Course Blog

Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray are two of my favorite characters of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in part due to how they illuminate the text’s perspective on female sexuality. Vampirism, in Dracula, is metaphorically linked to a number of socially frightening images, from ethnic stereotypes to a growing fascination with blood-sucking creatures. Sexuality is another such frightening image, and there is a notable contrast between how human women and vampiric women act. Dracula vampires, in general, are creatures of overt sexuality and lust. Dracula himself reflects the vampire tropes of Bram Stoker’s time, including the pervasive fears of foreigners preying on local women; Dracula has multiple female vampires at his estate that he has turned undead and kidnapped. 

As for how the women act after becoming vampires, their desire to feed bears strong resemblances to sexual desire. When Jonathan Harker encounters them while staying at Dracula’s estate, it is because of his failure to follow the Count’s warning to only sleep in his designated room. By failing to heed this warning, Jonathan opens himself to the insatiable lust of these women, an attribute so strong that they might find him anywhere in the estate to indulge themselves. They are described with starkly white teeth and unnaturally red, “voluptuous” lips, and Jonathan describes himself as feeling not only fear, but “ecstasy” at the touch of the women (Chapter 3). The women’s “voluptuousness” is a clear reference to their sexuality, but it is not the attractiveness of these women that is seen as frightening, is it that Jonathan describes their sensuality as “deliberate” (Chapter 3)—in other words, purposefully acting untoward and improper. In addition, the women awaken these sexual feelings in him unwillingly, something uncharacteristic of an ideal gentleman. In combination with their violent feeding habits, the sexuality of vampiric women is part of what makes them monstrous, as they represent unwanted parts of 1890’s society. 

The stark differences between human women and vampire women are seen most plainly through Lucy. In her letters, she is innocent and polite enough that the men of Dracula are tripping over themselves courting her. She is comfortable in her attractiveness, and teases about it—she jokes with Mina about her indecision between suitors by saying, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men”—but never blatantly inappropriate. Even this comment causes her to take back her words, noting them as “heresy” (Chapter 5). But when Lucy is turned to a vampire (spoilers!), she is purposefully using her allure. In fact, she has a bottomless sexual appetite, and is said to pose a threat not only to human lives, but in diminishing the self-control of men (Chapter 16). 

However, vampirism is not a surefire path to a woman’s sexual corruption. Rather, vampirism represents (for women) the threat of becoming unclean or impure, something that has the potential to cause their inhibitions to vanish. Mina Murray, for example, is never fully vampiric, and is returned to humanity at the end of Dracula. Throughout the novel, she has remained even “purer” than Lucy. She is the ideal Victorian woman: she never expresses any sexual thought, need, or suggestion, not even in the privacy of letters. Additionally, she has a strong desire to be of use to her husband, Jonathan. Despite her intense sympathy and kindness (she mentions the progressive “New Women” of England, and demonstrates an understanding of them), she is also dutiful, and remains a conservative housewife. Because of this dramatic escape from vampirism at the end of the novel, the binary of vampiric women is not entirely strict. Women such as Mina, who are paragons of Victorian womanhood, have the capability to resist this fate. Additionally, women in the novel are seen as important for upholding the morality of society, allowing vampires to represent multiple “evils.” Dracula is attempting to access and turn the men of England through the women he targets, painting Mina as an important figure not just in containing her sexual impulses, but in her empathy, her intelligence, and other positive qualities. 

Additionally, the text’s perspective on male sexuality complicates the notion that only female vampires are sexually ravenous creatures. Men, too, are seen to fall prey to impurity, as demonstrated by Dracula’s plan to tempt them, and Jonathan’s attraction to the three vampires at the Count’s estate. 

 

Works Cited:

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York, Grosset & Dunlap, 1897.

Carmilla was first published in the periodical The Dark Blue in four serialized segments. The first segment was published in December 1871, and the following three were each published a month apart, with the final installment appearing in March 1872. These chapters were accompanied by three illustrations which were drawn by D.H. Friston and engraved by C.M. Jenkin.  

