 If you don't already have them, or you can pick them up at the end of class, this is if you're in the Genesis stream. And, oh, we're turning this down a little. Oh, that. Okay. The other announcement is you may have noticed there are a fair number of movies that we suggest go along with some of the readings we're doing. And the first of those movies will be coming up pretty soon because we are reading Plato next week and the week after and the movie pairing with that is The Matrix. Just the first one. You don't have to watch the whole trilogy unless you're really keen. So these are on reserve in the library. If you go to the reserves, all the movies are there. They can be signed out for a day. So I suggest a bunch of you get together maybe and sign up the movie and watch it. But what we're also going to do for this movie and hopefully for some of the others, we'll see how it works, is we're trying right now to book a room next Monday late afternoon evening so that you can actually come and watch it together, bring your dinner or snacks or something, and watch the movie together as a group. We don't have the room yet, which means we don't have the exact time, but the start time will be probably sometime between 4 and 6 p.m. and the movie runs 136 minutes. So that's a little over two hours. So please watch your email because that will be... Oh, that just... Okay, that will be announced this week. Okay? All right. So this week you were asked to read something slimmer for a change. So we read The Penelope Ed by Margaret Atwood. I'm excited because this is one of the two, I think, things we're reading this term, where the author is still alive. See, arts one can be contemporary. Okay. So I want to start off with this quote, which I think is really important for understanding everything that's going on in The Penelope Ed. This comes from your introduction. And Atwood says when she was thinking about writing this that one thing she was interested in was this idea that a myth would be told one way and one place, and quite differently in another. That is, Atwood seems pretty committed in The Penelope Ed to exploring the idea of context, of location, and the way in which that changes a story. So keeping with our theme of repetition compulsion, we are repeating the story of the Odyssey here, we're repeating it from a quite different place than the place we read it in last time. Well, maybe not your location, I don't know where you read this, but the place from which it's being told. So I suggest to you guys that this is a story about divisions. That is different ways of telling divisions and how the story is told and how events are seen and how events are understood. And what I think is cool about that is the story is about divisions and the story itself is divided. That is, if you read this story, you would notice that there are two distinct types of story being told in this. And I know you all read it, so I shouldn't have said if you read it. So the first division that I'm going to look at is Penelope's voice against Homer's. That is against the original Odyssey. So I think even though, as far as I recall, Homer's name doesn't really come up in The Penelope Ed, what Homer did and what he said and what he wrote and the oral tradition that preceded him was put down and canonized by Homer is I think a hidden character in this story. Penelope is responding to another character, to this Homer figure, who has already put down a version of this story. So we have Penelope against Homer. Let me give you a visual of that. It's like glasses, semi on purpose. It's also just the limitations of Prezi, but look, it's like glasses. Oh, I don't know why we only have one up. I did turn the others on, but they're not working. So hopefully one is okay. So what I think is cool about that is a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is perspective. And we think of glasses as kind of helping our perspective. So I'm playing with this glasses imagery to talk about perspective. But we know it's not just Penelope against Homer. It's not just Penelope's version of the story being told in contrast to what you read last week because we also have the maids. This is why I think the story is divided against itself. The maids interspers and interrupt Penelope's narrative as you go through this text. Chapters are interspersed that come from the maids that are told in a very different way. So Atwood tells us that her introduction of the maids was to focus on two questions that must pose themselves to any close reading of the Odyssey. That is, all the passages dealing with the maids, according to Atwood, are focused on these two questions. What led to the hanging of the maids and what was Penelope really up to? That's odd, wouldn't you think Penelope's actual story of what happened would be what Penelope is really up to? Apparently no. Apparently the maids are telling us what Penelope was really up to. So I want to start just looking at Homer against Penelope. Or Penelope against Homer, rather. That's why the arrow's going that way. Penelope is responding to Homer. Couldn't do it the other way. Homer can't respond to Atwood. And in doing this, I'm going to look at four different parallels that I think happen. We get a juxtaposition of the ancient versus the modern. We get the public versus the hidden. We get the mythical versus the mundane or the normal, the commonplace every day. And we get spoken versus silenced, which means I get to talk about silence again. I know it's been two whole weeks since I got to stand up here and talk about silence. So there's other things going on, I'm sure, but we only have two hours. So these are the four that I'm going to focus on with reference to Penelope and Homer specifically. So for Homer, I have this lovely picture of Odysseus and Penelope. This is from Wikimedia Commons. And I like this because a lot of the time when we see Penelope in the Odyssey, we see her with Odysseus. So we don't really see Penelope. We see her with Telemachus or we see her with Odysseus. And we hear about things that she did while Odysseus was gone. But a lot of the time we see her in connection to these men in her life. So that's the picture I've chosen to represent kind of the Homeric version of Penelope. So over on the Penelope ad side, I have the suitors. So a lot of the text with the Penelope ad focuses on Penelope's relationship to the suitors and her relationship to the maids. We don't see her as often in... This feels like it's going in and out. Is that happening or is it just me? A little bit. We'll soldier on and I'll get louder if I need to. Okay, so we see Penelope in relation to the other women in her life a lot more than we do in the Odyssey. So the mundane. If you want to follow along, we are on page 83. Rumors came carried by other ships. Odysseus and his men had gotten drunk at their first port of call and the men had mutiny'd said some. So that's one story. That's a pretty mundane story. They went to a port and they got drunk and the men got mad at Odysseus and they mutiny'd. Pretty commonplace, pretty ordinary. But wait. No said others. They'd eaten a magic plant that caused them to lose their memories and Odysseus had saved them by having them tied up and carried on to the ships. So there's a picture of the lotus eaters. Odysseus had been in fight with a giant one-eyed cyclops said some. That's pretty mythical. A giant cyclops. No. It was only a one-eyed tavern keeper said another and the fight was over non-payment of the bill. Some of the men had been eaten by cannibals said some. No. It was just a brawl of the usual kind said others with ear biting and nosebleeds and stabbings and eviscerations. Odysseus was the guest of a goddess on an enchanted isle said some. She turned his men into pigs. Not a hard job in my view. But had turned them back into men because she'd fallen in love with him and was feeding him unheard of delicacies prepared by her own immortal hands and the two of them made love deliriously every night. Or maybe. No said others. It was just an expensive whorehouse and he was sponging off the madam. We have this constant tension between the stories that you might be familiar with from the Odyssey that you should all be familiar with from the Odyssey that paint a very epic, a very high, a very romantic, a very mythical view of what happened. And these much more commonplace mundane down to earth everyday kind of stories about a bunch of men who keep getting in fights and going to whorehouses. I mean a goddess sounds a lot better, right? There's one more that I think is happening this tension in this text and that's the maids themselves. The maids are called the chorus. And if you know any of these big plays the chorus is a very standard role in the play. So the maids take up this position of the chorus which seems to again kind of go back to this mythic classical period. But a lot of the time what the maids do strikes me as being more like a modern type variety show. That is they give us a film trial, an anthropology lecture, a jump rope, skipping songs, so they aren't always fulfilling the role of what I might think of as a classical chorus to fulfill. So we have this tension between this ancient tradition that carries all this kind of weight and importance and this romanticism and all these high emotions and this thing that kind of brings Odysseus down makes him much less of a hero, much more base, maybe much more relatable but also kind of much less epic. And Penelope doesn't tell us which one of these is true. Indeed, she doesn't actually know because she just keeps getting these stories coming to her from other people. So we have this tension and it is left as a tension. It is not explained. But it's related to the next thing I want to explore which is the ancient versus the modern. So there are lots of different examples I could have picked on for the ancient and I went with the way in which Homer expresses who Helen is the very first time we meet Helen. So this should be from last week. This is from the Odyssey. Helen emerged from her scented lofty chamber striking as Artemis with her golden shafts and a train of women following. So she's pretty awesome. Then Zeus's daughter Helen. So we have confirmation that Helen is partially divine. She is Zeus's daughter. Zeus's daughter Helen thought of something else into the mixing bowl from which they drank wine. She slipped a drug, heart's ease, dissolving anger, magic to make us forget our pain. So Helen is not only beautiful, she