The Paragon of Fidelity

      Everyone knows who the paragon of fidelity is, and there’s no use pretending you don’t: it’s Penelope. Just as Tarpeia was used as the Roman metonym for treachery, on many occasions I’ve heard one person called another person’s Penelope to communicate patient fidelity, whether over a protracted absence or in the face of deep uncertainty. And we all know why: Odysseus was mired in a distant war for ten years (despite his best efforts to dodge the draft) and was lost at sea for another ten, while Penelope waited at home, holding the fort for Odysseus and refusing to marry a new husband. At long last he returns and murders all his rivals, reassuming the kingship long abandoned. It can be told as a very simple fable, but there is more going on under the surface.

      Penelope is her own woman, most definitely. Here Odysseus has been off besieging Troy for ten years and getting lost at sea for another ten, and meanwhile Penelope was stuck at home, unsure for twenty years whether her husband was alive or dead (gone twenty years and he couldn’t pick up a phone, can you imagine). She’s independent and fully capable of getting along without her husband, and Dorothy Parker wrote an excellent poem on the subject of Penelope’s long-tried patience--a worthy rejoinder to Tennyson’s depiction of Odysseus as irresponsible, obsessed with novelty, and totally unsuitable for the kingship that Penelope so carefully defended on his behalf. In the Odyssey Penelope is very quiet, but she might be incredibly clever. In effort to maintain control over her home life, she dreams up the Web of Penelope: after Odysseus has been missing for some time, Penelope’s house begins to fill up with Suitors, who demand that she declare her husband dead and remarry. In the meantime, they set to drinking all the wine in the house and slaughtering the livestock. In response, Penelope announces that she’ll remarry only after she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father, who has no other offspring in evidence to take care of him. (He’s not dead, of course, but she thought he might appreciate a morbid little gift that will every day remind him that he is doomed to die, and that she is fully prepared for that eventuality.) To buy herself even more time, she weaves the shroud during the day and then unweaves it at night. The Suitors, who probably don’t do much weaving themselves (and are too busy drinking to worry about it anyway) don’t notice that the weaving is going slowly until one of the maids tips them off, at which point they force Penelope to complete it in a timely manner. So that’s the end of that.

      Penelope’s real cleverness, though, comes in when Odysseus returns. He wants to scout out the scene quietly, so he disguises himself as a beggar and starts casually hanging around Odysseus’ house--which by the way annoys the regular beggar, who challenges Odysseus to a fistfight for the rights to beg from the Suitors (the regular beggar loses miserably). This disguise ruse goes on for a good while, in which time Odysseus reveals to select people who he is--but never to his wife. If you study the Odyssey in a myth class, one of the big questions people ask about Penelope is, when does she realize that the “beggar” is really Odysseus in disguise? It’s clear that Odysseus doesn’t want her to recognize him; in fact, when the elderly nurse Eurycleia recognizes him, he threatens to kill her, and actually grabs her by the throat, to prevent her from revealing the truth to Penelope. Penelope herself never says anything to indicate that she’s in on the secret, but there are certain hints in the text that suggest she’s just putting on a pretense to keep everyone else in the dark. And it’s quite plausible she would do so, really. One of the difficulties of being a socially prominent woman in the Odyssey’s world is that Penelope is never alone: she’s always accompanied by at least two handmaidens, even in private settings. The text also makes clear the fact that the handmaidens are not necessarily to be trusted. We’re told that some of them are sleeping with the Suitors and therefore have an interest in deposing the current ruling family, and they could easily report Odysseus’ arrival if he reveals himself to Penelope. So we’ll concede that Penelope has a motivation to speak equivocally. But does she realize the truth the moment this “beggar” walks in the door, or is she truly in the dark right up until he starts shooting people?

      The most revealing scene, I think, is when Penelope has a dream (or at least claims to have a dream--she might just be fabricating it to have a coded discussion), wakes up in the middle of the night, and summons the “beggar” for a dream-interpretation. In the dream, she says, she had a little flock of twelve geese, and she enjoyed keeping the little pets, but then suddenly an eagle appeared overhead and killed all of them, and she was greatly distressed. The dream turns out not to need any strenuous interpretation, since the eagle delivers a speech claiming that the geese represent the Suitors and the eagle represents her husband. (The “beggar,” prompted for his interpretation, says that he's satisfied with the eagle's summing-up.) In the conventional interpretation, this is a rather transparent means for Penelope to discuss her suspicions with Odysseus, to let him know that she’s in on his plan and that she knows he’s only disguised himself so he can murder all the Suitors in good time. But then why does she say that the geese are to her, and that she’s upset when the eagle returns? Well, Penelope might have been a merry quasi-widow and have enjoyed various attentions from the many men who were so eager to marry her, but why would she reveal that so casually to a stranger who was hostile to the Suitors--or worse, to her husband? A much more interesting hypothesis was advanced by Margaret Atwood in her novel The Penelopiad, in which the geese are not code for the Suitors but rather the handmaidens, who work as Penelope’s spies, sleeping with the Suitors to extract information from them and remaining truly loyal to the mistress of the house. In the Odyssey, the handmaidens will be duly executed by Odysseus for their infidelity, and much of the drama in Atwood’s novel stems from Penelope’s sense of guilt in letting the punishment fall on their heads. It certainly makes more interesting material for contemplation than the dream-eagle’s interpretation.

     When Odysseus finally kills the Suitors and reasserts his right to the palace, Penelope insists on confirming the identity of this person who has been disguised in her home for so long. To this end, she proposes moving their private marital bed. Both of them know that one of the bedposts was a live sapling that was carved down to function as furniture, and cannot be moved because its roots are still in the ground. Odysseus grows irate at the prospect of moving the bed, and Penelope is satisfied that he is who he claims to be. The immovably fixed position of the bed, of course, is a metaphor for Penelope herself and the undisruptable state of their marriage, regardless of how other things change.