Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Atwood

Atwood isn’t nitpicking Homer so much as puncturing the aura that protects “classic” stories from ordinary scrutiny. “Doesn’t hold water” is a deliberately plain, almost domestic phrase for a monument of Western literature; it drags The Odyssey out of the museum and into the kitchen sink, where plots are allowed to leak. The follow-up - “too many inconsistencies” - reads like the voice of a skeptical reader who refuses to treat epic as sacred text. That’s the point: Atwood is interested in how authority gets manufactured through repetition, not how airtight the original narrative is.

The subtext is feminist and political without waving a flag. When a canonical tale is treated as flawless, the power structures inside it get naturalized: whose suffering counts, whose voice is “reliable,” whose bodies are disposable. Calling out inconsistencies opens a door to re-reading the story as a stitched-together artifact of competing agendas - a hero’s propaganda, a culture’s wish-fulfillment, a survivor’s selective memory. Atwood’s work often lives in that space where myth becomes testimony, and testimony becomes a battleground.

Context matters, too: Atwood is writing from a late-20th/21st-century moment saturated with retellings, revisions, and adaptations. Her sly provocation aligns with her project in The Penelopiad and beyond: to treat inherited narratives as editable, interrogable, and morally accountable. The “inconsistencies” aren’t a flaw to be corrected; they’re the evidence that a story has been used, and that it can be used differently.