Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(83)

We must draw our own conclusions about what Penelope wants, because the ways in which Homer presents her are contradictory. In Book Eighteen, for example, she is inspired by Athene to show herself off to the suitors. Should we see this as Penelope indulging in an understandable desire for praise from this posse of young men? Or should we conclude that Penelope tends to avoid the suitors unless Athene intervenes? That it is Athene who wants Odysseus’ wife to seem desirable to other men, rather than Penelope’s choice?

There is no doubt about one thing, however. The shroud which Penelope made has not been used as a winding sheet for the still-alive Laertes. It has not served as a metaphorical shroud for the end of her marriage to Odysseus: the happy couple have been reunited. In fact, as is underlined by the dead Amphimedon narrating this story for the final time, the shroud was for him, and the other suitors, and the slave-women, all killed by Odysseus and Telemachus. Even while Penelope was making it, she cannot have known that this massacre was coming. But she finished her weaving, and the deaths followed soon after. An evil spirit brought Odysseus home,23 Amphimedon says. Homecomings aren’t always happy endings.

Agamemnon certainly wastes no time on sympathizing with Amphimedon: true to form, he immediately takes the story and makes it all about him. He doesn’t even reply to the dead suitor, he addresses his response to the absent Odysseus. Lucky you, son of Laertes, he says. You have a wife of great virtue, who remembered you for so many years. The fame of her virtue will never die, he adds: the gods will compose a poem about her. And then, after seven lines praising Penelope and envying Odysseus, he turns things back to himself. Not like my wife, who killed her husband, he says. Amphimedon’s sad story doesn’t touch Agamemnon at all, save to make him envy the man who killed him, a hero who returned home to a faithful wife.

There are other questions about Penelope which the Odyssey raises: when does she recognize her returning husband? When she proposes the suitors compete, in Book Twenty-One, to string Odysseus’ bow and shoot an arrow through a set of axe-heads? Does she know then that the kindly beggar she has been talking to is really her husband? Has she found a way to arm him with precisely the weapon he needs to even the odds against a numerically superior enemy? Or is it just good luck: she knows the bow is difficult to string (and anyway, it is Athene who puts the bright idea of the contest into her head),24 and she is simply using this as another way of distracting the suitors and delaying her agreement to marry one? Is she teasing Odysseus or testing him in Book Twenty-Three, when she asks Eurycleia to move their marriage bed (he long ago carved it from a living tree which grows through the palace, so the bed cannot be moved)? Does she really doubt that the man who has entered her home in disguise, listened to her woes, befriended her son and turned into a spree killer is her husband? Athene has disguised Odysseus – improving and worsening his appearance as the situation requires – so perhaps she really doesn’t know for sure that he is her man. Perhaps she fears he is an imposter. Or perhaps – irritated that Odysseus had revealed his true self to his son, his nurse and his swineherd before he reintroduced himself to his wife – she is simply giving him a taste of his own medicine. Why should their reunion be entirely on his terms?

Penelope is not unknowable by accident. Homer has deliberately shown her opaquely: remember when we first met her, in Book One, she was hiding her face behind a veil. She is an enigma, praised by men who largely don’t know her as the ideal wife. When Agamemnon describes her virtue at the end of the Odyssey, who is he talking about? A woman he met once, twenty years ago, when he and Palamedes came to Ithaca to collect Odysseus and force him to join the war effort. Is he really praising Penelope, or just envying Odysseus having a wife who isn’t Clytemnestra? His preference for women other than his wife dates back to long before the latter murdered him, incidentally: in the first book of the Iliad, he cheerfully tells his men that he prefers Chryseis (his newly acquired war bride) to his wife.

And this is the great difficulty in finding Penelope among the praise heaped upon her by men. Are they describing her, or merely describing their idealized conception of what a wife should be? Which seems to be one who is competent, self-sufficient and conveniently far away. One who either doesn’t know, or at least doesn’t complain, that her husband has adventures (sexual and otherwise) with seemingly little recollection that he has a wife at all. And one who doesn’t do the same herself. Are they valuing her for nothing more than her chastity? Or, more specifically, for her chastity in the face of so many men apparently desiring her?

What happens if we take that chastity away from her? In the Bibliotheca of Pseudo-Apollodorus, in his final passage on the Trojan War, he considers some alternative versions of Penelope’s story and Odysseus’ homecoming: it’s said by some sources, he says, that she was seduced by Antinous, and sent back to her father by Odysseus because of this. In Arcadia, she was seduced by the god Hermes and gave birth to another god, Pan. Or Odysseus killed her when he found she had been seduced by another of the suitors, Amphinomus. Penelope’s chastity is vital to the value men place on her, but there are versions of her where she is different: less perfect, less chaste. We just tend to forget about them because the versions of her story which have been preferred through history are the ones in which she never wavers.

There is a second element to Agamemnon’s praise of Penelope, of course. We are witnessing a misogynist tradition which dates back millennia: praise one woman in order to criticize another. Penelope is a model of virtue against which other women fall short. For Agamemnon she is the ultimate good wife, everything his own wife was not. By lauding Penelope, he has found a new route by which he can reach his desired goal: to complain about Clytemnestra. Praising Penelope for qualities he can only know by repute is not insincere or inaccurate, but it is also not particularly relevant to who Penelope is.