Ways of Sentencing: Female Violence and Narrative Justice in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) redrafts the story of Homer’s Odyssey from the pointof view of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, and in the process reformulates cultural narratives of women,violence, justice and their interstices, thus indicating Atwood’s interest in creating points ofintersection between literature and broader social and political processes. While Atwood’s revision ofthe Odyssey, as an inherently corrective and political pursuit, can be viewed as a form of justice initself, this critical discussion focuses on Penelope’s engendering of justice through the writingprocess, and how the resultant ‘narrative justice’ is informed by inequitable and unstable powerrelations, despite its apparent impartiality and certainty. Continuing the role as arbiter of justice,assigned to her during her life in ancient Greece, Penelope draws attention to Helen of Troy’s unfairexoneration following her incitement of the Trojan War and, in an effort to correct this wrongthrough the act of writing, constructs and displays Helen as a figure whose previous public acts ofindirect violence parallel the psychological violence she commits on a personal level in the present.Penelope’s use of narrative justice to redress the falsely flawless image of Helen signals herappropriation of the traditionally masculine realm of justice in order to exact a feminine form of‘sentencing’, yet, in doing so, it also reveals traces of both her own biases and her involvement in themurder of her Suitors and her twelve maids. It is the voices of the murdered maids in particular thatprovide the chorus of the text and ipso facto offer a further revision to Penelope’s revisionarynarrative, thereby evoking the struggles for power often inherent in judicial processes.