The journal The Dark Blue was created by John Christian Freund and first published in March 1871 (Chapman). Though the journal was only in publication for three years, it received acclaim for the quality and variety of the content it produced, as well as the notable writers who were published in it. The periodical was reportedly named after the colors of Oxford University, which Freund and many of the periodical’s contributors had attended (Chapman). This fact speaks to the journal’s educated and likely well-connected readership. Though Carmilla would have been considered a middlebrow contribution to the journal, The Dark Blue’s educated and well-received writers and readers suggests that the story was written for such an audience. 

Following the story’s publication in The Dark Blue, it was published in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s anthology In a Glass Darkly as a short story (Le Fanu xiii). Notably, this version of Carmilla added “The Prologue,” which was not present in the version published in The Dark Blue (Le Fanu xiv). In the prologue, Le Fanu introduces the story as though it is a true record collected by a Doctor Hesselius. This addition frames the supernatural story and its female narrator Laura through the lens of the doctor’s male medical authority. This male-centered framing contrasts the at-the-time shocking nature of the novel’s powerful and assertive female villain Carmilla.  

Though Carmilla is said to have partially inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was published over two decades later, it didn’t gain much notice when it was first published. This is likely due to the female-centric plot and the subversive sexuality of the vampire Carmilla. However, the novella is now regarded as having had a strong role in establishing the conventions of the vampire novel, as well as providing insight into Victorian attitudes towards female sexuality. Consequently, the novella has gained popularity in the late 20th and early 21st century, resulting in increased scholarly discourse and several book, TV, and film adaptations.  

 

Works Cited 

Chapman, Alison. “The Dark Blue, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (1871-1872).” The University of Victoria Libraries, Omeka, 2018, omeka.library.uvic.ca/exhibits/show/movable-type/networks/dark_blue_carmilla.html. 

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. “Notes on the Text.” Carmilla: A Critical Edition, edited by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Syracuse University Press, 2013, pp. xiii–xvi. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j5d4xp.5. Accessed 12 Nov. 2024. 

Upon looking over my primary sources for going towards my senior thesis, something that caught my attention was the consistent presence of Grecian antiquity(ies) throughout romantic poetry. As Romantic poetry is typically seen as a response or contradiction to Neoclassical poetry, poetry focused on logic and reason, Romanticism focuses on raw emotion: emotion that cannot easily be described. Aside from the sensual verbiage and language that works to illuminate the sublime, Romantic poetry commonly features Greek gods, such as Proteus and his triton in Wordsworth’s “The World is Too Much with Us”, or Keats famous “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Interestingly, as these are all poems I am using to examine the use of ekphrasis, I was left with one major question- what is it about Greek art that intrigues/inspires Romantic poets, particularly European Romantic poets so much? The obvious seems to be that Greek art was highly focused on the aesthetics, but I think there is likely more to it.

As I previously mentioned, while neoclassical poetry involves logic and reason, it also involves an admiration for visual arts and literature (mainly inspired or found in Roman and Greek antiquity). Perhaps then, the two eras have a fair amount in common and Romanticism may have merely been an addition to Neoclassicism rather than a response to it. To go back to the Keats poem I had previously mentioned, “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and its ekphrastic nature involves many neoclassicist concepts. As the neoclassic approach is concerned with visual art, so is the narrator, as he remains preoccupied on the antique urn that gives him a sort of idealism about life. Though, while using these concepts, the narrator does take a very Romantic approach towards the art in appreciating how art can contribute to the sublime- how interpretating these antiquities can involve complex emotions that logic or reason cannot necessarily explain.

 

Works Cited

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Romanticism”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Oct. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism. Accessed 11 November 2024.

Irwin, David. “Neoclassical art”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Sep. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/art/Neoclassicism. Accessed 11 November 2024.

