Antiquity, Modernity, and Progress for Women Theme Analysis

The Penelopiad is framed as Penelope and the Maids’ retrospective narratives, in which they look back from the afterlife on what they did in the past. Due to this dynamic, Penelope repeatedly refers to how society has changed since the time when she was alive in Greece.

The ancient Grecian characters are keenly aware of what goes on in the modern era. In the afterlife, spirits have the option to return to earth for a time with the memories of their past lives wiped out. As a result, they are up to date on societal shifts and trends. Helen, who has taken this option several times, tells Penelope about “bikinis, and aerobic exercises, and body piercings” and suggests that she and Penelope take a trip to Las Vegas. Even understandings of Grecian history, which Penelope and Helen actually lived through, have changed since their time on earth. Penelope, for example, notes that modern people consider the Trojan War, in which Helen’s elopement with Paris is supposed to be the central issue, to have been an issue of trade routes. Through her comparison of contemporary customs and her narrative description of older ones, Penelope highlights the vast difference in culture between antiquity and the modern day.

At the same time, however, these changes have not done as much as the reader may think to improve the world, especially in regards to the treatment of women. Atwood most clearly showcases this during the Maids’ chapter “The Trial of Odysseus.” The chapter is written as a court transcript. The format of the trial is in the style of a modern-day court system, featuring lawyers, a judge, order in the court, etc. But despite the court’s modernity, the judge arrives at the same outcome for Odysseus as the Greeks did—no punishment for killing the Maids. The judge states that it is impossible to judge Odysseus because his times “were not our times.” However, the judge then goes on to say that it would be a shame if this one “minor incident” ruined his career. This is highly ironic, because fear of ruining a man’s career is an often-cited, and often criticized, excuse for silencing victims of rape in modern times. Through this irony, Atwood shows how Odysseus’s times are, in fact, not very different from our times, with violence against women going undiscussed and unpunished.

Not only does Atwood suggest that modern times have not made much progress in regard to the treatment of women, but she even suggests that progress is not guaranteed, and that societies can regress rather than progress. To give one example, Penelope discusses how, during her time in Greece, a switch was being made in marital practices. According to Penelope, men used to move in with their wives’ families, and money and titles were kept in women’s families as a result. Women were still being used as vessels to convey inheritances, just like in later Western Civilization before women could own property, but in this original Greek system women were at least not completely uprooted from their communities and physically trafficked elsewhere. But, as Penelope notes, during her youth there was a new and growing trend toward women moving in with their husband’s family instead of the husband moving to join the wife’s family. Penelope and Odysseus take part in this growing trend, with Penelope leaving fashionable Sparta for the isolated island of Ithaca. While Penelope is not upset about this when it happens, she often discusses feeling isolated and lonely, suggesting that this change may not be in her best interest. In general, this change could be considered to be more objectifying and more damaging for women, a regression in their personal rights.

Atwood makes the possibility of regressing in society’s treatment of women clearer in the chapter titled “An Anthropology Lecture.” During this chapter, the Twelve Maids explicitly make the case that the scene at the end of The Odyssey and The Penelopiad represents the switch from a women-centered society to one that is male dominated. In their argument, the maids argue that the twelve of them plus Penelope represent the thirteen lunar moons in a year, and that their rape and hanging represent the “overthrow of the matrilineal moon-cult by an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father-god-worshipping barbarians.” Their argument is not only based in the symbolism of the narrated event and its parallels to other iconography, but also in the fact that there is archeological evidence that such an overthrow actually existed. In other words, the Maids describe the fall of a women-centered society in favor of a men-centered one, leading to the rest of the patriarchal history of Western Civilization. Atwood’s emphasis on the precariousness of progress for women forces the modern reader to look critically at their own society and the cultural changes being made.