The Penelopiad
(Digression: When I was in the 5th grade, my class did a performance of Odysseus's homecoming scene from The Odyssey and I played Athena. I had two lines—“Odysseus, do you not recognize your homeland? This is Ithaca.”—and I completely froze up when it was time for me to speak. I was starstruck because I had a huge crush on the guy playing Odysseus. I had stayed up most of the night before speaking my lines into a tape recorder and playing them back to decide where the emphasis should be. “This is Ithaca” became an unsolvable riddle to me. Emphasize this? Emphasize is? Emphasize Ithaca? In the end, I emphasized nothing except my own dreadful acting skills.)
Atwood shows a Penelope who is quite mundane in many ways, frustrated by her inability to connect with her in-laws, resentful of her own parents’ ways, struggling to control her son who is on the brink of adulthood, jealous of her cousin Helen’s beauty, but still a strong independent woman. The tragedy of Atwood’s story is the hanging of Penelope’s 12 favorite maids. Atwood shows the hanging of the maids from several different perspectives, raising moral questions about why these women were executed and who stood to gain from their permanent silence.
I enjoyed the book, but found it much lighter than Atwood’s other books of similar length, such as Surfacing. Atwood highlights the ambiguities and complexities of being a woman in Hellenic Greece, but she only really highlights them. I wanted her to delve deeper and develop rather than hint at ideas.
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