“We had no voice”: Class Inequality through écriture
feminine in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad
“No teníamos voz”: La desigualdad de clases a través de la écriture feminine en Penélope y las doce criadas
de Margaret Atwood
Maya Zalbidea Paniagua
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8641-8771
Recibido: 28/12/2023
Aceptado: 01/05/2024
10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29748
Abstract
In Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005),
Penelope is associated with Artemis, the female-goddess cult leader, and the
twelve maids, with her followers.
These mythological figures belong to the Minoan matrilineal culture that was
eradicated by the patriarchal civilization of Greece. Margaret Atwood’s
intention, rewriting a feminist version of Penelope’s myth, is used as a
response to patriarchal myths that have influenced readers through generations.
The Penelopiad retells the Odyssey events from the Other’s view
—the women servant’s experience. This article explores the consequences of
class difference between Penelope and the maids from the Marxist feminist
perspective of Charlotte Perkins (1899). The maids’ chorus language will be
compared to écriture feminine by Hélène Cixous (1976) and Bracha Ettinger’s Matrixial
Subjectivity (2020) with the aim of
finding out how the text raises the voices of forgotten, marginalized and
invisibilized women.
Key words: Margaret
Atwood, Marxist feminism, Écriture
Feminine, Matrixial Subjectivity, Rewriting, Myth.
Resumen
En The Penelopiad (2005) de Margaret Atwood, se asocia a Penélope con Artemisa, una
diosa líder, y a sus doce criadas, con sus seguidoras, haciendo alusión a la
cultura matrilineal minoica que fue erradicada por la civilización cretense
patriarcal. En este artículo, la intención de Margaret Atwood de reescribir un
mito será razonada como una respuesta a los mitos patriarcales que han influido
a lectores a través de generaciones, relatando, con su novela, eventos
extraordinarios desde el punto de vista de las Otras, las sirvientas en
este caso. Las consecuencias de la diferencia de clase en la relación entre
Penélope y las criadas será considerada desde una perspectiva de feminismo
marxista de Charlotte Perkins (1899). El lenguaje del coro de las criadas será
comparado con el de la écriture feminine de Hélène
Cixous (1976) y la subjetividad matricial de Bracha Ettinger (2020) con el
objetivo de definir en qué modo el texto eleva las voces de las olvidadas,
marginadas e invisibilizadas.
Palabras clave: Margaret Atwood, Feminismo marxista, écriture feminine, subjetividad
matricial, reescritura, mito.
Introduction
In The Penelopiad,
Margaret Atwood offers a feminist version of Homer’s Odyssey portraying
Penelope as a possible female-goddess cult leader. As Hilde Staels asserts,
Penelope is associated with Artemis, and the twelve maids, with her followers,
alluding to the lost matriarchal culture and female-centered religion that
belongs to the Minoan-Mycenaean civilization of Crete before the patriarchal
civilization of Greece. “Penelope’s maids […] interpret themselves as
companions of the moon goddess Artemis, as twelve Amazons or moon-maidens who
are victims of fertility cults” (Staels, 2009: 104). Although the intention of this rewriting was probably
providing a story that supported women roles, the abuse of power from Penelope
of not avoiding the killing of the maids could be interpreted as loyalty to the
patriarchal normativity. In the novel, men’s privilege is represented by
Ulysses (symbolizing leadership and authority) and the judiciary system in the
trial chapter. The author clearly criticizes men’s privilege in Ancient Greek society,
but not only men’s privilege is denounced, but also upper-class women’s
privilege over low class women with the mockery of Penelope’s narrative voice
and a defense on the maids. Hypotheses from recent research have shown the
imitations of patriarchal modes in Penelope’s behavior (Rodríguez, 2015).
However, the perpetration of the abuse from those who are in a privileged
position is not only the product of patriarchy in the novel, class, accompanied
by gender hierarchy make possible the legalization of murdering the maids
violently. Mihoko Suzuki (2007) highlighted how gender and class hierarchies
are displayed in the maids’ chorus and our present study is going to examine
the maids discourse connecting it with feminist theories.
