A plainspoken analysis of how The Penelopiad retells the Odyssey from the perspectives of Penelope and the twelve maids, exposing the violence and uncertainty hidden inside a familiar heroic story.
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"I never knew where to start with nonfiction—BeFreed’s book lists turned into podcasts gave me a clear path."
"Perfect balance between learning and entertainment. Finished ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ on my commute this week."
"Crazy how much I learned while walking the dog. BeFreed = small habits → big gains."
"Reading used to feel like a chore. Now it’s just part of my lifestyle."
"Feels effortless compared to reading. I’ve finished 6 books this month already."
"BeFreed turned my guilty doomscrolling into something that feels productive and inspiring."
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"I never knew where to start with nonfiction—BeFreed’s book lists turned into podcasts gave me a clear path."
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"Feels effortless compared to reading. I’ve finished 6 books this month already."
"BeFreed turned my guilty doomscrolling into something that feels productive and inspiring."
"BeFreed turned my commute into learning time. 20-min podcasts are perfect for finishing books I never had time for."
"BeFreed replaced my podcast queue. Imagine Spotify for books — that’s it. 🙌"
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Imagine you are a teenager reading a classic adventure for the first time. You’re following the story of Odysseus, the cleverest man in the Greek world, as he fights his way home through monsters and gods. It’s a story of homecoming and the restoration of order. But then, right at the finish line, you hit a detail that stops you cold. After the suitors are slaughtered and the king is back on his throne, twelve young maids—servants of the household—are rounded up and hanged. The text describes them twitching like birds in a snare. For most readers throughout history, this was just a bit of grim housecleaning, a footnote to a hero’s triumph. But for Margaret Atwood, reading this as a young woman, the math didn’t add up. The official reason for their execution was disloyalty, but the sheer brutality of the scene felt illogical and "suspicious." Why were these women, who had no social power and likely no choice in their interactions with the suitors, the ones who had to die for the household to feel clean again? Decades later, when the publisher Canongate commissioned a series of modern myth retellings, Atwood returned to that specific friction. She realized that the "settled" nature of epic poetry—the way it presents a single, authoritative truth—actually hides a multitude of gaps. In the original Odyssey, the maids are silent objects. They are spoken about, judged, and disposed of, but they never speak for themselves. Atwood’s project in *The Penelopiad* is to dismantle that grand, polished narrative by pulling on the loose thread of those twelve deaths. She approaches the myth not as a sacred, fixed text, but as what it originally was: an oral, local tradition. Before these stories were written down in the form we know today, they were fluid. They were told and retold, shifting based on who was speaking and what they wanted their audience to believe. By choosing to center the story on Penelope and her dead maids, Atwood isn’t just adding "the woman’s point of view." She is investigating the evidence behind a crime. The retelling is framed around two piercing questions: what really led to that hanging, and what was Penelope actually doing during those twenty years of waiting? By asking these, Atwood transforms the myth from a heroic song into a site of contested memory. We are forced to step out of the light of Odysseus’s glory and into the shadows of the domestic quarters, where the labor is hard and the consequences of a master’s "cleverness" are often fatal for those at the bottom. This isn't just a story about a faithful wife; it is a story about how the powerful craft their own legends at the expense of the marginalized, and what happens when those marginalized voices finally start to shout back from the underworld.
