The Penelopiad: Demythologizing Lore

La Plata

Jornada; III Jornadas Internacionales de Cultura y Literatura en Lengua Inglesa; 2008

Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad Nacional de La Plata

The Anglo-American feminist intellectual developments of the 1970s seemed to have been concerned with the analysis of women´s textual productions created within male-centered contexts and evaluated according to traditionally phallogocentric qualities, all of which are taken here as textual political concerns. This brief study will focus on a novel, among many other productions written by women, that clearly exemplifies this concern: Margaret Atwood?s The Penelopiad (2006). In this novel, Atwood has turned the myth of Odysseus upside-down and retold it from a feminist perspective. In Atwood?s retelling, our heroine, Penelope, is dead but able to retell her story from Hades, particularly the events around Odysseus? absence. Following some conventions of Greek tragedy in the use of a chorus and in the sense that the story is highly theatrical, among other features, The Penelopiad stands as a powerfully built narration that tries to neutralize a dominant and long-lasting tradition: male-centered Greek mythology.