“We had no voice”: Class Inequality Through Écriture Femenine in Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/impossibilia.272024.29748Keywords:
Margaret Atwood, Marxist feminism, Écriture Feminine, Matrixial Subjectivity, Rewriting, MythAbstract
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.
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