In the traditional architecture of the Odyssey, the story ends with a homecoming that feels like a click of a lock. Odysseus, after twenty years of wandering, finally stands in his own hall. He proves his identity by stringing a bow no other man can bend, and then he turns that weapon on the suitors who have been eating his food and badgering his wife. It is a scene of violent restoration. The usurpers are cleared out, the king is back on his throne, and the social order of Ithaca is mended. But as the blood is mopped from the floor, the epic takes a sharp, cold turn toward the domestic staff. Odysseus demands to know which of the household maids have been "disloyal." This is a heavy word in an epic context. In the original Greek tradition, disloyalty isn't just a personal slight; it is a crime against the state of the household. Twelve women are singled out. The hero’s son, Telemachus, is tasked with their execution. He decides that a sword death—a "clean" death—is too good for them. Instead, he strings a ship’s cable across the courtyard and hangs them all at once. The epic records this with a chilling, clinical detachment, noting how their feet twitched for a little while, and then they were still. From the perspective of the returning ruler, this is a successful removal of a "problem." The epic point of view creates an illusion of moral completeness because it aligns entirely with the person holding the sword. If the king says they were disloyal, the poem accepts it. If the prince says they deserve a degrading death, the meter of the poem doesn't stumble. The restoration of "order" in these foundational myths almost always requires this kind of erasure—a quick cleaning of the slate where the people at the margins are swept away so the heroes can have their reunion in peace. But Atwood’s retelling pauses exactly where the epic hurries. She forces us to look at that word "disloyalty" and ask what it could possibly mean for an enslaved person. In a world where these young women were property, they had no social agency. They couldn't exactly file a complaint when the suitors—powerful, armed noblemen—demanded their attention. By re-examining the "verdict" of the Odyssey, Atwood highlights a massive moral gap: the maids are executed for failing to be loyal to a master who had been missing for two decades, while living under the roof of a mistress who, in some versions of the story, may have been the one who told them to interact with the suitors in the first place. When the hero returns and demands a "pure" household, these twelve women become the convenient scapegoats for twenty years of mess, compromise, and survival. The heroic ending isn't just a triumph; it’s a cover-up, and the "order" it restores is built on the silence of the dead.
Imagine standing in a field of gray flowers, watching the living world through a thin veil of centuries. This is where we find Penelope. In Atwood's version, the afterlife isn’t a place of divine judgment or dramatic hellfire; it is a sprawling, somewhat tedious waiting room where the dead drift like whispers. Penelope has been here for three thousand years, watching her own life harden into a statue. She has seen herself painted on vases, carved into marble, and eventually flattened into a moral trope: the "patient, faithful wife." Using the afterlife as a narrative vantage point is a brilliant move because it grants Penelope both timelessness and a biting, modern edge. She isn't just a bronze-age queen anymore; she is an observer who has watched the rise and fall of empires and the evolution of the very myths that define her. Death provides her with total hindsight, stripping away the immediate terror of the suitors or the physical weight of the loom. In this gray expanse, she is finally free from the social roles of daughter, wife, and queen. No one can tell her to be silent or to return to her weaving. Yet, this liberation is bittersweet. While she is free from the physical constraints of Ithaca, she is still a prisoner of her own reputation. She watches from the shadows of Hades as generations of poets and historians rewrite her character, often in ways that make her feel like a stranger to herself. This creates a fascinating tension: is she telling her story to set the record free, or is she simply engaging in a high-stakes game of reputation management? By placing Penelope in the afterlife, the retelling allows her to comment on the absurdity of her own legend. She can poke fun at the grandiosity of the Odyssey and the "official" version of her husband’s heroics. However, we have to ask ourselves if a narrator who is explicitly trying to "correct" a global myth is inherently more reliable than the myth itself. Penelope has a motive. She wants to be seen as more than a puppet of virtue, but she also wants to justify the choices that led to the blood on her floor. The afterlife serves as a space where the "settled" facts of the epic can be reopened. In the world of the living, the story of the Odyssey is a finished book, a closed case. But in the fields of asphodel, the voices of the marginalized can finally catch up to the heroes. Penelope’s narration suggests that as long as a story is being told, it isn't truly over. She is a woman who has spent three millennia listening to others talk about her, and her voice carries the exhaustion and the sharp wit of someone who has finally had enough of being a symbol. She isn't just recounting the past; she is arguing with history, trying to claw back her humanity from the cold grip of the epic tradition.
