The Penelopiad

The Penelopiad is a 2005 novella by Margaret Atwood. It is told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, and her twelve hanged maids. It offers an alternate perspective on the events famously portrayed by Homer in The Odyssey, giving depth to a previously shallow portrait of a faithful wife and her “deceitful” maids. Borrowing from Greek tragedy, Atwood switches narrators between Penelope, now dead and in the underworld, and the hanged maids, who speak in a chorus. Each of their chapters takes on a different form, ranging from a sea shanty, to an idyll, and even a taped courtroom scene. Atwood’s version of this famous marriage highlights gender and class disparities and forces the reader to question how our cultural biases influence mythology and vice versa.

Penelope is dead and in the underworld. Previously unwilling to tell her side of things, calling tale-telling a “low art,” she now feels that enough time has passed to present her side of her relationships with Odysseus and Helen of Troy. She describes her childhood, born in Sparta to King Icarius and Periobea, a naiad, or water nymph. As a child, Penelope’s father throws her into the sea to avoid a prophecy concerning his death, but she is saved by a flock of ducks. When she comes of marriageable age, a contest is held to see who will win her hand. Though ill-suited to the race, Odysseus of Ithaca wins, as he colluded with Penelope’s uncle to drug the other contestants. Odysseus is kinder and more sympathetic on their wedding night than Penelope expected, and she falls for him immediately.

Soon thereafter, Odysseus takes her back to his home island of Ithaca despite the expectation that he would stay in Sparta with his wife’s family. She feels quite alone there, as she has no friends of her status, and her mother-in-law and Odysseus’s former maid, Eurycleia, box her out of domestic duties. Soon enough she has a son, Telemachus. Not long after he is born, Helen runs off with Paris, and the Trojan War begins. Thus commences Penelope’s famous twenty-year wait.

While Odysseus is off at war, Odysseus’ mother dies and his father leaves the palace to live as a peasant. Thus, the running of the kingdom is left to Penelope, who exercises her cleverness to make it flourish. Still, she is even lonelier now that her husband has left. After the war ends and Odysseus still does not return, suitors begin appearing at the palace, making themselves long-term guests and eating her out of house and home. In order to avoid having to choose a new husband, Penelope devises the ruse of weaving her father-in-law’s burial shroud. While she weaves during the day, at night she secretly unweaves each day’s progress with the help of her favorite maids. She also spends this time encouraging her maids to seduce the Suitors and speak negatively about her and her family in order to gain their trust and learn their plans. During these three years, she comes to feel that the maids are almost like sisters to her.

Telemachus, meanwhile, sneaks out of the palace and goes off in search of news of his father. Penelope learns from the maids that the Suitors plan to murder him upon his return, but she is assured by a prophetic dream that he will be safe. He does, in fact, return safely, but his recklessness prompts a fight with Penelope, who he says is doing nothing to bring his father back.

Finally, Odysseus returns, disguised as a beggar. Penelope recognizes him right away, but does not let on, as it would put his life in danger. She asks him if she should challenge the Suitors to string Odysseus’s bow and send an arrow through twelve axe handles to determine her new husband, and he agrees. She knows that only he can perform this task, and he does, after which he reveals his true identity. He and Telemachus murder the Suitors. Odysseus wants to murder all of the maids as well, but Eurycleia convinces him to murder only the twelve most “impertinent” ones, i.e. the ones closest to Penelope, whose impertinence she had encouraged. Penelope stalls in order to hide her feelings about the murder of the maids. She asks Eurycleia to move their famously unmovable bed (one post is an olive tree, rooted in the ground) and Odysseus becomes furious, thinking it had been chopped down. Penelope relents, calling this the “bed test,” and saying he had passed. The reunite, and he tells her that she is all he ever wanted. However, soon after coming home, he leaves again for other adventures.

All along, the maids have been appearing in choruses between chapters, accusing Odysseus of hypocrisy. For hadn’t he been sleeping with goddesses while on his voyage, and yet they were murdered for their own romances?

As the novella concludes, the maids curse Odysseus. They will haunt him eternally and he will be plagued by the Furies. Though he joins Penelope in the underworld from time to time, he keeps leaving to drink from the Waters of Forgetfulness and be reborn into a new life, trying to escape the maids. All of his lives end horribly, for he cannot escape the Furies.