The Penelopiad

As a Latin scholar working on Ovids Heroides, I really enjoyed this book, as it not only takes on the Homeric version of Penelope, but also character traces found in Ovid. It shows that ancient stories are just a matter of perspective.

As the name suggests, this book is an "epic" about the woman heralded as the most perfect in Greek mythology: Penelope. It's not only her voice we get to hear/read in this one, but also of her twelve maidservants that suffer a tragic fate at the hands of Penelope's famous husband and their son. The book picks up the happenings described both in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but from a perspective we hardly hear about. Was Penelope all that willing to marry future hero Odysseus? What was her view on him leaving for the war on Troy, the ten-year absence caused by this, and the once again ten-year absence because of her husband's odyssey? How did she take to the suitors flooding her house and how Odysseus and their son Telemachus dealt with them? What about the fate of her twelve maidens? In Greek mythology, Penelope is often hailed as the perfect wife and thus woman; intelligent, patient, chaste, loyal to her husband, and never waving. A portrayal that is anything but realistic and actually quite detrimental to the view of "perfect women/wives". While she does get a voice here, for my taste, Penelope was a bit too whiney. She does not have that much agency, granted, but even in the afterlife, walking the Elysian field, she seemed more whinier and complaining than actually enraged or even bitter – which unfortunately took away a lot of her "strong female voice" in my eyes. The chiming in from the chorus, and the style of presenting the single chapters, are all great and varied. However, the decision to put some afterlife sequences in an all too modern world pulled me out of the immersion from time to time.