In the retelling of her own life, Penelope describes a childhood defined by a profound sense of precarity. While the traditional epics often skip straight to the marriage bed and the loom, Atwood’s version lingers on the formative insecurity of a young princess in Sparta. Penelope recounts a chilling mythic memory: her father, King Icarius, once attempted to have her drowned. In this version of events, she was saved by a flock of ducks that buoyed her up and guided her to shore. This "duck" myth is more than a colorful origin story; it serves as a metaphor for the absolute fragility of female survival. Even a princess is only as safe as her father’s whim, and Penelope learns early that her life depends on being resourceful, or perhaps just lucky enough to find help from unexpected quarters. This early trauma shapes her into a watchful, guarded person, but it is her social environment that hones her sharp edges. She grew up in the overwhelming shadow of her cousin, Helen of Troy. If Penelope represents the "plain" virtues of fidelity and domestic management, Helen represents the disruptive, legendary power of beauty. Penelope’s resentment toward Helen is palpable, but it’s important to look past the personal friction. The rivalry between these two women is a byproduct of a social architecture that ranks women by rigid, male-defined values. In a world where a woman’s worth is a currency used to forge alliances, Helen is the gold standard, and Penelope is the reliable, less-glittering copper. By framing their relationship this way, the narrative exposes how the system forces women into a zero-sum game of social dominance, where one cousin’s beauty becomes the other’s deficiency. When it comes time for Penelope to marry, the process is less a romance and more a transaction settled through a physical contest. In Atwood’s version, men compete for her hand in a footrace. However, the winner is not the fastest man, but the most deceptive one. Odysseus wins Penelope through trickery rather than traditional athletic prowess, a detail that foreshadows the nature of their future partnership. For Penelope, cleverness is not just a personality trait; it is a vital survival tool for someone excluded from the physical and political power held by men. She is drawn to Odysseus because his mind works like hers—always looking for the angle, the hidden exit, or the strategic lie. Marriage moves Penelope to Ithaca, a rugged island where she has no family of her own and little independent support. She is an outsider in a cold palace, traded from one patriarch to another. In this new home, her intelligence becomes her primary resource. While Helen’s beauty eventually burns down cities, Penelope’s cleverness is used to build a fortress of privacy and delay. She realizes that in a world where choices are unequal and often dangerous, the only way to maintain any agency is to be the person who controls the information. Her childhood taught her that the water is always rising; her marriage teaches her that the only way to stay afloat is to be smarter than the people watching from the shore.
In the traditional telling of the Odyssey, Penelope is the gold standard for the patient wife. She is a statue of fidelity, frozen in a pose of mourning for twenty years while her husband enjoys a world-spanning adventure. But when we look closer at the mechanics of her life in Ithaca, that image of passive waiting begins to dissolve. In Atwood’s version, Penelope isn't just sitting by a window; she is running a kingdom under siege. With Odysseus gone, the administrative weight of the estate falls entirely on her. She is the one rationing supplies, managing the servants, and raising a son who is growing up in the shadow of a ghost. This isn't just domestic chores; it’s high-stakes political risk management. She is surrounded by over a hundred suitors who have turned her home into a high-end squat. They are eating her livestock and drinking her wine, essentially trying to bankrupt the estate until she is forced to marry one of them. In this light, Penelope’s famous "waiting" is actually a grueling, decades-long holding action. She has to be clever enough to keep the suitors at bay without provoking them into an outright coup. The most famous tool in her arsenal is the shroud she weaves for her father-in-law, Laertes. The public story is a beautiful example of feminine piety: she claims she cannot marry until she finishes this sacred task. But the real work happens at night. By unpicking the day’s labor by torchlight, Penelope turns a traditional domestic craft into an act of subversion. She uses the very thing expected of a "good wife"—weaving—to sabotage the social expectation that she must move on and remarry. It’s a brilliant loop of wasted effort that creates the one thing she needs most: time. However, this strategy reveals a deep class divide that the heroic myths usually ignore. Penelope isn't unweaving that heavy fabric alone. In the retelling, she relies on twelve young maids to help her with the secret and to act as her eyes and ears among the suitors. This is where her "cleverness" takes on a darker edge. To keep her own reputation spotless and her stalling tactic secret, she puts these girls in incredible danger. She encourages them to mingle with the suitors to gather intel, effectively using them as a human shield for her own political survival. While Penelope is arguably a victim of a patriarchal system that gives her no direct way to say "no" to the men in her halls, she still occupies a position of immense privilege compared to her servants. Her survival strategy depends on the labor and the bodies of those beneath her. The retelling presents a Penelope who is acutely aware of her own constraints but perhaps less sensitive to the fact that her maids cannot "wait" the way she does. For her, the shroud is a shield; for the maids, it is a secret that ties them to a queen who may or may not be able to protect them when the weaving finally stops.
