43 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret AtwoodThe Penelopiad
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
Atwood opens the book by explaining its premise: while Odysseus’ story and his character are well known due to the fame of Homer’s Odyssey, the story of his wife, Penelope, is less well understood. While she is portrayed with “intelligence and constancy” (xiii) throughout the book and, more centrally, with faithfulness, Atwood advises that there are other sources of Greek mythology that paint a more nuanced portrait of Penelope’s early life and marriage. So Atwood’s Penelopiad is her story, told by Penelope herself and the twelve maids who slept with Penelope’s suitors and are hanged by Odysseus and her son Telemachus for their crimes. Atwood writes not only to explore Penelope’s actions and motives but to analyze why the maids were hanged and how it might haunt Penelope, as it haunted Atwood as a reader.
Chapter 1 Summary: “A Low Art”
This chapter is told through prose in the voice of Penelope. She establishes that she is speaking from beyond the grave; she is dead and ready to tell her tale. Penelope acknowledges that her husband “was tricky and liar, [she] just didn’t think he would play his tricks and try out his lies on [her]” (2). She bemoans gaining nothing from her constancy and faithfulness but becoming “An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with” (2). Still, as a woman, she is accustomed to keeping her peace, and though she acknowledges rumors flung around her, she also says that defending oneself makes them seem guilty. So she waited to tell the tale (the “low art” is tale-telling) until the others had “run out of air” (3).
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Rhyme”
This chapter introduces the chorus of slain maids. This chapter, unlike Chapter 1, is in the form of a poem consisting of three line stanzas, mostly made of four syllables. The maids immediately place the blame for their fate on Odysseus and Penelope, calling themselves “the ones you killed/the ones you failed” (5). They even point out Odysseus’s own hypocrisy, stating: “with every goddess, queen, and bitch/from there to here/you scratched your itch/we did much less/than what you did/you judged us bad” (5). They conclude the chapter by saying the violence “gave you pleasure” (6) while continuing to address Odysseus.
Chapter 3 Summary: “My Childhood”
Here, Penelope describes a traumatic event of her childhood. Daughter of Kind Icarius of Sparta and a Naiad (a water nymph), she was ordered by her father to be thrown into the sea. Penelope believes it was due to a misunderstood prophecy, stating that she would weave her father’s shroud (a burial shroud was wrapped around the deceased as part of Grecian funerals). Therefore, she believed that he threw her in the sea due to an “understandable desire to protect himself” (8). However, she believes the prophecy was misheard, and was referring to the shroud she would later famously weave and unweave for her father-in-law (as recounted in The Odyssey), thereby delaying her remarriage. Because Penelope was the daughter of a Naiad, she did not drown, as “Water is our element…and we’re well-connected among the fish and seabirds” (9) and was saved by a flock of ducks. After that incident, she notes that her father was overly-affectionate, likely due to guilt. She harbored a mistrust of people and learned the value of self-sufficiency.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Chorus Line: Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids”
The maids recount their childhoods, which were very different from Penelope’s. As they say, “We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen. These parents were not gods, they were not demi-gods…” (13). They speak of going to work in the palace as children, looking after noblemen and powerless to their demands. Beginning as children, they were taken by visitors who wanted to sleep with them: “our bodies had little value” (14), they say. They took what pleasures and scraps they could, as they owned nothing themselves. “We snatched what we could” (14), they conclude.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Asphodel”
Penelope gives more details on the afterlife. She describes the famous Asphodel Meadows, first described by Homer in The Odyssey as a place “where abide the souls and phantoms of those whose work is done”. In her characteristic wry tone, she bemoans the lack of variety in the fields, wishing for some color or maybe a hyacinth or two (asphodels are tall white flowers). Better conversation is had, she assures, in darker grottoes with a “minor rascal” (16). Once in a while, the dead get to see the world of the living. In the past, this was done through animal sacrifice, summoning hundreds of spirits to gain a vague prophecy (she says they “learned to keep them vague…to keep them coming back for more” [17-18]). Now, she describes, customs have changed. Their underworld was “upstaged” by a “much more spectacular establishment” (18) containing fiery pits and wailing— “a great many special effects” (19). Still, magicians and conjurers sometimes summon them to the surface. However, her cousin Helen (of Troy) is in much higher demand, and Helen revels in it: “It was like a return to the old days to have a lot of men gawping at her” (20). She gives twirls and flirtatious gazes, while Penelope is unsummoned. She describes herself as smart but not pretty and “would you want to conjure up a plain but smart wife who’d been good at weaving and had never transgressed” (21) she asks? She concludes by wondering why Helen was never punished, while so many others received such severe penalties for much lighter offenses.