is apparently all about fun, all about love and minimizing pain, all about joy and she is divine. Helen said, I yearn to sail back home again. I grieved too late for the madness Aphrodite sent me luring me to Troy far from my dear lands, forsaking my own child, my bridal bed, my husband too, a man who lacked for neither brains nor beauty. So Helen in discussing how it is that she inadvertently caused the Trojan War, calls again on the gods. Paints are the gracious woman as perhaps a very stereotypically good Greek wife who would never have left her husband if it weren't for this kind of madness that Aphrodite sent her. So Helen is fun and Helen would never have forsaken her husband were it not for Aphrodite's meddling. This is kind of the first picture of Helen we get in the Odyssey, the way in which she is described when Telemachus is introduced to her. We also know from the lecture last day that Helen is smart because she recognizes Telemachus. Helen in the Penelope Ed. It was claimed she'd come out of an egg being the daughter of Zeus who'd raped her mother in the form of a swan. Okay, so we have support that Helen is Zeus's daughter and that people seem to believe that she was the daughter of Zeus, you know, maybe. So there's a painting by Leonardo da Vinci of Helen's mother and the swan. That's Zeus. You can't tell, but that's Zeus. But how does a Penelope react to this? Do we get this picture of this beautiful, gracious, kind, intelligent hostess? She was quite stuck up about it, was Helen. I wonder how many of us really believe that swan rape concoction. There was a lot of stories of that kind going around then. The gods couldn't seem to keep their hands or paws or beaks off mortal women. They were always raping someone or other. So maybe this high story about Helen being semi-divine has a couple of question marks around it. In addition, though, look at the language that's being used here. Helen is quite stuck up. That doesn't sound very classical. It doesn't sound very ancient. I have another example. In describing her semi-divine, who is also actually semi-divine, she just is the daughter of a Neyad. That is a water spirit goddess type of thing. Bless her, goddess, not like Zeus. So Helen has way more divinity than Penelope. She says Neyads were a dime a dozen in those days. The place was crawling with them. Daughters of Neyads were a dime a dozen. That's kind of curious, because there were no dimes in ancient Greece. This is a very modern phrase. But Penelope is not in ancient Greece, is she? Where is she? As she tells us this story. When is she? She's here. Not here. But she's here now in modern times, living, not living, but existing in Haiti, in the gender world. So she is actually a modern. She is our contemporary in this story. And she reaffirms this contemporaneous by continually using these very modern phrases that seem a bit jarring, especially when she's talking about these ancient classical things like Zeus impersonating a swan. She uses this very modern language to talk about these occurrences. So there's Hades and Cerberus. Actually it's Pluto because it's Roman, but Pluto is the Roman analogue of Hades, so. So what I think is interesting is that the subject matter of this text is ancient. Most of the time, we have a few places where we actually jump to the modern, where Penelope talks about going to seances and stuff just to see what's going on in the world. And the trial of Odysseus seems to be happening much more contemporary. And then Helen gives us some stories about some things she's done in subsequent lives. But most of this text subject matter is ancient. It's classical. But the discussion of it is entirely modern, even down to the language used. Why? Why do we have a repetition of the Odyssey in such modern language? Any ideas? We speak to power of the myth, and not the myth. So the myth is so powerful that even in modern language it retains its power. Yeah. Okay, some more approachable. It could be. And in fact, Penelope, the character, seems to really want to be approachable and likable. So she might be speaking to us in language that we find familiar because she wants us to find her approachable and likable. If you read the text and still felt that this ancient storyline had the same kind of pull on you in this language as it did last week, that might point to the power of the story. As I read it, I had a slightly different reaction, which was that talking about swan-raping concoction seemed to kind of rob the myth of a little bit of its power for me. That may not be everybody's feeling. And there are parts of this story that I think even in the modern language are still powerful. So I do think that there is some point there. But there are other parts that I think lose some of their power when they're given this kind of base modern language, as opposed to the high epic, romantic, poetic kind of language, not romantic era, but more romantic in the feeling of, you know, in the feeling of heroes and journeys and that kind of stuff. That we get this kind of, when we have it in this much more modern language, it seems to lose some of that emotional connection and be replaced with kind of different emotional connections, usually kind of a ridicule. So I suggest maybe what's happening, and this is not the only reason, I think the idea of making Penelope relatable and that sometimes the myth is still powerful, even in this modern context, are both good ideas. But one reason I think it might be happening is that it actually robs this ancient text of a bit of its power. And I'm going to come back to this discussion. Or that it challenges kind of the nostalgia and agonistice of this text by uncovering some of the things that went hidden in the original way in which it was written. Okay. Speech is a huge part of this text. As it was of the Odyssey as well, so it's not that surprising, the Odyssey having been originally an oral tradition and focusing a lot on the Bard and the relationship with the Bard to Odysseus and with the Bard to the audience, which you guys talked about last week. But we start out on the very first page of the Penelopeette with this. Down here, that is in Hades, in the underworld, after death, everyone arrives with a sack, like the sacks that used to keep the wind in. If you remember, this is referring back to the Odyssey, the story that you could take all of the wind in a sack and only let out the wind that you wanted so you could blow yourself home. So down here, everyone arrives with a sack, like the sacks that used to keep the wind in. But each of these sacks is full of words, so not wind, but words. Words you've spoken, words you've heard, words that have been said about you. Some sacks are very small, so not very much has been said about you. Other sacks large, my own is of a reasonable so a lot of the words in it aren't about me. In fact, that's kind of the true of the Odyssey, isn't it? Penelope's most famous tale is the Odyssey before the Penelope Ed was written and arguably probably still afterwards. The Odyssey has a huge canonical position. Most spoken about Penelope are not actually about Penelope, they're about her eminent husband Odysseus. This means that most of the stories that she has that tell us who she is and what kind of life she lived aren't actually her own stories. But to some degree, I think that's true of all of us. A lot of the stories about you that people might tell aren't just about you, they're probably also about your parents and maybe about your siblings and about your friends and maybe about your partners if you're seeing somebody right now. And so they're not exclusively about you because who you are is this relationship you have with all of these other people. So here we have Penelope who's dragging around the sack in the underworld full of mostly Odysseus' stories. That might start getting a bit annoying after a while. So she decides she's going to do something about it and tell us her own story. And she begins by telling us about her birth and then progresses fairly linear, in a fairly linear way with some divergence to talk about life in the underworld but mostly her story is pretty linear. Her birth, her marriage, her time with the suitors, Odysseus' return. So it's a pretty linear storyline. I want to look at the events shortly after her birth. So she says when I was quite young my father ordered me to be thrown into the sea. I never knew exactly why during my lifetime and in fact she still doesn't know now after her death. I never knew exactly why during my lifetime but I suspected he'd been told by an oracle that I would weave his shroud. So here we have a parent trying to kill a child. That should sound familiar. I think it's interesting that I get to be up here talking to you again and again we have a parallel situation where the parent tried to kill a child. In this case Penelope tries to figure out why. So she says she was never told why and indeed Atwood did some research into this to uncover this myth of Penelope's birth and her father's attempt to drown her and Atwood couldn't exactly figure out why this happened. So parts of the Penelope's story are not told, not even by her, often because she doesn't know. So that's to suggest that even though her story progresses fairly linearly in this text there are still huge parts of this story that she is just filling in with her best guess or that she has to leave silent because she doesn't know what's happened or why something happened the way it did. What I think is interesting here is Penelope says that she didn't know why this happened. She didn't know why her father tried to drown her but when she doesn't know she guesses. She tries to figure it out. Maybe it's because she heard this prophecy about the shroud. Now it's not actually her father's shroud. She's going to weave, right? It's her father-in-law's shroud. So maybe her dad wasn't listening that close to the oracle or maybe the oracle made a mistake. But she makes a guess. She tries to make her father's actions intelligible. That is she tries to make sense of this gap in her knowledge. She tries to fill it in. And I think this makes her seem very human and very approachable because I suspect a lot of us try to do this. Try to fill this in. That's why people did it for Abraham when we were talking about Abraham two weeks ago. Trying to figure out, okay, well, why would he do this? Let's try and fill in that gap to make it intelligible, to make it logical. So here in the Penelope Ed, she decides