User:Maclean25/sandbox

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Penelopiad
Book cover of the first U.K. edition
Author	Margaret Atwood
Country	Canada
Language	English
Series	Canongate Myth Series
Genre(s)	Parallel novel
Publisher	Knopf Canada
Publication date	October 11, 2005
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	216 pp
ISBN	ISBN 067697418X

The Penelopiad is a 2005 parallel novel by Margaret Atwood, and one of the first books to be published in the Canongate Myth Series, a book series in which ancient myths are rewritten by contemporary authors. The story takes an alternative view of the story of Odysseus by focusing on Odysseus's wife, Penelope, and her twelve hanged maids. Most of the novel follows Penelope's struggle when Odysseus takes twenty years to return from Troy.

Atwood uses material from The Odyssey, along with present-day feminist voices, to spin a yarn about how Penelope waited twenty years for Odysseus to return, giving clues as to what she did to evade the suitors: did she collude with the maids to evade them, or did she herself fall for the suitors, betray Odysseus, and, when he returned, get the maids killed to save herself?

The novel, like Greek drama, uses a chorus: the twelve maids, sometimes playing Odysseus's sailors; sometimes characters in a 21st-century trial of Odysseus, for killing the suitors and them; mostly as themselves, minor characters in a story controlled by more important people.

Contents 1 Background 2 Plot 3 Style 4 Major themes 4.1 Story-telling 4.2 Feminism and double standards 4.3 Narrative justice 5 Influences 6 Publication 7 Reception 8 Theatrical adaptation 9 References 10 External links

[edit] Background

Publisher Jamie Byng of Canongate Books solicited author Margaret Atwood to write a novella re-telling a classic myth. Byng explained it would be published simultaneously in several languages as part of an international project. Atwood agreed to participate, believing she was helping a rising young publisher.^[1] From her home in Toronto, Atwood made attempts at writing the Norse creation myth and a Native American story but struggled.^[2] After speaking with her British literary agent about canceling her contract, Atwood began thinking about the Odyssey.^[1] She had first read it as a teenager and remembered finding the imagery of Penelope’s 12 maids being hanged in the denouement disturbing. Atwood believed she that the roles of Penelope and her maids during Odysseus' absence had been a largely neglected scholarly topic and that she could use help address it with this project.^[2]

[edit] Plot

[edit] Style

The novella is divided into 29 chapters with Introduction, Notes and Acknowledgements sections. The storytelling alternates between Penelope’s narrative and the choral commentary of the 12 maids. It is structured similar to a classical Greek drama.^[3] Penelope narrates 18 chapters with the Chorus using 11 chapters dispersed throughout the book to relate their story. The Chorus uses a new narrative style in each of their chapters, beginning with a jump-rope rhyme and ending in a 17-line iambic dimeter poem. Other narrative styles used by the Chorus include a lament, a folk song, an idyll, a sea shanty, a ballad, a drama, an anthropology lecture, a court trial, and a love song.

Penelope’s story uses simple and deliberately naive prose.^[4] Because she contrasts past events as they occurred from her perspective with the elaborations of Odysseus and with what is recorded in myths today, she is described as a metafictional narrator.^[5] The book uses the first-person narrative, though Penelope sometimes addresses the reader through the second person pronoun.^[6] The tone is described as "street-wise" by one reviewer.^[7] Atwood’s characteristic bittersweet and melancholic feminist voice^[7] with dry humour portray Penelope as "an intelligent woman who knows better than to exhibit her intelligence".^[8]

[edit] Major themes

[edit] Story-telling

The novella illustrates the consequences that stories from different points of view can have. The stories told in the Odyssey by Nestor and Menelaus to Telemachus, and Odysseus to a Scherian court make Odysseus into a hero as he fights monsters and seduces goddesses. Penelope is portrayed by this story as loyal, patient, and the ideal wife. The maids are portrayed as traitors who consort with the suitors. The consequence is that Odysseus will become a legend, Penelope will survive, and the maids will die. The story told by Penelope in The Penelopiad portrays Odysseus as a liar who drunkenly fights a one-eyed bartender then boasts it was a giant cannibalistic Cyclops. Penelope rejects the role as a perfect wife by warning others: "don’t follow my example" and denies the myths about her sleeping with the suitor Amphinomus or sleeping with all the suitors resulting in the birth of Pan. The maids portray themselves as innocent victims, used by Penelope to spy on the suitors, raped and abused by the suitors, and then murdered by Odysseus and Telemachus. Atwood shows the truth to occupy a third position between the myths and the biased points of view.^[9]

