Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(82)

Penelope is almost always shown sitting down. Visitors to the Musée d’Orsay can see a mid-nineteenth-century interpretation of Penelope, by Jules Cavelier.17 This gleaming white sculpture echoes the version of her we saw on the Chiusi pot, but this Penelope is very definitely fast asleep. She, too, has her legs crossed as she sits in an upright chair. But her hands are in her lap, and her head has drooped so far forward that your neck aches to look at her. She, too, is worn out by her night-time unweaving, and has simply had to give in to it and sleep.

She is awake in the American artist David Ligare’s picture, Penelope, from 1980.18 This modern Penelope sits on a chair, its curved legs casting shadows across a tiled floor. She is outside, facing the sun, her head turned towards the viewer. She looks pensive, rather than tired, and the sea is calm behind her. Her legs are crossed in the characteristic pose, but her left foot rests on a small grey brick. The painting has an almost photographic quality, and yet it is full of references to other, ancient art: is the brick beneath her foot a jokey reference to the plinths on which ancient statuary is often placed? Or is it a modern echo of the small footstool shown on a beautiful grave marker in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum?19 This particular grave stele is attributed to the fifth-century BCE sculptor Callimachus, and shows Hegeso – an Athenian woman – sitting on a klismos, a chair with exactly the same curved legs as the one Penelope sits on in the Ligare painting. Either way, the painting offers us a calm, thoughtful Penelope, her hands resting neatly in her lap, the underside of her right foot dirty next to the hem of her long white dress.

But two depictions of Penelope show her in a more active light, actually doing the thing that she is famous for rather than thinking about it or sleeping to recover from it. The first is Dora Wheeler’s tapestry, produced in 1886, Penelope Unraveling Her Work at Night.20 This Penelope is bathed in golden light; we can see a small lamp behind her which illuminates the scene. She is wearing a plain, sleeveless, white shift dress which is tinged to a warm cream colour by the light. A red bodice fits over it, and her bare arms are stretched wide. Her brown hair is tied in a loose bun, and her brown eyes are full of concentration. Her head is turned away from us, towards her loom. The lamp catches the underside of her jaw, which is set, determined. Penelope is hard at work: both her hands are wrapped in the warp yarns, which run from top to bottom of a woven cloth. The fingers of her right hand are splayed as she keeps the loose threads from tangling. Her left hand is clenched in the fabric: this is not an easy job. Her arm muscles and shoulders are toned from the physical demands of the work. There is something intrinsically pleasing about seeing a woven representation of this most famous story about weaving. Wheeler’s tapestry – which was based on a pastel drawing21 she made in 1885 – is somewhat degraded by time, but it is beautiful nevertheless. And there is something equally special about seeing Penelope in action, rather than seated in passive exhaustion. The daughter of a textile artist herself, Wheeler obviously knew and cared about the effort Penelope was making and the skill required, not just the weariness it would provoke.

The second Penelope in action is by New Zealand artist Marian Maguire. In her 2017 work, Penelope Weaves and Waits,22 she creates a Penelope in acrylic who resembles one we might see on a red-figure vase painting. Penelope is painted in a terracotta hue, perched on a stool, black curly hair tied back in a scarf. She leans in towards her loom with the weft thread and spindle dangling between her hands. The partially completed weaving is a bird in flight: its movement and freedom contrast with Penelope’s weary posture. However tired she is, she does not pause for a rest: her gaze is fixed on the thread in front of her. Maguire’s piece is a painted sculpture, so her Penelope sits in the centre of a wooden fireplace: the implication is that she is the heart of the house. Painted on both sides of the surround, in front of Penelope and behind, are ten grasping hands reaching towards her. These represent the suitors, grabbing at Penelope as she turns to deceit to try to keep them at bay. Above her, along the mantel, are twelve sets of dangling feet. These are the slave-women hanged by Telemachus, when Odysseus finally returns and takes his revenge on all the men and women who have – as he perceives it – worked against his interests in the Odyssey’s concluding blood-drenched books. Everything Penelope does has consequences for all the people to whom these disembodied limbs belong. One of her women gives her up to the suitors, who then demand that she stop tricking them and finish the shroud, as we discovered all the way back in Book Two from Antinous. And yet all of them will die in the aftermath of her completing it. If they only knew, they would be begging her to continue with her delaying tactics.

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The third time the story is told by Homer is in the final book of the Odyssey. We are in the Underworld and Amphimedon – one of the now-dead suitors – is telling the story to Agamemnon. If we hadn’t picked up on the parallels between Penelope and Clytemnestra before now, we can hardly miss them in this context: a man murdered by his unfaithful wife in conversation with a man murdered by the husband of the faithful woman he wanted to marry. Amphimedon and Agamemnon knew each other before the war, it turns out. Agamemnon asks where all these strong young men have come from, flocking down to the Underworld all at once. Agamemnon assumes it must have been a shipwreck, but the answer, of course, is that Odysseus and Telemachus slaughtered the lot of them. The Odyssey has an astonishingly bloody conclusion: over a hundred suitors slain, and the twelve slave-women who were deemed to have conspired with them hanged from a single length of rope. Amphimedon explains the whole story, beginning with the third rendition of Penelope and her loom. From his perspective, of course, the weaving and unweaving turned out to be lethally deceitful. He complains that Penelope didn’t want to marry any of them but wouldn’t tell them to leave. And while we might feel some sympathy with him (he is dead, after all), we might also think about the two previous times we have heard this story. Of Penelope telling the disguised Odysseus that she had run out of tricks and would have to remarry, and Antinous telling Telemachus that they had caught his mother out when her slave-woman snitched on her. How was Penelope meant to empty her house of all these men, when they were threatening the life of her son and destroying his future inheritance by eating and drinking their way through her supplies? Would they really all have left if she had told them she had no plans to remarry? Would her own parents have allowed it?