Intro:

Margaret Atwoods novella, The Penelopiad, is a post-modernistic reworking of

Homers The Odyssey. It aims at dislodging the dominant discourse which has
shaped the thoughts and attitudes of society all throughout history, and continue
to today. Myths (like the Odyssey) are timeless, larger than life stories that tend
to reinforce gender roles and cultural expectations through their fixed
representations of men and women. Once established they eventually start to
sound as if they are second nature rather than impositions, because they are
practiced over and over again. Atwood sets out to deconstruct these attitudes by
providing a different dimension to gender, social class and justice from a rather
contemporary, and feminist point of view.
Gender:
It is myths like the Odyssey which help engrain the dominant patriarchal
discourse which is embedded within society. What is masculine in our culture has
come to be seen as active, dominating and adventurous. Men represent all of
humanity. Women represent the opposite: something that isnt altogether
human, something other than them. When women are taught to accept this
system or ideology as something natural, they can be said to internalize it.
Believing it to be natural that men are dominant, they often then help to put
down their own sex and cooperate in their own subordination. The patriarchal
system often rewards such women by calling them ideal, such as the perfect
housewife.
The Penelopiad, aims at dislodging the traditional myth, which presents Penelope
as the archetype of a faithful and patient wife. For Atwood, Odyssey is the text
where womens oppression can be deciphered and therefore should be
challenged. She critiques the way women are represented based on the
virgin/whore dichotomy. Penelope voices this criticism through the construction
of the reader of the text.
From the statement Dont follow my example we can conclude that Atwood is
addressing the reader as a female rather than a male, creating the female as the
subject. The subject in Post-modernistic theory is the individual who observes
something, the object being the thing which is observed. Under dominant
patriarchal texts, men are set up as subjects, women as objects. This is due to
the convention that what women look at are unimportant, and that women only
exist when we look at them. The Penelopiad ignores this conventional patriarchal
verb construction, and adopts a more feminist approach, creating the women as
the subject, and men as the object. In doing this, Atwood is seeking to challenge
not only Homeric myth but also cultural myths about women and how literature
should only be read in the eyes of a man.

Class:
Another social archetype reinforced by Homers The Odyssey, is the idea that
Those of high social degree have power of those with low social degree. Along
with this, the traditional myth makes the clear distinction between high,
cultured art, engaged in by the Patricians and the low uncultured art engaged
in by the Plebeians, the two extremities of Classical Greek Art. Grecian societal
norms distinguishing the royal class and the common life were challenged
through Atwoods construction of a voice for the maids.
In her novella, Atwood prefaces all the chapters containing the maids collective
narrative with the chapter heading The Chorus Line, which is then followed by
the title of each individual chapter. This subseries creates an image of a ropejumping rhyme, creating a counter narrative by which the maids contradict the
perspectives that Penelope holds on certain events, giving the lower class a more
reputable view from the perspective of the audience. The textuality of the
Chorus Line also serves the purpose to blur the distinction between high and
low culture, the upper and lower class. The phrase The Chorus quickly sets the
genre of the text as high and cultured, the chorus being a group of actors in an
Ancient Greek tragedy. However, the addition of the word Line, plunges the
genre into a world of low entertainment, associated with Hollywood 1950s
musicals. Atwood is able to change the genre and culture level of the text with
only one word. In doing this she is mocking pre-modern texts, pointing out that
the distinction between the upper and lower class, an idea deriving from Ancient
Greek times, is in fact non-existent.
Justice:
The ancient construction of justice is another social archetype which has been
embedded into society by traditional myth. For the inhabitants of early archaic
Greece, justice was predominantly a masculine realm wherein little consideration
was given to a proportionate graduation of penalties, and typically brutal
punitive acts were ultimately determined by the offended party. Atwoods use of
narrative justice to redress the falsely flawless image of Helen signals her
appropriation of this traditionally masculine realm of justice and her
deconstruction of the dominant discourse of female passivity and victimization.
Helen, despite her notoriously flirtatious nature, escapes narrative justice in
Homers Odyssey. Unlike the Penelope of Homers Odyssey who mitigates
Helens guilt by stating that It was god who drove her to do [her] shameful
deed Atwoods Penelope adamantly insists upon Helens guilt and her suitability
to receive justice by exhibiting the intentionality behind Helens indirectly violent
acts and by undermining her ostensible genealogical connection to the Gods,
who, in Atwoods texts, are largely peripheral to and exempt from systems of
human justice. Atwoods doesnt absolve Helen for her sin of exploiting men
using the bait of her eternal feminine image. This rejects another stereotype of
women as oppressed and subjugated, underpinning the assertion that women
can be as strong and as oppressive as men.