on the process of canonisation itself that should be questioned.

In this paper I will compare these two techniques of narrative fracture and their function in the transformation of classical myth. I will argue that both authors use techniques of narrative fracture to contest the ‘universal’ cultural values placed on canonical texts in an attempt to bring the representation of female characters to equal status with their male counterparts within the texts in question.

In this paper we present a process model for the construction of educational games, which is driven by the exercises proposed by the instructors. This model promotes a tight collaboration between instructors and game developers during game construction. It also incorporates formative evaluation accomplished by instructors and students. In order to illustrate the process, we use an experience concerning game-based learning in a Compiler Construction Course.

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad was first published in 2005 as part of the Cannongate Myth Series which commissioned authors to retell a myth in ‘a contemporary and memorable way.’ In an introduction to the project, myths are defined as ‘universal and timeless stories that reflect and shape our lives – they explore our desires, our fears, our longings, and provide narratives that remind us what it means to be human.’

In the fractured, multiple narratives of The Penelopiad, Atwood employs the techniques of genre change and slippage to enact a transformation and manipulation of The Odyssey in order to contest the myth of her novel’s commission. Myths are presented as narratives that are especially open to manipulation and the imposition of new and often ideologically motivated meanings and values that are not ‘timeless’ and ‘universal’ but contingent on the new socio-historical context into which they are transposed. In doing so Atwood questions the constructed ‘universality’ of canonical texts.

In contrast, Ursula le Guin’s Lavinia presents an over-reading of The Aeneid that employs a temporally fractured narrative and slippages of focalization to transform the Lavinia myth. Le Guin utilizes this myth to represent the canonical text as a product of chance survivals and accidents of history. In doing so she suggests that it is the value that we place on the process of canonisation itself that should be questioned.

In this paper I will compare these two techniques of narrative fracture and their function in the transformation of classical myth. I will argue that both authors use techniques of narrative fracture to contest the ‘universal’ cultural values placed on canonical texts in an attempt to ‘salt the bones’ or prevent the gendered cycle of ‘burial and return’ of repressed elements of the cultural text by bringing the myths associated with female characters to equal status with their male counterparts within the texts in question.