‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

• Main Author: Gerardo Rodríguez Salas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidad Complutense de Madrid 2015-09-01
• Series: Amaltea: Revista de Mitocrítica
• Subjects: Margaret Atwood; Penelopiad; Myth; Odyssey; Female friendship; gyn/affection; hetero-reality
• Online Access: http://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/AMAL/article/view/47697

<p>Margaret Atwood’s novella <em>The Penelopiad</em> (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The <em>Odyssey</em>. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls <em>gyn/affection</em>, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to <em>weave</em> a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.</p>