Style
Judge (leafing through book: The Odyssey): It's written here, in this book — a book we must needs consult, as it is the main authority on the subject it says right here — let me see — in Book 22, that the maids were raped. The Suitors raped them. Your client knew all that — he is quoted as having said these things himself. However, your client's times were not our times. Standards of behaviour were different then. It would be unfortunate if this regrettable but minor incident were allowed to stand as a blot on an otherwise exceedingly distinguished career. Also, I do not wish to be guilty of an anachronism. Therefore, I must dismiss the case.
A court trial acted out by the maids, The Penelopiad, pp. 179–180, 182.The novella is divided into 29 chapters with introduction, notes, and acknowledgments sections. Structured similarly to a classical Greek drama, the storytelling alternates between Penelope's narrative and the choral commentary of the twelve maids. Penelope narrates 18 chapters with the Chorus contributing 11 chapters dispersed throughout the book. The Chorus uses a new narrative style in each of their chapters, beginning with a jump-rope rhyme and ending in a 17-line iambic dimeter poem. Other narrative styles used by the Chorus include a lament, a folk song, an idyll, a sea shanty, a ballad, a drama, an anthropology lecture, a court trial, and a love song.
Penelope’s story uses simple and deliberately naive prose. The tone is described as casual, wandering, and street-wise with Atwood’s dry humour and characteristic bittersweet and melancholic feminist voice. The book uses the first-person narrative, though Penelope sometimes addresses the reader through the second person pronoun. One reviewer noted that Penelope is portrayed as "an intelligent woman who knows better than to exhibit her intelligence". Because she contrasts past events as they occurred from her perspective with the elaborations of Odysseus and with what is recorded in myths today, she is described as a metafictional narrator.
Read more about this topic: The Penelopiad
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“I am so tired of taking to others
translating my life for the deaf, the blind,
the “I really want to know what your life is like without giving up any of my privileges
to live it” white women
the “I want to live my white life with Third World women’s style and keep my skin
class privileges” dykes”
—Lorraine Bethel, African American lesbian feminist poet. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” Lines 49-54 (1979)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)