to set the record straight but we already know by page seven that she can't set the record straight because she doesn't know everything. Her knowledge is not complete. So she's going to do her best but there are still going to be gaps. And the nature of Penelope's in comparison to the nature of the way in which the Odyssey was recited and later written down. So the Odyssey, we have an oral tradition, a kind of sawn or a Bard's tale that went along a company to music. Whereas Penelope is writing which is much more like a modern kind of memoir, a memory of what happened and the order in which she thinks it happened. But in doing this, she struggles right off the bat. Though she doesn't struggle for that lawn, so I'm curious about this. By page two, when telling us she's going to set the record straight, she says, the difficulty is that I have no mouth through which I can speak. She has no mouth because she's dead. This isn't, it is metaphorical but it's not only metaphorical, she is dead. I can't make myself understood, not in your world, the world of bodies of tons of fingers. She has none of that. And most of the time I have no listeners on your side of the river. That being the river sticks in Hades. So there's a problem with Penelope trying to set the record straight right at the outset. She can't speak or even gesture. She has no body, no tongue, no mouth. And we're not listening because she's dead. So that suggests that in order to tell these stories, you have to have embodiment. You have to actually be here and you have audience who is willing to listen. So Homer and the oral tradition are way ahead of Penelope already because the Homeric text is here. Here it is, right? When Penelope begins her tale, she is fighting against this. This which was an oral tradition which had an audience not only willing to listen but usually eager to listen and has had an audience now for thousands of years. There's a huge audience and the text itself is actually embodied in a sort of way. Not a human body anymore but the text was written down and it preserves. So Penelope has to combat this, this kind of canonical tradition that the Homeric Odyssey has been read and studied and discussed for centuries. The location of her speech, the location of the speech in the Odyssey is very interesting because the Odyssey was an oral tradition, it was public. We'd all sit down at two evenings, as we learned, two really long evenings and we'd listen to this. It was public, it was recognized, it was a form of entertainment and education and a way to create community. But Penelope is writing from the underworld. This actually creates a bit of a parallel between Penelope and one of the characters of the Odyssey, Achilles. So I don't expect you to have your Odyssey with you but if you do, we're on page 265. Odysseus has gone down into the underworld, you can just make a note of this if you want to look at it later. And he runs into Achilles and Achilles doesn't look very happy which is a bit of a surprise to Odysseus and he says, but you Achilles there's not a man in the world more blessed than you. Achilles is so great. There never has been, never will be one. Not only you're the best, you're like the best forever so all the rest of you can just give up. Time was when you were alive, you were honored as a god and now down here I see you lord it over the dead in all your powers. So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles. Achilles is so great that he is the best man who ever lived or ever will live and down in the underworld the king of all the other dead people. That's how awesome Achilles is. Achilles' response. He broke out protesting no winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus. By God I'd rather slave on earth for another man some dirt poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive than rule down here over all the breathless dead. Not only tonless, not only finger nitless, not only mouthless, not only bodyless but also breathless. The dead are incapable of speech and yet both Achilles and Penelope speak from Hades and revise their stories. Achilles denies that he's so great and says instead he would rather be a slave to a farmer than be dead. So he would rather not be so awesome and dead he would rather be alive and less awesome or not awesome at all. Penelope also revises her story from death. Because she's not the stories that are being told about her. So here they are in the underworld. Penelope and Achilles revising their stories from death. Hades being a world underground under our feet. A place that's hidden, a place that's not very easy to get into. A place that is not publicly acknowledged or publicly experienced. Public being the realm of the living. It is also literally beneath our feet. It is beneath the surface and so many scholars have taken this to be a representation of the unconscious which is something Atwood often does taking a hidden place or a place beneath the surface and using it as a metaphor or representation of the unconscious. If that's the case, Penelope's inability or difficulty to speak and you can tell me whether or not that difficulty is genuine later but her difficulty to speak could be actually more of us. Our difficulty in hearing a text like this because it's buried, it's unconscious because it's beneath the surface. Something that for some reason we don't want to deal with and we don't want to acknowledge because we like this version better. Maybe. The underworld is also, I suggest to you, since it's below is kind of a subordinate position that is beneath below, subordinate. So it could also be a representation of the power relation between Homer's Odyssey and Penelope's own story. That is the Odyssey taking a position of power, taking a position that this is often recognized as the legitimate text of Odysseus' journey. This is the one everyone reads, this is the one everyone has been reading, the one everyone talks about. And so this text takes a position of prestige and power that this one, move my stickie there, that this one simply hasn't or didn't. There is some reason to think that this is the case even within the Penelopeed. When we look at the relationship between Penelope and Odysseus, if we take Penelope as representative of the Penelopeed and Odysseus as representative of the Odyssey, what do you notice about the relationship between these two people? Yeah. And she also doubts a lot of what he says. But there does seem to be a bit of a power imbalance here, I agree. Penelope and Odysseus' relationship, at least the very early stages, right after the marriage, is an awful lot like a parent-child relationship, rather than a marriage of equals. Penelope is a lot younger than Odysseus, and she's also represented as much more naive. So Odysseus is kind of in charge. Here's fairly early on in the marriage scene. So Odysseus is talking about this bed that he built for them, and he remember this plays a huge role in the Odyssey, and the bed post is a tree, and he built the whole house around this tree, I guess, and then the bed. And so the bed can't move. And here is Penelope telling us about this revelation of the bed post. If word got around about his post, said Odysseus, in a mock sinister manner, he would know I'd been sleeping with some other man, and then he said frowning at me in what was supposed to be a playful way. He would be very cross indeed, and he would have to chop me up into little pieces with his sword, or hang me from the roof beam. He's teasing her with the threat of murder. I pretended to be frightened and said I would never, never think of betraying his big post. Freud is coming later. So she goes along with the game, but actually I really was frightened. So he's playing a game here. He's teasing her. He's like, oh, if anyone finds out, I'll know you cheated on me, and I'll have to kill you. And Penelope pretends to be scared. But she says actually it wasn't pretend, she really was scared. He's teasing her, but we know who has the power in this relationship. So is it just teasing? Or does she have genuine reason to be frightened? And the bigger question, how would she know if she could trust him or if she has genuine reason to be frightened? So in representing the underworld, Penelope's position of speech, as below, we're subordinate, I'm saying that there's an imbalance between the Penelope ad and the Odyssey, but even a greater imbalance between Penelope, the character, and Homer and Odysseus, who speak in the Odyssey. So Homer speaks a large part of it, but we know Odysseus speaks book 9 to 12 directly. Moving from speech to the public. Penelope tells us that Odysseus was always so plausible. Many people have believed his version of events was the true one. Give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few one-eyed monsters. So why does Penelope think that the Odyssey has been accepted? Because Odysseus is really plausible. We want to believe him. We don't want to believe books 9 through 12 aren't genuine, aren't actually what happened. And furthermore, we want to believe Homer, too. And this goes back to my discussion of the ancient versus the modern. It's more exciting and it's more interesting to think of Polyphemus as a cyclops that imprisons them and threatens their lives than just to think that everyone got drunk and the tavern owner had one eye and they got into a big bar fight. It's a more stirring tale if it's the little guy against the giant cyclops than if it's just a bar fight. And it's a more compelling tale if a goddess fell in love with Odysseus. I mean, how awesome must Odysseus be for a goddess to fall in love with him? That's a more compelling tale than that Odysseus kind of managed to worm his way into the bed of a brothel owner. That's not as exciting. So Odysseus is plausible and he's feeding us stuff that we want, says Penelope. And then she says, they were turning me into a story or into several stories, not the kind of stories I'd prefer to hear about myself. What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world if she defends herself she sounds guilty, so I waited some more. So how is Penelope represented in the Odyssey? From last week's discussion, yeah. She's pretty voiceless, she doesn't say very much. What are her characteristics? What do we know about Penelope? Yeah. She's very clever, absolutely. Anything else? Yeah. Domestic? She's very domestic, what do you mean by that? She doesn't leave the house, right? She often doesn't leave her room. She spends a lot of