Keats, John. “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Chicago Review, vol. 8, no. 1, Jan. 1954, p. 76. https://doi.org/10.2307/25293011.

 

While the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender itself is fictional, its influences are very much rooted in real cultures and global histories. Though no nation in Avatar is purely based on one culture, from a plot-based function, the Fire Nation with its violent colonialism and warmongering parallels the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), particularly at its height during WWII and the preceding decade.

Like Imperial Japan, the Fire Nation sits on a volcanic archipelago and commands the most impressive navy in the world of Avatar. It is a nation with a strong, centralized government that is extremely militant and expansionist. But the similarities are most evident when looking at the actual movements of the Fire Nation and its military. With the Air Nomads wiped out and the Water Tribes isolated from both one another and the rest of the world, the Earth Kingdom is the largest obstacle in the Fire Nation’s path to total hegemony. Large, geographically diverse, and multi-ethnic (drawing primarily off of China), the Earth Kingdom is hard to conquer in its entirety. At no point in the show does the Fire Nation manage to control the entire country, but they do occupy smaller islands, regions, and individual kingdoms. Instead, they colonize and occupy border territories in the west and south, with one of the most notable conquests being Omashu city. They have “colonies” with other minorities (usually Earth Kingdom), the existence of which allows Aang and his friends to hide in the Fire Nation as immigrants from the colonies. 

Japan’s own occupation of Manchuria, in northeastern China, bears similarity to the operations of the Fire Nation, down to the infiltration of the occupying citizenry into the occupied lands. After the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, Japanese citizens flocked to the region in large numbers—similar things happened with the siege and occupation of Omashu in season 2 of Avatar. The new proxy government was set up and Fire Nation citizens displaced Omashu residents in their own home. This pattern of similarity includes more large-scale violence. The genocidal massacre of Aang’s people, the Air Nomads, evokes similar levels of incomprehensible destruction and life lost to China during WWII. In the Nanjing Massacre alone, the Japanese military murdered up to 300,000 people. Low estimates for the amount of Chinese people killed during WWII (both civilian and military) stand at around 15-20 million. Since rewatching Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2020, I have always seen the real-life comparisons to Japan’s empirical age and the devastation they enacted throughout Asia but especially in China. But until I took a closer look and thought about the specific intricacies of that colonization, I didn’t realize just how similar certain plot points were to actual historical moments. 

 

Works Cited

Young, Louise. “Manchukuo and Japan.” Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism, 1st ed., University of California Press, 1998, pp. 3–20.

World War II Casualties by Country 2024. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/world-war-two-casualties-by-country. 

In the article “The Paratext and Literary Narration: Authorship, Institutions, Historiographies,” Florian Sedlmeier, an Assistant Professor at Freie Universität Berlin, explores the concept of paratext. Over the weekend I was browsing the databases for any additional texts on paratext that might be a better fit for my project and came across this piece. What drew me to this article initially was how the title promised discussion of paratext in relation to both authorship and narration, topics which I thought would be interesting when looking at The Princess Bride. 

While discussing authorship, Sedlmeier brings up a quote from Genette that explains how paratext acts as commentary from the author of the piece (67). I think this idea is interesting given how Goldman acts as the abridger of the novel because every note he has explaining he edits to the “original” text is based on his own opinion and perspective. Sedlmeier also introduces Genette’s concept of “autographic paratexts,” which are paratexts specifically attributed to the author (prefaces, titles, epigraphs, etc.) (69). In the article, Sedlmeier and Genette present paratext as a kind of link between the author, the text and literary historiography. This being said, Sedlmeier doesn’t explore how paratext could be used to mislead readers and spread misinformation. 