In the standard heroic account, the twelve maids of Ithaca are reduced to a footnote of disloyalty—a group of nameless servants who allegedly consorted with the enemy and were justly purged to restore the household’s honor. But in Atwood’s retelling, Penelope reveals a much more complicated and morally fraught reality. These twelve girls were not just passive residents of the palace; they were Penelope’s eyes and ears. She describes a deliberate strategy in which she used these young, vulnerable women as intelligence assets, ordering them to infiltrate the ranks of the suitors to gather information and help maintain the deception of the shroud. This proximity to the suitors was not a neutral assignment. By directing the maids to interact closely with over a hundred aggressive, entitled men who were already draining the estate’s resources, Penelope placed them in a position of extreme physical and sexual danger. The retelling presents these interactions as a site of constant coercion. While the official myth might frame the maids' behavior as a betrayal of their masters, the reality of their status as enslaved people makes the concept of "consent" almost impossible to apply. They were caught in a vice: ordered by their mistress to be "friendly" for the sake of the crown, while possessing no social or physical power to refuse the advances of the men they were spying on. The moral cost of this intelligence operation is one of the most haunting elements of the narrative. Penelope speaks of these girls with a certain maternal affection, yet she also treats them as tools in a larger political game. This creates a disturbing "knowledge gap." As the story unfolds, we have to ask whether Penelope truly failed to recognize the level of violence her maids were enduring, or if their suffering was simply an acceptable price for her own survival. The communication between the queen and her servants is depicted as strategically obscured. By keeping their missions unofficial and their instructions vague, Penelope maintained her own plausible deniability, but she left the maids with no protection when the "rightful" authorities eventually returned. In this light, the maids are not just victims of the suitors’ lust or Odysseus’s wrath; they are victims of Penelope’s brilliance. Her cleverness, so often celebrated as her greatest virtue, required a human shield. The retelling forces us to confront the idea that a person can be oppressed by one system—as Penelope was by the patriarchy of the suitors—while simultaneously exploiting those further down the social ladder. When the intelligence they gathered was no longer needed, the maids became evidence of a messy, compromised past that the restored royal family preferred to erase. Their role as spies made them essential during the years of waiting, but it also made them expendable the moment the hero walked through the door.