time in her room. Yeah. She's loyal, right? She has a whole bunch of suitors banning down the door and trying to get her to date one of them and more preferably marry one of them. And they're being really flattery and all this stuff goes for any of them, right? So she's very loyal to Odysseus. This is sometimes also put in the Odyssey itself that she's very... So we juxtapose Penelope against Clemenestra, Agamemnon's wife. Clemenestra is discussed in the Underworld chapter near where we were talking about Achilles. So when Odysseus goes to speak to Agamemnon, Agamemnon lavishes praise on Penelope for being such a good wife, for being so modest, for being so chaste, for being so virtuous, for being so loyal. Absolutely. So she's smart, but she's very domestic and she's very loyal. This is the kind of representation of Penelope that we get in the Odyssey. And it sounds like our Penelope character in the Penelopeid is not happy with this representation of herself. So she says, these are not the kind of stories I'd prefer to hear about myself. She doesn't like the way she's being represented. Homer's Odyssey is a classic though. It is the tale most accepted in its most canonized form. And so Penelope is fighting an uphill battle because her own story is hidden. So over here, someone said she doesn't talk very much, right? She doesn't say much. Her own story is pretty hidden in the Odyssey. Okay. So it's hidden because she's in the Underworld. So she says, since being dead, since achieving this state of bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness, that's interesting. She's lost the characteristics that mark her as female. So she is breastless. I've learned some things I would rather not know as one does when listening at windows or opening other people's letters. I think this is really interesting and I don't know what to make of this. So I put this up here as part of the hidden discussion. Penelope is in the Underworld and she is disembodied. And through this disembodied state, she learns a bunch of things she would rather not know. I wonder why that is? And she compares some of the things she knows to listening at windows or opening other people's letters. That is these hidden secrets that other people don't reveal. These don't seem to be the kind of things that she learned by popping in at séances where people are revealing things. So while it's never stated, I wonder if actually is receiving thoughts from other people that were previously hidden, previously held back by her embodied state. Because there's another line a little bit further on, perhaps this shroud-weaving oracle idea of mine is baseless. That is the idea that in her explanation for why her father attempted to drown her as a child, she says maybe he heard this shroud-weaving story and then she says perhaps this shroud-weaving story of mine is baseless. So much whispering goes on in the dark caverns in the meadows that sometimes it's hard to know whether the whispering comes from the outside or from the inside. That is, our narrator may not be able to tell which thoughts are her own. There's a breakdown between her mind and other people's minds. That's weird to me. She's become disembodied. She's lost her markers of femininity. She's lost this kind of physical identity. And now she's even losing track of her own thoughts. So we have Penelope trying to give us her perspective on what happened in the Odyssey. But she doesn't have a coherent perspective. Though she tries, and most of the time is fairly successful at giving us a coherent storyline through this text, we should be, I think, suspicious of this storyline given what she said at the outset about the breakdown of her own ability to have her own thought to have this kind of coherent perspective of what's going on. And also at the beginning she tells us she is having trouble even communicating these thoughts. So the coherence that we see maybe I just thought, but as I read this I found this story, Penelope's chapters anyway, to be pretty coherent pretty easy to follow. That should be kind of suspicious, I think. What is she not telling us? Or what is she making up in order to make this coherent? Because she's admitted at the outset that this is a struggle. There's another reason I think we should be a little suspicious. So we know from the Odyssey that Meden tells Penelope of the plot that the suitors have to murder her son when he arrives back in Ithaca. Remember he leaves to go talk to Helen and Anka Mamnon, and the suitors start plotting his murder back home. And Meden warns Penelope of this. Penelope acknowledges that this actually happened. So in the Penelope ad she upholds this version of the Odyssey, and she does this at strategic points. She acknowledges some of the things that the Odyssey says and says yes, that actually took place. So she says it's true that the Herald Meden revealed this plot to me as well, just as the songs relate. But I already knew about it from the maids. I had to appear to be surprised, however, because otherwise Meden, who was neither on one side nor the other, would have known I had my own sources. So in order to conceal that she was working with the maids, Penelope has to act surprised in the Odyssey. So what does that tell us about the reactions in the Odyssey as we read them? We can't trust Penelope in the Odyssey either, because she's lying in the Odyssey. And this comes again. So when Odysseus returns home, so when Odysseus returns home in the Odyssey, we know this is a big discussion around the Odyssey about whether or not Penelope recognized Odysseus. And last week's lecture talked about is Penelope smarter than a dog? Because the dog recognizes Odysseus and Penelope apparently doesn't. So what is Penelope's own take on this in the Penelope ad? She says I didn't let on that I knew. So she claims to have known it was Odysseus right away. She didn't let on that I knew. It would have been dangerous for him. Also, if a man takes pride in his disguising skills, it would be a foolish wife who would claim to recognize it. It is always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his wife. Is this because she's afraid of him or because she's a good wife? I don't know. But what it does say is that we can't trust Penelope as represented by Homer. She lied, she concealed and she was clever. So the story of Penelope as clever is both upheld in the Odyssey and in the Penelope ad. In both places, she is represented as clever. But that means in both places the story she tells us is suspect. And it is additionally suspect in the Penelope ad because she is dead and that is having a whole other effect on her perspective. So she's clever, so clever that her story may never be told. So I go back to the idea of her story of Penelope as subordinate. Of Penelope as not in a position of power. Because one of the most surprising things that the Penelope ad does is actively try and rewrite one of the strongest things in the Odyssey. And this is the interpretation of Penelope's dream. Do you remember Penelope has this dream where she sees 20 geese and she feels happy about the geese and compassion to the geese and then this eagle comes in and kills all the geese and she feels very sorry and sad. And Odysseus interprets the dream in the Odyssey for Penelope. And this interpretation of the dream has been upheld for a long time. So our own translator of the Odyssey Faggles here talks about the dream. Yet though her resolve that as Penelope's resolved to avoid marriage's firm she would not be human if she did not feel flattered by the suitor's infatuation with her. That is Faggles says that the dream reveals to us that Penelope likes the attention of the suitors and that this is important because it humanizes Penelope in a specific way. It makes her a woman who enjoys this is Faggles again in the dream the eagle as Odysseus and the geese as the suitors but not before Penelope has spoken of her delight in watching the geese and her unbridled sorrow at their destruction. In these few lines Homer shows more understanding of how, sorry, that should be how dreams work than is to be found anywhere in the four books of the interpretation of dreams written by Artemarius of Dallard in the second century of the Christian era. So this explanation of the dream which Odysseus gives Faggles upholds as showing a deep insight into how dreams work and important insight into Penelope's character. So I think one of Penelope's biggest challenges here is that she is adamant that we have for centuries misunderstood this dream and her task is to try and convince us that we don't understand the dream correctly and that Homer himself that is the author of the tale in its classic form misunderstood the dream. There's an eagle. We're talking about the dream. So Penelope says in this event this is about the dream. Odysseus and by extension Homer, Faggles and pretty much everyone was wrong about the dream. Odysseus was indeed the eagle but the geese were not the suitors. The geese were my 12 maids and learned my unending sorrow. How does this change Penelope's character? It means that her joy in beholding the geese presents a love for the maids and not an enjoyment of flattery. Right? This is Penelope interpreting her dream herself for us but she is doing it after all the facts are in so she's doing it from a place of retrospection. But you might wonder whether this interpretation of the dream is genuine because of who Penelope is. What do we know about Penelope our narrator? We know I think that she tries to appeal to the reader and I know from speaking to some of you as you read the Penelope this week that this has varying degrees of success some people really like Penelope some people found her to be a bit whiny but she tries to appeal to the reader and she plays on our sympathies she tries to appear to be human vulnerable and not without fault that is she has flaws and that humanizes her. In addition these flaws lend her story credibility if there were no flaws whatsoever if she was completely perfect you might think yeah okay Penelope is kind of whitewashing this an awful lot right so the fact that these flaws exist if the fact that parts of her personality you might find irritating lends credence to her story. So for example with regards to her supposed gullibility that is that she accepts these stories about Odysseus and Cersei as opposed to Odysseus and the brothel madam she says even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others and that might sound very