Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(81)

The story of Penelope and her weaving is told three times by three different people at three different moments in the Odyssey, with almost unvarying language. We can see that it is an important plot point, from the repetition alone. So let’s look at it in more detail. The first time we hear it is in Book Two, when Antinous – the most obnoxious of Penelope’s suitors – is speaking to Telemachus. Don’t blame us suitors for hanging around the place. Blame your dear mother: she’s the cunning one.13 He goes on to explain that Penelope has cheated the suitors for almost four years: she promised she would remarry once she had woven a shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. Laertes – to be clear – is not dead at the point when Penelope makes this offer; indeed, he survives beyond the end of the poem. But making a shroud for a not-yet-dead father-in-law is a perfectly respectable thing for Penelope to do: it means that, when he does die, he will be laid out appropriately. To do less would be disrespectful.

The suitors agree to this bargain, and Penelope begins her task. But here is the cunning part: by day she weaves the shroud, by night she secretly unravels it. Astonishingly, this trick deceives the suitors for more than three years. One wonders how they could be deceived for quite so long (did they believe it was an especially massive shroud? Did they think basic woven garments took ten or twenty times longer to make than they actually did? Sadly, Antinous does not say). Even in the fourth year, the suitors didn’t tumble to the trick: one of Penelope’s maids snitched on her. For those of us who have ever wondered if Penelope might have been a little tempted by one or more of these young men who occupy her home for so long, this seems to be a valid textual reason why she might not have remarried: these suitors are idiots. And she has been used to a relationship (albeit long ago) with Odysseus, a man who is assuredly not stupid. So, in this fourth year of weaving and unweaving, Antinous continues, the suitors caught Penelope in the act of undoing her work and forced her to finish the shroud. Now her delaying strategy is concluded, she must choose one of them.

There are a couple of points to consider in this story. The first is one that is all too often overlooked. Weaving is not something you can unravel quickly, like knitting or crochet (where each stitch is looped into another stitch, so if you remove the last one from your knitting needles or crochet hook and pull on the thread, the whole thing can be undone very easily). Weaving is a much more laborious process to undo: every line of fabric must be unmade by passing the shuttle over and under the threads in the exact same way it was made. Penelope has taken on a Sisyphean task: to make a few inches of cloth every day, to undo it again every night. The sheer physical effort involved in such a thankless task – staring at the threads by torchlight, hunching over the loom – is considerable. And that is before we consider the psychological strain of spending years making something and then undoing it, over and over again. In order to avoid giving up on Odysseus, Penelope has effectively sentenced herself to years of hard labour.

The second point is to ask whose shroud Penelope is weaving. It is ostensibly a shroud for Laertes, but is it really a shroud for Odysseus? She has delayed remarriage for several years by this point: the war must have ended five or six years before she began the project. She knows that she cannot delay indefinitely, only postpone the inevitable in the hope that Odysseus makes it home before she finishes. So is she weaving the shroud for her marriage to a man she loves, or loved long ago? She bursts into tears repeatedly in the Odyssey: doesn’t this suggest a woman who is under enormous emotional strain? There are parallels, as mentioned above, with Clytemnestra. But Clytemnestra is using her weaving prowess to create a trap for her husband, Penelope is using hers to try and avoid being trapped herself.

The second time the story of the weaving and unweaving is told, it is three-quarters of the way through the poem, and this time it is Penelope who relates it to an interested stranger who has arrived at her palace. We know the stranger is the disguised Odysseus (enchanted by Athene so Penelope doesn’t recognize him. Although after a twenty-year absence, perhaps she would not have known him anyway). But Penelope believes she is talking to an old beggar. I weave deceit, she says,14 before explaining the whole story, almost word-for-word as it was told in Book Two. There could be no more perfect phrase to describe this couple than dolous tolopeuō – ‘I weave tricks’ or ‘deceit’. That is another difference between Clytemnestra and Penelope: Clytemnestra works against her husband precisely because they are in no way alike. He could sacrifice Iphigenia, whereas she never could; he is gullible where she is conniving. But for Penelope and Odysseus, deceit is their unifying characteristic. He can barely open his mouth without fibbing; why would his wife value honesty? She adds details which Antinous did not mention: I can’t find another scheme to avoid marriage,15 she says. My parents are urging me to remarry. In this pair of lines, we can hear a terrible isolation in Penelope’s words. She has held out as long as she could, alone, and used up every idea she had. We already know she has a somewhat erratic relationship with Telemachus, who has lied to her, hidden from her and shouted at her during this poem. And now we discover that her parents are also keen for her to marry again. The energy it must have taken to hold out against all the suitors, a recalcitrant child, parents who seem to have sided with her enemies: and all that on no sleep because she has stayed up till all hours unweaving a shroud in the dark. No wonder she cries.

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This weaving scene is – directly and indirectly – the inspiration for many visual representations of Penelope. There is a lovely example of a fifth-century BCE red-figure skyphos (two-handled wine cup) in the Archaeological Museum of Chiusi in Tuscany.16 Penelope sits on a hard chair, ankles crossed. She wears a long draping robe, which gathers over her feet; her toes peep out from under the hem. She has a veil over her hair, too: her posture and dress are equally demure. But her right elbow rests on her right thigh, and her bowed head rests on her right hand. Her eyelids droop: she is clearly exhausted. A young man – Telemachus – stands in front of her, holding his pair of spears. Is he speaking to her, or trying to get her attention? The pot is slightly damaged so we can’t read his expression. But either way, it doesn’t seem to be working. Behind her, we see the reason for her fatigue: a loom on which is woven a length of fabric. The pattern is intricate: Pegasus and Medusa are travelling across the cloth, from left to right, at a gallop. The speed and movement of these tiny figures in the background are a direct contrast to the stillness and exhaustion of Penelope in the foreground. Their energy has come at the cost of her own.