43 pages • 1 hour read
Margaret AtwoodThe Penelopiad
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 11-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11: “Helen Ruins My Life”
Finally, Penelope describes the circumstances by which her husband leaves for twenty years. Though she has settled into Ithaca somewhat, she still feels quite isolated. Due to her status, she has very little freedom, and her mother-in-law and nurse, Eurycleia, took care of all of the domestic duties with which she might otherwise busy herself.
Here, too, Penelope shows the origin of certain parts of Odysseus’s identity that serve to identify him when he returns from Troy. She mentions the unmovable bed (one post is an olive trunk still in the ground), and his bow that can be strung only by him—both facts that Penelope uses to identify him upon his return in The Odyssey.
She also tells the story of how Helen had already been captured once before, as a child, by Theseus and Peirithous, and how her brother saved her then, too, by waging a successful war. In Penelope’s telling, Helen loved the sacrifices her capture had required: “The part of the story she enjoyed the most was the number of men who’d died in the Athenian war: she took their deaths as a tribute to herself” (75).
Of course, word then came that Helen had once again started a war, having run off with Paris, Prince of Troy. Odysseus does not want to go, and tries to trick Agamemnon and Menelaus by pretending to be mad, but Palamedes reveals his trickery when he places baby Telemachus in front of his team of oxen, and he has to break the farce to save his son’s life.
Chapter 12: “Waiting”
Here, Penelope describes how she waited while Odysseus was away. She hears news of the war through traveling minstrels, which include tales of Odysseus’s cleverness (including the idea for the Trojan horse). Finally, she learns that Troy has fallen, and her husband’s army was victorious. And still, Odysseus does not come home.
She hears rumors of mutiny and sirens, while minstrels play the “noblest versions” (84) of such tales in her presence. Her mother-in-law dies, and her father-in-law, Laertes, takes to the land like a peasant farmer. Though her time in Sparta had not prepared her at all to run Ithaca, she comes to undertake a great deal of the management of the kingdom; making inventories, planning palace menus, overseeing farms and flocks. “My policy,” she says, “was the build up the estates of Odysseus so he’d have more wealth when he came back than when he’d left… ‘You’re worth a thousand Helens,’ he would say” (88-89).
Rumors of his adventures continue to arrive, as more foreign ships and inquires of marriage also come to shore, due to Odysseus’s fame. Then, finally, the rumors stop all together, “Odysseus seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth” (92).
Chapter 13: “The Chorus Line: The Wily Sea Captain, A Sea Shanty”
This chapter, told by the maids costumed as sailors, recounts the tales of The Odyssey in the form of a sea shanty. Each stanza describes a famed encounter from Homer’s epic, including Odysseus’ felling the Cyclops, the cannibal Laestrygonians, the goddess Circe (who turns the men into pigs), The Isle of the Dead, the Sirens, the whirlpool Charybdis and snake-headed Scylla, and the goddess Calypso.
Chapter 14: “The Suitors Stuff Their Faces”
Penelope begins by recounting a recent encounter in the asphodel fields with her former suitor Antinous. Every time he sees her, he transforms into the appearance of the arrow-pierced corpse he became after Odysseus killed him. Penelope asks for the real reason for the Suitors insistent courtship, given that she was much older and unattractive, and he admits that it was for the treasure and the kingdom. He tells her that they planned to have her die first, and then take their pick of young princesses.
Then, she recounts the appearance of the Suitors in Odysseus’s absence. They appeared little by little, until there was a massive group, who proclaim themselves her guests and then try to eat her out of house and home to hurry a decision. Her maids tell her what the Suitors say behind her back and seem to revel in her misery at their crudeness. Still, she doesn’t have the force to expel them, so she acts on her mother’s advice to behave like the water, stringing them along until she gets definitive word about Odysseus.
Chapter 15: “The Shroud”
As Penelope continues to wait, she begins to feel more trapped and desperate. She doesn’t want to return home to a murderous father, leaving Telemachus with little fortune. So she continues to stall, while Telemachus grows more resentful. It is in this desperation that she comes up with the idea of the funereal shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes, saying she can’t marry until she finishes weaving. The task is too pious to be contested, so she begins working all day. But, she conscripts the help of her twelve youngest maids to secretly unweave the shroud at night, so that it never nears completion, all while probing them for gossip. To that end, she encourages the maids “to hand around the Suitors and spy on them, using whatever enticing arts they could invent” (115). She also encourages them to say rude and disrespectful things about her, Telemachus, and Odysseus, in order to “further the illusion” (117). Of course, this creates love affairs and rape, but Penelope still pushes these relationships, telling them: ‘It’s one way of serving your master, and he’ll be very pleased with you when he comes home’ (117). One of the maids betrays her, and the Suitors discover Penelope’s deception. They force her to finish the shroud quickly and choose a husband.