After reading Margaret Atwood’s
postmodernist feminist rewriting of the myth of Ulysses and Penelope from
Homer’s Odyssey, reflecting on the function of the maids of the story, who
become the protagonists of it, reading recent research already done of this
novella by Mihoko Suzuki (2007), Hilde
Staels (2009) and Gerardo Salas Rodríguez (2015), this article provides a new
comparative analysis of the maids discourse focusing on Marxist feminism
(Charlotte Perkins Stetson, 1899), écriture feminine (Hélène Cixous,
1976) and the matrixial gaze (Bracha Ettinger, 1948). In this article we will
study the reasons why Atwood chose myth criticism (Durand,
1979) to compose her feminist rewriting, and we will offer an innovative
analysis of the novel that has not been provided before: an inquiry into its Marxist
feminist criticism relying on Perkins (1899), to finally show, through an
analysis of maids’ interventions in the novel, how their transcendental message
intends to have an effect on readers in order to change from focusing on the
protagonists of the Odyssey as Homer wrote it, to pay more attention to
the forgotten ones, the maids, the representatives of the lowest social class:
the female servants.
The Penelopiad is not only told
from Penelope’s point of view, but also from the maids’ perspective. Penelope’s
narration unveils a story that from centuries was told centering on Homer’s
feats and only mentioning the role of Penelope as a passive faithful wife. At
the beginning of the novel readers may believe that the main theme of the novel
is going to be the revelation of Penelope’s real identity far from Ulysses
accounts. However, as the plot advances, readers discover the most important
theme of the novella: the assassination of the maids though they did not have
committed any crime. Penelope’s maids were women whose condition was much worse
than hers, and it is significant to notice that they were more in number (they
were twelve and she was only one), and, besides, they were servants. This makes
clear how, lower classes are higher in number and their possibilities of being
raped and murdered, in the case of women, are much more. From this view, The
Penelopiad is highlighting, not only the fact that women have been
discriminated in myths and legends, which has affected historically from the
ancient times to present day, but, Atwood denounces, more specifically, the
fact that the vast majority of women in these myths were servants and slaves,
who were never supported, not even by their female mistresses. In order to
analyze men’s privilege over women in the novel we will use Marxist feminism.
Methodology
In order to
understand the feminist criticism of classical myths of the novel, it is
necessary to answer to a relevant question: What may be the objective of
Margaret Atwood rewriting a myth dealing with women condition? Why a myth?
Myths show universal human emotions, experiences, virtues and defects. Gilbert Durand, considered the first theorist on myth criticism
recognized the presence of archetypal symbols in literary works. For him,
people have always been plagued by questions about their identities, ancestry,
the afterlife, and the origins of evil. These questions have persisted until
present day (1979: VII). The evil side of men and women can be seen in The
Penelopiad, in the lack of freedom of a semi-goddess to choose her husband.
Odysseus is a liar, Penelope a traitor, her maids, the victims. However,
even if the unreliable narrator of The Penelopiad
and the maids acting as secondary narrators telling the story through poems and
plays try to convince the readers that they are telling the truth, a myth does
not have any historical document to show evidence of its veracity. As José
Manuel Losada explains: “A myth is a functional story, symbolic and thematic of
extraordinary events with sacred transcendent supernatural referent, lacking,
in principle, historical testimony” (Losada, 2022: 193). History is mainly
studied following Western patriarchal thought, accounting events emphasizing
the superiority of men over women, and in a similar way, in myths women from
the lowest classes are invisibilized and excluded. In myth criticism recurrent
mythemes are often studied. The concept of the mytheme was in the first place
defined by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958) and widened by Durand in De la
mitocrítica al mitoanálisis by redefining it as a “mythical atom
[that] inherently has an ‘archetypical’ [and] schematic structure, in a Jungian
sense [according to Durand], and its content can indifferently be a ‘motive’, a
‘theme’, a ‘mythical decorate’ [...] and emblem, a ‘dramatic situation’ [...]”