human and very reasonable with regards to her role in leading the suitors on that is in kind of not promising that she'll marry any of them but not really discouraging them either she says I can't pretend that I didn't enjoy a certain amount of this of the attention everyone does we all like to hear sans and our praise even if we don't believe them but look at what she said here I can't imagine that I didn't enjoy a certain amount of this that seems to support the original dream analysis but then she says everyone does right you guys I'm not alone everyone feels like this so she's trying to bring you on side with her a little bit here like come on go along with me here this isn't weird everyone feels like this so she's trying to minimize while acknowledging this flaw she's trying to minimize it at the same time with regards to her role in the rape and the hanging of the maids which is one of the biggest questions in the Penelope had how involved was Penelope in this happening she says so I foolishly thought myself quite wise I can see that my actions were ill considered and caused harm but I was running out of time and becoming desperate and I had to use every ruse and stratagem at my command so again she acknowledges the fault but tries to excuse it what else was I supposed to do there was nothing else for me to do and okay I was a little hung up on my own cleverness but what else could I do again she's appealing to you to try and get you to accept her fault is totally understandable Penelope as a character I've said already that this text acknowledges what the Odyssey has told us about Penelope in terms of cleverness but Penelope seems to try very hard to downplay her modesty and her loyalty so it accepts the cleverness but it downplays some of the other aspects of Penelope's character that were told to you in the Odyssey so she says I was clever everyone said so in fact they said it so much that I found it discouraging so while she is clever she may not entirely be happy about being clever but cleverness is a quality a man likes to have in his wife as long as she is some distance away from him again we have this tension between Penelope and Odysseus that she feels she has to hide her cleverness when he is around that it's only useful when he's not there why is it challenging for her to be clever when Odysseus is actually home she also de-emphasizes her modesty so if you have the Penelope Ed we're on page 49 this is after she and Odysseus are married and Odysseus wins and decide wins the discussion about where Penelope and he are going to live so Penelope's father wants them to take up for her childhood home because that's what was standard and Odysseus wants her to go to Ithaca and he wins so she and all of her money are going to Ithaca with Odysseus so she says you've probably heard that my father ran after our departing chariot begging me to say with him and then Odysseus asked me if I was going to Ithaca with him of my own free will or did I prefer to remain with my father and I said that in answer I pulled down my veil being too modest to proclaim the words of my desire for my husband and that a statue was later erected of me in tribute to the virtue of modesty that's the story the ancient epic story Penelope acknowledges that there is some truth to this story in fact she thinks there's some truth to most stories it's just never the complete truth so there's some truth to this story but I pulled down my veil to hide the fact that I was laughing you have to admit there's something humorous about a father who once tossed his own child into the sea capering down the road after that very child and calling stay with me so Penelope acknowledges that she did pull down her veil but she says the reason we all think she did it is wrong she didn't do it out of modesty she's de-emphasizing the role of modesty this is curious to me though because we already know Penelope it is a narrator maybe not entirely trustworthy so in telling us this story how does she want us to see her why would she want to de-emphasize the modesty and emphasize the cleverness and this might go to another juxtaposition that is upheld in this tale and was in the Odyssey which is Penelope versus Helen in the Odyssey they are often placed as opposed they're not as opposed as Penelope and Clemenestra that's the really opposed one but Helen is kind of on the Clemenestra side she's not very faithful, for example she doesn't stay home she's not domestic, she's not modest whereas Penelope is all of those things here we have that juxtaposition again but Penelope seems to kind of have a weird jealous admiration of Helen such that if she is modest she doesn't necessarily seem very happy about her own characteristic of modesty such that it's not something about herself she wants to celebrate or she wants to emphasize I think it's also interesting that Penelope in this tale suggests that every story has some truth and we need to ask ourselves does that extend to her own story is it only partial? so before we go on to examine why it might be partial by looking at the role of the maids I'm going to have a 10 minute break so we'll start again at around 5 after 1 and your questions are up here in the top already on the break about Plato which you are all reading for next week you know we're doing Plato over two weeks I will double check this with the team I've checked it with some of the team but oh there's the other team she can contradict me if this isn't right so you're reading Plato over the next two weeks Christina is lecturing next week and I'm lecturing the week after and somebody asked me how far should you be for next week as far as you can yeah we're going to overlap what we're doing is Christina is talking about one aspect of the text and I'm talking about another aspect but both aspects run through the entire text so read as far as you can because you probably want to re-read anyway okay alright let's not worry about that right now let's go back to the Penelope so at the moment we have this pretty dualistic picture where we have Penelope responding to Homer but of course you know from reading the text that this is not the whole story there's also a whole bunch happening with the maids and in fact the maids interspers and interrupt Penelope's tale with chapters from the maids periodically throughout the whole tale so they appear in Penelope's story she tells us about them with chapters of their own where they're the voice speaking and they interrupt Penelope's chapters and the linear narrative of the story and what I think is really interesting is as we move towards the end of the story towards the climax the maids actually interrupt more and more and more so Penelope gets several uninterrupted chapters in a row towards the beginning but towards the end she gets fewer and fewer where the maids aren't interrupting alright I'm going to talk about four things with reference to the maids and what I think is interesting about the maids is that they're challenging both Penelope and Homer so whereas we had kind of this nice glasses imagery before now what we have is kind of this like shattered imagery like lines going in all directions and just go with me it's like shattered glass as much as a prize he can shattered glass and I think that's kind of important too because I think a lot of what the maids are doing is upsetting and distorting the tale that Penelope is trying to tell and at the same time upsetting and distorting the original Odyssey okay so what I want you to notice about the maids chapters is that they're very different from Penelope's own chapters the maids deal in interpretation and impossibilities so there's a lot of artistic interpretation there's a lot of songs there's a lot of jump rope things and plays and there isn't a lot of straight up narrative there's chants and dramas and court TV and lectures and ballads their voice is not plain speaking unlike Penelope's and their voice is also not linear the maids don't tell their story in one logical sequence in one narrative structure the very story the maids tell is fractured they repeat things more than once they revisit events in their lives over and over again especially the event of their death they refer to that a lot and they do so in a variety of different ways with a variety of different voices and narrative styles so while Penelope is trying very hard from the underworld to present us with a linear story of her life that makes sense, that is coherent that hopefully we will believe because I mean she's really likable and has some flaws but I mean don't we all so let's all get on side with Penelope the maids aren't trying to do that maids don't actually seem to care whether we believe them or not they aren't trying to present us with a linear story and they aren't trying to win us over so what are they doing let's start with the birth of the maids the birth of the maids is actually told to us twice it's a place where they repeat themselves once it's juxtaposed against Penelope's birth pretty early on in the story so we have a representation of Penelope and her parents and she tells us about hanging out with her dad after he tried to drown her and she says you can imagine there I would be strolling hand in hand with my apparently fond male parent along the cliff's edge or a river bank or a parapet and then the thought would occur to me that he might suddenly decide to shove me over or bash me to death with a rock so it's not a really good relationship with her father that seems fairly fair to say her mother my mother like all naïads was beautiful but chilly at heart she had waving hair and dimples and rippling laughter she was elusive when I was little I often tried to throw my arms around her but she had a habit of sliding away so Penelope doesn't have a strong bond with either of her parents you can see by what I've told you that I was a child who learned early the virtues if such they are of self-sufficiency I think she also learned the virtue of mistrusting and while Penelope never owns this as a characteristic of herself the fact that she is unable to trust runs through this entire story but she says I knew that I would have to look out for myself in the world I could hardly count on family support and she doesn't for most of the rest of the story Euryclea is one of the closest things she has to a family member once Odysseus is gone she doesn't trust him she doesn't get along with Odysseus' mom she doesn't get along with Odysseus' dad she doesn't get along with