Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(84)

For more detailed imaginings of Penelope, we can turn to two authors in particular: one ancient, one modern. Ovid composed a letter from Penelope to Ulysses (the Latin version of Odysseus’ name) in his Heroides. This Penelope is not an opaque creation, defined only by the way men value her chastity and apparent lack of murderous instinct. She begins her letter to her long-absent husband by explaining that she doesn’t want him to reply, but rather, to return. She is wildly unimpressed by the heroics he displayed in the Iliad, referencing Book Ten, where Odysseus and his friend Diomedes attacked the Thracian camp at night. She accuses him of forgetting about her and Telemachus25 when he embarked on these dangerous excursions. And even though the war is long over, for me, she says, Troy still stands.26 She makes no secret of her impatience, her anxiety and the pressures being exerted on her by her father to remarry. She complains about the suitors and Odysseus’ servants conspiring with them to eat up all their livestock. She reminds him that his son needs a father if he is to grow into manhood. Finally, she concludes with a damning pair of lines. When you left, I was just a girl, she says. If you came back right now, you would see an old woman.

She is – as women imagined by Ovid so often are – a highly nuanced character. She displays real human emotions of a woman in her position: anger, fear, worry, impatience, self-pity. It’s harder to imagine Agamemnon demanding the gods create a poem about this version of Penelope, because she is not merely a cypher of good wifely behaviour, but a woman with complicated feelings and demands of her own: come home, Ulysses, I need you.

A similar instinct – to create a three-dimensional Penelope we can see clearly, rather than the veiled enigma of Homer – is at play in Margaret Atwood’s wonderful short novel, The Penelopiad, published in 2005. The title is a clear nod to ancient epic poems which take the names of men or cities as their focus: the Iliad, the Aeneid. This is a slender epic about a woman, and told by her too. Like Agamemnon and Amphimedon in the final book of the Odyssey, this Penelope tells her story from the Underworld. And like Ovid’s Penelope before her, she does so in the first person, so we can hear this hidden woman speak out. The book retells the story of the Odyssey: of the suitors, the weaving, the drawn-out recognition between husband and wife. The chapter titles alone reveal Penelope’s amused, self-centred, caustic world view: ‘Helen Ruins My Life’, ‘The Suitors Stuff Their Faces’, ‘Home Life in Hades’. This is the woman we have longed to meet, who isn’t at all saintly, but is quietly watching and judging the behaviour of those who surround her. No matter how tart she now is with the dead suitors, however, Penelope is haunted even after her own death by the murder of her slave girls. This moment – commemorated on Marian Maguire’s fireplace sculpture too – has always haunted Atwood, according to her author’s note.27 Perhaps, rather than call it a retelling of Homer, I would do better to describe her novel as a necessary addition to Homer, who spends well over four hundred lines describing the killing of the suitors. Once they are all dead, the slave-women are forced to carry the bodies of these men outside, before cleaning their blood from the furniture. The women are then hanged by Telemachus: it takes Homer only ten lines to describe their deaths.

When the question arises – why retell Greek myths with women at their core? – it is loaded with a strange assumption. The underpinning belief is that women are and always have been on the margins of these stories. That the myths have always focused on men and that women have only ever been minor figures. This involves ignoring the fact that there is no ‘real’ or ‘true’ version of any myth, because they arise from multiple authors across multiple locations over a long period. The version of a story we find in the Iliad or the Odyssey is not somehow more valid than a version we find in a fifth-century BCE play or on the side of a vase merely because it is older. Homer drew on earlier traditions just as the fifth-century BCE playwright Euripides or the sculptor Phidias did. When Euripides wrote about the Trojan War, he centred his plays on the female characters: Andromache, Electra, Helen, Hecabe, and two Iphigenia plays, offering different, contradictory versions of her fate. Sometimes the stories centred on men have been taken more seriously by scholars. The Iliad was for a long time considered grander, more epic than the Odyssey, because the former is full of war and the latter is stuffed with women and adventures. The nineteenth-century writer Samuel Butler even suggested – with debatable seriousness – that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman, so packed was it with female characters. What on earth makes us believe that the Iliad, where Helen is a relatively minor player, is somehow more authentic than Euripides’ Helen? If Ovid could see that the stories of Greek myth could be told just as well from women’s perspectives as men’s, how did we forget? When people ask why tell the stories that we know best from the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, or Circe’s perspective, they presuppose that the story ‘should’ be told from Odysseus’ point of view. Which means the answer to this question should always be: because she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from her?





Conclusion


WHEN THE CONTENTS OF PANDORA’S JAR ESCAPE INTO THE WORLD, we have tended to see this as something bad. As discussed in Chapter One, for ancient authors, the contents of the jar aren’t always themselves evil; in some versions of the myth they are good. But those versions haven’t prevailed as the favoured narrative, perhaps because we find it easier to believe that things aren’t as good as they used to be. There is an enormous temptation to believe in some sort of declinism: that things are always getting slightly worse. And when Zeus sends Pandora to mortals (the price he sets against fire, which Prometheus stole for us), he intends her to cause trouble.