‘Let us just say: there is another story.’ A beguiling retelling.

By Issy Craig-Wood, student in Liberal Arts, King’s College London

Why is the word ‘beguiling’ used so often of the voices of the Odyssey’s women – sirens, goddesses, enslaved girls, translators, re-writers? Does it refer to the pleasure of hearing tales, the reward of being praised in song, and the satisfaction of telling one’s own side of a story? Or does it hint at the dangers inherent in storytelling, with all its exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies? Craig-Wood’s blogpost reflects on how Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad develops ‘another story’ by exploiting ambiguities in the beguiling tales told by the women of the Odyssey.

*****

The Penelopiad (2005) is a metafictional novella by Margaret Atwood in which Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, re-tells her life story from the fields of asphodel in the Underworld. It is a retrospective narrative that explores the lives of those at the palace at Ithaca, mostly women, during the Odyssey and beyond. Penelope’s narrative is frequently intercut with “a chanting and singing chorus” (Atwood 2006, xxi) formed of twelve of “the loveliest, the most beguiling” (115) of her enslaved girls, led often by Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks. The chorus line is an anachronistic, amorphous theatre troupe of dead girls: they perform eleven chapters, each in a different genre of oral tradition. Twelve ghostly attractions who haunt Atwood, and in turn, her Penelope. Atwood states in her introduction that The Penelopiad attempts to answer two questions: “what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to?” (Atwood 2006, xxi).

While The Penelopiad is a direct response to the Odyssey, it is not a translation of the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. It diverges from the Odyssey by questioning the original text, and does so by giving these women the power of narrative – and having their narratives contradict each other. For a more direct translation of the Odyssey that can be used to draw out Atwood’s innovations, there is Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey from 2018. This turns out to be a particularly apt version to discuss alongside The Penelopiad. As the most prominent female translator of the Odyssey, Wilson’s uniquely insightful perspective on the Odyssey has been deemed “appropriately beguiling” by A. E. Stallings in The Spectator (2018). It is as beguiling, indeed, as Penelope’s enslaved maids.

A little story-making

“An epic poem is, at its root, simply a tale that is told” states Wilson in her introduction to the Odyssey (Wilson 2018, ix). The first verse of the Odyssey invokes the omniscient muse: “Tell me about a complicated man”. The tale that is being told in the Odyssey is about Odysseus, but like the man himself, it is complicated. Twenty of twenty-four books are told by the muse-inspired bard, Homer, and the remaining four are told by Odysseus as he recounts his adventures to the Phaeacians in Odyssey 9-12. This is Odysseus’ apologoi, a story within a story, where Odysseus engages in myth-making to define his heroic status and consolidate his kleos. Kleos is the Greek word for glory, or esteem, which is “fundamental as a measure of one’s value to others and to oneself” in Homeric society, and, essentially, the “objectification of the hero's personal survival in epic song” (Segal 1983, 22, 26). For a hero to have kleos, their song must be sung for generations to come. Odysseus is in the unique position of being both the story-teller and the subject of the story.

Like Odysseus, Penelope must become the singer of her own song in The Penelopiad to consolidate her personal value beyond the events of the Odyssey. Penelope starts her narrative with a chapter addressing her thoughts on “tale-telling” (Atwood 2006, 4) – she thinks it’s “a low art” as the chapter is titled – but she is determined to have her voice heard: “It’s my turn to do a little story-making” (Atwood 2006, 3). In this first chapter of The Penelopiad, Penelope explains she is dissatisfied with her portrayal in the Odyssey, and therefore the way she has been remembered - her version of kleos. Penelope’s narrative in The Penelopiad is her attempt to revise common history and finally “contradict… ask awkward questions… dig deep” (Atwood 2006, 3) into Odysseus’ version of events.

