Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics

Comparative Literature, Summer 1996 by Bassi, Karen

Regarding Penelope is one of several recent studies on Penelope in the Odyssey which constitute a corrective to a scholarly tradition historically focused on the male hero. This is more than a book on Penelope or the female in epic, however. Felson-Rubin is interested in two related phenomena: "plot types" and psychological motivation or "psychologizing" characters. She acknowledges the influence of several research traditions" in her introductory chapter, i.e., narratology and psychoanalysis, but none is sustained or controlling. Her use of psychoanalysis is rather narrowly focused on the maturation of the adolescent male, Telemachus. Structuralism is taken to task in the final chapter. Five chapters (2-6) are devoted to subject positions occupied by Penelope in the narrative (Weaver, Wife, Mother, Heroine, Siren). These are framed by two methodological chapters, Poetry as Courtship (Chapter 1) and From Character to Poetics (Chapter 7).

Felson-Rubin begins by identifying possible and actual plot types in the Odyssey and suggesting how Penelope mediates between them. These plot-types "derive from the epic tradition as a whole" (p. viii) so that possible plots depend on established ones; in Aristotelian terms, what may happen in the Odyssey depends on what has happened in the epic tradition at large. This is a suggestive and often enlightening premise, especially when Felson-Rubin demonstrates how potential plots (for example INFIDELITY) surface and subside in the narrative (I follow the author in using all capitals). But there is sometimes an arbitrariness about what constitutes a plot-type. While COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE easily identifies a series of plausible or expected events, PATIENCE does not. Conversely, FelsonRubin does not take advantage of her method to analyze Telemachus's coming of age (the focus of Chapter 4) as a plot-type. Rather, she shifts to psychological and anthropological explanations, including a comparison with a New Guinea rite of passage (pp. 73-74). In doing so, she misses an opportunity to suggest how possible and actual plots in the epic are figured in terms of ambiguous or threatened masculinity. Nonetheless, the plot-types which receive the most attention in the book-COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE (exemplified by the story of Odysseus and Penelope) and INFIDELITY (exemplified by the stories of Helen and Menelaos and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra)-provide evidence for the usefulness of Felson-Rubin's approach. These plot-types and the metaphor of the "courtship dance" to describe the interplay between Penelope and Odysseus in Ithaca reposition the readers of the poem: no longer obsessed with the heroic male's outland adventures and return, we look to the poem's domestic scenes where the wife and mother is the center of attention.

One aim of Felson-Rubin's identification of plot-types is to collapse Homer (the Homeric narrator) and his character Penelope who both make "plot choices" and, in the process, keep the audience guessing about possible outcomes. "The depiction of Penelope intentionally, if defensively, manipulating her circumstances is Homer's master ruse for keeping his audience guessing and in the dark" (p. 25). She admits, however, that the same can be said of Odysseus. The big question is, "Will Penelope marry a suitor (the INFIDELITY plot) or be reunited with Odysseus (the COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE plot)?" According to Felson-Rubin, the problematic passage at Od. 23.209-30, in which Penelope "exonerates Helen to exonerate herself" (p.40), reveals Penelope's "plot awareness" and her "mental state" when contemplating the possible similarity between her plot and Helen's. Felson-Rubin's discussion does not address the actual similarities between the two, namely, that both Helen and Penelope tell revisionist tales in defense of Helen (cf. Helen's defense of herself at Od. 4.261-64) and that each tells the tale to her husband: Penelope at the moment of her reunion with Odysseus and Helen to Menelaus (and Telemachus) in Sparta. This reiteration suggests what might be called the domestication of the exemplary plot of female infidelity.

Penelope's "plot-awareness" also seems to underlie Felson-Rubin's claim that certain plots are "seen from a female-center or perspective" (pp. 17-18). One such plot is called DALLIANCE AND INFIDELITY, in which "a wife (her husband away) enjoys courtship and/or engages in a (playful) act of infidelity." However, the infidelities of Helen and Clytemnestra provide negative and deadly models of this plot type and complicate Felson-Rubin's somewhat utopian notion of a "femalecentered perspective." Coupled with her argument for "psychologizing" characters and for gender-distinct responses in the poem's "live audience," Felson-Rubin makes two assumptions-that an unmediated "female-center" or "female perspective" is possible in the poem and that it exists naturally in female characters (and audience members). She argues, for example, that "tact and discretion" may be responsible for the missing details of Odysseus and Penelope's lovemaking in Book 23, but that this is a factor "only for female listeners," illustrated by the goddesses' refusal to watch Aphrodite and Ares making love in the song Demodocus sings in Book 8 (p.13). Felson-Rubin's analysis of gender is problematic because it posits an essentialism that slips in and out between the poem's fictional universe and a "live" audience. It also leads to some less than convincing conclusions-for example, that because Penelope was a "fixed point" of return for Odysseus "he never strayed too far nor roamed too recklessly" (p.44). Or that killing the maidservants "cleanses [Telemakhos] of animosity toward women and rescues him from the misogyny of an Agamemnon" (p. 91). Still, Felson-Rubin's readings of individual passages are often illuminating, such as her analysis of the indeterminacy of Penelope's dream of the geese and eagle (p. 31ff.). Her insistence on the performative nature of the epic prompts a suggestive consideration of the "androgyny" of the poet-performer. And her concluding discussion of how "the narrative sequences in erotics and poetics correspond" in the Odyssey is a tour-de-force.