her own parents so she doesn't have any family that she can rely on or trust but she isn't alone she has the support of the maids in fact she raises the maids in such a way that they are dependent on her to some degree and that she can trust them and she comes to rely on them quite heavily the maids birth we too were children if we wept no one dried our tears if we slept we were kicked awake we were told we were motherless we were told we were fatherless we were told we were lazy so while Penelope doesn't have a very good relationship with her parents the maids don't have any parents at all they don't have any family connections we were told we were lazy we were told we were dirty and I vitalize that because the theme of the maids as dirty runs through the entirety of the maids passages we were dirty dirt was our concern dirt was our business dirt was our specialty dirt was our fault we were the dirty girls so we have a double play on dirt and fault here as maids they clean up the dirt and they are to blame if a room is not clean as subordinate slave women so remember we've talked about power relations if Penelope is below Odysseus the maids are far below Penelope in terms of their power in this text they are subordinate slave women they are blamed for dirty thoughts and actions of others in response to their presence and in fact we know that by the end of this text the maids are haunting Odysseus Odysseus cannot stay in the other underworld that is he cannot stay in the unconscious because thoughts of the maids are there thoughts of what he did to them thoughts of what he wanted to do to them and he has to keep fleeing maids are not protected in this text while they work very hard to protect Penelope they themselves are not protected and we know this right from the outset their bodies are considered safe for those in power to exploit in a way Penelope's are not the maids are often offered such that they are taken and raped and while this is sad it is expected in this text Penelope shows some sadness for it but not a whole lot of horror the maids bodies are public domain so Penelope has the support of the maids but it is far from clear that the maids have Penelope's support that's the first tale of the maids birth the second tale is juxtaposed against Telemachus's birth so here is Telemachus's birth Eurycleo did make herself invaluable when Telemachus was born she said the prayers to Artemis when I was in too much pain to speak and she held my hand and sponged off my forehead oozy woo she would croon to Telemachus when drying him after his bath Telemachus has like two mothers right he has Penelope and he has Eurycleo who takes a fierce protective control over him Odysseus was pleased with me of course he was Helen hasn't born a son yet he said which ought to have made me glad and it did but on the other hand why was he still and possibly always thinking about Helen so we have a mother who's pleased with Telemachus's birth and a father who's pleased with Telemachus's birth and a nurse who's pleased so Telemachus's birth is sacred and it's celebrated prayers are given to the gods he has a devoted nurse Helen takes pride in his existence and puts other people down because they don't have sons yet and he does and his existence elevates the status of his mother having given birth to a son she has now fulfilled her role as a mother and her status is elevated over Helen's this being the tension between Penelope and Helen that runs through this text what about the mates for his birth was lawned for and feasted as our births were not his mother presented a princeling spawned merely lamb ferroed littered hatched out their clutch we were animal young to be disposed of at will he was fathered we simply appeared like the crocus the rose the sparrows engendered in mud our lives were twisted in his life we also were children when he was a child we were his pets his toy things mock sisters his tiny companions look at how often the maids are compared to nature or to animals in this there's something to lighten the mood a little bit so the maids are littered lamb ferroed those are all words we use for animals having children having infants they're also compared to crocuses and roses they are to be disposed of as will they are pets they are toys the maids are objects that just appear in nature and belong to telomachus and penelope to be done with what they want in other words the maids are taught from an early age that they are not human that they don't deserve the rights and respect that being human carries with them even penelope though she isn't in a subordinate position has much more rights and respect and protection than the maids do that's the question yes they are the maids are slaves so is Iroquia though she oddly has a slightly better position than the maids probably due to the fact that Iroquia has been around a lot longer and gained some through being indispensable they need Iroquia's services so the birth of the maids is told to us twice why? I want to suggest to you that penelope and the maids are all women in this world they know what it is like to be a woman in this world but they don't experience womanhood in the same way telomachus and the maids are all children together they know what it is like to grow up on Ithaca but they don't experience this childhood in the same way so this tale being repeated twice once against penelope and once against telomachus drives home the point that the maids are in the same place on Ithaca in a different context and they are experiencing this story in a much different way than penelope is or in other words that there is a plurality of perspectives here and possibly a plurality of truths a plurality of stories but there is also to return to our earlier theme a kind of silence around the maids so while penelope professes to speak her own truth the maids are often silent about their truths they often refuse to tell you what they think about what's going on they challenge these narrative at several points in the text but they often refuse to give their own so one of the places where this comes up and we'll talk about another place in a little bit but the first place this comes up is could they have killed telomachus as a child and they say only the feats can say so they give this story where they talk about playing with telomachus and they say you know 12 against 1 we could have just pulled him under the water and held him down had we known had we known that he would grow up and murder us all would we have done it would we have were we capable of it and she says only the feats can say only they know our hearts from us you will get nothing so the maids decide not to tell you whether or not they would be capable of murder whether or not their bond of friendship with telomachus was so strong that had they known he would be their murderer they would have let him live anyway or not but why do they refuse to speak they are dead now Penelope finds quite a freeing in death that she can tell you all sorts of stuff that she claims to have not been able to say before but the maids don't I wonder though if there is a kind of more power in this silence and their refusal to speak it makes me anyway much more interested such that I actually pay more attention to the maids chapters than Penelope's chapters because I'm trying to figure out what their game is whereas Penelope told me at the start what she wanted the maids also spend a lot of time on the imagery of the ship or the boat first time I saw this appears in their sawn if I was a princess then sail my fine lady on the billowing wave the water below is as dark as the grave again we have this imagery of death beneath our feet and maybe you'll sink in your little blue boat it's hope and hope only that keeps us afloat so the lady the princess possibly Penelope is sailing on a blue boat in a billowing ocean with death beneath her feet look at another boat imagery the birth of Telemachus in his frail dark boat the boat of himself through the dangerous oceans of his vast mother he sailed again we have references to sailing in a boat and a parallel between sailing in a boat and life and death and we the twelve who were later to die by his hand at his father's relentless command sailed as well in the dark frail boats of ourselves through the turbulent seas of our swollen and sore footed mothers after nine month voyage we came to shore beached at the same time as he was struck by the hostile air infants when he was an infant wailing just as he wailed helpless as he was helpless but ten times more helpless as well so there's a way in which the maids are very like Telemachus but they're more helpless as well their frail boats perhaps more frail less support if something goes wrong the maids don't have a proud father and a doting nurse and an elevated mother to help them repair the ship of themselves they don't have recourse for anybody to help them out here this one I find really interesting the Wiley sea captain here the maids take on the voice of the sailors and actually fairly quickly they tell us most of what Odysseus told us in book nine through twelve of the odyssey so the Wiley sea captain is on page ninety three so it's performed by the twelve maids in sailor costumes and it goes through pretty much everything that happens that Odysseus tells us about we have the lotus eaters we have Poseidon and the Cyclops but let's look at the refrains here's health to our captain this is on page ninety four so gallantan free whether struck on a rock or asleep near a tree or rolled in the arms of some nymph of this all like to be so health to our captain wherever he may roam tossed here and tossed there on the wide ocean foam and he's in no hurry to ever get home Odysseus the crafty old cauldron both of those seem to challenge the stories Odysseus gave it which was that he was desperate to get home that he wasn't enjoying his time with a goddess that he was in a hurry just one more I think the last one page ninety eight so a health to our captain wherever he may be whether walking the earth or a drift over sea but he's not down in Hades unlike all of we and will leave you not any the wiser again maids don't tell us where Odysseus is and at this point I think it kind of becomes odd because I start wondering when it says for he's not down in Hades unlike all of we are they talking about the sailors that they're impersonating or are they talking about themselves because we know Odysseus doesn't stay in Hades because the maids keep haunting him