The Maids in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: Transgenerational Haunting

Abd Elsalam, Dina

doi:10.21608/tjhss.2023.217613.1196

The Maids in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad: Transgenerational Haunting

Document Type : Original papers

Author

Dina Abd Elsalam

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria University, Egypt.

10.21608/tjhss.2023.217613.1196

Abstract

Margaret Atwood confesses in her “Introduction” to The Penelopiad that she has always been haunted by the maids who were hanged in The Odyssey upon the orders of Odysseus. In Homer’s epic, they were given no voice, and their side of the story was silenced. In The Penelopiad, which is Atwood’s rewrite of The Odyssey, Penelope becomes the heroine of the work and the twelve maids play the role of the chorus. Both Penelope and the maids relate their stories from the underworld, and haunt the text as ghosts who have come back to vent. Though Penelope is the main narrator, the maids, who represent the chorus, keep intervening in the action. Their intervention counterbalances the narrative and forces Penelope to reveal some secrets which she would have preferred to conceal, had they been absent. Based on the work of Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Jacques Derrida regarding transgenerational haunting, the paper will focus on the narrative of the maids in The Penelopiad, as it is the one that has always haunted Atwood. Not only are the stories of the maids subversive in content, but they are equally subversive in form. In a postmodern streak, Atwood parodies the epic form, and juxtaposes different styles and genres to disrupt the grand narrative of Odysseus, and the epic form through which it was delivered. In so doing, the narrative of the maids is allowed to surface and to present itself in defiance of established and canonized structures.

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