As stated earlier, The Princess Bride does display aspects of paratext that Sedlmeier describes in the article, but it also uses paratext to create an illusion of reality. In the introduction, notes and epigraph of the novel, Goldman talks about Florin and Guilder as if they were real places with lengthy histories. Paratexts also complicate Goldman’s connection with the text because while his own opinions are explicitly stated in some paratext, the S. Morgenstern pseudonym that Goldman writes the novel under and his constant claim to being only the abridger in other paratextual elements limit his connection to the original piece. This divide between Goldman and the text also complicates my previous ideas regarding escapism because if The Princess Bride is supposed to be Goldman’s way of escaping reality, why does he try to distance himself from it by hiding behind a pseudonym? Or does Goldman’s escape lie in the paratexts where he takes on a narratorial role and becomes part of the story in that sense? 

Sedlmeier, Florian. “The Paratext and Literary Narration: Authorship, Institutions, Historiographies.” Narrative, vol. 26, no. 1, 2018, pp. 63–80. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26405564. Accessed 11 Nov. 2024.

As I was reading through The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the post-colonialist aspects of the books constantly popped out at me. One scene in particular interested me the most throughout the whole three novels. That scene is from the third book, The Return of the King and is in chapter five, “The Ride of the Rohirrim”. In this chapter, the riders of the country of Rohan, the Rohirrim, are rushing to the country of Gondor as a troop of Orcs are about to attack Gondor’s main city, Minas Tirith. As they are riding, Merry hears drums in the distance and asks if that is the enemy. Elfhelm responds in the negative and tells Merry, as well as the readers, of the Wild Men (Tolkien 102).

Elfhelm describes the Wild Men and their history, stating “They still haunt Druadan Forest, it is said. Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as the beasts.” (102). The words Elfhelm uses to describe the Wild Men are strong and hold negative connotations. “Haunt” signifies a ghostly origin. A haunting is often unwanted, and something many try to get rid of. As well, if the Wild Men are supposedly “haunting” the forest, then that is not considered their home anymore. Think ghosts haunting the homes of where they once lived.

Continuing on, he claims that the Wild Men are “remnants of an older time…”, making it clear that they do not use modern technologies or languages and therefore do not fit into the modern world (102). They use drums to signify their presence, whereas most other people use a horn, a newer invention in the world of Middle-Earth. Lastly, and probably the most egregious thing that Elfhelm says is his comparison to beasts. He does not consider the Wild Men to be people, but rather another beastly race. It became clear to me through the way Elfhelm described the Wild Men and how the Wild Men spoke of their mistreatment by the Rohirrim (they ask to not be hunted “like beasts any more”), that the Wild Men were supposed to be a metaphor for Indigenous People (104). The Wild Men are only in the book for about 5 pages, 4 in “The Ride of the Rohirrim”, and on page 274.

Though they are barely in the trilogy, they play a pivotal role in the Rohirrim’s ride to Gondor, not only pointing them in the right and fastest direction, but also to a road that is not well known and therefore safe from the enemies. They are also mentioned in one of Aragorn’s first decree as the new king of Gondor, with him stating that “Behold, the King Elessar has come! The Forest of Drúadan he gives to Ghân-buri-ghân and to his folk, to be their own for ever; and hereafter let no man enter it without their leave!” (274). This all begs the question of, did Tolkien add the Wild Men in solely as a commentary on England’s colonization of indigenous land and subsequent murder of indigenous people?

Documentary poetics rose out of Modernist approaches to poetry and the act of “making it new,” but the form didn’t fully manifest itself until the 1990s-2000s, where the emergence of new technological advancements changed our society’s relationship to the nature of a rapidly expanding news cycle (Leong 5). The turnover of current events into archived historical events increased in an unprecedented manner, and the impact of these moments was felt by more people than ever before, as the emergence of new technology provided extensive additions to the ways in which media, news, and societally impacting moments were consumed. But, understanding documentation processes also includes how these moments are narrated by the bureaucracies and institutions who hold control over the news cycle itself. As a result of the new state of technological advancements, the social circles of those impacted simultaneously expanded to include more people, but became shallower in their meaning within people’s lives.

