THE RENUNCIATION AND RECONFIGURATION OF PHALLOCENTRIC PENELOPE IN CLAIRE NORTH’S ITHACA

Abstract

This study aims to show that Claire North use retelling Greek myths as a strategy to dismantle the prepotency of phallocentrism designating steady female identities and resituate the feminine passivated and ossified in canonical male texts in her novel, Ithaca, through a lens of Irigarian standpoint and feminist revisionist mythmaking. In the myth of Penelope forming the basis of the novel, the feminine is embedded and appreciated in cultural memory as faithful, passive, subservient, and complementary of man. North evacuates the feminine from the monolithic and homogenizing representations in  Greek myths  and reverberates that the feminine solidified  and essentialized by the omnipotence ofphallocentrism is artifact through engendering alternative realities and  pluralistic interpretations about the struggles of Penelope. Re-fictionalizing the peripheral object of phallocentric logic in myths as speaking subject, she destabilizes the phallocentric notions which are premised upon solid entities and accord no specificity to the feminine and reconstruct the feminine as dynamic, polymorphous, and fluid subjects which are not jammed in singular and static concepts. North also rejuvenates the feminine disidentified and obfuscated by phallocentric decrees by endowing female figure of Greek myths, Penelope, with cunning features and mutate the quiescent, virtuous, and man-dependent woman into self-reflexive subjects afar from symbolic systems subtended by male imaginary. Thus, she builds a new feminine culture defying marginality and passivity of the feminine through providing multiple and alternative experiences of Penelope which are not imbedded by male imaginary in Greek myths and renouncing the phallocentric representations of the feminine embedded in cultural memory.

Keywords: Greek Myths, Revisionist Mythmaking, Phallocentric, Luce Irigaray, Claire North, Penelope