“Water does not resist.” Penelope’s mother says, “Water flows. When you plunge your hand in it, you feel its caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it.” (Page 43). Water—mainly in relation to the sea or sailing--plays an important role within the whole of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. She uses this imagery to represent freedom and show the imbalance of freedom within the society set up in The Odyssey and then broken down in The Penelopiad.
To begin this analogy between water and freedom, Atwood begins by explaining the rules of what water is within the world presented in the story. Penelope’s mother is a Naiad—the personification of water and thus, how this world characterizes water. Penelope illustrates that her mother “preferred swimming in the river to the care of small children.” (page 11). Instead of raising her daughter, she was swimming, playing around, being carefree—the embodiment of freedom from responsibility. She later gives advice, mentioned before, about how water goes with the flow and it will always get what it wants. She continues to say, “Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.” (Page 43). This can be interpreted that she is saying that being like water allows you to not have to make a choice or face things head on—you just go with the flow and eventually you will get what you want. A freedom from choice. With this consideration of how water is personified by Atwood within the Penelopiad, this should be able to be applied to how water is treated and thought of within the entirety of the book.
Penelope’s relationship with water is complicated as she is half water—stating “Water is [a naiad’s] element, it is our birthright.” (page 9) At infancy, she is dropped into a river by her father to drown—he was trying to prevent a deadly prophecy from happening and believed getting rid of his daughter would allow him to escape that prophecy. Penelope did not gain anything from this as she was an infant trying to be killed, but her father was trying to become free from her, free from a possibly deadly future. Penelope is also one of the only female characters to make a voyage throughout the entirety of the book and she is extremely uncomfortable about it. She complains that it was “long and frightening” (page 55) and she is sea sick the whole trip to Ithaca. With this voyage, she is free from her past life, but she is not familiar with freedom. She is free from her parents, free from the maids that make fun of her, free from having to find a suitor. However, her freedom is never fulfilled in her eyes because she is now trapped on an island with a mother-in-law that wishes she would die, a husband that threatens to kill her, a life of relative solitude, and with the job to breed a son. Once she is trapped in this situation, the only way she can become free is through using her mother’s advice—going with the flow until she gets what she wants.
Penelope being half-water causes people to use her to have some sense of freedom. The suitors use Penelope and her questionable marriage status as a way to get free food, free lodging, and sadly, free sex from the maids. They have no responsibilities because as guests in a house with no man, they have the right to act as they please and be disrespectful. The maids also feel that they gained some sense of freedom with Penelope once she tasks them to help her with the shroud and with being spies, but because they are women, they cannot be fulfilled in that freedom because eventually they are punished for having too much freedom and must die. On page 51, the maids sing an interesting few lines, “Then sail, my fine lady, on the billowing wave/ the water below is as dark as the grave/ and maybe you’ll sink in your little blue boat/ its hope, and hope only, that keeps us afloat.” This can be interpreted many ways, but it is one of the few times where the water is seen as dark and deadly—the first time being Penelope’s almost drowning incident. In terms of freedom and water symbolism, it could mean that freedom for women is seen as deadly and scary, and these maids understand that, but want to keep going and hoping that one day they will achieve it. The “fine lady” could be Penelope, riding her own waves, and only the maids know that when she gave them a sense of false freedom that it was a death sentence for them, and while they were alive they were only holding on to hope that it wouldn’t be.
It’s interesting that water is female coded in The Penelopiad because it isn’t in The Odyssey. Besides the female coded whirlpool, the sea is interpreted as male, as the sea-god Poseidon. And even though, in Atwood’s version of events, there are mentions of Poseidon and how he might be “annoyed by his failure to devour [Penelope]”, (page 55) he does not fully represent the sea like Penelope and her mother do. Poseidon seems to be someone who just controls the water, but doesn’t embody it. This relationship with water is extended to every other male character such as Odysseus and Telemachus. These characters use and harness the water to gain freedom and regain the manhood—which is turn gives them freedom.
Within The Odyssey, The voyages Odysseus takes are seen as forms of freedom—as he escapes Calypso by building a boat and then sent home by ship by the Phaeacians. Throughout the Penelopiad, Penelope hears of Odysseus’s stories secondhand through bards and townspeople who tell about his trials to get back home. There are dueling interpretations of his story, either he was on an island as a sex slave or he was in a whorehouse mooching off the madam. It doesn’t matter if his story is mythical or more grounded in reality because while he is out in the world, Penelope is stuck at home, being the head of the house, berated by their son, and has to deal with suitors overtaking their home. He is free from everything happening at home—or at least that’s how Penelope sees it. Even after he comes back to Ithaca, reclaiming his house and his wife by killing the suitors and the twelve maids, he decides to set sail again to cleanse himself from the suitor’s death. He wants to be free from guilt and death, but interesting enough he wants to be free from the responsibility of killing the maids. He never acknowledges that he needs to cleanse himself from the maids’ death, it’s as if he was running away from their deaths. And this is confirmed as he keeps running away from them in the afterlife as well.
The maids’ perspective on sailing and water is what truly pushes the idea of how freedom is unbalanced within this society. The maids’ chapters—around the time in the story where Odysseus leaves for the war of Troy and Telemachus is born—start to have a theme of revolving around sea or sailing. In chapter ten, they compare their births and Telemachus’ birth as “nine months [sailing] the wine-red seas of [their mothers’] blood.” (page 65) Within the womb, they were free from the lives they are fated to have—it’s the maids only time where they were truly free. As a fetus, they weren’t yet sold into slavery, traded around, and having to clean and do their master’s bidding. They further compare their experiences of being birthed to Telemachus’ by saying “In his frail dark boat, the boat of himself/ through the dangerous ocean of his vast mother he sailed.” And, going on in the next stanza, to say that they “sailed as well in dark frail boats of [themselves]/ through seas of our swollen and sore-footed mothers.”(Page 66). The sea is still female coded, blatantly so within these lines, but their motherly seas are obviously different—one being “vast” and the others being “swollen and sore-footed.” Even in the womb their senses of freedom are still determined by the sea, or the womb, that carries them. The ending of this poem is very important as well because the maids are looking back on their childhood shared with Telemachus with the fact that he will end up killing them. They say that they wished they had drowned him so he would never have a chance to kill them—a very blatant example of how water would have created freedom for them.
After this chapter, the maids continue on with more sailing imagery. In “The Wily Sea Captain, A Sea Shanty”, the maids are literally dressed in sailor costumes and singing all about Odysseus’s mythical travels. There has to be a sense of jealousy within this shanty which is later supported on in “Dreamboats, A Ballad”. The maids sing, “We dream we are at sea/ we sail the waves in golden boats/ so happy, clean, and free.” (page 125). The sailor outfits don’t just mock Odysseus, but also act as a Halloween costume of some sort—it’s something the maids wishes they could be. They want to sail away from their problems on land and set sail like Odysseus does, and find freedom like they do. But, because they are women and especially women of lower class, they cannot harness water and thus any false hope they gain from Penelope’s schemes are all washed away once they are gathered up and hung by their necks.
Through the heavy imagery of water and sailing, Margret Atwood is able to further push the ideas of freedom within the society that’s represented in The Odyssey and criticized in The Penelopiad. Freedom may be female coded, almost created by women, but the female characters within this story can never harness or be allowed to use the water to truly be free. It is men who harnessed the sea. It is men who use it to find their manhood and freedom. While women are at home, the men are allowed to find themselves out in the world. While the maids are subjugated to slave labor as their livelihoods, the men in power are allowed to do as they please and just kill these young women.
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