The climax of the Odyssey is usually framed as a masterpiece of suspense. We watch the aging beggar, mocked by the suitors, take up the massive bow that no other man can string. He succeeds, the rags of his disguise fall away, and the hall turns into a slaughterhouse. In the traditional epic, this is the moment of ultimate restoration: the king has returned to purge his house of usurpers. But in the retelling from the underworld, this scene feels less like a divine triumph and more like a carefully managed domestic disaster. The most provocative shift in this version of the story is the timing of Penelope’s realization. While the classic account suggests she only accepts Odysseus after he describes the secret construction of their bed, the retelling presents a Penelope who is far more perceptive. She claims to have recognized her husband much earlier, seeing through the filth and the rags of his beggar’s disguise. If we accept this claim, the entire bow contest changes flavor. It isn't a desperate gamble to find a new husband; it’s a delivery system for a weapon. Penelope isn't just a prize to be won; she is the one who puts the instrument of execution into the hands of a man she knows is ready to use it. This shifts the moral weight of the homecoming. If Penelope knew the beggar was Odysseus, then the "test" of the bow was actually a coordinated strike. The bow ceases to be a symbol of ancient justice and becomes a tool of domestic re-assertion, used to reclaim property and status through a bloodbath. Penelope’s claim of early recognition makes her a silent partner in the violence that follows. It suggests a level of cold strategic alignment between husband and wife that the traditional "patient weaver" persona tends to obscure. However, the restoration of the royal couple requires more than just the death of the suitors. It requires a cleansing of the servant class, and this is where the role of the "loyal" servant becomes chilling. Eurycleia, the old nurse who has been the pillar of the household’s internal order, becomes the primary agent of condemnation. In the retelling, it is Eurycleia who identifies the twelve "disloyal" maids for execution. She functions as a sort of internal police force, separating the women who remained obedient to the hierarchy from those who—willingly or under duress—consorted with the suitors. By delegating the naming of the victims to Eurycleia, the royal family maintains a degree of distance from the act, but the result is a brutal enforcement of class boundaries. The "loyal" servant is used to validate the destruction of the "disloyal" ones, ensuring that the restored household is purged of any voice that might complicate the hero’s return. Penelope narrates these events with a haunting mix of hindsight and self-defense, leaving us to wonder how much of the maids' fate was a tragic misunderstanding and how much was a necessary sacrifice to ensure the queen’s own survival in a world that had no room for compromised women.
While Penelope narrates her life with the smooth, practiced authority of a woman used to managing a palace, her story is constantly punctured by the twelve maids. In traditional Greek drama, a chorus usually stands apart from the main action to provide moral commentary or context, but Atwood’s version transforms them into a disruptive, shape-shifting force. They don’t just comment on the story; they fight for the right to tell it, refusing to let the "official" version of Penelope’s life settle into a comfortable, heroic rhythm. What makes this chorus so unsettling is how often they change their tune. They don’t speak in a single, consistent voice. Instead, they cycle through an exhausting variety of genres: sea-shanties, ballads, jump-rope rhymes, and even a mock anthropology lecture. This variety serves a specific purpose. By constantly shifting their form, the maids prevent us from ever getting too comfortable with one perspective. If Penelope represents the stability of prose and the "truth" of the survivor, the maids represent the fragmented, chaotic memory of the victims. They use these different styles to highlight that they were never just one thing—they were children, workers, sexual objects, and political pawns—and no single narrative can contain the reality of their deaths. The use of parody is particularly sharp here. In one instance, the maids deliver a lecture on the "true" meaning of their execution, using the language of modern scholarship to suggest they were merely symbolic figures in a fertility ritual. By adopting this dry, academic tone, the retelling exposes the absurdity of trying to explain away real human suffering with grand theories. It’s a biting critique of how history and academia can sometimes sanitize violence by turning it into a "theme" or a "motif." When the maids parody these explanations, they are essentially mocking any attempt to make their deaths look like a necessary part of a larger, cosmic order. Ultimately, the chorus functions as a collective memory that refuses to stay buried. Penelope can try to explain her choices and her husband’s return with as much wit and nuance as she wants, but the maids are always there in the background, literally and figuratively. They are a haunting presence that Penelope cannot manage or weave away. In Atwood's version, the maids' songs serve as a reminder that a "restored" household is often just a household where the inconvenient witnesses have been silenced. By giving the maids the final word in so many chapters, the narrative ensures that the reader cannot simply accept the hero's homecoming as a happy ending. The variety of their songs reflects the complexity of their lives, and their refusal to stop singing ensures that the "settled" myth of the Odyssey remains a site of active, unresolved conflict.