(2013: 344). Also, in Mitos y sociedades (2003), Durand explained that
the mythemes can be manifested as actions conveyed by “verbs [...] by
kinship relationships, kidnap, homicide, incest [...] or even emblematic
objects: staff, trident, axe, a dove [...]” (Durand, 2003: 163). Rape of women
and punishing them after being raped is a constant mytheme in Greek mythology,
rape and punishment are as normalized in myths as in real life. A good example
of punishment after rape can be Medusa’s myth in which, as Faith Roush defends,
the myth of Medusa is still important in modern day as it highlights issues of
sexual assault and its twisted repercussions for both the perpetrator and the
victim (Roursh, 2019: 1).
In Greek mythology we
find a high number of rape cases. Many female princesses are raped, such as:
Alcippe, Alcmene, Callisto, Demeter, Europa, Hera, Persephone, Philomela, etc.
Male characters are also raped: Adonis, Endymion and even Odysseus, to name a
few. Rapes took place in myths and there was no punishment for the rapist in
many cases, something that happens often in different parts of the world.
Probably, for this reason, Margaret Atwood chose to rewrite a Greek
myth, to show how patriarchy is perpetrated through myths and future
generations can be influenced by a retelling in which the empathy and
identification is focused on the raped and murdered servants, instead of
exclusively on the smart and brave male hero, his patriarchal counterpart
Athena and the faithful Penelope. The reason why Margaret Atwood chose feminist
mythmaking shows a clear attempt to report extraordinary events from the Other
experience, the women experience in this case. As Simone de Beauvoir stated: “A
myth is the projection of the Subject, its hopes and fears, through the Other”
[…] “Any myth implies a subject that projects its hopes and fears to a
transcendental heaven” (Beauvoir quoted in Losada, 2022: 127). This is the case
of Atwood’s maids myth, after dying they are believed to be able to fly, they
have been released from pain in the end of the novella: “The Maids sprout
feathers, and fly away as owls” (Atwood, 2005: 196). Feminist rewriting can
clearly criticize gender issues: “Myth has always been a platform for
discussing and criticizing social issues and problems. Myth exemplifies these
social concepts and personifies them to make them more accessible” (Zehren 2016:
6). As Katabasis is a mytheme in Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus
descends to the underworld. Similarly, in Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Penelope
descends to hell where she finds the fields of Asphodel (15). There is a
shocking contrast in the way Penelope describes with humor her experience of
living in hell at the beginning of the novel with the tragical way she
describes her suffering at the end. In the fifth chapter entitled “Asphodel”
she explains how it feels living in the dark death, some dead people are
summoned by mediums and magicians, however, Penelope admits that she never got
summoned much by the magicians, whereas her cousin, Helen, “was much in demand”
(Atwood, 2005: 20). The light tone of the “Asphodel” contrasts with the last
chapter “Home Life in Hades” in which she blames Helen of Troy for the people
who died in the war she provoked, and also, Penelope describes her hell as a
place in which she will not forget the maids she betrayed, they will haunt both
Odysseus and her.
It is important to highlight the fact that the main problem we find in
Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is the never-ending story of women
competitiveness. Penelope feels jealous of her cousin Helen of Troy, does not
get on well with her nurse and betrays her maids. In our analysis, we agree on
Gerardo Rodríguez’s applying of Janice G. Raymond’s hetero-reality and
gyn/affection theories to explain Penelope and the maids’ behavior (Rodríguez,
2015: 20). For Rodríguez, the murdered maids stand for Raymond’s gyn/affection,
a term Raymond uses as “a synonym for female friendship” whereas Penelope is
unable to escape from Raymond’s hetero reality: “the world view that woman
exists always in relation to man” (Raymond quoted in Rodríguez, 2015: 20).
Apart from the way women are raised to place love over all the other important
matters, there is a social class issue that cannot be denied in the novel, and
it is that, even if the maids show a positive example of female friendship,
their circumstances cannot be compared to those of princess Penelope.