However, Penelope is also complicated. Penelope and Odysseus, in both The Penelopiad and the Odyssey, are seen as an intellectually matched pair. Penelope has “a capacity for deceptive storytelling” (Wilson 2018, xxxviii), “planning and forethought… comparable to her husband’s” (Wilson 2018, xxxiv).  They both have enchanting bard-like skills which allow them to “tell stories which make falsehood seem like truth” (Segal 1983, 27). Atwood’s Penelope describes herself and Odysseus as “proficient and shameless liars of long standing” (Atwood 2006, 173), and like Odysseus, she is remembered for her schemes. The most famous of these is her “interminable weaving” (Atwood 2006, 115): which she undoes by night with the help of the twelve enslaved girls. From the outset of The Penelopiad, Atwood makes explicit the link between weaving and women’s stories through analogy, metaphor, and descriptive puns. Penelope intends to “spin a thread of [her] own” (Atwood 2006, 4). Metaphors of thread and weaving are not absent from the Odyssey, they are just a little harder to see – just as the women of the Odyssey are harder to see. Wilson describes her choice to translate Odysseus’ opening descriptor polytropos – “much-turning”– as “complicated” (1.1) in The New York Times Magazine as a signal to readers to “be on the lookout for a text that’s not going to be interpretively straightforward” (as quoted by Mason, 2017). At the end of that same first verse, this complicatedness is pulled through into a tangly imperative: “find the beginning” (1.11). Penelope’s “spin” is just as unreliable as Odysseus’ apologoi: full of “inconsistencies and contradictions” (Akgün 2018, 206) which are brought into the light by the guerrilla communication of the murdered Chorus Line.

Toythings

In Atwood’s introduction, she highlights the inconsistencies of the form: “mythic material was originally oral, and also local – a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another” (Atwood, p. xx). The eleven interruptions of the Chorus Line represent what is missed in Penelope’s and Odysseus’ narratives. They are truth-seeking, justice-restoring, and they sing in a way which reminds the reader that the written version of the Odyssey is not the only version. The twelve hanged girls perform a rhyme, a lament, a pop song, an idyll, a sea shanty, a ballad, a drama, an anthropology lecture, a love song, a poem and appear on videotape at a trial. The Chorus Line is constant, vicious, and satirical. In their interludes they reject Penelope’s version of events and hold her descriptions up to the light to see the holes.

One major revision by Penelope and many translators of the Odyssey, as Wilson points out in The New Yorker, is how these girls are referred to. Penelope calls them her “maidservants” or sometimes simply the “girls” or “children”. Wilson sees this translation as euphemistic, for really they are slaves. Wilson recognises “the need to acknowledge the fact and the horror of slavery” in her translation (Wilson as quoted by North, Vox, 2017). The twelve girls who are murdered by Telemachus are born into slavery at Ithaca or “bought or acquired… when they were small children” (Atwood 2006, 113) and raised alongside him as – in their words – “his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions” (67). Atwood is completely aware of their enslavement: Eurycleia and the enslaved girls refer to themselves as slaves, and Penelope refers to the other enslaved people at Ithaca as slaves, just not the twelve maids. Penelope’s version of truth works to remove her role as the mistress of these slaves. Technically, all the enslaved people at Ithaca belong to Odysseus, but in his absence, Penelope is their mistress. She does not explore in The Penelopiad what this involves beyond raising the occasional “pretty child”, “teaching it to be a refined and pleasant servant” (88) – which is a foul sentiment even if Penelope thinks she is involved in some selfless service.

I sound like an owl

One of these children is Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks, who had been “treated just like a daughter by Penelope” (18.322). Melantho is the only named girl in the Chorus Line, and she is characterised by her voice. Penelope notes that the girls all have “lovely voices” (Atwood 2006, 114), but she also calls Melantho “cutting” (137) and “snide” (117), and according to Eurycleia, Melantho is “impertinent” and “rude” (159). Melantho insults Odysseus in Odyssey 18 and 19 when he returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, and in return, both Odysseus and Penelope call her a dog, an insult which denotes she is crossing a boundary of social hierarchy and effectively tells her to stop yapping. “The silencing of female voices, and the dangers of female agency, are central problems in the poem”, as Wilson says in The New Yorker. The twelve enslaved girls are silenced in one brutal stanza in Odyssey 22:

“As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly

Home to their nests, but someone sets a trap—

They crash into a net, a bitter bedtime:

Just so the girls, their heads all in a row,

Were strung up with the noose around their necks

To make their death an agony. They gasped,

Feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

(22.468-474).

The enslaved girls are likened to birds by Penelope too, after she hears the news of their murder from Eurycleia in The Penelopiad: “my snow-white geese,” she laments, “my thrushes, my doves” (Atwood 2006, 160). Birds in Homer are often a representation of freedom and song. These birds specifically, the thrush and the dove, are symbols of beauty and beautiful song, often linked with the goddess of love, Aphrodite.

