The novels The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and Lavinia by Ursula LeGuin both focus on the wives of prominent Greek personas Odysseus and Aeneas. Minor characters in the epics, The Odyssey and The Aenid, these two authors give life to Penelope and Lavinia by creating the Greek epic narratives in their perspectives. The Penelopiad, specifically, creates multiple voices as a postmodern text. Coming up with this project, I thought hard about the need for a postmodern theme in the novel and I read it as an approach to deconstruct the male-centered narrative of The Odyssey. “Jocasta’s Dictionary” endeavors to do the same thing. Patterned after David Levithan’s The Lover’s Dictionary, this short story deconstructs the objective, meaning-producing dictionary and re-situates it in Jocasta’s subjectivity.
