Summary
Chapter 1—"A Low Art"
"A Low Art" opens with Penelope explaining her existence after death. She is in the Underworld, where souls go when they die, according to Greek mythology. Penelope explains that she has learned more than she wishes to know in the Underworld. She says that everyone who arrives in the Underworld brings with them a sack with words they have spoken, words they have heard, and words that have been said about them during their life. Penelope's sack mostly concerns her husband, Odysseus. He famously went on a decades-long journey following the Trojan war, which is recorded in the Odyssey. Penelope says that Odysseus is "plausible," which is why it was so easy for everyone to assume that his version of events is true. Penelope reveals that she had doubts about Odysseus's trustworthiness, but she kept them to herself in order to play the role of the good wife. Now that many years have passed, it's her turn to tell her own version of events.
Chapter 2—"The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Rhyme"
"A Rope-Jumping Rhyme" is a poem. The speakers are 12 young maids, who Penelope will meet later in the novel. The 12 maids are killed by Odysseus and Telemachus (Penelope and Odysseus's son) at the end of the novel once Odysseus returns home. Throughout the Penelopiad, the maids are speaking from the Underworld after they have died. The maids introduce themselves in this poem: "we are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed" (5).
Chapter 3—"My Childhood"
In this chapter, Penelope explains her background. Her father was King Icarius of Sparta and her mother was a Naiad (in Greek mythology, a spirit that lived in bodies of freshwater). Penelope says that her father tried to have her killed when she was little, perhaps because he heard a false oracle say that she would weave his shroud (which would be placed upon him at the time of his death). As part of her father's plot, Penelope was thrown into the sea. The fact that Penelope is half-Naiad saved her, as the children of Naiads are "well connected among the fish and seabirds" (9). A flock of ducks rescued Penelope and brought her to shore. Her father had no choice but to raise her in the palace. Ever since then, Penelope has felt wary of her father. She also has had little relationship with her mother, who is flighty and has a short attention span. As a result, Penelope grows up learning how to take care of herself.
Chapter 4—"The Chorus Line: Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids"
In "Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids," the 12 maids lament their difficult lives. They explain, "[we] were set to work in the palace, as children; we drudged from dawn to dusk, as children. If we wept, no one dried our tears. If we slept, we were kicked awake" (13). The maids say that they were seen as "dirty" and were forced to sleep with palace visitors, even when they were children. They grew up learning how to disguise their feelings and become "polished and evasive" as a mode of survival (14). They tried to make as much happiness for themselves as they could.
Chapter 5—"Asphodel"
Penelope describes the Underworld: it is dark, and there are mostly just fields of asphodel. There are darker levels where seedier individuals congregate, but Penelope rarely goes there because the "truly villainous" are punished there (16). Penelope says that sometimes there are opportunities to see how the outside world is advancing through communication with mediums and other means. Penelope says that she rarely gets summoned even though she is very famous. She remarks that her cousin Helen is in much demand due to her beauty and fame. Penelope closes the chapter by wondering why Helen was never punished for the events of the Trojan war. (As recounted in the Iliad, Helen left her husband, Menelaus, for Paris, causing a deadly war).
Chapter 6—"My Marriage"
Penelope says in "My Marriage" that her marriage was arranged by "devious" means (23). She explains that when she was alive, only the most important people got married. Otherwise, people were just sleeping with each other—often, gods also entered into the mix. Marriages were intended for having children, so that property and wealth could be passed on. Sons were seen as more valuable, because they could help protect the family's property. Girls were married off quickly so that they could give birth to sons. In Sparta, where Penelope is from, the custom is for the man to stay in the wife's kingdom so that he can contribute to the making of male offspring for the family. They also hold competitions to see who should marry a particular young woman, with the winner getting the bride. In Sparta, the competition is a race. Penelope says that she peeked out of the window of her room at all of the competitors on the day of her wedding. She knows that none of the men actually want to marry her; they just want the riches that she comes with. From her bedroom, Penelope sees Odysseus. He is from Ithaca and of a lower class than most of the other suitors. Penelope's maids make jokes about Odysseus's sexual prowess based on the shortness of his legs. Helen appears and teases Penelope, saying that Odysseus would be a good match because she also has short legs. Penelope starts to cry and is taken to bed. She sleeps through the race itself, which Odysseus wins. Penelope later learns that he cheated by giving the other contestants a drug that slowed them down. Penelope and Odysseus marry.
Chapter 7—"The Scar"
Penelope recounts the wedding feast, where there were heaps of food and plenty of wine. The wine was mixed too strong, and King Icarius gets too drunk. Odysseus does not get drunk, and Penelope is too nervous to eat a thing. Odysseus does not look at her, however, and is instead staring at Helen like every other man in the room. Penelope's mother attends the wedding and gives Penelope advice, telling her to be like water: "Remember that you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does" (43). After the feast, the wedding party proceeds to the wedding chamber, where Odysseus and Penelope are meant to have sex for the first time. Odysseus tells Penelope not to be afraid and tells her to scream loudly as if they were having intercourse to get the party to leave them alone. That night, Odysseus tells Penelope how he got a long scar on his leg: he got it while boar hunting with his crafty grandfather Autolycus. Penelope then tells Odysseus how she was almost drowned and got rescued by ducks. By the next morning, Penelope and Odysseus are friends. Soon after, Odysseus announces that he wants to take Penelope with him to Ithaca. King Icarius is annoyed at this request, but Penelope and Odysseus leave nonetheless. King Icarius runs after Odysseus and Penelope's cart as they depart.
