Athena blessed her with intelligence,
great artistry and skill, a finer mind
than anyone has ever had before,
even the braided girls of ancient Greece. (2.116–19)
She weaves a great piece of cloth that is supposedly the shroud in which Laertes will be buried and convinces the suitors that she cannot marry any of them until the task is completed. This delaying tactic shows her capacity for deceptive storytelling—a quality shared by her husband—as well as her technical skill in weaving, which is analogous to her husband’s competence as a construction worker. But we should also notice differences. The things Odysseus constructs (such as the Wooden Horse, his raft to get away from Calypso, and his bed) are finished, and are supposed to remain finished. Penelope’s weaving is designed to be undone. Moreover, whereas the deceptive plots of Odysseus are geared towards a particular end (to invade a city, to reach his home, or to destroy the suitors), the deceptive plot of Penelope serves in the opposite direction: to hold off an end point, to avoid the end of the story. It is meant to be forever in a state of becoming, not completion.
We get only glimpses of Penelope’s state of mind, which is repeatedly described as ambiguous or opaque. What comes across most clearly is her emotional pain. She is in a state of constant apprehension for her young, vulnerable son, constant grief for her lost husband, and constant doubt about how long she can put off the suitors. Penelope knows that marriage to one of them will mean an enormous, wrenching loss; for one thing, remarriage may uproot her from the house to which she feels a deep attachment, the house in which she has lived for her whole adult life: “this beautiful rich house, so full of life / my lovely bridal home. I think I will / remember it forever, even in / my dreams.” But she also knows that she may ultimately have little choice; she cannot hold the suitors off forever. In an evocative passage from Book 19, she tells Odysseus—whom she has still not recognized—about her nightly tears:
As when the daughter of Pandareus,
the pale gray nightingale, sings beautifully
when spring has come, and sits among the leaves
that crowd the trees, and warbles up and down
a symphony of sound, in mourning for
her son by Zethus, darling Itylus,
whom she herself had killed in ignorance. (19.520–26)
The simile suggests that Penelope feels a desperate and ambiguous kind of guilt about the husband and son whom she may be forced to “betray,” through no fault of her own. Later in the same passage, Penelope tells the story of a dream she had in which there were geese in her house, eating her corn, which were destroyed by an eagle. Odysseus, in his guise as a beggar, immediately interprets the dream to his own advantage: the dream shows, he says, that her husband will return and rout the suitors from the hall. It is, he assumes, unambiguously positive. But Odysseus’ interpretation entirely ignores the most striking feature: Penelope says that in the dream, she “wept and wailed” at the death of the geese. This dream response suggests that on some level, Penelope might not want her husband to come home. This would be a perfectly reasonable feeling, since her position in the household is not markedly improved by his return. But when she learns that her suitors really are dead, Penelope is “overjoyed”—although she still refuses to accept that the old beggar might be her husband in disguise. Penelope’s feelings are mixed and confusing.
Some readers have argued that this clever woman may well have recognized her husband much earlier than she lets on, or at least half-recognized him. Perhaps she has; the text seems to allow for this possibility, although it gives us little evidence for it. But it is important to see what is at stake in the decision to interpret Penelope as either cognizant or ignorant of her husband’s identity. Some critics have been understandably motivated by a desire not to see female characters as victims—and therefore want to see her as more in control than she may appear. Alternatively, one can emphasize the ways that female characters can be disempowered in a male-dominated environment, through no fault of their own; one can then argue that Athena and Odysseus work together to keep Penelope in the dark about her husband’s return. In this view, she is presented as an intelligent woman whose capacity for planning and forethought is comparable to her husband’s—but who lacks the apparatus of divine and human help that enable Odysseus to achieve his ends with confidence. Penelope’s cognitive disadvantage parallels the sexual double standards by which Odysseus’ infidelities are treated as normal, and Penelope’s twenty-year sexual loyalty is seen by certain characters within the poem (such as the dead Agamemnon) as the centerpiece of her moral worth.
These radically different interpretations are possible because the text keeps the reader or listener of the poem to a large extent in the dark about Penelope’s state of mind. This might be a mark of discomfort with the gender inequalities implicit in the plot or a mark of the text’s particular kinds of blindness. There are certain particularly ambiguous moments in the depiction of Penelope that underline this narrative tension. For instance, in Book 18, Penelope suddenly decides to show herself before the suitors, although she has previously shunned them. We are told that the reason is to increase their desire for her and promote her own honor. One can assume that it is Athena, not the mortal woman, who is controlling events at this point and who has decided to make Penelope show herself. Or one can argue that Penelope herself has recognized her husband, and has decided to do this to continue her plot to deceive the suitors about her true intentions. Or one may argue that Penelope has not recognized Odysseus, but simply feels the impulse to gain greater attention from the suitors for herself—a possibility that has been neglected by most critics only because it is assumed, with obvious sexism, that a “good” woman would not behave in such a way. The most important point to notice here is how ambiguous the text itself is about these various possibilities, a fact reinforced by Penelope’s “mysterious” laugh as she makes the proposal. Penelope’s desires and motivations are defined as unknown.
Becoming a Man
The Odyssey tells the story not only of Odysseus and Penelope, but also of their son, Telemachus, whose slow and incomplete journey to adulthood is charted in the course of the poem. Telemachus is the most vulnerable member of the family: the suitors plot to murder him, and we see him break down in tears after a failed attempt to speak up and assert himself in the men’s assembly. The boy must be at least twenty years old at the time of the poem’s action, and he is physically an adult, full grown and handsome. But he struggles to grow to psychological maturity, to become man enough to help his father defeat the suitors. Telemachus’ standard epithet, pepenumenos, suggests “of sound understanding” or “thoughtful”; the poem traces the boy’s developing cognitive maturity, as he begins to learn what adult masculinity might mean.
In the course of Telemachus’ journey in search of news about his father, he meets two alternative father-figures: the controlling, long-winded Nestor, and the rich, narcissistic, uxorious Menelaus. Each of these men seem to echo character traits in Telemachus’ own father—as does the old Sea God Proteus described by Menelaus, a slippery character who can change his shape at will. Back in Ithaca, the swineherd Eumaeus is an even more devoted alternative father: he greets Telemachus on his return like a long-lost son,
Just as a father, when he sees
his own dear son, his only son, his dear