Modernism theorist Zygmunt Bauman writes that this “disintegration of the social network,” or the expansion and devaluation of the news cycle, is a symptom of what he coins as “liquid modernity” (Bauman 14). Bauman defines liquid modernity as “the falling apart, the friability, the brittleness, the transience, the until-further-noticeness of human bonds and networks” (14), where the value of the human, social moment is lost to the constant march of the “next new thing” the present moment is made to engage with. 

The relationship between cultural memory and the news cycle then lies in the lasting representations of people’s lives. Documentary scholar Maurizio Ferraris signifies the social aspect of documentary work as its primary driver of meaning-making in a text, regardless of the text being intrinsically artistic, strictly archival, or existing in the liminal plane between the two. Ferraris augments Jacques Derrida’s claim of “nothing existing outside of the text” by claiming that, rather, nothing social exists outside of the text (Leong 4). Poetry scholar Michael Leong corroborates Ferraris’ claim, stating “Social life, according to this view, depends upon – and is mediated by – documentation” (Leong 4). Thus, in the ever-evolving news cycle that values the next great upset over lasting advocacy and change, documenting marginalized lives has become an act of resistance to their “social deaths,” (Leong 4) or public erasure. Leong then understands documentary poetry as an extension or critique of history as an engagement with “the texture of social reality” (7). Documents that support, or undermine, cultural memory can then be reordered and redefined by documentary poetry, as the form relies on both individual and collective identities to frame a given event’s place in its historical moment. Activated through the understanding that bureaucratic documentation alters the cultural memory of an event, documentary poetics functions as a counter-hegemonic practice that validates the experiences of marginalized groups within the social network.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Polity Press, 2000.

Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. University of Iowa Press, 2020.

I’ve been taking a short break from thesis readings to take in some literature loosely related to my topic. Besides the 1947 dissolution of the Raj, I’m also interested in partitions across South Asia more generally, so I read Seam (2014) by Tarfia Faizullah. Her poetry collection focuses on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a conflict that saw Bengali nationalists fight against East Pakistani forces to establish the independent nation of Bangladesh. There are so many parallels between 1971 and 1947, especially within the way women are enshrined in literature as a form of collective remembering of mass rapes otherwise absent from the historical archives.

In my second blog post, I briefly touched upon how a word for “rape” does not exist in Urdu:

“In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.”

This same phenomenon is true for Bangla. With this absence of language to describe the rupture of the self due to sexual violence, literature becomes a tool to express the complicated issue of creating a historical record of women’s experiences: in this sense, fiction becomes a method for remembering the events of 1947 and 1971. To pay attention to the use of figurative language, em dashes, and ellipses in these narratives is to listen to a historical truth that has previously gone unrecorded. Faizullah highlights this phenomenon of the inadequacy of language to describe sexual violence as a historical truth in the poem “Interview with a Birangona” (note: birangona is a Bangla term created by the Bangladeshi government to describe women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Pakistani army; it roughly translates to “war heroine” and is part of a larger effort to reintegrate these survivors into society and reduce stigma). Not once in this poem is the word “rape” explicitly mentioned. Faizullah interviews a survivor of rape who describes her unborn daughter: “She grew whole inside me/ like a lychee, my belly a hard shell” (Faizullah, lines 9-10). This simile comparing her stomach to the shell of a lychee is highly illustrative of the nature of her pregnancy carrying a war baby. To eat a lychee, there is an inherent act of violence that must be committed in forcibly ripping through the rough—but thin—peel of the fruit. Without explicitly mentioning rape, she communicates the sexual violence that conceived her daughter and the violence of childbirth. The gap or silence left by the untranslatable experience of sexual assault is filled by a culturally-specific simile. The woman’s comparison links her womb to a product of the land meant to be torn open to reach the fruit: here, the children born from the creation of an independent state. Furthermore, the newborn daughter is inferred to be the fleshy, edible fruit of the lychee. Whereas her mother is meant to be torn through and discarded, this war baby is meant to consumed by the men of the state. In this regard, women become objects during these two conflicts, a position that directly correlates their bodies to the state.

