He Was Trying to Sing Love Into Existence Again and He Has Failed Atwood

"A Chorus Line": Margaret Atwood'due south Penelopiad at the Crossroads of Narrative, Poetic and Dramatic Genres

Susanne Jung

Published in Connotations Vol. 24.1 (2014/15)

Abstract

In her novel The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood artfully employs a mix of narrative, poetic, and dramatic styles. While the main narrative – a retelling of Homer'south Odyssey past his wife Penelope – comes forth as a straightforward narrative in the vein of Christa Wolf's Kassandra, Atwood intersperses Penelope'south tale with lyrical segments, giving voice to the twelve maids killed by Telemachus on Odysseus' return to Ithaca. Both Ancient Greek chorus and modern musical number, these lyrical interludes employ a range of poetic genres, from plant nursery rhyme to sea shanty to ballad and idyll, thus giving the maids voice as a collective. Further interludes take them take on singular roles in, variously, a courtroom drama and an anthropology lecture. This paper is going to investigate the diverse forms and functions of Atwood'south poetic insertions into her narrative text. I volition argue that the interludes serve as a performative enactment of the silenced female voices of the Odyssey. They may furthermore serve as a pointer, an invitation extended to the reader to go in search of silenced voices haunting other texts of the Western literary canon.

"Don't ask for the true story," the speaker of Margaret Atwood's 1981 poem "True Stories" implores; "why do you need it? / Information technology'south not what I set out with / or what I carry. / […] The true story lies / among the other stories, / […] The truthful story is brutal / and multiple and untrue / […] Don't ever / ask for the true story." This poem might very well serve every bit a motto for Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad, which features many stories, both "fell" and "multiple" and also "untrue." The Penelopiad (2005) could exist described as an attempt to depict i such "true story" lying "among the other stories," in more means than one, not simply the story as seen by one graphic symbol and seen by another character, but also the story as told in prose and in verse.

In her novel, Atwood artfully employs a mix of narrative, poetic and dramatic styles. While the main narrative—a retelling of Homer'southward Odyssey by Penelope—comes along as a straightforward narrative in the vein of Christa Wolf's Kassandra, Atwood intersperses Penelope's tale with lyrical segments, giving voice to the twelve maids killed past Telemachus on Odysseus' return to Ithaca. Both ancient Greek chorus and modern musical number, these lyrical interludes employ a range of poetic genres, from nursery rhyme to bounding main shanty to carol and idyll, thus giving the maids vocalisation as a collective. Further interludes accept them take on atypical roles in, variously, a court drama and an anthropology lecture.

[→ page 42] This newspaper is going to investigate the various forms and functions of Atwood's poetic insertions into her narrative text. ^ane) Incidentally, Atwood's Penelopiad is quite literally situated at a crossroads of genres, equally Atwood herself turned her novel into a play. Differences between the novel and play version of The Penelopiad every bit regards the lyrical interludes will therefore also be discussed. I will contend that the interludes serve as a performative enactment of the silenced female voices of the Odyssey. They may furthermore serve as a pointer, an invitation extended to the reader to become in search of silenced voices haunting other texts of the Western literary canon.

A Line of Echoes

Since the time of its inception, Homer's Odyssey has inspired many rewritings. ²⁾ The almost prominent amidst them have made Odysseus, the epic's protagonist, the centre of their work. In his seminal study The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adjustability of a Traditional Hero, W. B. Stanford identifies the complexity of the ballsy'due south protagonist with regard to his "character and exploits" every bit the master reason for Odysseus' enduring popularity with subsequent writers (seven). Later critics, such every bit Edith Hall in The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer'south Odyssey, extend Stanford'due south statement by pointing towards a whole cast of characters that might concenter hereafter readers' and writers' attention, stating that "one reason for the verse form'southward enduring popularity must be that its personnel is then varied that every aboriginal or modern listener, of any historic period, sex activity or condition, seaman or servant, will take found someone with whom to place" (4). ³⁾

