The Penelopiad - Influences

Influences

myths cannot really be translated with any accuracy from their native soil — from their own place and time. We will never know exactly what they meant to their ancient audiences.

Margaret Atwood, "The Myths Series and Me" in Publishers Weekly.

Atwood's use of myths follows archetypal literary criticism and specifically the work of Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism. According to this literary theory, contemporary works are not independent but are part of an underlying pattern that re-invents and adapts a finite number of timeless concepts and structures of meaning. In The Penelopiad, Atwood re-writes archetypes of female passivity and victimisation while using contemporary ideas of justice and a variety of genres.

The edition of the Odyssey that Atwood read was the E. V. Rieu and D. C. H. Rieu's translation. For research she consulted Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths. Graves, an adherent to Samuel Butler's theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman, also wrote The White Goddess which formed the basis of the Maid's anthropology lecture.

Atwood had previously written using themes and characters from ancient Greek myths. She wrote a short story in Ovid Metamorphosed called The Elysium Lifestyle Mansions re-telling a myth with Apollo and the immortal prophet the Sibyl from the perspective of the latter living in the modern age. Her 1993 novel The Robber Bride roughly parallels the Iliad but is set in Toronto. In that novel the characters Tony and Zenia share the same animosity and competition as Penelope and Helen in The Penelopiad. Her poem "Circe: Mud Poems", published in 1976, casts doubt on Penelope's honourable image:

She’s up to something, she’s weaving

histories, they are never right,

she has to do them over,

she is weaving her version

Atwood published "Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing" in her 1996 collection Morning in the Burned House in which Helen appears in a contemporary setting as an erotic dancer and justifies her exploitation as men fantasize over her:

You think I’m not a goddess?

Try me.

This is a torch song.

Touch me and you’ll burn.