| dc.description.abstract | Recently, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of rewritings of Greek myths by and from the perspective of women. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is one of these books. It is a mythical retelling of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus’ wife Penelope tells her side of the story. In her story, these is an interesting emphasis on relational accountability, a concept used in feminist scholarship as a condition for the production of good (which means partial and situated) theory.
Through a feminist poststructuralist discourse analysis, I examine Penelope’s enactments of relational accountability in the context of several gendered discourses that strongly shape her life. In her relationships with other characters, her belonging is dictated by compulsory heterosexuality, which makes her prioritise her belonging with men over belonging with women. In her relationship with the Odyssey, Penelope questions the inconsistent treatment of her cleverness in the Odyssey, thus revealing a gendered discourse that only allows Penelope’s cleverness to celebrate powerful men. In her relationship with the audience, Penelope tries to be accountable for her role in the death of her maids through telling her story to the audience, because she could not and still cannot belong with them directly. These different discourses interact to achieve the common goal of keeping women from belonging with other women and hailing them into an identity that simply exists to celebrate powerful men, but Penelope is not only shaped by their power: she resists it too.
In the context of the mythical retelling, Penelope’s dynamic position realises myth’s potential for open-endedness and opens up the story of the Odyssey for new meanings. Through enacting relational accountability in her individual life story, Penelope is able to transform the story that has dominated cultural memory for a long time. This analysis shows why it is important to take stories seriously as sources of knowledge: they can expose obscured power relations and the discourses that they hold in place. In a time where we attempt to value women’s perspectives and incorporate them into our structures and cultural memories, we need stories and specifically mythical retellings as a site where we can challenge what we know and come to understand the way in which we make sense of the world. | |