Margaret Atwood's rewriting of Homer's Odyssey is then, in her ain words, "an echo of an echo of an repeat" (Penelopiad: The Play v). ²²⁾ The Penelopiad was originally commissioned as a novel, as function of the Canongate Myths Series which saw a number of well–known authors rewrite traditional myths (Atwood, "The Myths Series" 58). Two years after the publication of the novel, The Penelopiad: The Play premiered in July 2007 at the Purple Shakespeare Company'due south Swan Theatre in [→ page 43] Stratford–upon–Avon, a coproduction with Canada'south National Arts Centre, and the play afterward transferred to Canada as well. ^iv) For her portrayal of Penelope, Margaret Atwood drew on both the Odyssey and other mythological sources of Greek antiquity (cf. Penelopiad 197–98). ^five) The novel consists of two intertwined narratives: in the principal narrative, Penelope, speaking from the Underworld, relates her life from birth to the end of the Trojan War and, finally, Odysseus' return to Ithaca. Both her own and her husband Odysseus' afterlife in the Greek Underworld are too described. This main narrative, a prose monologue, or equally Penelope herself has it, a "tale" (Penelopiad 4), is shadowed past the narrative of the maids, who relate their side of the story in lyrical segments interspersed throughout the main narrative. The maids speak mostly as one collective phonation, mostly in verse.

Coral Ann Howells describes "Atwood's projection" as a retelling of "The Odyssey as 'herstory' for modern readers" ("'We tin't help'" 59). Significantly, "Atwood shifts the focus of The Odyssey away from grand narratives of war, relocating information technology in the micronarratives of women at habitation" (63). Susanna Braund notes that, past presenting the maids' story prominently alongside Penelope'south story, Atwood "reminds u.s. that the stories of myth are not in the least concerned well-nigh the ordinary people who make the lives of the kings and heroes possible and […] challenges us to reassess the consequences of the identifications we make when we read mod retellings of ancient myth" (203).

This is how Atwood herself describes her reasoning backside the unusual structural features of her novel: "The chorus of Maids is in part a tribute to the use of the chorus in Greek tragedy, in which lowly characters comment on the main activity, and too to the satyr plays that accompanied tragedies, in which comic actors made fun of them. The Maids in The Penelopiad do such things, but also they're aroused, as they even so feel they accept been wrongfully hanged" (Penelopiad: The Play vi). ^half-dozen) This explains very well the overall construction of the novel, which features alternating capacity of Penelope's and the maids' stories, much similar in Greek tragedy episodes would alternate with choral [→ page 44] dance segments. According to Brockett and Hildy, the functions of the chorus in Greek drama include among other things: setting "the mood for the play," calculation "dynamic free energy," "giving advice" to the characters or even serving equally an "antagonist," only also, setting upward an "ethical […] framework" of the events portrayed in the main action (19–20). I would debate that peculiarly the last one applies strongly for Atwood's novel. ⁷⁾

And so who are the twelve maids who make up this chorus in Atwood's novel? The Penelopiad features two epigraphs, excerpts from the Odyssey pertaining to Penelope and the maids. The following is the one pertaining to the maids (Penelopiad xiii):

… he took a cable which had seen service on a bluish–bowed ship, made 1 end fast to a high column in the portico, and threw the other over the round–house, high upwardly, so that their feet would not touch the footing. As when long–winged thrushes or doves get entangled in a snare … so the women's heads were held fast in a row, with nooses round their necks, to bring them to the most pitiable end. For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long. (The Odyssey, Book 22, 470–73)

