Sam Vanderhave

Mr. Gardner

English 9 Block E

23 January 2023

A Female Choir

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still,

like dust, I'll rise (Angelou).

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise (Angelou).

For a long time, women were not respected. They did not work and make money, they

did not go to school, and they definitely did not fight in wars. Rather, women were there to cook,

clean, and have children. When it came to societal class, women were at the bottom. They were

the last to gain the right to vote, and the last to be allowed to work. Literature was no different.

In the early decades, not only did men dominate society, but they also dominated the world of

books. The Odyssey, written by Homer in BCE, represents the first male dominated story.

Focused on Odysseus’ point of view, it successfully incorporates the limited role of women in

society. Like many myths and legends, The Odyssey is very male dominated, making it ripe for a

feminist revision. It caught the eye of a female writer, Margaret Atwood. As a feminist critic,
Atwood adapts The Odyssey to fit modern day customs. Instead of showing the oppression of

women and hiding their voices, Atwood breaks stereotypes, extracts misogynistic elements, and

takes a different point of view to tell a classic story. In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood

narrows the social disparity between men and women, and empowers women by giving them a

voice.

Through dissecting the male-centered account of Odysseus’ journey home, The

Penelopiad identifies the difference of treatment between primary male and secondary female

characters. The Odyssey is centered around the idea that men should be authoritative and

powerful. During Odysseus’ journey home, he gouges the Cyclops’ eye out. He makes a boat

and sails himself across the rotten sea. He also saves his crewmen from the addictive Lotus. The

whole story revolves around Odysseus, master of craft and battle. Throughout The Odyssey, so

much attention is on Odysseus that everyone forgets about the maids. “Remember us? Of

course you do! We brought you water for you to wash your hands, we bathed your feet, we

rinsed you laundry” (Atwood 191). Despite all they do, these lower-class women are

forgotten.all but ignored as All the focus is on Odysseus’ journey home. He could have fought a

one-eyed monster, or it could have been a “one-eyed tavern keeper” that he fought, “just a brawl

of the usual kind, [. . .] with ear-bitings and nosebleeds and stabbings and eviscerations”

(Atwood 83). All this focus on the primary character, leaves little room to expand upon the

Maids. The Maids are not known as hardworking and helpful servants; rather, “twelve

accusations, toes skimming the ground, hands tied behind our backs, tongues sticking out, eyes

bulging, songs choked in our throats” (Atwood 192). The Maids were not only forced to clean up

their lover’s guts, but they were also hunghanged. By Odysseus’ hand, the Maids went from

being Penelope’s family to dead. In the original story, Odysseus is constantly the hero. The
Maids are poorly represented and given no chance to tell their story. By questioning Odysseus’

“slipperiness, his wiliness, his foxiness, his – how can I put this – his unscrupulousness,”

Atwood reduces Odysseus’ role in the story (Atwood 3). More attention is given to the Maids,

and Atwood addresses The Odyssey’s failure to correctly represent all characters.

By approaching retelling The Odyssey from a feminist view, Atwood attempts to

reduce the social disparity between men and women. The original account of The Odyssey

involves hiding the women from conflict and portrays them crying in their rooms.

However, Atwood’s account, The Penelopiad, focuses on the role that women have while

Odysseus is off at war. Without a man in the house, Penelope takes over some of Odysseus’

affairs. Penelope “oversaw the farms and the flocks,” and the “swineherd would [go] to [her] for

advice” (Atwood 88). Penelope and the Maids have to figure out how to get by without

Odysseus. To do this, they become family and help each other out. The Maids spy on the suitors

to help get Penelope information. They help her stall the suitors and comfort her when she is sad.

By instilling the idea that women should be more than just pretty, Atwood contradicts The

Odyssey. Women are told to “get some self-respect / and a day job. / Right. And minimum wage,

/ [. . .] behind a glass counter / bundled up to the neck, instead of / naked as a meat sandwich”

(Atwood). The idea of women being told to stay out of the way creates a misogynistic element.

Women should not exist just to bear children and be pretty. Giving women a chance to be a part

of the society helps them succeed. Throughout the novel Atwood shows that the world would not

survive without women. The Penelopiad is put into the hands of marginalized women, who were

marginalizedrelagated to support roles throughout The Odyssey, allowing readers to understand

the important role of women in the society.

 Atwood uses songs to accentuate the oppression of the twelve Maids and dramatize

their experience. In The Odyssey, the reader could hardly tell the Maids existed. They were

marginalized and deemed “the suitor’s whores” (Fagles 22. 490). Not once was any piece of their

life incorporated or explained. The Penelopiad changes this through 11 songs or “Chorus Lines.”

In these stories, the Maids grow from kids jumping rope, to owls who fly off with one last Envoi.

What one may not gain from The Odyssey, is that the Maids are human: “We too were children.

