Cast portrait: Penelope

This portrait is released the day Penelope's arc peaks in the cycle, after Odyssey XXIII — Recognition by Penelope. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Epics: Odyssey. First appearance: Odyssey 1 (described); first stage entrance Odyssey 1.

Lineage

Penelope is daughter of Icarius of Sparta, niece of Tyndareus (and therefore cousin of Helen and Clytemnestra), wife of Odysseus, mother of Telemachus. She came to Ithaca as a bride twenty years before the Odyssey opens; for ten of those years her husband was at Troy, and for ten more he has been somewhere on the sea. She has had no certain news of him through the second decade. She has run the household of Ithaca alone — managing the estate, raising the boy, putting off remarriage. Of all the cycle's women, she is the one whose interiority Homer renders most deeply.

In the Odyssey

She is the Odyssey's structural centre, even more than its absent hero. The poem opens with the situation she has created and maintained: a hundred and eight suitors from Ithaca and the neighbouring islands have come to her court, demanding she choose one of them as Odysseus's replacement. They eat her stores, slaughter her livestock, harass her serving-women, plot against her son. She has held them off by stratagem.

Her great trick — recounted in the poem more than once — is the loom. She told the suitors she would choose a husband once she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes; she wove by day and unravelled by night for three years. A treacherous handmaid eventually betrayed the trick, and the suitors compelled her to finish the cloth — at which point she devised the bow-stringing contest that opens Book 21: she will marry the man who can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve aligned axe-heads. None of the suitors can do it. The disguised beggar — Odysseus — can.

In Book 19 she interviews this beggar, who has come up to the great hall by Eumaeus's hand. She tells him her sorrows; he gives her precise news of her husband (that is, of himself), inventing a careful story that is mostly true. She does not recognise him — or, in the line of reading most modern critics now follow, she half-recognises him and tests him without saying so. She tells the beggar a dream of geese and an eagle that he interprets as the suitors' coming slaughter. She then announces the bow-contest. Book 23 — the recognition scene — has Penelope refuse to acknowledge Odysseus even after the suitors are dead, until he correctly answers her test about the bed: the marital bed was carved by his own hand from a living olive tree, one of its bedposts the living stump, and cannot be moved. He flares at the suggestion the bed could have been moved; she sees the man.

The interpretive crux

The question of when Penelope recognises Odysseus is one of the Odyssey's great cruxes. Read one way, she is genuinely fooled until the bed test — Athena had to assure her husband that she would not recognise him until he wished. Read another, she has known or suspected since the interview in Book 19 and is testing him through the bow contest and the bed test — a stratagem as elaborate as his disguise. The latter reading, popularised by Philip Whaley Harsh and Joseph Russo in the twentieth century, makes Penelope Odysseus's intellectual equal: she is polymetis as he is polymetis, two cunning minds testing each other across a hall full of corpses. This is now the dominant reading among Homerists.

Across the cycle

Penelope is not in the other three epics, but she is the Odyssey's structural answer to several other figures. Most pointedly to her cousin Clytemnestra — Agamemnon's wife, who had a lover (Aegisthus) ready when her husband returned from Troy and murdered him at the welcome feast. The contrast is hammered relentlessly through the Odyssey: Agamemnon's ghost in Book 11 praises Penelope's wisdom and chastity at length, and Athena and the narrator both invoke the Atreid catastrophe as the dark mirror of the Ithacan happy ending. Penelope is also the cycle's structural answer to Helen — both descended from Tyndareus, both wives of Achaean kings, but Helen left and Penelope stayed.

The scholarship

Read Penelope as Odysseus's equal in cunning, his structural complement in the poem's design, the inheritance to which his entire journey is oriented. The bed test in Book 23 is not the recognition of a face but the recognition of a mind: the man and the woman both pass it.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.