The quest for agency - how Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller make modern heroines out of the Odyssey’s Penelope and Circe

The word odyssey has become part of the common English vocabulary as “a series of experiences that teach you something about yourself or about your life.” The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that the women of the Odyssey, in particular the two who are featured the most, Penelope and Circe, have benefitted from contemporary revisions by authors Margaret Atwood and Madeline Miller. Their works add to a tradition of literary retellings by women writers from the Romantic and Modernist period. These creators approached myth, an inhospitable terrain for women, and embarked on an odyssey of their own, a journey of self-actualization and self-realization through the re-writing of epic female figures. Atwood and Miller expand the stories of Penelope and Circe, exposing the misogynistic narratives of the original epic in which they were reduced to archetypes. By further exploring and developing their stories, they demonstrate that characters don’t have to be either wholly good or wholly evil but that there can be a balance in their attributes. These even-handed portrayals of beloved mythological figures can teach modern readers something new about themselves, their lives and the role of women in narrative fiction and contemporary society.