In her novel, Atwood prefaces all the chapters containing the maids' narrative with the chapter heading "The Chorus Line," which is so followed by the title of each individual chapter. I take this to be an allusion to another genre evoked by Atwood hither: that of modern–twenty-four hour period musical theatre; and so the maids literally appear as chorus line girls dancing and singing in the chorus line segments of Atwood'due south novel. This may also be an allusion to the 1975 musical A Chorus Line by Marvin Hamlisch which turns the chorus line into protagonists, foregrounding what is usually backgrounded in musical theatre: the musical numbers containing trip the light fantastic and choral song. ^viii) And, indeed, many of the poetic forms used here by Atwood happen to be songs: the nursery rhyme, the popular melody, the sea shanty, the carol, the honey vocal. (Note, however, that this practice of referring to the chorus as the chorus line is not retained in the play, where the vocal or scene headings only characteristic the occasional "chorus" in front of the private songs or scenes.) Like Hamlisch'southward musical, Atwood'south novel and [→ page 45] play foreground previously neglected characters and storylines: information technology is Penelope and the maids–equally–chorus–line who take eye phase in this item rewriting of Homer'south Odyssey.

Forms and Functions of the Lyrical Interludes

Before taking a closer look at the forms and functions of the poetic insertions in Atwood's prose narrative, I would similar to give an overview of the lyrical segments in both novel and play. Every bit can be seen from the following table, the lyrical segments of the novel are mostly integrated into the various scenes of the play. Some segments plant whole scenes of the play; others are excluded from the terminal text of the play. 2 additional lyrical segments are added to the play text:

Novel 9)	Play
The Chorus Line: A Rope–Jumping Rhyme	incorporated in Scene 2
*Kiddie Mourn, A Complaining by the Maids	incorporated in Scene 4
If I Was a Princess, A Pop Tune	Scene 8
The Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll	incorporated in Scene 10
The Wily Ocean Captain, A Bounding main Shanty	incorporated in Scenes 15 and 26
Dreamboats, A Carol	Scene 22
The Perils of Penelope, A Drama	—
*An Anthropology Lecture	—
*The Trial of Odysseus, every bit Videotaped by the Maids	**(partly incorporated in Scene xxx)
*We're Walking Behind You, A Love Vocal	—
Envoi	incorporated in Scene 32
	new: untitled weaving song (Scene 19)
	new: untitled nursery rhyme (Scene 13)
(* printed in prose) (** the invocation of the furies from the trial, printed in prose in the novel, is retained in the play, but appears in the play printed equally a costless poesy poem)

Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad is thus structurally and thematically multivoiced, a polylogue offer multiple perspectives. By choosing [→ folio 46] to separate Penelope's beginning–person account from the account of the maids–equally–chorus, the novel appears structurally with, on the one hand, an autodiegetic narrator (Penelope), and, on the other hand, the speaker/narrator of the interludes (the maids every bit chorus line). An integration of both voices into one (prose) narrative is withheld throughout the novel.

The reader first encounters the maids in chapter two, placed later the novel's opening chapter in which Penelope, speaking every bit her shadow self from the Underworld (Penelopiad 1), announces to the reader that she is now set up to tell the tale of her own life—"it'due south a low art: tale–telling" (3–4). The maids speak as i hither.

The Chorus Line: A Rope–Jumping Rhyme

we are the maids
the ones you killed
the ones you failed

we danced in air
our blank feet twitched
information technology was not off-white

with every goddess, queen, and bitch
from there to here
y'all scratched your itch

we did much less
than what yous did
yous judged united states of america bad

you lot had the spear
you had the word
at your control

we scrubbed the blood
of our dead
paramours from floors, from chairs

from stairs, from doors,
we knelt in water
while you stared

[→ page 47] at our bare feet
it was not fair
you licked our fright

information technology gave you lot pleasure
you raised your paw
you watched the states fall

we danced on air
the ones you failed
the ones yous killed (Atwood, Penelopiad 5–vi)

