The Odyssey Page 0,7

themselves the suitors’ mistresses with more savagery than his father has sanctioned, killing them by the cruel and dishonorable means of hanging rather than dispatching them with the quick sword. More comically, he condemns with boyish heat his mother’s failure to accept Odysseus as her returned husband on sight, at which “royal Odysseus smiled, and said . . . ‘Telemachus, leave your mother in the hall to try my truth’ ” (p. 286). At the same time, the young man’s journey toward identity demands that he take his place in a hierarchical structure that elevates men over women and leaders over followers. The fact that Telemachus takes command of a ship, planning and accomplishing an adventure in which his fellows acknowledge his leadership, establishes him as the true son of Odysseus with equal if not greater force than what he finds on his voyage. To know oneself in the Telemachy is to know one’s place.

Such a system requires Penelope not only to know her place but virtually to become a place. Confined as Greek wives generally were to the interior life of the home, she can exercise no leadership even there. She cannot administer her missing husband’s property; were she to admit his death, she would have to marry one of the suitors and be carried off to provide the foundation of his household, to bear his heirs and superintend the spinning of his cloth. Instead, she must maintain her identity with the home or risk the fate of Clytaemnestra. She must be the unaltered place to which Odysseus may return, just as women, nymphs, and witches give being to the destinations between which he travels: ten years in pursuit of Helen at Troy, nine years as Calypso’s consort, a year of dalliance with Circe, a few final days as Nausicaaä’s potential fianceé. As little of the Trojan War as the epic recounts, Helen’s flight from home and husband shadows every inch of its ground: The whole tragedy of combat and frustrated homecoming follows from the consequences of just one woman’s mobility. That the reviled Clytaemnestra, who betrays her husband’s bed and conspires with her lover to murder him, is also Helen’s sister suggests that their twin offenses stem from a single root.

If male identity follows lineally in descent from father to son, if the son ideally inherits his father’s exact slot in the social hierarchy, only the mother’s fidelity can guarantee the legitimate succession of a male child who is genuinely his father’s offspring. Indeed, in Greek medical theory, the mother’s womb merely supplied the ground in which the male seed took hold and grew; again, the woman slipped from person to place. Any feminine movement, whether of Helen’s body or Clytaemnestra’s heart, undermines the system. Penelope, by contrast, demonstrates her transcendent worth by a brilliantly creative act of annulment: She delays the suitors by secretly unweaving in the concealing night the strands of the burial shroud of Laäertes, which she has begged time to finish before she chooses her new mate. In the past thirty years or so, the image of Penelope endlessly weaving and unweaving the same garment, going no place and completing nothing, has come to serve as a cautionary symbol for the frustration of women’s creativity, so powerfully does it encapsulate the consequences of the logic of gender hierarchy. In contrast to her son’s challenge of becoming what he is not, Penelope must continue always to be what she has been.

As Virginia Woolf noted, modern sympathies fall more easily on Clytaemnestra’s side than on that of Agamemnon—who, after all, took the sacrificial knife to their daughter Iphigenia in order to satisfy oracles for the departure to Troy. While the Telemachy’s assertion of hierarchical authority against the rule of chaos may have appealed to the uncertainties of the educated elite of the Renaissance (and after), it may well repel contemporary readers, however engaging they find the tale in other respects. But the Odyssey does not end after four books. The small odyssey of Telemachus takes the boy from his home island—all he has ever known—and reveals by contrast the nature of the conditions prevailing back on Ithaca. The great odyssey of his father carries the poem’s audience entirely outside the realm of normal human reality—all we have ever known—and casts us into a series of inhuman worlds, some beautiful and some terrifying, against which we come to judge the values of the human community itself. The work thus sets the pattern of fabulous travel narratives from