There is a specific kind of reading experience that only happens when you have already done the work. Not reading more books, necessarily — but doing the reading inside yourself that prepares you to receive what a book is offering. I had that experience once already in this journey, when a copy of The Penelopiad I pulled off my daughter’s bookshelf in Boston quietly conditioned me for Homer’s Book 11 before I knew I was being prepared. Now, having completed The Odyssey and carried its tension back into the world with me, I find I cannot leave it alone. I have returned to Atwood — and she is hitting differently.
Not differently as in better or worse. Differently as in truer. Because I am bringing a lens now.
The Introduction to The Penelopiad is not a preamble you skim. It is, if you let it be, a small act of scholarly humility that reframes everything that follows. Atwood acknowledges directly that the myths around these characters — Penelope, Odysseus, Helen, the maids — were not fixed. They were contested, living, and in several cases subject to very early revision inside the oral tradition itself. Different city-states had different versions. Different poets had different loyalties. The “official” Homer may have consolidated one telling, but there were other tellings — some of which positioned Penelope quite differently, some of which asked harder questions about whose interests the dominant story served.
That matters. Because what Atwood is offering in The Penelopiad is not a modern feminist rewrite grafted onto an ancient story — it is more like a scholarly excavation of possibilities that were always there, buried underneath the version that survived. She is not inventing a counter-narrative. She is making room for one that had a legitimate claim all along. That is a different kind of creative act, and it gives her Penelope a grounded authority that would otherwise feel imposed.
I suspected it the moment I hit Chapter ii, and the chorus of the twelve maids arrived not as narration but as verse. If you have spent any time with Atwood’s poetry — and I’ll admit I have only minimally, before this re-read — you recognize immediately that she is not wearing a costume here. She is in her element. The shift into lyric form is not decorative. It is structural. The maids speak in a different register than Penelope precisely because they are a different register: collective where she is individual, rhythmic where she is reflective, raw where she is composed.
Atwood is doing something sophisticated with form that mirrors her argument about voice. Penelope narrates in the mode of someone who learned early to think before speaking — careful, ironic, controlled. The maids are denied that luxury. They speak in chorus because no one ever bothered to individuate them in the original. Atwood gives them poetry because poetry, with its compression and its refusal to be ignored, is the form that fits people who were never given the length of a sentence in their own defense.
And then there is Chapter vi — the marriage chapter — and here is where my Odyssey lens sharpens everything to a point.
I wrote in an earlier post (Was It Wander… Lust? — The Longing Beneath the Map) about the tension I felt in Book 11, watching Odysseus openly worry about Penelope’s faithfulness while having made very comfortable arrangements for himself elsewhere. I went off researching the sexual double standard in the ancient Mediterranean world — Greek, Near Eastern, Hebrew — because I needed to understand the logic of a system I found, frankly, difficult to sit with. What I found was that it was not arbitrary cruelty. It was architecture. Built into property law, into inheritance, into the very grammar of honor and shame as those cultures deployed them. Atwood doesn’t let the ancient world off easily. In the society she reconstructs, children were vehicles for passing things along — inheritance, bloodline, the continuity of name. If that was the assigned value of a child, one can only imagine how the calculus worked for the women who bore them.
Chapter vi of The Penelopiad walks you straight into that architecture and makes you stand inside it. Atwood does not lecture. She paints — and the painting is of a young woman being transferred, with the good intentions of everyone involved, into a world where her value is entirely relational. Wife of. Mother of. The social and cultural weight on Penelope in that moment is not exceptional. It is the system. Every woman of her world inhabited the same structure. What Atwood excavates is what it felt like from inside — and she does it with an intimacy that Homer, however magnificent, simply never aimed for.
This is the ground floor of what makes the re-read electric. I carry Penelope differently, as I noted when I wrapped up the Odyssey — not as patience personified, but as radical endurance inside a system that never asked the same of her husband. Now Atwood is showing me the blueprints of that system, chapter by chapter, from Penelope’s own narration. That is a key that only works if you have already seen the door.
I paused myself after Chapter vi and sat down and wrote these words. It caused me to process all this fresh. The further I go back into Atwood’s telling — particularly as the story of the twelve maids deepens and the question of Penelope’s knowledge becomes impossible to dodge — the more this book will demand its own reckoning. My next post will bring the second half of The Penelopiad into a clearer focus, and I suspect by then the Odyssey lens will have shifted from clarifying to uncomfortable in the best possible way.
For now: if you have read The Odyssey and just maybe have The Penelopiad on your TBR, now is time for you to pull it off that shelf. Atwood handed us a key before we knew there was a door. I would not wait any longer to use it.
I’ll join you back here soon with ‘the rest of the story’… As Paul Harvey, the radio host of the 70’s and 80’s, used to say.
The Curious Table 