but I also think it's cool that the maids here take the voice of the sailors in fact I think this is a natural parallel that somehow doesn't always get talked about in the Odyssey Odysseus has companions right he has all the sailors and he loses all of them through his crafty plans through his cunning he manages to accidentally get them all killed Penelope has the maids they are her companions throughout most of this 20 year story she also loses all of them possibly also through her craftiness through her cunning through her hubris she gets them all killed so it's another place in which the maids fall silent in which they refuse to tell us where Odysseus is and in which they refuse to say whether or not it's them speaking or the sailors that they're impersonating we have one more dream boat that is a ballad by the maids and when we sleep we like to dream we dream we are at sea we sail the waves in golden boats so happy clean and free this is after Penelope tells us about her dream the maids interspersed and tell us about their dreams we sail the waves in golden boats happy clean and free we already know that the maids are associated with dirt and that the maids are not free so the maids biggest dreams here are to have golden boats and to be clean we have a parallel of water against dirt which might seem quite common for the maids as they probably have to actually clean dirt with water but again they view themselves as dirty and they return over and over again to this boat imagery to this imagery of water and we have clean against dirty so why all the boats any ideas? yeah yep so the ship represents the moon sailing through the sky and the idea of a matriarchal society and a cult of the moon that's been overthrown by a patriarchal society and a worship of a sun god so we might be returning to the boats to kind of support this view that's given to us in the anthropology lecture yeah yes? it's referred to as water and her mother actually has that famous it's repeated twice saying to move like water water eventually finds a way so move around obstacles and water will find a way and so you might see the maids in boats kind of being carried where Penelope will take them they can't move for themselves they're in rudderless ships being carried by the water that is Penelope yeah so we have Telemachus as an individual in the vast womb of his mother right? so we already have this idea of one person, one boat and we know that now in the underworld if we take the idea of one body, one boat the boats are gone for the river sticks and none of us have bodies anymore so we lose I like these other ideas a lot too but that's sort of where I was going but the first thing I want to suggest is of course the imagery of the boat is a natural choice because we are retelling the Odyssey which is already full of boats well just one but it's there a lot actually no, Telemachus has a boat too there is more than one boat so the Odyssey is already journey by water, journey with boats so the water imagery and the boat imagery is quite natural but on the other hand while I say it's quite natural I also find it a little bit odd because as we've said Penelope doesn't go anywhere Odysseus is the one journeying by water if Penelope wants to tell her own story why does this boat imagery keep coming up maybe she hasn't been able to completely divest herself of having a story that's actually all about Odysseus but also I thought of the boats as metaphors for the selves but not just for an individual self but for an individual's life a journey by water is representing a journey of your life and what I think is cool about that is when we look at the way the maids use the boat imagery we all have a boat because we all have a self but how sturdy is this boat and what dangers do we face in the water and do we have help to repair the boat if it's damaged do we have other people we can trust and we can count on to help us navigate some of the difficulties of our lives and it seems like Penelope does have some though not as much as maybe she would like because she can't trust her family the maids just have each other what we see here at the end is the maids being treated as a single entity still traveling around with each other they don't ever really speak in isolation they always speak as a group in fact I listen to this as an audio book and it's kind of sometimes hard to listen to the maids because they're all chanting at once not when they do a play then they each take individual parts but for a lot of the rest of it there's multiple voices chanting they speak together they speak as one voice they only have each other and none of them are very in a very secure or strong position and so if something goes wrong that boat is going down there's nobody to come and rescue them and finally remember that the maids die hanging from a ship's hauser this is built into the odyssey and in the Penelope it is supported by the Penelope so a hauser is a big rope off the front that's often used as a mooring line to tie the ship up to shore this is what hangs the maids they are hanged through a ship imagery which again brings us back to the anthropology lecture but also reinforces this boat imagery again insofar as a hauser is used to tie a ship up do the maids have a safe harbor do they have anywhere they can go or anyone that they can turn to when they start getting raped for example they do turn to be it kind of asks them to take advantage of this new relationship they have with these men not kind of that is what she does alright the next one I want to look at is the perils of Penelope a drama so the maids impersonate Penelope now and Iroquia and they perform a play for us this is near the end the climax is coming the death of all the suitors and the haining of the maids is almost upon us and the maids interrupt and they say as we approach the climax grim and gory let us just say there is another story do you remember this other story they offer in the perils of Penelope do you remember what they suggest they suggest that actually Penelope was unfaithful to Odysseus this is another challenging of this strong message we get from the Odyssey that Penelope is modest and loyal the maids suggest that's not so we already know Penelope is not that happy with that characterization of herself though she seems to kind of own it in a begrudging way the maids say no she's not modest she wasn't loyal she was unfaithful she wasn't weaving a shroud at all that shroud weaving imagery which is such an iconic imagery of who Penelope was the maids says is a lie what was actually happening was she was using the story of the shroud to conceal her affairs because it gave an excuse why she had to be in her bedroom all night and the maids would help her do this they would help bring a suitor to her bedroom then she would have a great night with the suitor and the maids would help scurry the suitor away so the maids were part of Penelope's scheme to bet as many suitors as possible and they were helping her do this so now when Odysseus comes home Penelope really needs the maids to shut up right like if the maids tell Odysseus that Penelope was having sex with all the suitors what's going to happen to Penelope we already know that because we know the bed post story Odysseus is going to kill her teasing but maybe not so we need to get rid of the maids and Eurycleia finds a way to do that and says don't worry I told Odysseus that the maids were unfaithful and they were sleeping with all the suitors so they got killed so they're out of the way so you won't have to pay for all your adultery and Penelope's like awesome this is a drama that the maids perform all they tell us about it is that this is another story it's another possible way of understanding the events do they tell us it's true no and we don't know a lot of the motivation of the maids while Penelope talks at great length about her intentions and her motivation and why she did the things she did the maids don't tell us very much so can we be sure that the maids aren't just trying to get back at Penelope by spreading this lie about her because they hold her responsible for their deaths somehow or are the maids telling us the truth but not acknowledging that it is the truth I don't know is it true or is it just a drama it's another place where the maids keep silent they don't tell us the anthropology lecture the anthropology lecture is often identified as this point in the text in which the text suggests a way of interpreting the text so the text becomes self-reflective suggesting a way in which it can be understood so it's quite common to find people who take the anthropology lecture and just run with it as an interpretation for the entire text of the Penelope Ed and there's some reason for doing that so it is another way of interpreting this text so let's look at it on page 164 oh I put a sticky note in to help myself hahaha so 164 isn't actually the start of it the anthropology lecture actually starts on 163 pointing out that the number 12 is important because there are 12 months actually there are 13 lunar months but that's okay because we actually have 13 women if we include Penelope and so they say B. that we were ritual sacrifices devoted priestesses doing our part first by indulging in orgasic eh sorry fertility right behavior with the suitors by washing ourselves in the blood of the slain male victims so first they have sex with the suitors and then remember they have to clean up after the suitors are killed washing themselves in the blood of the slain victims such heaps of them what an honor to the goddess and renewing our virginity as Artemis renewed hers by bathing in a spring dyed with the blood we would then have willingly sacrificed ourselves as was necessary reenacting the dark of the moon phase which is not visible in order that the whole cycle may begin again and the silvery new moon goddess rise once more this reading of the events in question ties in excuse the excuse the plan where it's ha ha ties with the ships hauser from which we dangled for the new moon is a boat and then there's the bow that figures so prominently in the story the curved old moon or bow sorry the curved old moon bow of Artemis used to shoot an arrow through 12 axe heads the arrow passes through the loop of the handles the round moon shaped loop and the hanging itself think dear educated minds of the significance of hanging above the earth so we have a lot of imagery of below the earth below our feet now here we have hanging above the