“Close as a Kiss, Close as Your Own Skin”: Exploring the Effects of the Shadow-Chorus of Murdered Maids in Atwood’s Penelopiad

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen female writers revisit ancient stories and characters with increasing frequency. Linda Hutcheon (2013) has argued for the value of adaptation, and these writers certainly engage with classical texts in ways that revise and expand upon the gendered mythological landscape that seems indelibly woven into the fabric of the narratives which have shaped and shadowed Western culture. Ostriker has suggested that “the need for myth of some sort may be ineradicable” (1982, 71), that myth has markedly shaped modern Western culture, and that perhaps transforming these organising and defining myths can transform culture, too. One such adaptation aimed at transforming an existing myth is Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005), which initially seems to engage in classic feminist revisionist mythology by resituating the conventionally othered woman, Penelope, as the main character and narrator of her own story. Yet Penelope’s confessional narration is intermingled with genre-bending interjections by the 12 maids of her household, whose deaths Odysseus eventually orders and who are intent on telling a story of their own. This chorus line of murdered maids undermines Penelope’s polished autobiographical tale and reminds us that, for every story that is voiced, there are countless stories that remain untold, and thus that every narrative is haunted by the shadow narratives that it does not address. In this way, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad engages in complex revisionist mythmaking, which not only gives a voice to previously neglected female characters, but also foregrounds the fraught negotiations inherent in the reshaping of this mythological landscape.