The lack of equality due to social class difference demands connecting
the relation between Penelope and the maids with Marxist feminism. The maids,
working in precarious conditions become profitable for Penelope and Ulysses as
well as for the noble men who rape them and for Penelope’s suitors who seduce
them. The maids live under the most extreme abuses of Capitalism. The use of
maids as in Women and Economics (1899), Charlotte Perkins Stetson
explained how the human race developed in a way in which men could control the
economy while women could only depend on men and their labor as house workers
and mothers did not give them the chance to be economically independent. For
Perkins: “The women whose splendid extravagance dazzles the world, whose
economic goods are the greatest, are often neither houseworkers nor mothers,
but simply the women who hold most power over the men who have the most money”
(Perkins, 1899: 21-22). From a sociological point of view, Perkins highlights
how “when man began to feed and defend woman, she ceased proportionally to feed
and defend herself” (Perkins, 1899: 61). This explains why Penelope, instead of
saving the lives of her servants, she saves her own life by accusing them, as
in the patriarchal period in which they live, women depend on men.
With regards to the style in
which the novella is written, there is a connection between the writing style
used for the chorus of the twelve maids with écriture feminine concept created
by Hélène Cixous, not only for the way their chorus songs and speeches is
written, but also for the intentions behind it: uncovering the reality of poor
women. Their speech is feminine as it reflects women situations that men do not
live in a similar way: being treated as prostitutes by noble men, nursing and
spoiling a male child and being punished for being raped without permission as
it is established in the trial at the end of the novel. Sofía Varino has
highlighted the feminist strategy of this type of feminine writing. According
to Varino:
Hélène Cixous used the concept of the 'feminine' in her plays as a container for
heterogeneity, liminality and difference, mobilizing it to animate feminist
strategies that interrupt male, white and/or hegemonic forms of subjectivity.
If, for Cixous the practice of feminine writing is fundamentally characterized
by the desire to create a mode of expression in which (gendered, embodied,
racial) difference and otherness would retain their alterity (Sofía Varino,
2018).
The classic story of Odysseus
takes the place of a confluction in Atwood’s novel, a literary account
which was far away from the truth but everybody believed. It is a metaliterary
work in which the events are told as if they could have been real, whereas
everything is fiction, the patriarchal as well as the feminist version.
However, in Atwood’s novel the testimonies of the maids work to show how art
can be used to transport trauma, a method we can explain through Bracha
Ettinger’s psychoanalytical theory, from the chapter “Art as the
Transport-station of trauma” from Matrixial subjectivity, aesthetics, ethics
(1948). The twelve maids uncovering the truth story functions as what Bracha
Ettinger called transgenerational transmission of memory (Bracha Ettinger,
1948: 329). The concept of transgenerational transmission of memory that Bracha
Ettinger defended is compared to the author’s ability to transmit through a
literary work a message that will be received through different generations of
readers, and as it will be kept in their memory, their account of Penelope and
Ulysses myth could include a perspective in which the most powerful ones are
the agents of injustice and the maids were the victims of their
irresponsibility and egoism. The maids will tell future generations their
memories as female servants to show that there is no possible female
empowerment while there are privileged classes.
Penelope betrays her “daughters” following patriarchal ideas. Margaret
Atwood’s story transmits to present day and future generations the tragical and
transcendental consequences of the lack of sisterhood. The lack of sisterhood
can remain in women bodies and psychologies. Bracha Ettinger explains that
there is a web of connections in the individual limits:
This web, which is not only a
feminine beyond-the-phallus web but also an originary matrixial web, is
tragic in many senses, but it is not melancholic, hysterical or psychotic […]
Such realization of encounter via the artwork penetrates into, impregnates and
creates further encounters between the artist and the world, the artist and the
object, the artist and the Other, artists and viewers. The realization
of such an encounter transforms the tableau [painting or artwork] and is
transformed by it into a transport-station of trauma” (Ettinger, 1948: 331).
In The Penelopiad the
maids tell their trauma and, therefore, through the Chorus (artwork/song) their
trauma is transported to the readers, who are addressed by the maids at the end
of the novel: “but now we’re here, we’re all here too, the same as you” (195).
The traumatic, for Ettinger, becomes Beauty and redefines it. In our
comparative analysis the maids are considered artists who use -in Ettingerian
terminology- their Matrixial Gaze, because their language has its
origins in a feminine-maternal sphere of encounter that begins in the most
archaic (pre-maternal-prenatal) humanized encounter-event and they are able to
transmit ethic questions, “to raise questions and doubts” and compassion to the
readers (Dina Abd Elsalam, 2023: 39).