earth and the maids continue to hang even in the underworld Penelope tells us as the maids chase Odysseus around their feet dangle they are hanging which is odd why should they have feet let's ignore that for a minute okay above the earth up in the air connected to the moon governed sea by an unbilical boat link linked rope oh there are too many clues for you to miss it so the suggestion is we can read this whole text as this kind of fertility moon cult thus possibly our rape and subsequent hanging represent the overthrow of a matrilineal moon cult this is an incoming group of usurping patriarchal father god worshiping barbarians so we can see all this as very symbolic the symbolic overthrow of a matrilineal order by a patrilineal order the symbolic overthrow of one type of religion by another type of religion that the maids are just symbols that they just are metaphors for something that was happening in the culture the overthrow of a matriarchal society by a patriarchal society and then they say no sir so they're giving a lecture, they're imagining an audience and the audience is kind of heckling them the audience doesn't like what they're suggesting no sir we deny that this theory is merely unfounded feminist claptrap this I think is really funny so somebody's heckling them in the audience and they stand up for themselves and say no this isn't just feminist claptrap this is genuine this is funny because that what herself said that she came up with some of this idea not entirely she credits other scholars as well but she credits herself for the especially the focus on the 12 axes that this is her way of reading what's happening in the odyssey and so she's kind of making fun of herself by putting this feminist claptrap that her own idea could be called feminist claptrap kind of self-reflective but the point being is that you don't have to get too worked up about us dear educated minds you don't have to think of us as real girls real flesh and blood real pain, real injustice that might be too upsetting just discard that sordid part consider us pure symbol we're no more real than money we're no more real than money okay so what is this suggesting to us money's real right because if it's not yay consider us pure symbol so I ask is this encouraging or resisting this kind of feminist reading of the text the anthropology lecture offers us a feminist reading of this text not just of the panellopeia but also a feminist reading of the odyssey in which what's happening is the overthrow of a matriarchal society for a patriarchal one are the maids encouraging us to take this view after offering it or are they resisting that we take this view because there's a way in which this is a little bit bewildering don't get too worked up about us you don't have to think of us as real that's upsetting just make a symbol that's easier then you won't have to be sad that we got killed I don't think it's clear whether this is encouraging us to accept the anthropology lecture or not and I think that's pretty common of what the maids are doing in fact I think it's kind of saying both because there's this cautionary detail here that if we think of the maids as pure symbol we must be sure not to forget that they are also real characters in this story they aren't merely a symbol so there's plurality again the maids can be a symbol but they're also real women in this world if you see them as mere symbol you are again objects you are again denied just as they said they were denied at birth so if we find it too upsetting to think of the maids as real women who really were raped and killed in this story if we reduce them to symbol we are again making them work for us do what we want them to do they are our toy things our play things in the same way they were for Telemachus so what the maids portion of this tale suggests to me is not just that there are two ways of seeing the Odyssey but that there are actually multiple ways of seeing the Odyssey multiple ways of telling this story this is not a text in which Penelope's voice is represented in unchallenged opposition to Homer's in fact there are some other people too on the sides some of which I have something to say about and some of which I don't but maybe you do so we know Helen is a big player in this story we get the juxtaposition between Penelope and Helen preserved just as it was in the Odyssey but not quite just as it was so when Penelope talks about there's a chapter called Helen ruins my life right how dare she ruin my life by getting all these men killed but that ruined my forget about that anyway Helen ruins my life says Penelope you think that Helen might have got a good whipping at the very least after all the harm and suffering she caused to kill people but she didn't not that I mind not that I minded so there's a way in which this juxtaposition between Penelope and Helen in this text is fraught with petty emotions Penelope is often represented as having jealousy and pride and Helen is always like oh Penelope you had like 120 suitors fighting after you that's not bad I mean I had like way more but good for you right so there's a way in which they're kind of petty with each other and that isn't actually represented in the Odyssey they're never represented as petty with each other in the Odyssey both of them are represented as much much more detached from the situation so we get Helen and Penelope against each other but it's other people who juxtapose them against each other it's never them who are doing it whereas in this text this is quite personal they're cousins and they really don't get along and Penelope doesn't necessarily look like the good one in this text whereas in the Odyssey Penelope is kind of the good girl and Helen is a little more scandalous in this text Penelope because we see the way she's thinking about Helen I don't think she comes off as looking very good which raises a question that I talked about or that I actually talked about with our guest lecturer a little bit last week in the Penelope ad then she is in the Odyssey what do you guys think well that's part of what we have to find out in what ways might she be weaker if she is weaker yeah okay so she comes off as more realistic but perhaps less in control cool yeah she still cries here that's upheld mm-hmm okay so she is driving at least half of this story because she's the one telling it to us assuming that she has found a way to tell the story in a way that isn't just her husband's story so if she has done that she does have more power here cool there's another hand yeah silence yeah so she's exposed truths about herself that maybe aren't flattering because she's trying to expose the whole truth and that puts her in a vulnerable position perhaps because we see her in a new light whereas in the Odyssey we're kind of left to decide you know how clever is Penelope well I could kind of figure out do I think she knows it's Odysseus and how in charge is she of the suitor's situation cool yeah yeah especially since Odysseus isn't there for most of it it's hard for her to be in a wifely role cool one more yeah yes she's like princess Zelda or peach okay I don't have anything specifically that I wanted to say about Euryklia but I do want to raise her as another driving character in this story she has a lot more power in the Penelope because she has a higher representation Penelope finds her very frustrating because she's always like oh you don't know what to do I'll just do it all for you but I think it would be very interesting to hear this story told from Euryklia's perspective that's another suggestion I have Telemachus in some ways Telemachus doesn't come off as particularly stellar in either version of this text whether in the Odyssey or in the Penelope ad so and then the last one I want to talk about is Antonis one of the suitors another revision from death so he also revises his story from the underworld you'll notice very few people who are part of the Odyssey or Penelope ad are willing to talk to Penelope in the underworld she talks to Helen the maids run away from her Euryklia has a whole pile of dead babies that she's hanging out with so she has no time to talk to Penelope but Antonis does so Penelope he always has the arrow through his neck and he's all like oh Penelope I loved you so much and look what you did to me and so finally Penelope one day pins him down and she's like Antonis what's going on what really was happening and this is what he tells her you weren't exactly a Helen but we could have dealt with that the darkness conceals much all the better that you were 20 years older than us you'd die first perhaps with a little help and then furnished with your wealth we could have had our pick of any young and beautiful princess we wanted you didn't really think we were maddened by love for you did you you may not have been much to look at but you were always intelligent you should have known we weren't really interested does she think the suitors were interested in her she says I'd said I'd preferred straightforward answers but of course nobody does not when the answers are so unflattering and this takes us back to the narrator that again she appeals to our sympathies there's one more thing I want to say about Penelope as a narrator when she and Odysseus are finally reunited the two of us Penelope and Odysseus by our own admission are proficient and shameful liars of law and standing and then she says it's a wonder we believed each other at all but we did or we appeared to and we trust Penelope's version of the tale can we trust Odysseus can we trust Homer, can we trust the maids can we ever get a complete story of what happened here Atwood says the story as told in the Odyssey doesn't hold water there are too many inconsistencies you may or may not have thought that as you read the Odyssey but those inconsistencies aren't resolved here they are actually compounded the story gets more complex more voices into it and more perspectives more versions of the tale things get muddier I think so Atwood revisits the Odyssey she retells it she repeats it because she found the original version to have too many inconsistencies but her version doesn't get rid of those inconsistencies if anything it makes things worse which leaves you and me this week with these kind of questions can the whole story ever be told or ever be heard that is if there really are a plurality of perspectives how do we get at what actually happened to the maids what led to their haining Penelope was really up to thank you