by Maria Tatar
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Mnemosyne, 1881
How about an experiment? the German writer Christa Wolf once asked. “What would happen if the great male heroes of world literature were replaced by women? Achilles, Hercules, Odysseus, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Jesus, King Lear, Faust, Julien Sorel, Wilhelm Meister.” Today that experiment is being carried out by women writers in many different cultures, and they are focused less on Faust or Julien Sorel than on Achilles and Odysseus. They recognize the challenges of taking on the ancients (and that is where the action has been), rewriting Homer rather than Shakespeare, though the Bard has received his share of challengers. How have writers like Margaret Atwood, Christa Wolf, and Pat Barker approached the sacred texts of times past? Most are not out to change the story but rather to show us the perspective of the women on the home front, the vulnerable observers on the sidelines who have been, until now, silent—or silenced—onlookers deprived of any real agency.
Homer and other bards made sense of the phantasmagoria of war by focusing on a few idealized figures and compressing the action of their narratives into scenes of vivid and intense drama. Women writers have used a range of strategies to “reenvision” (that is the term they invoke again and again) the past. How do they let us see things with fresh eyes? The dominant tactic has been to take us inside the minds of women so that we can experience their side of the story. The Trojan War, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Bourbon Restoration all look different when seen from a new angle and described by a “chatty” narrator, eager to provide all the details and to let us know what it felt like to be on the sidelines of bloody conflicts and contests fought by heroes.
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad is told by Penelope and by the twelve “maids” (in reality, enslaved women) who fought off the suitors, successfully or not. Christa Wolf’s Cassandra is a first-person account from the title figure on the day of her death. And Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls lets us hear the voice of Briseis, a captive woman given as a war prize to Achilles. These “correctives” to The Odyssey and The Iliad are all first-person accounts, at times rambling, prolix, and wordy to a fault. But they are also personal, confessional reports from those who were victimized, enslaved, and violently subjugated by those in power. They move in a number of modes, ranging from complaint and indictment to self-justification and also self-incrimination. They turn the tables in radical ways, and suddenly the heroes are given new attributes and epithets. “The brute Achilles”—that’s how Wolf’s Cassandra describes the Greek warrior again and again until the reputation of Homer’s shining hero is finally shattered.
The writers who took up the cause of women from the ancient world could be described as Social Justice Storytellers, were it not that the term “Social Justice Warrior” has been appropriated by right-wing political alliances and turned into an insult. The latter term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, and it was defined as a derogatory noun to describe “a person who expresses or promotes socially progressive views.” It was applied to activists with an agenda driven by political correctness and identity politics and with the aim of correcting social injustices. Before 2008, the term was used to describe champions of those left behind economically and socially, the underprivileged and overworked. But soon, in the wake of the Gamergate controversy of 2014 (a right-wing backlash that pitted those who accused the gaming industry of oppressing and harassing women against those who took up arms in the defense of gaming culture), “Social Justice Warrior” became an insult hurled at those who came to the defense of victims of harassment, many of whom in turn became the targets of vicious troll activity and received countless death threats.
Social Justice Storytellers: that descriptor, for all its concerning overtones, still defines what women writers in the last century and in our own century have been after. On a mission to make visible the faces of those who have been marginalized and to let us hear their voices, they tell stories that compel us to reassess how women lived in times past and to discover what strategies they used to survive. These authors document heroic acts of compassion as well as the artful tactics used in times past for airing grievances and bringing about change.
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad and #MeToo: The Victims Speak Up
It is the year 2005 and Margaret Atwood is having breakfast with Jamie Byng, a rising small publisher who pitches the idea of rewriting a myth from classical antiquity. Breakfast, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale later confesses, is her “weakest time of day,” and, in a burst of goodwill, she signs a contract—and then hits a wall, with a powerful case of writer’s block. Just as she is about to scrap the project and return the advance to the publisher, the Muse taps her on the shoulder, and Atwood begins writing The Penelopiad. What irked Atwood in The Odyssey and inspired her to engage in rethinking the Greek epic was, surprisingly, not so much Penelope’s marginalization as the hanging of the twelve maids, which seemed “unfair at first reading, and seems so still.”35
The Odyssey, as it turns out, became something of a launchpad for rewriting the literary canon, a challenge taken up by several women writers in the late twentieth century and first decades of this century.36 Rewriting the epic from the perspective of Penelope is not an obvious choice, and it certainly was not that back in 1928, when Dorothy Parker wrote a poem called “Penelope” with the punchline “They will call him brave.” Her Penelope sits at home, brewing tea (a perfect anachronism!) and snipping thread, while Odysseus rides “the silver seas.” It did not occur to Parker to go beyond sarcasm, and it took many more decades to see in Penelope a woman who had been restricted to waiting, weaving, and marking time. Atwood’s Penelope is forever on the brink of tears. As for Odysseus, “there he was making an inspiring speech, there he was uniting the quarrelling factions, there he was inventing an astonishing falsehood, there he was delivering sage advice, there he was disguising himself as a runaway slave and sneaking into Troy.”37 Penelope, by contrast, is confined to the marriage plot, without access to the world of deeds and action.