An analysis of écriture feminine in The Penelopiad through
a Marxist Feminist perspective
Margaret Atwood chose two
quotations from Homer’s The Odissey as a prelude to the novel to highlight
the ironical tone of her novel. In the first one, Penelope’s faithfulness is
glorified, showing how women’s virtue was based on her loyalty to her husband,
leaving no other possibility of a woman’s self-development than providing her
husband a clean public image: “…Shrewd Odysseus!..You are fortunate man to have
won a wife of such pre-eminent virtue! How faithful was your flawless Penelope
[…] The glory of her virtue will not fade with the years, but the deathless
gods themselves will make a beautiful song for mortal ears in honour of the
constant Penelope” (The Odissey, Book 24 (191-194) quoted in Atwood
n/p). The second quotation makes reference to how the maids were tortured: “he
took a cable […] so that their feet would not touch the ground. […] so the
women’s heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks (The
Odissey, Book 22 (470-473) quoted in Atwood n/p). These quotations
anticipate the clear difference between how high class and low class women are
treated as it is stated in intersectional theory. High class women were
expected to be loyal and faithful like Penelope, while servants were slaves and
their lives did not have any value. In both cases patriarchy gives men the
right to dominate women’s lives. In the second quotation it can be seen how
violence is normalized in myths and those who are victims of the murders from
the heroes are described without any sense of compassion.
In the introduction Odysseus excellent fame is summarized. He is
described as a “disguise artist” (Atwood, 2005: xvii). Interestingly this makes
reference to the way he kills the maids in the novel, through a performative
act in which he is disguised as a beggar to pretend to belong to the lowest
scale in society, an underclass person. The ones who tell stories traditionally
have been the rich men, but here, Margaret Atwood provides a rewriting of the
story giving voice to the silenced victims who are assassinated in a “play” in
which, as if it were a Renaissance tragedy like Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish
Tragedy or William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is a performance
prepared before a revenge murder.
It is remarkable to emphasize the fact that “his divine helper is Pallas
Athene, a goddess who admires Odysseus for his ready inventiveness” (xcii).
Athene is the bravest and most masculine of Greek goddesses, she always works
in favor of patriarchy. Ancient goddesses from Western and Eastern cultures
previous to ancient Greek were worshipped by their femininity, motherhood,
beauty and also fighting abilities, but they did not fight only for men
interests as Athena does. Athena, who punished Medusa after having been raped,
accompanies Odysseus, representing the archetype of the woman who betrays her
own female nature through destroying other women. Penelope “weaves a shroud
that she unravels at night, delaying her marriage decision until its
completion” (xviii). As Gerardo Rodríguez points out: “This initial image
points at Penelope’s potential to weave an alternative version that
simultaneously unweaves or discredits the patriarchal one” (Rodríguez, 2015:
23). She was not really desiring to marry soon, she tried to avoid an arranged
marriage as much as she could regarding other possibilities.
In the first chapter entitled “A Low Art”, the title refers to the art of
storytelling. “Only children or old people have time for them”, the narrator
(Penelope) explains, and adds: “I have no mouth through which I can speak”
(Atwood, 2005: 4). As a dead person she cannot speak, this is ironical and
paradoxical. The novel is full of irony and paradox. Only those who are dead
here can raise their voices. Penelope’s narrative is written in a surprisingly
informal way, imitating a colloquial present-day chat with the aim of getting
close to the contemporary readers. The use of contractions gives the text a
feeling of reading some kind of joke or mockery. From the second page of the
novel the feminist message can be perceived in the rhetorical questions that Penelope
uses to defend herself and justify her actions: “Hadn’t I been faithful? Hadn’t
I waited, and waited, and waited, and waited, despite the temptation — almost
the compulsion — to do otherwise? And what did I amount to, once the official
version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women
with”. (Atwood, 2005: 2). The feminist approach is clear here, Penelope was
faithful to her husband, as it is told in the Odyssey and in this
rewriting, and at the end of this novel we learn that he murdered Penelope’s
maids, his act was considered justified because those maids were raped without
his permission and Penelope did not protect them. For the narrator, Penelope,
she has a referent that makes other women suffer. She decides that she is going
to become a storyteller, to tell the hidden truth. She states: “I’d tried to
play the minstrel” (4), the word chosen here, “minstrel” is remarkable from our
Marxist feminist analysis, because the art of storytelling is considered to be
something that lower classes are good at. Like the minstrels from the Middle
Ages or the players of the Renaissance who were storytellers, actors or
jugglers. Art has been considered as servants work. This is the reason why
Penelope affirms: “there’s nothing more preposterous than an aristocrat
fumbling around with the arts” (4). In this novel, we have two storytellers, on
the one hand, Penelope, as an aristocrat, and the maids, as artist servants who
recite poems, sing songs and perform.
