Redeeming the Maids and Penelope’s Guilt in Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad

Rebecca F. Kennedy (George Washington University)

The Penelopiad is the second book in a new series of retellings of Classical myths and takes a crack at one of the most well-known of them all—Homer’s Odyssey. It is written as a sort of defense by Penelope (now in Hades) of her own actions during Odysseus’ absence especially as concerns the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus upon his return home. The tale is told from two perspectives; that of Penelope and that of the maids and aims at answering the question as to why Odysseus hung them. Were they deserving? An attempt to redeem an otherwise negatively portrayed female character from myth telling the story from her side is not unusual. What is unusual is the choice of the story of Penelope who, for all intents and purposes, needs no redeeming. But the hanged maids do for Atwood and their redemption may be Penelope’s condemnation so that Atwood’s tale becomes a direct challenge to Penelope’s paradigmatic status as ideal wife and woman.

In this paper, I examine Atwood’s representation of the hanged maids (and Penelope), her mode of representing them (they appear as a tragic chorus) and specific passages where Atwood seems to make a defense of their actions while Odysseus is away. I say ‘seems’ because what Penelope tells us and what the maids themselves sing don’t align and we are left wondering what happened after all. Were the maids hanged because of Penelope’s innocent mistake (as she herself tells it)? Or, because Erykleia wished to exact revenge? Or, because they knew too much? In the end, I argue, it is the last of these. Atwood’s Penelope is not the chaste, long-suffering paradigm of wifeliness we have all come to know. Rather, she was as scarlet as Helen or Clytemnestra. This inevitably subtly raises the question of her status as paradigm and what it means to be a proper wife. In some ways, it also undermines the category of “wife” itself and calls into question a long tradition of dividing women into categories based on their sexual activities—into either wives or whores. The condemnation of the maids functions to silence speech that may undermine this division. Because of Penelope’s status within the Classical tradition and because of the privileging of the Classical tradition in Western thought, Atwood’s tale also calls into questions many of the assumptions about women that have dominated scholarly discussion and popular representations alike based on Classical models.