Formal Experiments in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Abstract

This essay examines two formal features of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: the use of the underworld as the novel’s setting, and the use of time and character in the first and last chapters of the novel. It explores how Atwood competes with Homer by recording a multi-tonal female voice that antagonizes the male voice of the Odyssey, turning its products into falsifiable legends. The women’s accounts in The Penelopiad are also targets of this rhetoric because they present different and at times mutually exclusive versions of events from the Odyssey. The novel’s polemical stance has interesting epistemological ramifications as it portrays a kaleidoscope where men and women vie with one another for the possession of a partial and always unverifiable “truth.”