The first time the maids appear is in ‘The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping
Rhyme’. The author’s choice of calling this poem “A Rope-Jumping Rhyme” must be
a way to show how stories from the past were transmitted from one generation to
another through children’s nursery rhymes. The language used by the maids is
completely different from the colloquial style of Penelope, maids’ speeches are
written in a poetical form, using only small letters and absence of
punctuation. In their song they introduce themselves and directly address
Penelope to blame her for betraying them:
we are the maids
the ones you killed
the ones you failed
we danced in air
our bare feet twitched
it was not fair
(Atwood, 2005: 5)
We can consider that the maids
speech is a manifestation of écriture feminine, because of the use of
small letters, the use of “we” as representing women, the gaps and the
silences. For Hélène Cixous, écriture feminine was an act that “was
marked by woman's seizing the occasion to a uniquely feminine style of writing
characterized by disruptions in the text, such as gaps, silences, puns”
(Mambrol, “Écriture feminine”). With regards to the form of the text, it is
important to pay attention to the exclusive use of small letters, a technique
commonly used by contemporary feminist writers such as the hyperfiction writer
Francesca da Rimini or the confessional Insta poet Rupi Kaur. In the maids
chorus the reason why only small letters are used can be because of their
intention to avoid hierarchies and lack of equality of importance from some
letters to others. It can also be to show that they feel small or inferior
because of the treatment they have received since their childhood, and this is
why Atwood chooses to write the whole poem only using small letters.
As far as style is concerned, écriture feminine was described as
eccentric, incomprehensible and inconsistent, and the difficulty to understand
it was attributed to centuries of suppression of the female voice, writing is
considered an act in which the woman is able to speak: “hence her shattering entry
into history, which has always been based on her suppression” (Cixous, 1976:
188). The maids raise their voices because their whole communication and life
has been suppressed:
With every goddess, queen and bitch
From there to here
You scratched your itch
(Atwood, 2005: 5)
This chorus is vindicating how
lower-class people -women in this case- are sacrificed, even to death, so that
those who belong to high class do not lose their divine power. In the lines “we
scrubbed the blood of our dead paramours from floors, from chairs” (2005: 5) it
makes clear that they had to clean after the killing of Penelope’s suitors.
Their poem includes rhymes (air/fair, bitch/itch) and stylistic devices such as
alliteration with “feet”, “fair” and “fear”, and anaphora in the repetition of
“the ones, the ones” in the last verses: “the ones you failed, the ones you
killed” (Atwood, 2005: 6). Penelope’s childhood was harsh and traumatic as she
survived his father attempt to kill her. Despite the fact that she was the
child of a Naiad, her father ordered her to be thrown into the sea, probably
because an oracle told him she was going to weave his shroud. Fortunately, we
did not die because being the daughter of a Naiad, she was able to float: “It
was stupid of Icarius to try to drown the daughter of a Naiad, however. Water
is our element; it is our birth right” (2005: 9). From a feminist myth critical
view, it is often found in mythology that women are connected to water, like
mermaids, this assumption has its origins in the idea of the beginning of the
world as a vast ocean from which life started, a similar sea like the amniotic
liquid inside of a mother’s womb. Women are connected to water for the water
they contain inside of their bodies. Women’s relationship to water can be found
in myths from Assyrians, Mesopotamians, and Sumerians. According to Sumerian
reliefs, the world was born as Abizu, the bisexual, primordial sea. Barbara Mor
and Monica Sjöö explained that earth started with a female sea and the ocean
womb contained all organic life. “Charles Darwin believed that the menstrual
cycle originated here, organically echoing the moon-pulse of the sea” (Mor and
Sjöö, 1987: 2). “In the course of evolution, the ocean -the protective and
nourishing space, the amniotic fluids, even the lunar-tidal rhythm-was
transferred into the female body” (Mor and Sjöö, 1987: 2). In The Odyssey
mermaids fail to seduce Odysseus, and as a counterpart, Penelope’s father fails
to kill her daughter as she can float because of being the daughter of a Naiad,
and, also, because she is rescued by a flock of ducks. In the end of the novel
the maids become owls, also Penelope explains that every time she tries to
scream from the underworld in which she lives since she is dead she can only
make an owl cry. Also, Athena is represented as an owl in Greek mythology.
