ABSTRACT

Throughout her literary career, Canadian author Margaret Atwood has engaged with the past as a means of revealing the prejudiced cultural and historical representation of female characters, as well as their "absence" from historical records. Her recent work The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus (2005) inscribes itself in this same tradition. In The Penelopiad Atwood revisits the myth of Penelope and Odysseus, as told in Homer's Odyssey, and questions some of the fundamental assumptions made in the mythical narrative-assumptions that deal with an ideal of feminine chastity and loyalty, as well as with the use of weaving as an expression of female domesticity.