John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, Penelope, 1849
There are reasons why Atwood was stumped by the assignment to rewrite a myth. Kathryn Rabuzzi captures precisely the challenge of retelling Homer’s epic poem from the perspective of Penelope. “Finding voices authentic to women’s experience is appallingly difficult,” she writes. “Not only are the languages and concepts we have . . . male oriented, but historically women’s experiences have been interpreted for us by men and male norms.”38 The very title of Homer’s epic underscores, on its own, the erasure of female experience. The wife of Odysseus is just that, marginalized socially and subordinated domestically. Even her son Telemachus famously tells her to shut up and return to her weaving. What we know of Penelope and other women from classical antiquity has been mediated by male voices, making it something of an impossibility to capture what it was really like for women in that era. The challenge was to find words, not just for Penelope but also for the twelve maids, deputized as spies by Penelope and, under her watch, subjected by the suitors to sexual assault.
In 2006, a year after the publication of The Penelopiad, social activist Tarana Burke used the phrase “Me Too” on Myspace (a now-defunct social media platform) as a rallying cry for victims of sexual harassment and assault. Over a decade later, on October 15, 2017, the American actress Alyssa Milano received a screenshot of the phrase from a friend and tweeted it out, adding, “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”39 The next morning she woke up to find more than thirty thousand people had signed on to #MeToo. Suddenly women were empowered to use words and stories to transform secrets tainted with shame into a form of solidarity that banished vulnerability and guilt.
Even before real-life women began telling their stories on social media platforms, as well as to journalists and legal teams, women writers (Atwood was among the first) had already heard a distant dru
mbeat and were exploring tales from times past, hoping to get another side to stories and a different perspective on epics and myths we have elevated to classical status. Suddenly Penelope was able to come back from the dead and speak to the living. Homer may not have allowed her to say much, but Margaret Atwood could give her a voice. And Penelope’s experience was ripe for revision. It was time to reenvision her life. And if she seems less of a victim than survivors of sexual harassment and assault today, it is worth recalling that Penelope’s life began with an act of unspeakable cruelty, when her father Icarius, who had hoped for a son, threw the newborn girl into the sea. Penelope was saved by some ducks, and Icarius then had a change of heart and named her after the Greek word for duck. We do not learn about the circumstances of Penelope’s birth in The Odyssey, but Atwood’s figure starts her narrative by reporting that event and then moving on to her arranged marriage at age fifteen to a man who wins (by cheating) a competition staged by her father. “I was handed over to Odysseus, like a package of meat,” she tells us. And let us not forget that in The Penelopiad, we also finally hear the voices of the victims of multiple sexual assaults, the murdered maids.
“You think you’d like to read people’s minds? Think again,” Penelope warns us on the first pages of The Penelopiad. We have access not only to her thoughts, but also to the voices of the twelve maids. “Now that I’m dead I know everything,” Atwood’s Penelope declares in a solo performance meant to assert her omniscient narrative authority. Then we hear the maids, who intone: “We are the maids / the ones you killed / the ones you failed.” The twelve have their day in court at last, near the end of The Penelopiad, with a judge who consults Homer’s Odyssey and confirms that “the suitors raped them” and “nobody stopped them from doing so.” Penelope’s monologue becomes an exercise in self-incrimination, by disclosing that both she and Odysseus used their positions to take advantage of the enslaved women and failed to protect them. But it is only in Penelope’s account that we find that eye-opening revelation. It was not a concern for Homer.
How does Atwood create room for heroism? Her Odysseus is cut down to human size, and Penelope does not fare much better. Is it possible to find heroism in the patience and fidelity of a woman on the home front?40 To drive home the difference between Telemachus and Odysseus on the one hand, and Penelope on the other, Joseph Campbell noted that The Odyssey tracked three journeys: “One is that of Telemachus, the son going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle. . . . And the third is Penelope herself, whose journey is . . . endurance. . . . Two journeys through space and one through time.”41
Penelope’s inventiveness in the face of adversity and her ingenuity in warding off aggression remind us that she too is an active agent in her destiny. More than patient, submissive, and doggedly faithful, she is as wily and cunning as the “man of twists and turns.” The foregrounding of her weaving on both a literal and metaphorical level—her expert handiwork as well as her skill at plotting and deceiving—reminds us that her so-called journey through time has its own value as story. Penelope’s account turns out to be equally compelling and seductive when voiced by a modern bard willing to explore—with ironic distance as well as sympathetic engagement—the hearts and minds of characters from long ago and far away.