Probably, the fact that both Penelope and the maids become owls is a symbolic
way to explain the wisdom they have acquired from their experiences as well as
a reincarnation in a bird so that they can experience the freedom they never
experienced during their lives.
During Penelope’s childhood, she accounts that her parents did not love
her, so she learnt self-sufficiency at an early age. Her first days are
contrasted with those of the maids, accounted by them in “iv. The Chorus Line:
Kiddie Mour, A Lament by the Maids” in which they explain that they were not
demigods, they were servants and they had always been the ones to sacrifice for
the gods. They did not have parents and had to suffer from the sexual abuse of
noblemen. From an early age they learnt to repress their sadness, it was
useless to cry as nobody would give them any comfort: “It did us no good to
weep, it did us no good to say we were in pain” (14). Janice Raymond calls this
attitude protective mechanism, allowing victims of prostitution to separate themselves from the humiliation, violence,
and degradation experienced (Raymond, 2013: 70). The maids in The Penelopiad,
like prostitutes in the real world from the studies by Janice Raymond, learn
strategies to avoid their own recognition of being degraded and humiliated. Instead of crying, they realized that the only
comfort they could find was in mischievous actions like meeting boys behind the
pigpens or drinking the wine left in the wine cups. “As we grew older we became
polished and evasive, we mastered the secret sneer”; “We drank the wine left in
the wine cups. We spat onto the serving platters...We laughed together in our
attics” (Atwood, 2005: 14). According to Gerardo Rodríguez “The final image
connects the maids together through the mad woman in the attic, with a clear
wink to Jane Eyre and Gilbert and Gubar’s seminal study about literary
sisterhood in Victorian times” (28). They laughed together and shared secrets,
their complicity and gyn/affection helped them to survive.
In “viii. The Chorus Line: If I was a Princess, A Popular Tune” the maids
sing with their ironical humor a song in which a maid wishes to be a princess
to marry a hero and be always happy, this metanarration is directly connected
to Penelope’s forced marriage. The chorus sing that they have no hero and hard
work and death is their destiny. At the end, they pass a hat providing humor to
the scene, as if they were singing on the street to get some coins. This song
is performed, which is what jugglers and minstrels used to do to entertain the
court. While all Penelope’s chapters are in direct speech, with a first person
narrator, the maids sing and perform just like the way servants had to do it,
begging for money at the end of their show.
In “ix. The Trusted Cackle-Hen” Penelope shows her attitude of
competitiveness with other women as she shows that she feels jealous of how
much Odysseus former nurse, Eurycleia loves her child and is able to
communicate with him: “The woman who gave me most trouble at first was
Odysseus’s former nurse, Eurycleia […] if there was one thing she knew -as she
kept telling me-it was babies. She had a special language for them” (Atwood
2005: 60-64). Penelope has an inferiority complex with her nurse, as a mother without
any previous experience, instead of feeling grateful, she feels jealous. It
could be said that the language Eurycleia uses with the baby can be connected
to Hélène Cixous’ écriture feminine and Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial
space as it is a language that belongs to a pre-linguistic stage that only the
mother -in this case the nurse- and the baby share.
