Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(80)

This is an intriguing shift in their relationship: one minute Telemachus is snapping at his mother, completely unprovoked; now he is trying to protect her feelings. His contradictory attitude is reflective of a conflicted young man who wants to protect his mother and yet finds her infuriating. The notion that she might not miss him for twelve days is quite something too. Is that because Penelope will be confined to the women’s quarters and so wouldn’t see her son for days at a time? Or is it because Telemachus often disappears for a few days without warning? We must be careful not to read our own values into the Homeric world: we would undoubtedly think it odd if a mother and son living in even a reasonably large house didn’t see one another for twelve days at a time. But Bronze Age Ithaca is not now, and however much the psychology of this mother–son relationship rings true, the practicalities are not the same. When Penelope finds out in Book Four10 that her son has gone off on his own quest, she does indeed start to cry.

And then she gets angry. For a few moments, she cannot speak. Then she berates her womenfolk for keeping this information from her. If she had known Telemachus was planning to go away, she says, she would have made him stay or he would have left over her dead body. Eurycleia admits that she had kept Telemachus’ voyage a secret, and explains that he was trying to avoid upsetting her. Penelope is somewhat mollified and retreats to her chambers to bathe and sleep. Athene – whom we have already seen show quite a brisk attitude to Penelope – now softens a little and sends her a dream: Penelope’s sister Iphthime appears to her as she sleeps and tells her that Athene is guiding Telemachus. Penelope asks if Odysseus is dead or alive, but the spirit cannot tell her. The book ends with the suitors plotting to kill Telemachus, so we know that Athene’s support for the young man might well be the difference between life and death.

It is not until Book Five of the Odyssey that we find out how our hero might feel about his wife, after almost twenty years without her. Odysseus has spent seven years trapped with Calypso on the island of Ogygia. She is finally persuaded by Hermes to send Odysseus on his way. Calypso is resentful about it, in particular about the fact that Odysseus wants to return to his wife, specifically,11 not just his home. I’m prettier and taller than your wife, she tells him (I should confess that it is at this moment I really fall for Calypso. Who hasn’t wanted to believe they are at least taller than a love rival?). Odysseus agrees that his wife is not as beautiful as the goddess. Is this honesty – goddesses are surely more beautiful than any mortal – or is it tact? She is mortal, he concedes, and you are divine.12 At this point we also discover that Calypso had offered to make Odysseus immortal if he would stay with her as her consort. And still he chooses the grief-stricken path back to Penelope. No wonder Calypso wants to console herself with her greater height.

The bond between Odysseus and Penelope is an unusual one. It is – evidently – not a two-way street as far as sexual fidelity is concerned. Calypso is not Odysseus’ first dalliance, although she is the longest-lasting. He has also spent a year living with Circe. One year, seven years: these can hardly be dismissed as casual affairs. Meanwhile Penelope has a house full of young men, who both outnumber her and could physically overpower her. But even the suggestion that she might marry one, back in Book One, left Athene snorting in anger: let her go back to her father’s house, if that’s what she wants. Not for the first time in literature and society, and assuredly not for the last, there is one set of standards to which Penelope must adhere, and a very much looser set for Odysseus. And yet, in some ways, Odysseus does remain faithful to his wife. He shares another woman’s bed, but he doesn’t share her idea of their future. She offers him something of enormous value – immortality, for which all heroes strive, one way or another – and he rejects it. He would rather return to his less beautiful, mortal wife. Homeric heroes make huge sacrifices for even a brush of immortality: Achilles specifically chooses a short, glorious life that will result in fame which outlives him (a kind of immortality) rather than a longer, less famous existence. And here is Odysseus, offered eternal life but rejecting it. And all for the chance to return to a woman he has not seen for twenty years. A divorce lawyer might not call this fidelity, but it is something.

Sadly, we can only imagine how Penelope might feel if she heard this exchange between her husband and Calypso. Would she be hurt by the easy admission that she is less beautiful than the nymph? Or would she admire her husband’s wiliness: he needs Calypso’s assistance to build a new boat on which he may leave. If he flatters her, he is more likely to find himself in a seaworthy vessel. Would Penelope be angry that her husband has shown so much less sexual restraint than she has, or would she expect nothing else? They are a couple of their time, after all. She would surely be touched that her husband rejects immortality just for the opportunity to take to the seas again (he has already undergone multiple maritime disasters at this point), with the goal of returning to her. One has to hope she never finds out that the first person Odysseus meets on his journey back to Ithaca from Ogygia is a young princess, Nausicaa. He washes up, naked, on a beach in front of her.

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But what does Penelope do while Odysseus is making his erratic journey home? The short answer is, she weaves. Way back in Book One, when we first met Penelope, we saw Telemachus tell her to be quiet, stop crying and go back to her weaving. This could be a suggestion made to any respectable woman in the Homeric tradition: women weave. Even Helen weaves, and she is – as everyone is keen to stress, even her – a terrible wife. But for Penelope, weaving plays an integral part in her story, and her freedom from unwanted entanglements with the suitors: the literal saves her from the metaphorical. And just as Agamemnon’s homecoming was dictated by Clytemnestra’s weaving – the strange straitjacket which she uses to paralyse him – so is Odysseus’ homecoming decided by Penelope’s weaving. Both women use this most traditional skill for deceitful purposes: the difference is that Penelope is using deceit to help her husband, while Clytemnestra used it against hers.