Reweaving Memory: Narrative Fragmentation and the Multiplicity of Truth in The Penelopiad

Abstract

Myths have long been commonly accepted as stories of indeterminable origination tale-telling the accounts of events which may have instituted a change in the workings of the universe or in the conditions of social life. A dominant pattern evident in most patricentric mythic cultures of the world is the patronisation of gods and male superheroes with extraordinary strength, sidelining the women in the story to mere figures of ornamentation. The foundational Greek epic, The Odyssey by Homer follows similar prototype in singing the tale of the war-hero Odysseus’ tryst on his decades-long adventures in the Trojan war and on the sea back home, while marginalizing Penelope, Odysseus’ wife to an epitome for womankind, and her maids as exemplary corrupt women. This discriminating idolization and vocal repression of women characters have found its reflection into the societies for generations, and has thence, been a gap for feminist writers to utilise for the empowerment of women. Margaret Atwood endeavours to dismantle this very monolithic male authority of the Homeric epic by altering the narrative fragmentation by granting women the voices they are denied, and the epistemology of truth. Atwood has presented the argument to destabilize patriarchal modes of storytelling by juxtaposing Penelope’s retrospective narrative with the polyphonic choral interludes of her maids, while questioning the very notion of the historical authenticity and singular truth. In disintegrating the ideas of voice, form, and memory, Atwood achieves to reclaim the feminist goal to explore silenced perspectives, trace the cracks in the canonical myth-making, and recondition the feminist narratology as one of agency and multiplicity rather than of insignificant passivity. Thus, this study uses the theories of Postmodernism and feminist historiography to explore Atwood’s strategy of “reweaving memory” to foreground the fluidity of “truth” and the ethics of storytelling in the context of gendered mythic retellings.