(NB: In case you are coming across this post randomly, PLEASE read the quick introductory material here, because this is part of a longer series aiming at a particular end. Thank you.)

A second “Alt-Penelope” one finds radical cynical scholars (female and male) sometimes presenting is the one who, over the course of the whole Odyssey, supposedly serves merely as a Passive Pretty Object, a patriarchally-stereotypical woman whose entire identity comes only from her association with her husband and who never does a thing of any real consequence, being animated only in an auxiliary manner by external forces. In short, this is the Alt-Penelope who, in the language of the radical cynics “has no agency.”

On this reading, Penelope the Circumspect, whose fame used to be held to reach to the stars in an equal, though different way from that of her husband, might as well not even be a person, for, as it was once actually said directly to me someone in the grip of this sort of bitter feminism, “even Odysseus’ bow has more personality than Penelope.”

Ridiculous, you say? Quite right, and in this post I want to at least begin showing why.

The first issue behind the Penelope as Passive Pretty Object slur grounds itself in the quite proper (and I would even say, for Christians, biblical) concern to recognize the real agency, that is the real personhood, of women. Women are not mere auxiliaries to men, as should be clear from the Genesis creation account itself. There, although woman is created second, and from the rib of the man, the stated reason for God doing this focuses on the incompleteness of man without woman.

Whatever we may or may not want to say about gender roles at various points in history, and even about whether Christianity teaches a universally normative set of gender roles, ((I am referring here to the persistent debate, even among conservative Christians, between complementarians and egalitarians.)) we all must surely be quick to acknowledge that women are not sub-human and ought not to be thought of as identifiable only in relation to men who more or less literally possess them in some sort of power relationship.

Patriarchy is one of the last few terms that late Modernity is willing to acknowledge as a real Dirty Word Which Ought Not Be Said, but quite aside from secular intemperance about the term, it is true that there has often been in history – and still is today – an unhealthy and abusive type of patriarchy which really does demean women as mere auxiliaries of men rather than exalt them as fellow image-bearers and fully equal to men in all the ways that matter to the God, who looks not on outward appearances, but on the heart. This is the type of patriarchy that today’s radical cynical scholars have made the focus of their bitterness, and just as in the saying about people who only have hammers, here too those whose minds can only contain one idea necessarily see that idea everywhere they look.

It is this sort of scholar, utterly obsessed with the idea that Rapacious Gender Conflict Is the Universal Key to All Human Experience, who may be found vomiting the most foul of calumnies against what was, until quite recently, the commonly accepted portrait of Penelope as the very model of the virtuous wife who anchors her husband and children by ordering and preserving that which is truly the seedbed of politics, the family. Penelope, say these scholars (and the impressionable young women they infect with their poison), pretty much does nothing but get manipulated by men and cry over the whole course of the Odyssey, revealing that she isn’t even really a person, but just a Pretty Object that could be replaced by, say, a pile of gold or a painting without any actual detriment to the story.

Again, ridiculous, you say? Again, quite right, but I’ve belabored the point in order to highlight how actually crucial this portrayal of Penelope is to the gender fanaticism that presently rules our culture. In some quarters of academia, the need to portray Penelope as a mere prop in a story that is only and solely about toxic masculinity is so overpowering that you can tell, reading the book or article, that advanced degrees notwithstanding, critical thought has been simply overcome by emotional intemperance and intellectual incontinence. Strong words, true enough. But if you ever descend into the cesspool that is this type of scholarship (or even into its popular representations, such as Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad), you’ll find out just how tame my language actually is.

(At this point, I want to state my apology to readers: below is just a copy / paste of my notes on this subject; I’ve had no time to rewrite it all into a more enjoyable prose format. Hopefully it will still be of some use.)

1. “agency” – ability to act in order to achieve a result
   
   1. Penelope does act, and quite significantly, for the entire course of her husband’s 20 year absence:
      
      1. She’s the supreme royal on Ithaca
         1. Telemachus is a child all the way up to the beginning of the story (“child” here meaning unable to take responsibility for one’s own domain).
            
         2. Telemachus is an inept and irresponsible male, and so he is not really in authority at all despite his occasional bold words.
            
         3. The only other royal male, Laertes (Odysseus’ father) has deliberately withdrawn from the household, laying down any claim to authority and power he had. (He’s another irresponsible male!)
            
      2. Although the physical labor of the house is done by maids and servants, Penelope is the directing force behind the whole thing: the servants serve her because she’s in charge: a positive word from her will make their day; a negative word from her will result in punishment. What is all this but agency?
         
         1. Her direction of the house, without any male overseeing or directing her, also means that she is the political authority in the household, since for the Greeks politics means directing a community towards its purpose.
            
            1. It is merely an idea of our own time period that politics means voting and making laws and so on. But these things are not the root and basis of politics for the Greeks; they are only some of its normal external effects.
               
            2. Politics for the Greeks begins in the oikos (the household), and flows “upward” to the rest of the society in the public sphere.
               
               1. The central problem of the Odyssey is, thus, that the royal oikos of Ithaca is in severe disorder, meaning that the public sphere beyond it is also in disorder. Penelope can’t fix all that by herself, but that is no proof that she “doesn’t have agency.” Agency only means ability to act; it doesn’t necessarily imply actual opportunities to act, let alone successful actions. Politics requires prudence, and Penelope has that quality in abundance.
                  
               2. It is often pointed out that women and children were generally confined to a special upstairs area of the house, the gunaikon. What of it? Within this area, the wife had the power and responsibility – which is all that is required to refute the notion that Penelope did not have “agency.” Again, the problem with this sweeping claim is that it is a petitio: “agency” can only mean political / physical power and authority.

