Women In Margaret Atwood's The Panelopiad

IN her well known essay “When we dead awaken : wring as re-vision”Adrienne Rich advocated the idea that it is necessary to revisit known stories from a new critical point of view inoreder to gain a new understanding of gender and Patriarchy. In her essay she defines revisioning as “the act of looking back with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction, is for us [ women] more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusalof the self destructiveness of male dominated society”(18).
Her aim through this essay is to bring forth the need to revisit male narratives from a female perspective, thereby exposing the unjust actions of the patriarchal society that forces …show more content…
By giving the power of narration to the female characters of the myth Penelope is giving them an opportunity to “spin a thread” (4) of their own and to shift the focus to their emotions and their understanding of various occurances. The main narrative by Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, traces her life from her birth to the return of Odysseus from the Trojan war. In this narration readers are provided with a new understanding of the life of Penelope and how she was confined to the image of a quintessential loyal wife to the exclusion of her other abilities(2). The narratives by the maids are interwined, in various lyrical forms, along with the main narrative, and depict the life of the maids and their determination to have a fair judgement of their action througha chance to voice out their experience. This attempt by atwood was pointed out as retelling of the odyssey “as her story for modern readers”. (Howells