Chapter 8—"The Chorus Line: If I Was a Princess, A Popular Tune"
"If I was a Princess, A Popular Tune," are lyrics of a song performed by the 12 maids, accompanied by "a Fiddle, an Accordion, and a Penny Whistle" (51). In the song, the maids say that they would be "beautiful, happy, and free" if they were princesses (51). However, they are destined for a different life: "Hard work is my destiny, death is my fate!" (52).
Analysis
If you have read Homer's The Odyssey, you may remember the character of Penelope, Odysseus's patient and devoted wife. In Homer's story, Penelope faithfully waits for Odysseus to return from his 20-year journey. When suitors try to pressure her to remarry, after Odysseus is assumed to have died, Penelope comes up with a scheme to hold them at bay. She announces that she is weaving a shroud for her father-in-law and will choose a suitor once it is finished. However, every night, she and her maids take apart the weaving, so that the work is prolonged until Odysseus finally comes home. In Atwood's Penelopiad, Penelope tells her version of the events, from the land of the dead.
According to Greek myth, dead souls go to the Underworld (also called Hades), where they exist as shades with no bodies. Penelope describes what existence is like here by emphasizing the parts of her body that she no longer has: "Since being dead—since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness, I've learned some things I would rather not know" (1). Though the souls in the underworld no longer have bodies, they can still communicate with each other to a certain extent. In fact, they arrive to the Underworld "with a sack" containing all the "words you've spoken, words you've heard, words that have been said about you" (2). Penelope uses these words to find the correct version of events of her life, and of Odysseus's journeys.
The "official version"—as told in the Odyssey, and as determined by Odysseus's own version of his journeys—is not, Penelope says, the real truth. In fact, Odysseus's version of events, Penelope argues, can't be fully trusted: "[Odysseus] was always so plausible. Many people believed that his version of events was the true one, give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few one-eyed monsters. Even I believed him, from time to time" (2). Through it all, Penelope emphasizes that even though she has been praised for centuries for her patience and constancy, she suffered greatly. She warns the reader, "Don't follow my example" (2). In the end, once Odysseus's version of events became famous, Penelope's role was minimized. She was turned into a symbol of herself, used to keep women in their rightful place of the obedient wife. Penelope laments, "and what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with" (2).
Penelope declares that it's her "turn to do a little story-making" (3). In doing so, she casts doubt on many stories that we have taken as set-in-stone for centuries. For example, it is widely known that Penelope's cousin, Helen, is the daughter of Zeus. She was conceived when Zeus raped Helen's mother, Leda, who was hiding in the form of a swan. Helen was born out of an egg. However, Penelope suggests that this is all a lie meant to make Helen seem more otherworldly and attractive: "She was quite stuck up about it, was Helen. I wonder how many of us really believed that swan-rape concoction?" (20). In her introduction to Penelopiad, Atwood argues her case for taking liberties with these stories. She notes that "Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story." In fact, because these stories were originally told orally rather than written down, they were prone to mutations: "Mythic material was originally oral, and also local—a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another." Atwood also says that she has "drawn on material other than The Odyssey" to find information about Penelope (xiv). Ultimately, Atwood argues, "the story as told in The Odyssey doesn't hold water: there are too many inconsistencies" (xv). That's where The Penelopiad's Penelope comes in: it is her turn to set the record straight.
In these opening chapters of the novel, you might have felt that the Penelope from The Penelopiad is different from the one in The Odyssey. In The Odyssey Penelope was endowed with a few certain traits: faithfulness, cleverness, constancy, and discretion. In this novel, Penelope shows herself to have all of those qualities but to also be resourceful, ironic, funny, and brave. Penelope notes that her famous intelligence was a double-edged sword. Because Penelope is a woman, her intelligence can also be a threat to the men in her life. She notes, "I was clever, everyone said so—in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging—but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him" (29). In the end, Penelope is seen as valuable in Ancient Greek society not because of her cleverness or other virtues. It is because she is rich, and marrying her will also give her husband status and riches. Penelope reiterates this idea on her wedding day: "I know it isn't me they're after, not Penelope the Duck. It's only what comes with me—the royal connection, the pile of glittering junk" (29). This kind of attitude dehumanizes Penelope, as she is passed off on her wedding day as if she were an object rather than a human: "And so I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat. A package of meat in a wrapping of gold, mind you" (39).
Atwood weaves a chorus of 12 maids between Penelope's narrations. These maids do not appear as characters until later in the novel; however, their voices haunt the novel from the very beginning. They introduce themselves: "we are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed" (5). The maids suggest that they have been harmed physically and sexually by the nobles in the castle. They write, "We were told we were dirty. We were dirty. Dirt was our concern, dirt was our business, dirt was our specialty, dirt was our fault. We were the dirty girls. If our owners or the sons of our owners of a visiting nobleman wanted to sleep with us, we could not refuse" (13-14). The maids have a similar sardonic and sarcastic tone as Penelope throughout the novel. Like Penelope, they are given the chance to tell their story beyond the grave.
