Narrating Her/Story in Epic: Feminist Counterwriting in The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood And Kadın Destanı by Ayla Kutlu

There have been postmodern rewritings of canonical works in the second half of the twentieth century. The writers, inspired by canonical narratives, rewrite them by embodying counter-discourses. In recent years, women writers’ counter-discourse of canonical texts has increased considerably. Women writers revise the representation of women in the canonical stories, epics, or myths of patriarchal cultures. This study analyses Margaret Atwood and Ayla Kutlu’s feminist counter-writing performances, The Penelopiad and Kadın Destanı(the Epic of Women). The Penelopiad disrupts Homer’s Odysseus, and Ayla Kutlu’s Kadın Destanı is a response to Gilgamesh. By contemplating the principles of feminism, this study is expected to reveal important similarities and differences between the two works, offering valuable insights into deconstructing the dominant patriarchal ideology in the literary tradition. The epics, Homer’s Odysseus and Gilgamesh exclude the experiences and voices of women. Atwood and Kutlu employ a revisionist and critical discourse closely related to counter-writing’s aim; by taking on epics as their sources. They create new stories that form continuity with the ancient epics through polyphony and parody. They have established their counter-writings to decentring and silencing strategies of patriarchal narratives. They replace history in men’s epics with women’s ‘herstory,’ restoring the voices of the silenced women in the canonical classics and re-inscribing these women as subjects who narrate their experiences from their perspectives.