Because she contrasts past events as they occurred from her perspective with the elaborations of Odysseus and with what is recorded in myths today, she is described as a metafictional narrator. Major themes Perspectives The novella illustrates the differences perspectives can make. The stories told in the Odyssey by Nestor and Menelaus to Telemachus, and Odysseus to a Scherian court make Odysseus into a hero as he fights monsters and seduces goddesses. According to Penelope in The Penelopiad, Odysseus was a liar who drunkenly fought a one-eyed bartender then boasted it was a giant cannibalistic cyclops. Homer portrays Penelope as loyal, patient, and the ideal wife, as he contrasts her to Clytemnestra who killed Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. In The Penelopiad, Penelope feels compelled to tell her story because she is unsatisfied with Homer's portrayal of her and the other myths about her sleeping with the suitors and giving birth to Pan. She rejects the role of the ideal wife and admits she was just trying to survive. The Odyssey makes the maids into traitors who consort with the suitors. From the maids' perspective, they were innocent victims, used by Penelope to spy, raped and abused by the suitors, and then murdered by Odysseus and Telemachus. Atwood shows the truth occupies a third position between the myths and the biased points of view. Feminism and double standards The book has been called "feminist", and more specifically "vintage Atwood-feminist", but Atwood disagrees, saying, "I wouldn't even call it feminist. Every time you write something from the point of view of a woman, people say that it's feminist." The Penelopiad'''s antagonistic relationship between Penelope and Helen is similar to the relationships of women in Atwood's previous novels: Elaine and Cordelia in Cat's Eye, and Iris and Laura in The Blind Assassin, and follows Atwood's doubt of an amicable universal sisterhood. The story does endorse some feminist reassessments of the Odyssey, like Penelope recognizing Odysseus while disguised and that the geese slaughtered by the eagle in Penelope's dream were her maids and not the suitors. Using the maids' lecture on anthropology, Atwood satirizes Robert Graves' theory of a matriarchal lunar cult in Greek myth. The lecture makes a series of connections, concluding that the rape and execution of the maids by men represent the overthrow of the matriarchal society in favor of patriarchy. The lecture ends with lines from anthropologist Claude