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Though I’ve never actually read either Homer’s The Iliad or The Odyssey, I am familiar with the story, and over the course of this class, it can be said that I am considerably more familiar with the story, as well as the major events and characters that inhabit the supposedly blind, possibly fictional poet’s world of Greek antiquity. Now, obviously, Homer himself never actually wrote the story, he transposed it from oral storytellers, or so the story goes, but in either case, the main viewpoint in either story is always that of Agamemnon, Odysseus, Paris, Hector, Achilles, and the vast numbers of male characters as they assert their masculine prowess against each other, cycloptic sons of gods, sea monsters, waves upon waves of armies, and all sorts of other villains and foes, fodder for the hero’s cunning and machismo. Behind these tales are the women; Circe, the witch who turns Odysseus’ men into pigs; Helen, whose beauty drives men to lust for war; and Penelope, Odysseus’ doting, forever fateful wife who, even after decades of absence, never turns from her long lost husband. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, as well as a few of the other books we’ve read this semester, seek to remedy that feminine silence within the stories of classical Greek antiquity by filling out, in the case of this novel, the cage of threatened violence that was ancient life on the Greek peninsula, and in doing so, shines a light on the cage of threatened violence in modern times. Atwood, no stranger to lending a feminist voice that echoes through history is probably most well-known for her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which creates a dystopia in fundamentalist patriarchy. That book, which was released in 1985 was dedicated to a now-infamous accused witch that Atwood believed to be an ancestor of hers. Mary Webster, a resident of Massachusetts faced years of abuse and accusations before she was eventually murdered for apparently “murdering” a prominent member of her community with “witchcraft.” In truth, she was an outspoken woman who was regularly beaten by fellow citizens who claimed she had placed a spell on their animals that forbade them from passing by her house. In the end, although she was found not guilty of witchcraft, she was hanged from a tree, the fact that she didn’t die right away serving as “proof” of her being a witch. Atwood writes in her poem about Webster: “When they came to harvest my corpse / (open your mouth, close your eyes) / cut my body from the rope, / surprise, surprise: / I was still alive. /Tough luck, folks, / I know the law: / you can’t execute me twice / for the same thing. How nice. / I fell to the clover, breathed it in, / and bared my teeth at them / in a filthy grin. / You can imagine how that went over. / Now I only need to look / out at them through my sky‐blue eyes. / They see their own ill will / staring them in the forehead / and turn tail / Before, I was not a witch. / But now I am one.” Webster was a victim of time and circumstance. She lived in a zealously religious Puritan society that was heavily patriarchal. Penelope, the hero of Atwood’s Penelopiad is, likewise, the victim of time and circumstance. Warring forever with the visage of her cousin Helen’s beauty, and with her husband’s nurse Eurycleia, Penelope lives in a world of constant danger, where even her devious and clever husband serves as a threat. Near the end of the story, as Odysseus speaks to her disguised as a beggar she has him interpret a dream in which her beloved geese are killed by an eagle with a crooked beak. Odysseus, unaware that Penelope knows he’s in disguise, interprets the dream as his triumphant return, in which he kills the suitors who’ve taken up residence in his home, ignoring the fact that Penelope refers to the geese as “beloved”, something she certainly doesn’t feel for the suitors who’ve raped her maids, have spoken ill of her behind her back, and even plotted the murder of her son. He also doesn’t recognize that the eagle has a crooked beak, something that suggests an imperfect polish on one of literature’s oldest heroes. “In the event, Odysseus was wrong about the dream,” writes Atwood. “He was indeed the eagle but the geese were not the Suitors. The geese were my twelve maids, as I was soon to learn to my unending sorrow.” Penelope in Atwood’s novel lives in a world wherein even the closest people among her feel like distant islands, fraught with danger, cyclopic images, and sea monsters, and waves upon waves of armies to conquer. Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. "Half-Hanged Mary." Atwood, Margaret. Wild Women. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997. —. The Penelopiad. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Marshall, Bridget M. "Mary Webster, the Witch of Hadley, Survives a Hanging." New England Historical Society (2003): https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/mary-webster-witch-hadley-survives-hanging/.
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