Disarming the canon : exploring Tepper’s and Atwood’s retelling of classical (her)story

Abstract

This dissertation explores the ways in which two contemporary texts, Sheri S. Tepper’s (1990) The gate to Women’s Country and Margaret Atwood’s (2005) The Penelopiad, adapt classical texts by Euripides and Homer in order to make and strengthen statements about contemporary gender ideologies that may be rooted in and perpetuated by the canonization of classical texts such as those involved in this study. I start by discussing the curious phenomenon of the simultaneous prevalence of adaptations of classical Greek literature in contemporary culture and the often negative perception of adaptations. I then explore the inequalities of gender, originality, and genre in both the contemporary texts and their classical counterparts before suggesting that although these qualities mean that the contemporary texts might have been critically neglected, they are also the reason that the contemporary texts are able to effectively question the classical texts that they adapt. I draw on Hutcheon’s (2013) theory of adaptation and Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of dialogics to motivate a critical analysis of the ways in which both contemporary texts use adaptation to write back to the past. Chapter one explores Sheri S. Tepper’s (1990) The gate to Women’s Country, which adapts three plays by Euripides – Iphigenia at Aulis ([410BCE] 1999), Iphigenia among the Taurians ([412BCE] 1959), and The Trojan women ([415BCE] 1959). Chapter two explores Margaret Atwood’s (2005) The Penelopiad, which adapts Homer’s ([800BCE] 1937) Odyssey. Through this analysis, I argue that by writing in liminal genres, Tepper and Atwood are uniquely situated to destabilise contemporary patriarchal worldviews rooted in a classical past and perpetuated by a classical canon. This dissertation thus aims to demonstrate the value of adaptation in reframing an old order so as to posit a new one.