Works Cited
Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.

I first read Northanger Abbey while abroad at Oxford last year in my second term. It was my first (and only) book I was able to and did request, and I was able to read it with my favorite tutor, making the experience intellectually special. Jane Austen does not really resonate with me very strongly otherwise, but a gothic parody seemed tailor-made for my interests of the gothic genre and camp, so I wanted to try. I had greater emotion attached to the novel beyond the intellectual, though. I had been really disappointed with my first term for a number of reasons, the main of which included my first term tutor disparaging my supposedly lacking time management skills. I knew it wasn’t true, but it did hurt- and I did wonder. As such, I resolved to overprepare with contemporaneous Gothic novels to contrast against Northanger in my second term by reading as much as I could. This included works like Vathek and The Old English Baron, but also more pertinent ones like The Romance of the Forest and The Mysteries of Udolpho. I loved the Radcliffe not for themselves, but what they represented. They reminded me very much of the YA trash I read as a teenager and what continues on the market, and I really enjoyed thinking about the parallels in tropes and what that says about how far or little we’ve come in depicting women. My prep reinvigorated my intellectual energy and sense of fun, and it actually made me excited for the next term.

The depiction of Catherine Morland defines my love of this novel. I consider her a keystone figure for the depiction of cringe teenage girls everywhere. For ultimately, most people are more like the occasionally-socially unsure and perhaps-obsessive Catherine than witty and proud Elizabeth Bennet. Despite what I had read in various scholarship positioning Catherine Morland as a silly and stupid heroine, I believed her to be treated realistically and without the underlying scornful aggression that sometimes underlie parodies. The text maybe laughs at her antics, sure, but not her as a person, and always allies with her when she expresses deep distress. Though Catherine adores Gothic novels, she doesn’t actually start out with much familiarity of them: rather she wants to be a heroine (Austen 17). She wants to be someone, in the gendered capacities her world will allow. Gothic novels give her an outlet to explore this rather than them being the strict object of obsession. This aspect of life has not gone away: novels like Twilight and the Sarah J Maas books may be bad on an ideological and prose level, but the archetypes they invoke of a powerful heroine, a sexy and dangerous-but-not-too dangerous promise of love are speaking more to a psychological need of security than quality literature. No matter their era, people, especially young people, use books to figure out their life and how they should behave. The cringe young people of today and Catherine are no different.

Northanger Abbey was also what I needed at that point of reading. Through Catherine, the Gothic novel and the chick-lit they represent are gently critiqued, but ultimately affirmed as worthwhile for fulfilling that same psychological need. In the end, Catherine is also ultimately a normal girl who learns to be the person she wants to be unlike the Radcliffe heroines who are born perfect. She makes mistakes and misjudgments, but she learns. To me, that’s really affirming. Most are just “normal’ people, and have to work hard to get somewhere. Her choice in educational fiction also is not necessarily wrong, either: Gothic novels present real problems and anxieties through an uncanny mirror, but that mirror only works if there is something to be afraid of in the first place. Perhaps Catherine doesn’t have ghosts after her, but she does have men in her life who want to make her feel small so they can control her. Though people try to mislead her in various ways, she ultimately has to decide what’s wrong or right based on her own determinations, and instead has to accept her own judgements on the right way to be. As someone who has always cherished feedback and was conflicted about the ones I was currently receiving, Catherine’s resolutions affirmed me emotionally as well as intellectually.

Ultimately, I don’t know how “good” my thesis will turn out. But I will like it. I will like it for myself and all the past, present, and future cringe teen girls Catherine represents.

 

Works Cited:

Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Penguin Books, 2003.

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?