1. Thus, it is anachronistic interpretation to say in an unqualified way that Penelope “has no political power”, let alone “has no agency.”
   
   1.  Why should standards from our time get to pass judgement on a past culture – especially if everything is “relative” and “there is no truth”?
       
2. Two crucial actions Penelope makes that demonstrate her agency:
   
   1. Planning and executing for three years the deception of Laertes’ burial shroud required significant planning and willpower on her part, especially since she, a lone woman with no male backup, is setting herself against 108 young, strong, aggressive men. What is this courage, determination, and sustained course of action but agency of the highest degree?
      
   2. Setting up the contest of the bow: Athena “inspires” her to do this, but the Greek term “inspire” here refers to only emotional desire: Penelope herself had to decide to do what her emotions were telling her to do. And what is this but agency?
      
   3. These two actions “bracket” the return of Odysseus to restore the needed order to the household: the shroud deception prevents Penelope from being “claimed” by another man, and the bow contest enables her husband to symbolically and publicly reclaim the kingship and restore order both to the house and to the kingdom. Penelope’s agency drives the whole story.

Thus, in a way it might be said with all sobriety that the real hero of the Odyssey is Penelope, without whose significant and persistent courage, determination, and outright craftiness (prudence, wisdom) the supposed hero, Odysseus, would be just another boring, chest-thumping male veteran of the Trojan War, arriving at last at home only to be killed by malefactors bent on destroying his family and his kingdom. Far from being a merely Passive Pretty Object who could be replaced by a pile of gold or a painting, she is the very life of the story, the master thread which, if pulled out, would cause the whole epic and all its associated glories, to unravel just like Laertes’ burial shroud.

But that, of course, is precisely why this awful slur against Penelope has been invented in the first place.

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Infamous “Alt-Penelopes” Index

Main Series Index

Probably few female characters from the classical Western heritage are better known as models of feminine virtue than Odysseus’ wife, Penelope. For space’s sake, I will not indulge in a recitation of the facts of this reading of Penelope, as it is well-known and adhered to in classical Christian education circles.

As noted in the Introduction to this series, my purpose in all posts contained in it is resolutely to engage with darkly cynical alternate visions of Penelope that, if not quite dominant in secular academia, yet play far too powerful a role in reflecting (and so in an ongoing way, shaping) the general post-Christian intellectual milieu in which we ourselves live and are attempting to carry out the difficult task of classical Christian education.

The sorts of vicious attacks regularly made on Penelope’s character by radically feminist scholars constitute not only attempts to batter down what little is left of the once great cathedral of classical Christian learning, but also a devilish strategy of poisoning the hearts and minds of young women against men. ((This is not merely rhetorical embellishment: I have personally engaged with bitter young women in classrooms – which is the biggest reason I became seriously interested in analyzing attacks on Penelope and defending her image.)) And since a great many Christian young women these days live and learn about the world in the corrosive milieu of public schools, the danger to our sisters is greater than we might be comfortable imagining. ((Meaning, our sisters in classical schools and homeschools are not necessarily safe from this malignant distortion of femininity: if they aren’t getting it from popular culture, they will certainly encounter it outside the home when they leave it.))

For those of us who only read and teach the narrow range of materials found on typical “Great Books” lists (and who, moreover, do all our teaching from within the intellectually-safe confines of a narrowly construed “biblical worldview”) it can come as a shock to learn that speaking casually of “the classical tradition” can function, as do all generalities, as an unconscious filter on both our knowledge and our expectations. That is, we became so used to the accepted way of telling the stories drawn from the canonical books that we fail (not by deliberate vice) to realize that canonical implies extra-canonical, and that for our secularist neighbors, this is the great and holy Day and Age of Finding and Advancing The Marginalized.

It’s done with Scripture all the time, of course – we’ve all heard of the Gnostic Gospels and other such works which inform a bloated realm of sub-scholarship devoted to using them to deconstruct Christianity itself. This is the day when it is ever so fashionable to say, “But who’s to say which Christianity is the real one? After all, ancient conservatives conspired to suppress alternate versions. The whole thing was and is just a vicious power game.”

The inestimable Penelope, daughter of Icarius, wife of Odysseus, and mother of Telemachus, has, alas, also become a victim of this sort of bitter crusade, and that by the fact that various skeptics and cynics have mined from the detritus of the classical world a variety of what I will call “Alt-Penelopes.”

Without further ado, let me jump into the cesspool of academic attacks on the virtue of Penelope by recounting some not widely-known “Alt-Penelopes” found, ironically enough, in classical sources themselves. Below is a list of the posts in this particular sub-series:

I. Penelope the Adulteress (?)

II. Penelope the Passive Pretty Object

III. Penelope the Silent Victim

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To make a long story short, having encountered in some non-Christian educational circles I’ve traveled, much soul-rotting skepticism about the “supposed virtues” of Penelope, which skepticism does not scruple to simply and viciously attack her as a virtual non-entity in a world of oppressive toxic masculinity, I’ve decided to do a series of posts on Penelope that engage in detail with such skepticism.

My hope is that this series will serve to alert other classical Christian teachers to the horrific way Penelope tends to get treated in certain academic circles, and so enable such teachers (1) to better engage the classics for themselves and (2) better prepare their students for the “toxic feminism” that is presently and quite brutally victimizing our whole cultural heritage and indeed, our own souls.

Back to “Penelopiad” Index