The rope–jumping rhyme comes along as a deceptively simple iambic dimeter, with three lines to each stanza. And yet this verse form is highly crafted. Nosotros observe anaphora (multiple times: "the ones," and very emphatically: "you"), chiasmus ("from floors, from chairs / from stairs, from doors"), the odd rhyme ("bowwow / itch"), and a striking enjambment ("dead / paramours," resulting in an emphasis on the describing word "dead"). Virtually striking of all, however, is the metaphor of the dying maids "dancing" at the terminate of another set of ropes, not the ropes used by seven–twelvemonth–old girls, merely the ones placed by Telemachus, noose–like, around the maids' necks in the novel's mythical intertext. Atwood takes the epitome of the maids' twitching feet directly out of the Odyssey'south Book 22, and turns it into an extended dance metaphor: "For a piffling while their anxiety twitched, but non for very long" (473). But who is the "you" here, the poem's addressee? Odysseus for sure, who "scratched [his] itch / with every goddess, queen and bitch" while the maids did "much less" in sleeping (for the most part against their will) with Penelope's suitors. Merely the maids accost Penelope as well, who "failed" them by not coming clean with Odysseus in time about her part in instructing the maids to behave the way they did. Atwood is rewriting Homer here, giving more agency to Penelope in the story of her long look for Odysseus' render. The trip the light fantastic toe metaphor is a grotesque one, and information technology is among other things this image, the image of the hanged maids, which compelled Margaret Atwood to prepare out on the job of rewriting this particular myth in the first place: "I've e'er been haunted by the hanged maids," she says [→ page 48] in the introduction to the novel (xxi). Indeed, in the dramatized version, the stage directions for the maids for this lyrical segment read: "while jumping ropes or doing other rope tricks" (Penelopiad: The Play 4).

In the envoi Atwood returns to the same kind of seemingly simple poetic class: three five–line stanzas containing iambic dimeter and using mostly rhyming couplets. "It was not fair," the maids emphatically repeat, a direct quote from the rope–jumping rhyme from the novel's beginning.

Envoi

we had no vocalism
we had no name
we had no choice
we had one confront
i face the same

we took the blame
it was not off-white
only at present we're here
we're all hither too
the aforementioned as you lot

and at present we follow
y'all, nosotros observe you
now, nosotros call
to you to you
too wit as well woo
too wit too woo
as well woo (Atwood, Penelopiad 195–96)

In simple, nursery rhyme–like poesy the maids take their exit, "sprout[ing] feathers, and fly[ing] away as owls" (Penelopiad 196). Their transformation into birds of wisdom at the novel's close allows for the possibility of release for the maids. ¹⁰⁾ Telling their tale, presenting their side of the story, a shadow narrative to both the Odyssey and Penelope's tale, might serve in this reading as a kind of redemption [→ page 49] for the maids, who accept released non simply their physical human form but also their negative touch on, with the implied twenty–first century reader serving equally witness to their trauma. The transformation of anger into art, into poetry and vocal, releases their negative affect and its agree over them.

Notwithstanding, in the play, the transformation of the maids into owls is withheld; the maids take their exit as their eternal chorus line selves, "danc[ing] abroad in a line, with their ropes around their necks, singing" (Atwood, Penelopiad: The Play 82). Thus, the catastrophe of the play does not allow for such an affective closure. Here, the maids remain stuck in their chorus girl selves, following Odysseus and Penelope, and haunting the Underworld as angry, damaged spirits. When Penelope tries to address them in the play's final scene, the stage directions read that the maids "titter eerily, bat–like, and circle away from her" (Atwood, Penelopiad: The Play 82). I read this performative gesture as a sign of trauma. The trace of what has happened to them still remains visible in their not–verbal utterances. The dance of the chorus girls turns into a grotesque mocking shadow of an entertaining dance of the Broadway musical chorus line.

"[B]ut now we're hither / we're all here as well / the aforementioned as you," the maids intone. Death serves as the slap-up equalizer, eliminating class differences between the maid servants and Odysseus and Penelope. Finally they are "the same equally you lot," their masters. Just what has happened in betwixt? What kind of story have the maids narrated in between? And to what kind of poetic forms have they made allusion, incorporating and ventriloquizing the master soapbox of Western literary canon? ¹¹⁾

Some of their commentary uses straightforward poetry and song, such every bit the pop tune, the sea shanty and the ballad. The popular tune, which is prefaced in the novel by the annotation "As Performed by the Maids, with a Fiddle, an Accordion, and a Penny Whistle" (Atwood, Penelopiad 51), uses simple four–line stanzas with dactyls, a tetrameter and rhyming couplets. The maids present the stanzas equally soloists but are joined in the chorus by all the other maids. At the end the maids [→ folio fifty] all curtsy, and Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks walks around, "passing the lid" (53).

