The Penelopiad

Study Guide

Characters

The Twelve Maids

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Characters The Twelve Maids

The Maids provide their perspective throughout The Penelopiad, often revealing a contrast between the struggles of women of different classes or contradicting Penelope’s version of events. Though Penelope sees her own life as tragic, the Maids’ stories show how women are not oppressed equally. The Maids have lived as slaves since the moment they were born, wishing they had as much freedom as someone like Penelope and only dreaming of being able to marry someone like Odysseus. The Maids also call into question some of Penelope’s assertions, such as her insistence that she never had affairs with the Suitors. In this way, they serve to point out how Penelope is an unreliable narrator.

Because the Maids deliver each chapter as part of a chorus, and only one of them is given a name, the Maids appear largely symbolic. Their lives and their fate show how little women are valued, as their deaths go unpunished and largely unnoticed. However, in the anthropology lecture the Maids deliver, they remind their audience that they are real people, sardonically saying that this may be uncomfortable to acknowledge. In this way, the Maids show that the oppression of women is not simply abstract but has real consequences. They also demonstrate the consequences by haunting Odysseus, not only in the Underworld but also in each life he is reborn into. Their haunting of Odysseus shows that, while men may think their treatment of women may go without retribution, they will not escape punishment in the end.