Penelope Speaks: Two Feminist Novels

Betty Rose Nagle (Indiana University, Bloomington)

Homer’s heroine tells her own story in two recent novels—The Penelopeia (2003) by Jane Rawlings and Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005)  Although both could be characterized as feminist, their approaches are radically different. 

Rawlings’ novel is modeled on Homer in both form and content, as a twenty-four “book” verse novel written in the style of Lattimore’s translations.  Despite the Homeric form, characters are added, most notably twin daughters born after Odysseus’ departure from Ithaca and raised in the countryside, but also a slave woman who turns out to be an Ethiopian princess and Eurybates’ sister.  The feminism is tendentious; Penelope is an overly explicit mouthpiece for contemporary ideas of empowerment and self-realization.  Some of the plot elements are predictably familiar—one episode features a women’s cult at  pre-Apollinine Delphi and another involves Amazons.  Mother-goddess worship and  Amazons are commonplaces of feminist popular culture (for the latter, see Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Firebrand [1987]; for the former, see Barry Unsworth’s The Songs of the Kings [2002]).  The difference in titles is telling—Atwood’s suggests an epic with Penelope as the hero, while Rawlings’ recalls the “Telemachia.”  Although Rawlings’ Penelope experiences a journey away from and return to Ithaca, it is comparable not to her husband’s odyssey but to her son’s rite of passage.  In fact she travels the same route as her son, visiting Nestor at Pylos and Helen (but not Menelaus!) at Sparta.  Rawlings’ decision to hew so closely to her model makes the departures all the more incongruous and unbelievable.  It strains credulity that Odysseus would concur with his wife’s description of the twin daughters as wonderful “treasures” (given that Rawlings’ Ithaca is not matrilocal).  Or, that he would permit his wife to make a sea voyage with those daughters and minimal chaperonage.  A nice touch of psychological realism is the difficulty Odysseus encounters in being reintegrated  with his family, reflecting as it does the real problems actual war veterans experience.  Rawlings’ novel is clever in many ways—including her formulaic verse—but mostly ones best appreciated by someone very familiar with the Odyssey.

Atwood’s Penelope, however, may speak a modern idiom, but her mentality ultimately remains the product of her own culture.  She tells her whole life story as a correction of the “official version.”  Her voice is colloquial—there are chapters titled “Helen Ruins My Life,” and “The Suitors Stuff Their Faces”—and appropriately deadpan, given that the narrator is a shade in the Underworld.  Atwood doesn’t change the details, but her telling the story from Penelope’s point of view changes our understanding of it.  This Penelope is wracked with guilt over the hanging of the twelve maids—her dream of the twelve geese killed by an eagle turns out to refer to them.  Their behavior with the suitors was in reality Penelope’s scheme for using them as informers; unfortunately, she never let Eurycleia in on the plan, and didn’t get to tell her husband about it in time.  So she claims.  But Atwood’s novel is polyphonic, and the maids get their say as well.  They serve as a Greek chorus, and like a Greek chorus their intermittent commentary takes the form of songs.  In their version of events, like some ancient ones, Penelope did sleep with the suitors; the maids died because they were privy to her infidelity.  Even in her own version, Penelope may protest too much.  One whole chapter is devoted to her refutation of “Slanderous Gossip,” but immediately following comes the Chorus “The Perils of Penelope, a Drama,” a bedroom farce in which Amphinomus sneaks down the back stairs just as Odysseus returns home.  Although Penelope feels guilty about the maids’ death, she never comprehends the full extent of her exploitation of them.  These were girls she had raised from infancy, but only the “pretty” ones and only after selling their slave parents away as part of managing the estate.  She continued to use the girls as moles even after several were brutally raped.  The Chorus does not comment about evenings spent helping their mistress undo the shroud, but they most likely did not experience it as a cosy bonding experience she remembers.  Penelope’s mentality is clear enough from her own narrative, but the maids’ Chorus supplies more of the grittier details of growing up female and a slave. Ironically, Penelope’s self-defense confirms her guilt in ways she can not imagine.  Scholars don’t get off the hook either—the single prose Chorus is “An Anthropology Lecture,” Cambridge School style.  It concludes with remarks addressed to “dear educated minds”: “You don’t have to think of us as real girls, real flesh and blood, real pain, real injustice.  That might be too upsetting.  Just discard the sordid bits.  Consider us as pure symbol.  We’re no more real than money.”