I did the Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood ( a reconstruction of the Odyssey from Penelope's POV) . It's quite good in that there are a lot of links you can say between subverting the mythology esp if you are doing the Minotaur.
These are just some of my random notes on it;
• Is a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey told through the voice of Penelope, speaking from beyond the grave as she tells her life story in the form of a confession
• Margaret Atwood stated that “Strong myths never die. Sometimes they die down, but they don’t die out. They double back in the dark, they re-embody themselves, they change costumes, they change key. They speak in new languages, they take on new meanings”
• Penelope is trying to make herself heard as she tells her stories about the ancient Greece and about the other ghosts in the underworld with her
• Atwood’s female storytellers always seem to be disembodied voices. They have disappeared by the end of their life stories into death or back into the text- and only their voices remain. Can link this to Plath and how her voice only remains through her poems e.g. daddy
• Atwood obsessed with the transgression of boundaries between the living and the dead. ---> Plath’s suicide attempts
• In Atwood’s Underworld, contrary to Homer’s assertions, The waters of forgetfulness don’t always work the way they are supposed to . Her ghosts seem to remember everything
• Margaret Atwood stated that “ Myth’s can be used-as they have been so frequently-as the foundation stones for new versions, new renderings, -renderings that have, in turn, their own contexts, that find their meanings within their own historical moments”
• Critic Sharon R Wilson has remarked that Atwood “ replays the old stories in new contexts and from different perspectives-frequently from a woman’s point of view-so that the stories shimmer with new meanings”
• In the Penelopiad, Penelope is given a voice for the first time from Atwood through her literary imagination to dissent from cultural myths imposed on them.
• Penelope says her version is the “plain truth”. However Atwood is playing with two levels of myths here: The Homeric myth of “faithful Penelope” and cultural myths about women as either submissive and domestic or as duplicitous schemers and femme fatales---> Can link to Fulbright Scholars when Plath is described with a “ Veronica Lake Bang”
• Penelope remains an enigma, her name buried under the accumulated weight of centuries of gossip and rumour. → Can link to how Plath was an enigma to Hughes. Could link this to Fulbright or your Paris
• Thus Atwood is free to reinvent her, Penelope vigorously parodies male myths of heroism
• It is Penelope’s voice speaking from the dead which sparks the connection between ancient myth and contemporary reality, for her story is grounded in the domestic details of her life as daughter, wife, mother and then as a queen.
• Though Penelope is strictly speaking faceless, it is her words which restore her identity through her narrative of self-justification. Taking us into her confidence, she sets up the confessional dynamics, seducing us with her promise to tell us “everything.”
• Paradoxically Penelope seeks to establish her authority by confessing that sometimes she makes things up “ Perhaps I have only invented it in order to make myself feel better”
• It can be said that Penelope is a liar. In Odysseus’s and Penelope’s reunion she states “The two of us were-by our own admission-proficient and shameless liars of long standing. It’s a wonder either of us believed a word the other said”.
• Penelope seduces and delights us with her lies
Form and techniques of the Penelopiad
• Penelope’s tale is frequently interrupted by the voice of her 12 hanged maids, those nameless slave girls have nothing to say in the Odyssey and whose hanging is a minor element in the story of Odysseus homecoming.
• Atwood uses the Penelope’s story to tell another story in it
• Atwood uses her novelistic imagination to expand Homer’s text, giving voice to this group of powerless silenced women
• Atwood uses intertext from other novels such as Robert Graves The Greek Myths
• Penelope’s narrative, however though conversational and engaging, tells us a great deal more than the realistic details of the her everyday life, for this is her story of resistance to all those other stories, both the eulogies and the scandals that have been imposed on her.
• Atwood’s story of Penelope is a fictive autobiography. This type of writing is always a discourse of ‘self-restoration’ in the face of death and the power of morality, and therefore subject to distortion through the chosen rhetorical mode of presentation
• Penelope’s confession is ironically undercut by the voices of the maids “Those naughty little jades!” ( pg 151) who haunt her narrative from the beginning to the end. They blame her for their deaths.
• The maid’s transform the Penelopiad into a polyphonic narrative where their dissident voices counter the authenticity of Penelope’s confession. It is the maids and not Penelope who have the last word, defaming the Homeric monument to male heroism and female fidelity.
• The event of the maid’s deaths has it’s significance entirely transformed in Atwood’s contemporary version, where she makes the hanging the central mystery of the text and perhaps the main motivation for Penelope’s narrative.
• Atwood reimages the maid’s lives through a dazzling variety of narrative forms. such as a prose poem, an anthropology lecture, a burlesque drama,
• As Atwood commented in her introduction the maids are like the Chorus or the satyr plays of Greek drama, through the sheet variety of their narratives draws our attention to the different generic conventions through which stories may be told, so that the interaction between Penelope’s confession and the maid’s shifting narrative forms cast doubt on the absolute truthfulness of any single account, including Penelope’s. With so many competing narratives, what is fact and what is fiction?
• The riddle of the handmaid’s hanging is never solved and their tales persist.
• Need to think about the paratextual elements, which comprise the materials on the margins of the main text ( or of the spoken dialogue in the play). These paratextual elements are the devices which structure the readers expectations and guide their interpretations; in a printed text they are there is to be read. Paratextual elements include epigraphs, introductions and notes, chapter titles etc
• In the Penelopiad there is two epigraphs from The Odyssey. One refers to the ‘faithful Penelope’ and the other to the hanging of the maids. Both Penelope and the maids are silent in these passages from the Odyssey, though in Atwood’s woman-centred revision the perspective is entirely reversed. Atwood emphasizes her feminist inflections in her Introduction with her reference to the Odyssey, indicating that her story comes to us already framed by the Homeric intertext.
• In the notes, Atwood tells us that she is not simply retelling the Odyssey but going to other sources as well, for there is no one version of the ancient Greek myths.
Basically I got the info from the PDF " 5 ways of seeing the Penelopiad"
Also another related that you might want to do that I have not written any notes on yet is the movie A Beautiful Mind ( It's a really interesting)
Hope this helps!
