The Penelopiad is story of feminism but its most crude and painful form possible. The story follows Penelope as she finally tells her side of the story and we see a clever woman using her femineity to try and keep herself safe and negate the suitors that come to see her. The problem is that she believes that she is saving herself and having what she considers her “sisters” help her out but the moment that it becomes not useful for them to be around she tells her husband (the all might Odysseus) to only kill them for the way they had seduced the other suitors. We see in the underworld that the maids have cursed Odysseus because they had been killed for the same thing he had been doing with other women throughout his journeys and he would not reach peace as they will haunt him for eternity because the hypocrisy he shows. The feminism that is shown in this novel is the way Penelope is trying to fight for herself inside the system and still ends up looking like the bad guy because she is not doing more outside the system, (ignoring the way she turns on the woman she called sisters in this example). This is something I have seen time and time again of women being called out because the work they are trying to do in the system is seen as conforming to the patriarchal society we live in, but on the other side of that coin the women fighting outside the system are seen as too rough or told if they want change, they need to fight inside the society. There is no winning in this scenario, there is only truly who loses less, and who loses more. The woman fighting with the power, or the maids fighting without.
Comments