[edit] Feminism and double standards

The novel has been called "vintage Atwood-feminist"^[7] but Atwood disagrees saying "I wouldn't even call it feminist. Every time you write something from the point of view of a woman, people say that it's feminist"^[10] The story does present some feminist reassessments of the Odyssey, like Penelope recognizing Odysseus while disguised and that the geese slaughtered by the eagle in Penelope's dream in Book XIX were her maids and not the suitors.^[11] In the maid's lecture on anthropology, Atwood satirizes feminist criticism. The lecture states that the rape and execution of the maids by men represent the overthrow of the matriarchal society in favor of a patriarchal and concludes with lines from Levi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship: "Consider us pure symbol. We're no more real than money."^[11]

A major theme throughout is exposing double standards. Odysseus' adultery with Circe is condoned but the maid’s relations with the suitors are deserving of death. The double standard apply to Penelope and the maid's as Penelope excuses her involvement in getting the maids killed even though, as Atwood reveals, Penelope enlisted the maids to spy on the suitors and even encouraged them to continue after some were raped. At the same time Penelope condemns Helen for her involvement in getting men killed at Troy.^[11]

[edit] Narrative justice

Penelope’s story is an attempt at narrative justice to retribute Helen for her erroreously idealized image in the Odyssey^[6] as the archetypal female.^[9] Penelope acts like a judicial arbiter, a position she held in Ithaca as the head of state and, during Odysseus’ absence, as head of the household. The ancient form of justice and punishment, which was swift and simple due to the lack of courts, prisons, and currency, is tempered by more modern concepts of balanced distributions of social benefits and burdens. Penelope’s chosen form of punishment for Helen is to correct the historical records with her own bias by portraying her as vain and superficial,^[5] as someone who measures her worth by the number of men who died fighting for her.^[6]

The maids also deliver their version of narrative justice on Odysseus and Telemachus who ordered their execution and Penelope who was complicit in their killing. The maids do not have the same sanctioned voice as Penelope and are relegated to unauthoritative genres, though their persistence eventually lead to more valued cultural forms. Their testimony, contrasted with Penelope’s excuses while condemning Helen, demonstrate the vulnerability of judicious processes to not act upon the whole truth. When compared with the historical record, dominated by the stories in the Odyssey, the conclusion, as one academic states, is that the concepts of justice and penalties are established by "who has the power to say who is punished, whose ideas count" and that "justice is underwritten by social inequalities and inequitable power dynamics".^[6]

[edit] Influences

Atwood's use of myths follows archetypal literary criticism and specifically the work of Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism. According to this literary theory contemporary works are not independent but are part of an underlying pattern that re-invents a finite number of timeless concepts and structures of meaning. In The Penelopiad Atwood re-writes archetypes of female passivity and victimisation while using a variety of genres and contemporary ideas of justice.^[6]

The edition of the Odyssey that Atwood read was the E. V. Rieu and D. C. H. Rieu's translation. For research she consulted Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths.^[12] Graves, an adherent to Samuel Butler's theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman, also wrote The White Goddess which formed the basis of the Maid's anthropology lecture.^[13][14]

Atwood had previously written using themes and characters from the Ancient Greek myths. She wrote a short story in Ovid Metamorphosed re-telling the story of Apollo and the immortal prophet Sibyl from Sibyl's perspective who is living in the modern age.^[7] Her 1993 novel The Robber Bride roughly parallels the Iliad but set in Toronto during World War II. In that novel the characters Tony and Zenia share the same animosity and competition as Penelope and Helen in The Penelopiad.^[11] In her 1976 collection of poetry Selected Poems she published "Circe: Mud Poems" in which she casts doubt on Penelope's honorable image: "She’s up to something, she’s weaving Histories, they are never right,/She has to do them over,/She is weaving her version,/...". Atwood published "Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing" in her 1996 collection Morning in the Burned House in which Helen appears in a contemporary setting and reacts to men fantasizing over her.^[11]