Commencement Maid:
If I was a princess, with silver and gold,
And loved by a hero, I'd never abound old:
Oh, if a immature hero came a–marrying me,
I'd always be beautiful, happy, and costless!

Chorus:
So sail, my fine lady, on the billowing moving ridge—
The water beneath is as dark as the grave,
And mayhap you'll sink in your little blue boat—
It'south promise, and hope merely, that keeps usa adrift.

Second Maid:
I fetch and I conduct, I hear and obey,
It's Aye sir and No ma'am the whole bleeding mean solar day;
I smile and I nod with a tear in my center,
I make the soft beds in which others practice lie. […] (Atwood, Penelopiad 51–52)

In the manner of street musicians or music hall singers, the maids describe their daily life at Odysseus' court while expressing their dreams of condign princesses. It is all very much tongue in cheek, and all the same there is a serious undertone to the maids' jesting.

The ballad follows a similar formal pattern, using the regular ballad metre: iambs and simple four line stanzas with alternating tetrameter and trimeter, and one rhyme per stanza. Just the social criticism already present in both the rope–jumping rhyme and the popular melody is harsher at present, equally the fate of the maids at courtroom has become much more dire: in Atwood'southward version of the Odyssey, it is Penelope who sets the twelve maids up to mingle with the suitors and spy on them; they are to be her "eyes and ears" among the suitors (Atwood, Penelopiad 114–15). While being a clever programme for Penelope, it likewise results in a number of the maids getting raped by the suitors; this is not prevented by Penelope herself. The maids relate their life as Penelope'southward spies thus: [→ page 51]

Sleep is the merely residue we get;
It'southward and so nosotros are at peace:
We practice not accept to mop the flooring
And wipe away the grease.

We are non chased around the hall
And tumbled in the dirt
By every dimwit nobleman
Who wants a slice of brim.

And when nosotros slumber we similar to dream;
We dream we are at ocean,
We sail the waves in golden boats
And so happy, clean and free.

In dreams nosotros all are beautiful
In glossy crimson dresses;
We sleep with every man we love,
We shower them with kisses.

[…]

But then the morning time wakes us upward:
Again we toil and slave,
And hoist our skirts at their command
For every prick and knave. (Atwood, Penelopiad 125–26)

Only when asleep, so the maids relate, are they released from their bonds of servitude. Remarkably, the sea serves for them equally a space of longing, continuing in metaphorically for a place of freedom and happiness. This is in stark contrast to Odysseus' own longing, throughout the Odyssey, to go out the bounding main behind and reach the shore of, preferably, his homeland Ithaca. Neither the pop tune nor the ballad characteristic phase directions in the play (presumably because both constitute stand up–lone scenes), leaving the dramatization of the songs to the play'due south manager and movement director.

In the sea shanty, the maids take on the part of Odysseus' sailors and present a summary of Homer'south Odyssey. What happened really to Odysseus during those long years betwixt the finish of the Trojan War and his eventual return to Ithaca? Penelope herself offers rumors; but [→ page 52] even after her death and speaking from the Underworld, she knows "merely a few factoids I didn't know before" (Atwood, Penelopiad i). Thus the reader of at least this tale is left with zero but an array of conflicting stories. This is what Penelope relates to the reader at 1 point, in prose:

Odysseus had been to the State of the Dead to consult the spirits, said some. No, he'd simply spent the night in a gloomy old cave full of bats, said others. He'd fabricated his men put wax in their ears, said one, while sailing past the alluring Sirens—one-half–bird, half–woman—who enticed men to their island and so ate them, though he'd tied himself to the mast so he could listen to their irresistible singing without jumping overboard. No, said another, information technology was a high–class Sicilian knocking shop—the courtesans at that place were known for their musical talents and their fancy feathered outfits. (Atwood, Penelopiad 91)

The reader is offered a myriad of stories, theories, points of view of what might have happened, but knowledge of the "truth" of what happened is forever deferred. Or, looking at information technology in light of the verse form quoted at the beginning of my newspaper, it is the sum of all the stories that constitutes "the truth." Both the narrative and the shadow narratives, the line of echoes, coexist.

