The Rest is ‘not’ Silence: Rereading Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad as a Counterwriting Practice

Abstract

The ideological construction of the Western literary canon sparked heated arguments, particularly after the 1980s, in the context of 'opening up the canon' issue. Since then, contemporary women writers have questioned the monolithic perspective of the literary tradition which has systematically ignored the experiences of women, minorities, and those from lower classes. As a reactionary yet strategic move, contemporary women writers have produced 'counterwritings' through rewriting canonical texts in order to undermine the patriarchal conventions of the literary pantheon and transform it into a polyphonic narrative entity through which the voices of the silenced, exploited and marginalized are heard. In Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (2001), Christian Moraru defines 'counterwriting' as a revisionary and critical rewriting practice that "work[s] on – and, again, obsessively work[s] through — other bodies of writings" because mythic stories "explain us," they are "founding-texts" (2001, p. 8). This article explores Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's (1939- ) novella The Penelopiad (2005) as a contemporary revisionary myth-making practice in the light of Christian Moraru's 'counterwriting' concept. The article will provide a theoretical background to discuss ‘counterwritings’. It then deals with Atwood's motivation for producing a 'counterwriting’, as well as how she relies on the source text while being unconstrained by its restrictions using postmodern narrative strategies. The article also sheds light on how a founding myth of the Western literary tradition has been used as a reference point in a counterwriting to question the authority of its source text, Homer’s The Odyssey.