In “x. The Chorus Line: The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll” the maids look
after Penelope’s baby singing: “nine months he sailed the wine-red seas of his
mother’s blood” (65)”. In his study, Gerardo Rodríguez focuses on maternal body
theories by Julia Kristeva and Elizabeth Grosz. According to Rodríguez: “The
poem is a reproduction of the maternal realm driven by instincts, corporeity,
irrationality, lack of language and vulnerability, thus connecting with
Kristeva’s semiotic phase” (Rodríguez, 2015: 28). Rodriguez relate the
maids’mothers in Atwood with the abjection and female jouissance. Corporeity is
enhanced to present the woman’s (maternal) body as a body of signification
(Grosz, 1990 quoted in Rodríguez, 2015: 29). Then, as a flashforward, the maids
realize that if they had known he was going to kill them in the future they may
have drowned him instead of playing with him on the beach. Here it is shown the
female ability to both create and destruct.
In “xiii. The Chorus Line: the Willy Sea Captain, a Sea Shanty” the maids
satirize Odysseus figure calling him a liar and highlighting the fact that he
became Circe’s lodger and in the end he was found naked on the beach by
Nausicaa’s maids and they were scared of him. Here, again they are using humor
as a defense mechanism.
In “xvii. The Chorus Line: Dreamboats, A Ballad” the maids find relief
when they dream because in their fantasy they do not have to clean floors
anymore nor going to bed with nobles, but when they wake up they have to let
the noble men having sex with them without any complaint. Here, it is another
example of the prostitutes of defense mechanism of Janice Raymond explained
before.
In “xxi. The Chorus Line: The Perils of Penelope, A Drama” the maids
uncover the truth about Penelope and how she had sex secretly. Eurycleia tells
Penelope that the only ones who know she has not resisted to her suitors are
the twelve maids. She recommends Penelope to send them to Hades so that they
will not confess.
“xxiv. The Chorus Line: An Anthropology Lecture” is the most important
intervention from the maids from an anthropological perspective. Here, prose
substitutes poetry to denounce that the twelve maids could have been
moon-maidens, companions of Artemis, virginal goddess of the moon. They report
that: “our rape and subsequent hanging represent the overthrow of a matrilineal
moon-cult by an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father-god-worshipping
barbarians.” (Atwood, 2005: 165). The feminist speech denounce how patriarchal
Greek society finished with the Minoan religion that worshipped a female
goddess.
In “The Trial of Odysseus, As Videotaped” Odysseus murder of the maids is
justified by his Attorney of the Defense because they were his slaves. When
Penelope is asked by the judge if she punished them, at the beginning there is
a light of sisterhood in her speech and she expresses her distress for them:
“They were like the daughters I never had. (Starts to weep)” I felt so sorry
for them!” (181), but later, she normalizes rape as it is generally done: “But
most maids got raped, sooner or later; a deplorable but common feature of
palace life” (181). And to finish, she admits that the problem for Odysseus is
that the maids were raped without permission. At that moment, readers realize
that Penelope explains the situation but do not separate from Odysseus, even
knowing that he is a rapist and a murder, instead of leaving him, she justifies
him and stand up for him. She is following the hetero reality narrative from
Janice Raymond described above.
In “We’re walking Behind you, A love Song” the maids are even more
ironical and angry as before and they address Odysseus asking him why he killed
them. “We’re the serving girls, we’re here to serve you” (193). In “xxix.
Envoi” they denounce “we had no voice” (195) and they finish with an
onomatopoeia imitating the sound of birds: “to wit to woo” (196) and they fly
as owls. Their metamorphosis shows that they are finally free, their souls fly.
Conclusion
Neoliberal feminism is
criticized in the novel. The poorest women are sacrificed for the benefit of
the rich ones. The supremacy of the power of a hero in Greek mythology allowed
him to finish with the lives of women and this is how ancient matrilineal cultures
and goddesses’ cults disappeared completely.
Atwood rewrites a myth to tell the other part of the story that was experienced by the servants, women whose lives are considered of less value than those of their mistresses. In the maids’ discourse, it is shown how the artists, through the artwork, create encounters between the artist and the world, between artists and viewers, like in an originary matrixial web (Ettinger, 2000: 331) as Bracha Ettinger calls it. The maids’ feminine contribution does not need to be understood simply as a masquerade, parody or irony, it reflects how those who may have been invisibilized, exterminated and forgotten in the past can inspire future readers.
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