We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents: parents who

sold us, parents from whom we were stolen” (Atwood 13). Being male centered, The Odyssey

leaves out major details of the women’s lives. The Maids are made out to be awful people who

break rules and deserve to die. By telling the story of the Maids in songs, Atwood addresses the

continued feeling of oppression they face. The short songs are able to draw attention to the brutal

life the Maids encounter. As told by the Maids, “We were set to work in the palace, as children;

we drudged from dawn to dusk, as children” (Atwood 13). From the beginning, the Maids saw

adversity in every aspect of their life. However, without knowledge of their story, they are only

thought of as the disloyal maids. Throughout The Odyssey, the twelve Maids are not treated as

real people, but as disposable products. Through “Chorus Lines,” Margaret Atwood changes this

view and empowers the Maids by giving them a meaningful platform to share their story.

Through The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood pieces together a feminist critique, focused

on the lack of characterization given to women in The Odyssey. Atwood emphasizes the role of

women, inspects social disparity between men and women, and reconstructs the way female

characters are portrayed. She identifies the overwhelming part Odysseus plays in The Odyssey

and shows that women do not need men to succeed. By doing this, Atwood empowers the female

characters.
 Similarly, wFurthermore, this story sends a powerful message of the capability of

Women are capable of succeeding in modern society. They do not just exist to be pretty and have

children. Women have jobs, and contribute to many discoveries in the world today. They can

achieve and accomplish goals that were once thought to be unreachable. As time goes on,

women’s confidence will continue to rise, and the accomplishments they make will continue to

greaten.

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise (Angelou).
 Works Cited

Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise.” 1994. Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

Atwood, Margaret. “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing.” 1939. Poets, Academy of

American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/helen-troy-does-countertop-dancing

Atwood, Margaret---. uThe Penelopiad. Grove Press, 2005.

Fagles, Robert and Bernard Knox. The Odyssey. By Homer, Penguin Classics, 1966

WOW, Sam, some really great stuff here. You make some interesting and valid points.

You’ll want to make sure that, typically in essays like this, you bring in some other sources,

some other critiques or thoughts from other writers about the story. Using Jstor or some other

search engine to access educational periodicals, to strengthen your line of inquire or point out

how they are not quite right. This extends your thinking and analysis. I applaud your

willingness to take on this challenge, and I am super proud of what you’ve produced here. What

might make the writing stronger is making use of an outline. You tend to make strong claims,
and you find good evidence and examples to support it, but at times, you can lose track of your

main idea. This is on the paragraph level. I would suggest going back after your first draft and

creating an outline if that’s how you best work. Then it’s a bit easier to see where you are going

off track. This might be stronger without some of the summary of Odyssey. You can assume

that when you write this type of essay, your audience has read your main texts, not so much other

articles or critiques, but your main ones, Penelopiad and Odyssey. In your intro, you make some

vague statements about the historical role of women in (American) society, and I think you can

make the bigger point with an assumption that this is well-known and perhaps not needed to be

specifically stated. As your build your individual arguments, on the paragraph level, really try to

keep focused on your claim. Your thesis is strong, and it’s complex enough to be broken down

into several individual claims. Focus your revision efforts or keeping those paragraphs centered

about that one claim, and your analysis focused on the textual evidence you present. For

example, the third paragraph, I believe, about Atwood’s use of songs, you don’t really go into

how the song format plays a role, but that is your claim, and halfway through you are talking

about Odysseus. That’s one area where you could sharpen your focus onto the text itself, it’s

structure, its impact, its meaning.

But wow, oh, wow, have you really stretched your ability here. I’m very impressed with

the effort and work you put into this. We’ll use this A to fill in for any poetry writing we’ll do as

a class, so you can skip that. We’ll talk about it for clarification. Make sure to save this and

consider revising for the end of the year portfolio. I’m happy to meet with you and go over it

together if you think you’d like to.

Great work, Sam. Keep up that effort!

 Bibliography

Napikoski, Linda. “What Is Feminist Literary Criticism” ThoughtCo, 6 Feb. 2020,

https://www.thoughtco.com/feminist-literary-criticism-3528960.

Suzuki, Mihoko. “Rewriting the ‘Odyssey’ in the Twenty-First Century: Mary Zimmerman's

‘Odyssey’ and Margaret Atwood's ‘Penelopiad.’” College Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2

(2007): 263-278. Accessed January 23, 2023. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25115430

Howells, Coral Ann. “Five Ways of Looking at ‘The Penelopiad.’” Sydney Studies in English,

Vol. 32, 2006, pp. 5–18. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/ielapa.200608517.

Atwood, Margaret. “Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing.” 1939. Poets, Academy of

American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/helen-troy-does-countertop-dancing

Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise.” 1994. Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise

Atwood, Margaret. The Penelopiad. Grove Press, 2005.

Dhanumol, C. M. “Strong Myths Never Die: A Post Modern Reading of Margaret Atwood’s The

Penelopiad.” Labyrinth, Vol. 4, No. 2, April 2013, pp. 158-164.

Fagles, Robert and Bernard Knox. The Odyssey. By Homer, Penguin Classics, 1966

Jung, Suzzane. “‘A Chorus Line’: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad at the Crossroads of Narrative,

Poetic and Dramatic Genres.” Connotations, Vol. 83, 30 Sep. 2014, pp. 41-62.

https://www.connotations.de/article/susanne-jung-a-chorus-line-margaret-atwoods-

penelopiad-at-the-crossroads-of-narrative-poetic-and-dramatic-genres/