Rereading Penelope’s Web: The Anxieties of Female Authorship in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Feminist readings of the Odyssey often cast Penelope’s weaving and unravelling of Laertes’ shroud as an act of resistance against the suitors and the threat they pose to her independence, and as a signature or allegory for female authorship. In The Penelopiad (2005), Margaret Atwood uses a similar set of critical approaches and interpretive strategies in her feminist refiguration of Penelope and the twelve maids hanged at the end of the Odyssey as literary representations of female authors. In this, Atwood can be seen to play on the oral origins of the androcentric primary epic and the negative cultural associations of weaving with a dubious and inauthentic female oral tradition in order to explore, challenge, and confront the anxieties of female authorship