Penelope with Attitude

Mythical figures are Houdinis. No sooner have they been padlocked inside some airtight text than they wriggle free. Achilles, Hector, Helen of Troy and even such later creations as Hamlet or Don Quixote live and move in our imaginations as much as in books. Of these immemorial escape-artists, none is more slippery than Odysseus. His peregrinations after the fall of Troy pale beside his posthumous wanderings through western literature, from Virgil and Dante to Tennyson, Joyce and Cavafy.

Of his faithful wife we hear less. Penelope abides merely as a watchword for patience. But her errant husband’s roamings take on meaning only against her rootedness. Without her, Homer’s Odyssey would be little more than a fantastic picaresque; she is the lodestone of home that gives purpose to his rambles. Odysseus fought for ten years at Troy and spent another ten reaching Ithaka while Penelope waited, discouraging importunate suitors by a wily Odyssean ruse: by day she...