[edit] Publication

The hardcover version of The Penelopiad was published on 21 October 2005 as part of the launch of the Canongate Myth Series, which also included A History of Myth by Karen Armstrong and a third title chosen by each publisher (most chose Weight by Jeanette Winterson).^[15] The Penelopiad was translated into 28 languages and released simultaneously around the world by 33 publishers,^[16] including Canongate Books in the UK, Knopf in Canada, Grove/Atlantic Inc. in the US, and Text Publishing in Australia and New Zealand. The French translation was published in Canada by Éditions du Boréal and in France by Groupe Flammarion.^[17] The trade paperback was released in 2006. Laural Merlington narrated the 3-hour unabridged audiobook which was published by Brilliance Audio and released along side the hardcover. Merlington's narration was positively received, though sometimes upstaged by the unnamed actresses voicing the maids.^[18]

[edit] Reception

On best seller lists in the Canadian market, the novel peaked at #1 in MacLean's and #2 in The Globe and Mail in the hardcover fiction category. In the American market the book did not place on the New York Times Best Seller list but was listed as an "Editors' Choice".^[19] The book was nominated for the 2006 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature and long-listed for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.^[20][21] The book's French translation was nominated at the 2006 Governor General's Literary Awards for best English to French translation.^[22]

Some reviewers like Christopher Tayler and David Flusfeder, both writing for The Daily Telegraph, praised the book as "enjoyable, [and] intelligent"^[23] with "Atwood at her finest".^[24] Robert Wiersema also calls this "Atwood at her finest" and adds that the book shows Atwood as "fierce and ambitious, clever and thoughtful".^[25] The review in the National Post calls the book "a brilliant tour de force".^[26] Specifically singled out as being good are the book's wit, rhythm, structure, and story.^[24][25][27] Mary Beard found the book to be "brilliant" except for the chapter entitled "An Anthropology Lecture" which she called "complete rubbish".^[14][13] Others criticized the book as being "merely a riff on a better story that comes dangerously close to being a spoof"^[28] and saying it "does not fare well [as a] colloquial feminist retelling".^[29] Specifically, the scenes with the chorus of maidservants are said to be "mere outlines of characters"^[28] with Elizabeth Hand writing in The Washington Post that they have "the air of a failed Monty Python sketch".^[16] In the journal English Studies, Odin Dekkers and L. R. Leavis call the book "a piece of deliberate self-indulgence" and compare it to "Wendy Cope’s limericks on The Waste Land" and say that it reads like an "over-the-top W. S. Gilbert".^[30]

[edit] Theatrical adaptation

Following a successful dramatic reading directed by Phyllida Lloyd at St James's Church, Piccadilly on October 26, 2005, Atwood finished a draft theatrical script.^[31] The Canadian National Arts Centre and the British Royal Shakespeare Company expressed interest and both agreed to co-produce. Funding was raised mostly from 9 Canadian women, dubbed the "Penelope Circle", who each donated CAD$50,000 to the National Arts Centre.^[32][33] An all-female cast was selected consisting of 7 Canadian and 6 British actors, with Josette Bushell-Mingo directing and Veronica Tennant as the choreographer.^[3] For music a trio, consisting of percussions, keyboard, and cello, were positioned above the stage. They assembled in Stratford-upon-Avon and rehearsed in June and July 2007.^[34] The 100-minute play was staged at the Swan Theatre between July 27 and August 18 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa between September 17 and October 6. Atwood’s script gave little stage direction allowing Bushell-Mingo to develop the action. Critics in both countries lauded Penny Downie’s performance as Penelope, but found the play had too much narration of story rather than dramatization.^[35][36] Adjustments made between productions resulted in the Canadian performance having more emotional depth that was found lacking in Bushell-Mingo’s direction of the 12 maids.^[37][38]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Canongate's page on The Penelopiad