{"id":1541,"date":"2024-11-08T15:28:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T20:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2024-11-08T15:28:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T20:28:24","slug":"atwood-penelope-a-short-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2024\/11\/08\/atwood-penelope-a-short-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Atwood & Penelope: A Short Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Having just finished reading Margaret Atwood\u2019s <\/span>The Penelopiad<\/span><\/i>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Atwood\u2019s own words, she describes the story in a 2005 issue of <\/a><\/span>Publishers Weekly<\/span><\/i>. A book publisher, Canongate Books, had decided to make a \u2018Myth Series\u2019 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 \u201cpre-coffee\u201d at a cafe by Jamie Byng, the \u2018Hermes\u2019 of Canongate. Atwood was \u201censnared\u201d 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\u2019s refusal to let her pull from the project that prompted the genesis of <\/span>The Penelopiad<\/span><\/i>: \u201cDesperation being the mother of invention, I then started writing <\/span>The Penelopiad<\/span><\/i>. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is <\/span>fascinating<\/span><\/i> to me. I feel like so many mythology retellings are born of passion, of an author\u2019s love for a character and compulsion to do them justice. The fact that <\/span>The Penelopiad<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s nuanced and sometimes unsavory approach to Penelope\u2019s character more understandable. As she says herself, \u201cAs 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.\u201d The plot is pretty much set within a retelling \u2013 there\u2019s only so far you can move within a framework set thousands of years ago \u2013 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 \u2018human,\u2019 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 \u2018doesn\u2019t know\u2019 why she started the story, then how do we approach where it did go?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having just finished reading Margaret Atwood\u2019s 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\u2019s own words, she describes the story … Continue reading Atwood & Penelope: A Short Biography<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4989,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4989"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}