As the story nears its conclusion, the narrative shifts from the shadows of Hades and the hazy memories of the bronze age into the cold, fluorescent light of a modern courtroom. In Atwood's version, this isn't just a change of scenery; it is a calculated collision between ancient blood-feuds and contemporary logic. By staging a mock trial for Odysseus regarding the deaths of the twelve maids, the retelling puts our own modern systems of justice under the microscope. We see a judge, defense attorneys, and the formal parsing of evidence, yet the procedure feels like a hollow mimicry of fairness. This legal frame highlights an uncomfortable truth: even when we try to modernize a myth, we often end up adopting the hero’s original assumptions. In the courtroom scene, the defense relies on the idea that the maids were essentially property, or that their "disloyalty" justified their disposal. The legal system, designed to be objective, struggles to account for the massive power imbalance that defined the maids' lives. When the law looks at a world where an enslaved person has no right to refuse a master or a suitor, it often finds itself unable to assign blame without dismantling the very concept of "authority" that the law is built to protect. The procedure doesn't offer a path to justice; it offers a way to sanitize the violence through jargon. The courtroom's most revealing move is not a surprising piece of evidence, but its decision about what counts as evidence at all. The maids can describe coercion and powerlessness, yet the proceeding keeps returning to the property rights and household authority of the people above them. Their lived experience enters the room as testimony and leaves it as background noise. Odysseus can be treated as an individual actor with motives and defenses; the twelve girls are still processed as a category. The form looks modern, but the hierarchy inside it remains ancient. Ultimately, the trial fails to provide any meaningful repair. It is a modernizing tool that leaves the underlying power dynamics untouched. The maids are still treated as objects in a dispute between more powerful people rather than as people whose deaths demand accountability. Atwood’s parody suggests that our desire for a clean verdict is often a way to avoid the messy, haunting reality of the past. We want the case closed so we can stop thinking about it, but the trial proves that you cannot litigate your way out of a tragedy that the system itself helped create. The "official" word, no matter how modern, remains a poor substitute for the truth of those who lived and died at the bottom of the social ladder.
The story concludes in the gray expanses of the underworld, but it offers no peace. In Atwood’s version of the afterlife, the dead do not find a sudden, clear understanding that erases their earthly grievances. Instead, they carry their hierarchies and their wounds with them. Penelope continues to watch the world of the living, still preoccupied with her reputation and still resentful of her cousin Helen. Odysseus, ever the strategist, is depicted as a soul constantly looking for an exit, seeking new lives and fresh disguises to escape the weight of his past. But the maids remain. They do not move on, and they do not forgive. This persistence is what we might call haunting. In a narrative sense, haunting is the manifestation of unresolved social responsibility. It is the sound of a debt that has never been paid. The maids follow Odysseus through his various rebirths, appearing as a taunting, rhythmic reminder of the twelve necks he broke to restore his own domestic order. They avoid Penelope, too, refusing to grant her the comfort of a reconciliation. By denying her a clean apology or a moment of shared understanding, they deny her the right to feel like a victim alongside them. They remind her that while she was trapped by a patriarchal system, she was also the one who held their leashes. This creates a sharp contrast in what we can call the "hero’s privilege." Throughout the novella, Odysseus and even Penelope have the luxury of reinvention. They can tell their stories, explain their motives, and attempt to reshape how history perceives them. They have the mobility of the powerful. The maids, however, are frozen in the moment of their trauma. They are "the hanged maids" forever; they don’t get to grow, change, or become something else in the afterlife. Their identity is locked into the violence they suffered, which is the ultimate fate of the marginalized in epic storytelling. They are the friction that prevents the "heroic" machine from running smoothly. The novella’s refusal to provide a definitive verdict on Penelope’s guilt is a deliberate ethical choice. If Atwood had written a scene where Penelope was proved innocent, or one where she was condemned as a cold-blooded traitor, the reader could close the book and feel that justice had been served. By leaving the truth obscured by Penelope’s own selective memory and the maids’ mocking interruptions, the story forces us to sit with the discomfort. We are left to wonder if any version of a story told by the powerful can ever be truly "fair" to those who served them. To read Penelope’s story is to practice a necessary suspicion: always ask who is weaving the shroud, who is unweaving it, and who is paying the price for the delay.