The maids nowadays to the reader the "official" version, every bit laid downwards in Homer'south Odyssey. Their telling takes the grade of a sea shanty: Regular 4–line stanzas using anapest and tetrameter (the last line always uses trimeter) are interspersed with a chorus using the same grade. This is the sea shanty, "As Performed by the Twelve Maids, in Sailor Costumes" (Atwood, Penelopiad 93):

Oh wily Odysseus he set up out from Troy,
With his boat full of boodle and his centre full of joy,
For he was Athene's ain shiny–eyed boy,
With his lies and his tricks and his thieving!
His offset port of call was the sweet Lotus shore
Where we sailors did long to forget the foul war;
Only we shortly were hauled off on the blackness ships once more,
Although we were pining and grieving.

[…]
[→ page 53] Here'south a wellness to our Captain, and so gallant and free,
Whether stuck on a stone or asleep 'neath a tree,
Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea,
Which is where we would all similar to be, human being! […] (Atwood, Penelopiad 93–94)

The crossdressing maids put on the costumes of Odysseus' sailors for this song. Incidentally, their captain, whom the sailors praise in the chorus ("so gallant and complimentary"), manages to lose all of them and become them killed in Homer's epic. So how seriously are we equally readers supposed to take this praise? In presenting the Odyssey as a sea shanty, the maids' retelling takes on the form of travesty. But is this Margaret Atwood presenting a caricature of the Odyssey, or but an entertaining mode of presenting a summary of the mythical intertext? The ironic mode would of course allow for both to be true at the same time.

There is another parody the maids present to the reader: "The Nativity of Telemachus, An Idyll" relates the story of the birth and childhood of both Telemachus and the maid servants, his childhood playmates. On a formal level, Margaret Atwood presents in the idyll verse in the vein of Tennyson or Whitman ¹²⁾ ; on the level of content this poem, too, tells the story of the makings of the hereafter rex of Ithaca. But information technology is closely linked to the story of the maids:

Nine months he sailed the vino–ruddy seas of his mother'south blood
Out of the cave of dreaded Night, of sleep,
Of troubling dreams he sailed
In his frail nighttime gunkhole, the boat of himself,
Through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed
From the distant cave where the threads of men'south lives are spun,
Then measured, and and then cutting brusk
By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent on their gruesome handcrafts,
And the lives of women also are twisted into the strand.

And we, the twelve who were later on to dice by his paw
At his father's relentless command,
Sailed as well, in the night delicate boats of ourselves
Through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore–footed mothers
Who were not purple queens, merely a motley and piebald collection,
Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped from serfs and strangers.

[…]
[→ page 54] Our lives were twisted in his life; we also were children
When he was a child,
We were his pets and his toythings, mock sisters, his tiny companions.
We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran every bit he ran,
Though sandier, hungrier, sun–speckled, almost days meatless.
He saw united states as rightfully his, for whatever purpose
He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him,
Rock him to slumber in the dangerous boats of ourselves.

Nosotros did not know as we played with him in that location in the sand
On the embankment of our rocky goat–island, close by the harbour,
That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold–eyed teenaged killer.
If we had known that, would we have drowned him dorsum then?
[…]
Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood–cerise mazes,
Tangling the lives of men and women together.
Only they know how events might and then accept been contradistinct.
Simply they know our hearts.
From usa you will get no answer. (Atwood, Penelopiad 65–69)

The poetry used past Margaret Atwood here is marked by composure and retains an almost epic quality: parallel constructions and repetitions of words and phrases reminiscent of oral literature, besides equally the use of extended metaphor, the journey of pregnancy and birth as a sea voyage. All of this speaks of a language and mode far more than elevated than the previous examples of speech communication allocated by Atwood to the maids. The maid servants here successfully imitate highbrow poetry, the discourse of their masters. While on the level of content, the inequality in social hierarchy betwixt Telemachus and the maids is foregrounded, on the level of grade, information technology is successfully deconstructed.