Chapter 16: “Bad Dreams”
Here begins what Penelope calls “the worst period of [her] ordeal” (121). Telemachus sneaks off in a ship to get news about his father, and Penelope learns that the Suitors are planning to ambush and murder him upon his return. That night, she dreams of horrible things happening to Odysseus. She imagines all the trials famously told in The Odyssey going wrong: being eaten by the Cyclops and seduced by the Sirens and, in one, “making love to a beautiful goddess, and enjoying it very much. Then the goddess turned into Helen, she was looking at me over the bare shoulder of my husband with a malicious little smirk” (123). Finally, she receives a comforting dream. Her sister, Iphthime, comes to her bedside to tell her that Telemachus will return safely, though she refuses to give news of Odysseus.
Chapter 11-16 Analysis
This section, set in the days before the war, sets up Penelope’s penchant for patience and inaction, as well as what in Odysseus’s actions might contribute to her patient fidelity. When Odysseus tells her about the unmovable bed, he swears her to secrecy, saying if word got out about the bed he would know that she’d been sleeping with another man. Though Penelope says he meant to sound playful when he threatens her life is she is unchaste, it legitimately frightens her. Additionally, due to the coldness of her in-laws, she “soon found it was more peaceful just to keep out of things,” (72) spending much of her time isolated and inactive.
Helen’s telling of her former abduction as a child showcases her mad lust for attention and hints that she may have welcomed, and even hoped for, the Trojan War. As Penelope says: “The part of the story she enjoyed the most was the number of men who’d died in the Athenian war: she took their deaths as a tribute to herself” (75). And: “She wanted to make a name for herself” (76).
In Chapter 12, as Penelope waits, she hears tales from minstrels and gossiping visitors. This section of the book is a clever deconstruction of the creation of The Odyssey, which is believed to have originally been performed by a poet or singer, as an oral epic. So, the “noblest versions” (84) the minstrels sing in her presence contain the supernatural and larger-than-life encounters that The Odyssey covers. The reality, thinks Penelope, is probably closer to the other extreme of the rumors she’s overheard: where instead of a Cyclops it’s a one-eyed tavern keeper, or instead of wooing a goddess to save his men, Odysseus simply camped out in an expensive whorehouse. So through Penelope, Atwood comments on the probable origins of an epic poem such as this: some run-of-the-mill encounters blow out of proportion by minstrels seeking fortune and fame.
After her mother-in-law dies and her father-in-law abandons his throne, Penelope finally gets to utilize her intelligence as she maintains the kingdom. Still, instead of doing it for her own pleasure, she strives to enrich the estate to impress Odysseus and spite Helen. “‘You’re worth a thousand Helens,’ he would say,” (89) she conjectures.
In Chapter 13, the maids’ chorus takes the form of a sea shanty. A sea shanty is a song that’s meant to be sung by a maritime crew to give rhythmic cues for their work. Lyrically, shanties were known to be simplistic, or even nonsense. So, reducing the epic of The Odyssey to a nonsense working song further trivializes Odysseus’s story, allowing Penelope’s to shine. While most of the shanty is simple recounting of The Odyssey, the maids do not fail to get a dig in at Odysseus—saying that, while bedding Circe “he’s in no hurry to ever get home” (95).
In Chapter 14, in Penelope’s current-day interaction with the suitor Antinous, she gives an incisive jab at the behavior of the men in her life. When Antinous says that the gods wanted to destroy the suitors, Penelope responds “That’s everyone’s excuse for behaving badly” (101). Her father’s attempted murder of her, Odysseus’s long delay and promiscuity due to Poseidon’s disfavor were both excused by their heavenly curse. Though Penelope formerly forgave these acts of self-preservation, as she continues to gain distance from her earthly life and its excuses, she is more assertive and less forgiving.
As the suitors appear, and start feasting away her fortune, propriety again creates inaction. They are guests, so she cannot evict them, and her lack of male support means that she feels that she cannot force a confrontation. Plus, the malicious whisperings her maids bring to her, insulting her looks and wishing for her death, make it unlikely that she will want to choose any of the Suitors. She even says that Eurycleia was “trying to harden [her] heart against the Suitors” (106) with the gossip. She also recalls her mother’s advice at her wedding to “Behave like water,” (108) further rationalizing inaction.
As she is forced into some decision, Penelope stalls further with the weaving and unweaving of Laertes’s burial shroud. To aid her in this deception, she chooses the twelve closest maids, and, in this telling, pushed them toward seduction of the Suitors. She rationalizes it by saying that Odysseus would approve: “It’s one way of serving your master, and he’ll be pleased with you when he comes home” (117). Of course, he is not pleased and kills the maids in retaliation. In this telling, Penelope is the one who pushed them toward the task out of loyalty, not knowing it cost them their lives.
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