Another bird that comes up in The Penelopiad is the owl. Owls are the bird of Odysseus’ patron goddess, Athena, and are linked to her traits of wisdom and shrewdness. They also provide a contradictory metaphor, as they are wise, yet “nonmelodious” (Friedrich 1997, 309) – their sounds are not acknowledged as song. The metaphor of the owl provides bookends of symbolism to The Penelopiad. Penelope describes in the opening chapter her frustration at being relegated to the side-lines of her own myth. “What did I amount to…?” she asks, “I want to scream… But when I try to scream, I sound like an owl” (Atwood 2006, 2). From this frustration comes her desire to be heard clearly. The last chapter of The Penelopiad, ‘Envoi’, shows how Penelope’s version of her story does to the murdered girls what the Odyssey has done to Penelope. The Chorus Line are the ones who become owls: in the last line of their poetic farewell they “sprout feathers, and fly away as owls” (196). Though they are as shrewd as Penelope, the girls of the Chorus Line have no storytelling agency beyond their unauthorised interruptions: they will never be heard clearly.

Another story

The major alteration that The Penelopiad makes regarding the death of the enslaved girls is Penelope’s involvement. There are two versions of events. The first is Penelope’s: she enlisted the help of the twelve girls to unravel her shroud at night, and to be her “trusted eyes and ears in the palace” (114), getting close to the suitors to spy on them, using insults about Telemachus, Odysseus and Penelope to gain their trust. Penelope says she “would never have hurt them” (115) but also recognises that her directions led these girls into the hands of their rapists, and the punishment for their rape was their murder. This change raises questions about Penelope’s accountability and the consequences of actions that are absent in the original text of the Odyssey.

The second version is that of the enslaved girls. “Let us just say: There is another story” (147), Melantho says in the prologue to the Chorus Line’s burlesque drama ‘The Perils of Penelope’. Their performance is employs comedic modes – iambic pentameter, rhyming couplets, and even a tap-dance – yet they reveal an alternative truth to the reason for their murder: removing witnesses. The dramatic chapter explores the possibility that if these girls were Penelope’s closest servants, they would have been witness to any affair she was having with the suitors. They accuse Eurycleia and Penelope of formulating the plan to “point out those maids as feckless and disloyal” (150) to Odysseus, and consequently “stop their mouths by sending them to Hades” (151).

*****

The Penelopiad transforms the Odyssey by giving narrative power to Penelope and the twelve enslaved girls. It has an analytical eye which seeks to see clearly the lives, reasoning and motivations of the women which are left unexplored in the Odyssey. The Penelopiad triumphs as it presents contradictions: it gives the reader both Penelope’s sweeping, revisionist storytelling, and the Chorus Line’s desperate attempts to hold onto the truth as they are dissolved from history. The Penelopiad successfully interrogates the ancient text by introducing a wealth of inconsistencies which expand on those already present in the Odyssey, with a focus on exploring the realities of gender dynamics, slavery, and the power of story in a kleos-based society.

Bibliography

Akgün, B. (2018) “Spinning a Thread of One’s Own from Homer to Atwood”, Brill's Companion to Prequels, Sequels, and Retellings of Classical Epic, ed. Simms, R. Brill, 206-223.

Atwood, M. (2006) The Penelopiad. Canongate Books Ltd, Edinburgh, UK.

Friedrich, P. (1997) “An Avian and Aphrodisian Reading of Homer's Odyssey”, American Anthropologist, New Series, 99. 2: 306-320.

Homer (2018) The Odyssey. Trans. E. Wilson. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, USA.

Howells, C. A. (2006) “5 ways of looking at The Penelopiad”, Sydney Studies in English, 32:5-18.

Mason, W. (2017) “The First Woman to Translate the ‘Odyssey’ Into English”, The New York Times Magazine. 2nd November 2017. Available online at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html

North, A. (2017) “Historically, Men Translated The Odyssey. Here’s What Happened When a Woman Took the Job”, Vox. 20th November 2017. Available online at: https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/20/16651634/odyssey-emily-wilson-translation-first-woman-english

Segal, C. (1983) “Kleos and its Ironies in The Odyssey”, L’Antiquité Classique, 52: 22-47.

Stallings, A. E. (2018) “A Long Way Home”, The Spectator, 27th January 2018. Available online at: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/a-long-way-home/

Wilson, E. (2017) “A Translators Reckoning with the Women of The Odyssey”, The New Yorker. 8th December 2017. Available online at: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-translators-reckoning-with-the-women-of-the-odyssey

Wilson, E. (2017) “Found in Translation: How Women are Making Classics Their Own”, The Guardian. 7thJuly 2017. Available online at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/07/women-classics-translation-female-scholars-translators