In his essay "'Poetry in Fiction': A Range of Options," Matthias Bauer delineates the different forms the appearance of verse in prose can take, differentiating between "poetry every bit genre," "poesy as form of speech," and "poetry as manner." All the examples from Atwood'southward Penelopiad discussed upwardly to this point could be argued to exhibit the characteristics of "poetry as genre." Only the other two forms of poetry in prose can be plant in Atwood's novel as well. "Verse as course of speech" makes an appearance in the affiliate "The Perils of Penelope, [→ page 55] A Drama," which over again employs verse, but this fourth dimension it is the verse of eighteenth–century mock–heroic drama. ¹³⁾ The topic is Penelope's surmised marital infidelity; the maids assume the roles of Penelope, Eurycleia, and the chorus line, while Melantho of the Pretty Cheeks presents a prologue; the drama is written in iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets (cf. Atwood, Penelopiad 147–52). ¹⁴⁾ Information technology is removed in its entirety from the play version, as is the "Anthropology Lecture," a parody of critical writing on the Odyssey in the vein of Robert Graves, which reduces the maids and their suffering to mere symbol. As one would look from a parody of critical writing, no verse is to exist found here (cf. Atwood, Penelopiad 163–68). ^xv)

Three more than numbers of the chorus line can exist found to exist using prose, every bit marked in the overview above: the lament, the beloved song, and the trial of Odysseus. But is it really prose that is used here? Both the honey song and the lament exhibit poetical qualities: parallelisms abound; the titles—honey song and lament—refer to poetic genres. They can thus serve equally an example of what Matthias Bauer refers to as "poetry as manner" equally it appears in prose. To illustrate my bespeak, here are 2 curt excerpts from both lament and honey vocal:

We too were children. We too were born to the wrong parents. Poor parents, slave parents, peasant parents, and serf parents; parents who sold us, parents from whom we were stolen. These parents were not gods, they were not demi–gods, they were not nymphs or Naiads. Nosotros were set to work in the palace, every bit children; we drudged from dawn to sunset, as children. […] ("Lament"; Atwood, Penelopiad xiii)
Yoo hoo! Mr Nobody! Mr Nameless! Mr Principal of Illusion! Mr Sleight of Hand, grandson of thieves and liars!
We're hither also, the ones without names. The other ones without names. […]
Nosotros're the serving girls, we're hither to serve you. Nosotros're here to serve yous right. We'll never get out you, we'll stick to you lot similar your shadow, soft and relentless equally glue. Pretty maids, all in a row. ¹⁶⁾
("Love Song"; Atwood, Penelopiad 191–93)

In Atwood'southward version of the tale, the shadows of the maids really do stick to Odysseus similar glue in the Underworld. In the novel, Odysseus [→ page 56] is tried for the murder of the maids in a court drama, over the class of which the maids take matters into their own hands, calling on the Erinyes, the Furies, to punish Odysseus for his wrongdoings. (The xx–first century judge refuses to sentence Odysseus on grounds of the example beingness some 2000 years out of date.) The courtroom drama does not make it into the play, just the invocation of the Furies is kept, with the maids themselves becoming the Furies and carrying out their revenge. Atwood uses the same text for the invocation, basically a expletive, in both novel and play. In the novel, this is written in prose, whereas in the play, the same lines are presented in gratuitous poetry. Clearly, the invocation transcends generic boundaries, blending poetry and prose in i of the most emotionally charged texts of the play:

O Aroused Ones, O Furies, y'all are our last hope!
We implore you to inflict penalization and exact vengeance on our behalf!
Be our defenders, we who had none in life!
Smell out Odysseus wherever he goes!
From one identify to some other, from ane life to another!
Whatever disguise he puts on,
Whatever shape he may take,
Hunt him downward!
Dog his footsteps.
On world or in Hades.
Wherever he may have refuge!
Appear to him in our forms.
Our ruined forms!
The forms of our pitiable corpses.
Let him never be at residue! (Atwood, Penelopiad: The Play 78)

We are now in the realm of poetic language, which here is also the linguistic communication of the sacred, the diction of biblical texts, of prayer. One might even hear in this grotesque parody echoes of biblical prayers such as the Lord'south Prayer. ¹⁷⁾

In Atwood's version of the Odyssey, Odysseus and to a certain extent too Penelope remain haunted by what has happened. In Odysseus' case this includes a literal haunting, as the expressionless maids keep following him even in the Underworld. "He sees them in the distance, heading [→ page 57] our way," Penelope recounts towards the novel'south shut. "They make him nervous. They make him restless. They cause him pain. They make him want to exist anywhere and anyone else" (Atwood, Penelopiad 189). ¹⁸⁾

With her borrowing from Ancient Greek tragedy by making use of choral interludes, Atwood presents a prose narrative haunted by its excluded shadow narratives. In her essay "'We can't help simply exist modern,'" Coral Ann Howells contends that, with its myriad of textual transformations and hauntings, "The Penelopiad might be seen as Atwood's Gothic version of The Odyssey" (58), where "[the maids'] stories persist, for their fates represent the dark underside of heroic epic and their voices celebrate the return of the repressed," and where, finally, her "Underworld despite its classical trappings is the Gothic territory of the Uncanny" (69).

Another way of reading the interludes, this fourth dimension drawing not on psychoanalytic theory, equally Howells does, but on contempo trauma theories, might be the post-obit: the maids' subjectivities, which accept been denied bureau in the main narrative, haunt this same narrative. (Lyric) poesy lacks the temporality that (narrative) prose possesses. The failure to reintegrate the narrative voice of the maids inside the master (i.e. Penelope's) narrative is presented—accordingly—as an ever present haunting of that narrative in the form of poetic insertions. The insertions might thus be argued to serve, structurally, also equally representations of intrusions produced past the trauma of exclusion of these voices. And as such they remain, appropriately, forever severed from the temporality of the main narrative. ¹⁹⁾

More Than a Number

The maids' poetic insertions serve several functions within the framework of Atwood'southward novel. By presenting their utterances as outside to Penelope's prose narrative, Atwood illustrates the maids' social status as slave servants who cannot make their voices heard and who retain no bureau within the framework of the main narrative. ²⁰⁾ Transferred to the culture of the twentieth and 20–start centuries, [→ folio 58] the maids retain their roles as entertainers, condign girls in a chorus line. However, while, on the level of plot, no agency is given to the maids, they still manage to speak out and present their point of view, to make their voices heard from the position and within the space allocated to them: in their poetic interludes, dances and songs. Female voices silenced in the Odyssey are thus past Atwood performatively made audible in the novel's interludes.

These interludes are much more than merely the equivalent of the musical numbers of a background chorus line to either Homer's Odyssey or Penelope's retelling of it from her ain point of view. Being excluded from Penelope's prose narrative, the maids raise their voices, in the interludes, as outsiders; yet, as outsiders they as well speak from a position of epistemic privilege. ²¹⁾ It is with them that an important "truth" of the story resides. And it is in their interludes that questions of ethical responsibility and accountability of deportment (Odysseus', Penelope'due south, Telemachus') are raised.

"For a little while their feet twitched, but not for very long" (Penelopiad 13). This is the line from Homer which Margaret Atwood started out with. Why not, love reader, take this as a pointer: which other silenced voices haunting other texts of the Western literary canon tin you hear?

Eberhard Karls Universität
Tübingen

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Source: https://www.connotations.de/article/susanne-jung-a-chorus-line-margaret-atwoods-penelopiad-at-the-crossroads-of-narrative-poetic-and-dramatic-genres/

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