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:
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can’t be separated.”
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“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)