Having just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, I wanted to do a bit of a dive into her biography to understand why she chose to write this novella. Interestingly, the inception of this project did not come from personal passion or interest, but from a challenge.
In Atwood’s own words, she describes the story in a 2005 issue of Publishers Weekly. A book publisher, Canongate Books, had decided to make a ‘Myth Series’ that would pull together tons of authors to write novella retellings of mythology from all over the world. Atwood sets the scene in Edinburgh, caught unawares “pre-coffee” at a cafe by Jamie Byng, the ‘Hermes’ of Canongate. Atwood was “ensnared” by the idea, and agreed to write a story for the project. Yet, she struggled to do so. Her early attempts (looking at Norse and Native American myth) failed spectacularly, and it was the dread of looming deadlines and her agent’s refusal to let her pull from the project that prompted the genesis of The Penelopiad: “Desperation being the mother of invention, I then started writing The Penelopiad. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.”
This is fascinating to me. I feel like so many mythology retellings are born of passion, of an author’s love for a character and compulsion to do them justice. The fact that The Penelopiad was something Atwood stumbled upon, was pretty much forced into, changes how I view the text. While I think it is still a notable work of literature, it does make Atwood’s nuanced and sometimes unsavory approach to Penelope’s character more understandable. As she says herself, “As every writer knows, a plot is only a plot, and a plot as such is two-dimensional unless it can be made to come alive, and it can only come alive through the characters in it.” The plot is pretty much set within a retelling – there’s only so far you can move within a framework set thousands of years ago – so Atwood really had to attach herself to the characters. I think she did a great job with the maids’ side of the story, looking at the gruesome and unjust treatment of those lower-class women, but her portrayal of Penelope (particularly her weirdly misogynistic hatred of Helen) is unjust to the source material. I can see how in some ways it makes Penelope more ‘human,’ but I feel that this misunderstanding of Penelope may stem from the fact that this was not a passion project, rather something she stumbled into. If she ‘doesn’t know’ why she started the story, then how do we approach where it did go?
This is so interesting as a framework for this text, as an exploration of the contexts that lead to tension between author-voice and characterization give way into ideas about representations and retellings when the author is reluctant to understand the character itself. I haven’t read this book, but it makes me want to if only to see how an emotional state impacted the execution of this story. I’m wondering how Helen was portrayed misogynistically and what that says about Atwood’s imposed authorial voice in the text?
This is interesting, and though I haven’t read the broader text I think part of the question you’re asking can be applied to the genre of retellings more broadly. That is, how close should the author stay to the source material? Do they have the right to take large leaps with characters? I think it depends on what leaps they’re making and what they’re trying to emphasize with their retelling. Overall, I think we run into the same issue as with the so-called “abridger” in The Princess Bride. That is, how should authors manage the clash between their creative vision and that of the author of the source material?
First of all, great job! Second, you bring up a very good point on Atwood’s lack of passion and how it may influence how we read the text. Based on your description of Penelope, she vaguely reminds me of Serena Joy from The Handmaid’s Tale. Granted, it has been a while since I last read The Handmaid’s Tale, so this might be a misinterpretation, but could Atwood’s interpretation of Penelope be inspired by one of her previous characters?
It’s so interesting to learn about the motivations and intentions behind an author’s writing, because I think it provides so much insight into how their work can be interpreted. The point you make at the end of your post concerning Atwood’s portrayal of Penelope is really interesting to me, because it raises the question of how accurate to source material retellings should remain. With how popular retellings of classical myths have become recently, I’ve often wondered what aspects of a story make it good for retelling, and what one is able to change before it becomes too diverged from the original.