Introduction-Chapter 5 Analysis
The introduction explains Atwood’s fixations and interests in writing from the point of view of Penelope. As she explains, The Odyssey and associated commentary have delved heavily into the wiliness and intelligence of Odysseus. Atwood turned to sources outside of The Odyssey to create a better-rounded portrait of Penelope, beyond the faithful wife archetype. One with more of a backstory, and more clear motivations, for as Atwood says, “the story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water” (xv). So, she focuses on two questions: 1. What led to the hanging of the maids, and 2. What was Penelope up to?
As the book opens, Penelope speaks to us from the underworld. Her tone is informal, almost chatty, but she doesn’t fail to communicate how propriety continues to shape her behavior, even so many generations later. She failed to contradict hurtful rumors because a woman that defends herself sounds guilty. She calls telling tales “a low art,” (3-4) but has also waited long enough to go against her inclinations toward decorum to tell her side of things. Here, we also see foreshadowing about how Penelope does not view her marriage as the well-matched, eternal love story it became in legend, but refers to how Odysseus also tried his tricks on her, and all it amounted to was “a stick used to beat other women with” (2), i.e. she ended up being nothing more than a paragon of faithfulness and virtue that led to the punishment of her gender, while Odysseus is endlessly lauded.
In the second chapter, we first hear from the point of view of the twelve maids. Atwood borrows from the Greek tragedy tradition of having a chorus, giving a group of characters voice to the audience or reader’s concerns. While the chorus is typically separated from the action and thereby able to present an outsider’s perspective, here, Atwood appropriates that device to give voice to a set of women who suffer unduly at the hands of Odysseus and are therefore integral to the story. This first chorus is labeled as a rope-jumping rhyme, which is typically a song that’s short, staccato, easily repeatable, and passed down verbally. As with many of the chorus sections to follow, the triviality of the structure belies the tragedy of the content. The maids begin, in fact, by accusing Odysseus of hypocrisy—while he himself was sleeping with goddesses and queens, they were merely having romances, but Odysseus “judged [them] bad” (5) and they accuse him of even taking pleasure in their fear and pain.
So, right as the book opens, the narrators tell the reader outright that Odysseus is not the stuff of legend but a vengeful and hypocritical trickster. Atwood is inserting a feminist perspective to the story—highlighting just how unbalanced the expectations of men and women were in this tale. While Odysseus sleeps around on his journey home without consequence, the maids are slaughtered for an even lower sin (for they are not married or committed to another). And even if a woman embodies a perfect wife, she is still laughed at, betrayed by her husband, and amounts to nothing more than an unreachable example, the anti-feminist paragon used to punish others.
In chapter 3, as Penelope discusses her childhood, she explains her reserve and distrust of people’s motives due to her father’s attempt to kill her but still gives him the benefit of the doubt, saying that she would understand if it had been done for self-preservation. Still, she learns to fend for herself after her father’s betrayal, prefiguring her forced self-sufficiency after her husband leaves for all those years.
In Chapter 4, the maids present a counter-example: the childhood of a young, poor woman. They say explicitly “our bodies had little value” (14), telling of how they were powerless against important men, and alone in their misery. They had no parents, no fortune, no wedding feast in their future. So instead of becoming reserved, they become snide and polished. They steal what pleasures they can in leftover wine and trysts with young men. Their lives hold such little value that their only pleasure is in snatching the cast-offs from the noblemen.
In Chapter 5, as Penelope further explains the underworld, we see the first hints of her jealousy toward Helen. Helen, who is conjured and summoned by occultists, and revels in the attention. And, more importantly, Helen who was never punished. Like Odysseus versus the maids, Helen suffers no torment in life or the underworld for her sins. Though Penelope says that she doesn’t mind, it is clear that Penelope feels a lack of justice has occurred and that Helen had, and in legend continues to have, an outsize reward for simply being beautiful.
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