Bored, lonely, and weepy, Penelope sits at home, surrounded by suitors, weaving a shroud for Laertes, and refusing to wed until that covering is completed. Each day she works at the loom, weaving “finespun, / the yarns endless” and each night she undoes the labor of the day.42 In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt described three components of the vita activa, or active engagement with and in the world. The first, Labor, is what is required to sustain human life, and it is carried out by animal laborans, a creature tied to the biological necessities of life and caught in endless cycles of consumption and reproduction. By contrast, homo faber is the exponent of Work, the architect, inventor, or legislator, charged with constructing buildings, institutions, and laws, all of which divide the human world from the natural world. Finally, there is zoon politikon, a social and political being who creates and secures spaces of freedom by becoming an actor or agent in the public sphere. Penelope is clearly doomed to dwell in the domain of animal laborans, engaging in an activity that leaves no traces whatsoever behind it, while her husband, the man of twists and turns, undertakes a circuitous journey that elevates him to the rank of hero, celebrated in song and story. Driven less by a political mission than by an appetite for literal self-mythologization, Odysseus transcends the limits of the human, becoming an exemplar of the cultural hero: autonomous, adventurous, and ambitious in the pursuit of renown.
But is there more to Penelope’s story than what appears to be an utterly pointless activity? Her weaving seems to be even less effectual than the efforts of animal laborans in that the labors of the day are undone at night. To be sure, the undoing is strategic, but it secures nothing of real worldly value. Atwood’s Penelope rejects all claim to fame, refusing the role of “edifying legend.” “What did I amount to?” Penelope asks. “A stick used to beat other women with. Why couldn’t they be as considerate, as trustworthy, as all-suffering as I had been? That was the line they took, the singers, the yarn-spinners. Don’t follow my example, I want to scream in your ears.”
Addressing readers as a silent jury, Penelope does what one critic describes as “telling a story in order to name and blame an evildoer.”43 At the same time, the chorus of the maids tells a different story, indicting Penelope for failures that she tries to refute by blaming others or to dismiss because she was “desperate” or “running out of time.” Penelope’s account reminds us that lurking beneath the abstract principle of justice are social inequalities and asymmetrical power relations, along with personal disputes and vendettas. The maids are Penelope’s nemeses, but they are also reminders of how storytellers, no matter how passionate about telling the truth and getting to the bottom of things, can give us only a single perspective that cannot tell the whole story or resolve the question of moral culpability. Or is it possible that the author of The Penelopiad escapes that charge and manages to be “the fairest of them all” by giving us multiple perspectives? Is Margaret Atwood, then, our new cultural heroine, who speaks truth to power?
Instead of generic heroes, driven by conflicts and contests and known for their actions (Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Hercules), a new typographic heroine has emerged, known for intellectual powers and literary feats. Thomas Carlyle, back in 1841 in lectures on heroes, hero worship, and the heroic in history, celebrated a new archetype, the “Man of Letters,” a singular figure who engages in the “wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing.”44 Heir to the prophets, poets, and seers of times past, this hero conjures with words. After all, Carlyle adds, “the great deeds of heroes like Achilles, Aeneas, or Regulus would be nothing without the literary labours of Homer, Virgil, or Horace.” This form of heroism becomes the trademark of some of our heroines from the past century and in the present one.
Cassandra and Calliope Speak Their Minds
Today we can speak without hesitation about heroines with a thousand and one faces, and writers may be at the very top of that list. For them, the call to adventure may take the form of an epiphany, a recognition that the old story is no longer true and that a new ideological orientation can transform the story as it was once told. But what specific strategies do authors use to identify the other thousand heroines among their number? Today, many women writers seem to be looking backward, resurrecting figures from times past to reveal that those who are socially marginalized were not as weak and powerless as they may at first blush seem. Finding dignity, value, and significance in the lives of those who were sidelined in one way or another, these writers give us new angles, new perspectives, and new stories.45 What if we are able to listen to the voices of Europa, Arachne, Hecuba, Psyche, and others? The effect is to defamiliarize the stor
ies that circulate widely in our culture and to interrogate those same old stories, with critical instincts engaged, and to reflect on the old versus the new. But beyond that, these narratives challenge us to make an effort to get our stories right, to recognize that no single protagonist has a hotline to the truth, and to understand how justice is a hard-won social good that requires us to listen to more than one voice and to be open to listening both to individual testimony and to choruses of lamentation and complaint.
The ancient world rarely let women speak their minds, neither in real life nor in myth, story, and history. There are, of course, exceptions, and Euripides lets Hecuba rip into Ulysses, when she learned that she was to be his slave: “My luck is to serve / The foulest man / Alive, back stabber, / Justice hater, / Hell-born snake / Whose slick tongue / Twists everything / To nothing, twists / Love to hate, / And hate to love.” But then it is also Euripides who gives us a line blaming the entire Trojan War on “one woman and her evil marriage.”46
Margaret Atwood discovered that women from the ancient world could be revived and given voices. But even before The Penelopiad, Christa Wolf discovered a kindred spirit in a Greek woman whose voice had perpetually gone unheeded and who needed to be heard today. “To speak with my voice, the ultimate,” Wolf’s Cassandra tells us in the 1983 novel of that title. In Cassandra, Wolf discovers an alter ego, a double who can look into the future because she has “the courage to see things as they really are in the present.”