From The Penelopiad (2006) by Margaret Atwood  

A Low Art

The explicit conflict of this prose is Penelope’s exasperation towards Odysseus “getting away with everything” while she was alive. It is a monologue of her reflection and regrets towards not letting herself discover Odysseus’ true self—“his slipperiness, his wiliness, his foxiness”—due to the constraints of her role in the family as a woman. It is about her regret of “turning a blind eye”. However, Margaret Atwood is also implying something more than just Penelope’s distress; she is writing to speak out about the conventional role of default submission to their husband that several women are trapped in through Penelope’s monologue.

Atwood’s Penelope speaks with direct language and an impassive tone. This modernised voice of Penelope allows a straightforward monologue that speaks about the frustration of women who have their individual identity stolen by their husbands. She asserts this directness in the first line where she gets straight to the point: “Now that I’m dead I know everything”. After a whole life living as ‘Penelope, wife of Odysseus’, Penelope after death is speaking as ‘Penelope’. Atwood shows clearly that Penelope was the spitting image of a submissive wife: even with her suspicions of her husband, she “turned a blind eye”, or “kept (her) mouth shut”. Only after death, when she sees her situation from an outside view, is she finally able to see herself as her own individual, not one belonging to her husband. She makes this clear with the line “I’ll spin a thread of my own”. This is one of the many examples of direct references to Greek mythology Atwood uses throughout this prose—the thread of fate, which determined a mortal’s fate, had decided Penelope’s fate as a “faithful” wife, submissive and powerless as she waits twenty years until her husband’s fateful return. The line itself is in fact quite powerful. While it may be a reference to Greek mythology, the symbolism of a spinning a ‘thread of fate’ is universal, and to “spin a thread of my own” hints at women to essentially ‘get a hold over your own life’. The interesting part about this line and even the general voice of assertion throughout the prose is that it all occurs after Penelope’s death. She shows clear frustration of her powerless self (“I want to scream in your ears—yes, yours!), and appears to be sending some message about avoiding the role of submissiveness. It is not clear whether “your ears” implies she is speaking to her former self out of frustration or is giving genuine advice to any woman. She says “Don’t follow my example”, which could be a hint that she is addressing a wider audience. Is it plausible that she is speaking to both, and that this prose shows her regretful monologue that is full of raw emotion and simultaneously an inspirational speech that can be directed toward readers. Through this prose, Atwood derives from a traditional poem a modern criticism of the portrayal of one of the female characters who could only speak out after death when she had no disapproval from society and her husband to be afraid of.