Can I read ‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad on EtoBox?

‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad by Rodríguez Salas, Gerardo is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.

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

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, 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 weave 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.

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

Author

Rodríguez Salas, Gerardo

Publisher

Universidad Complutense de Madrid; Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) (ISSN 1989-1709)

Published

2015

Language

EN

Field

Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)