Sadly, we can only imagine how Penelope might feel if she heard this exchange between her husband and Calypso. Would she be hurt by the easy admission that she is less beautiful than the nymph? Or would she admire her husband’s wiliness: he needs Calypso’s assistance to build a new boat on which he may leave. If he flatters her, he is more likely to find himself in a seaworthy vessel. Would Penelope be angry that her husband has shown so much less sexual restraint than she has, or would she expect nothing else? They are a couple of their time, after all. She would surely be touched that her husband rejects immortality just for the opportunity to take to the seas again （he has already undergone multiple maritime disasters at this point）， with the goal of returning to her. One has to hope she never finds out that the first person Odysseus meets on his journey back to Ithaca from Ogygia is a young princess, Nausicaa. He washes up, naked, on a beach in front of her.
*
But what does Penelope do while Odysseus is making his erratic journey home? The short answer is, she weaves. Way back in Book One, when we first met Penelope, we saw Telemachus tell her to be quiet, stop crying and go back to her weaving. This could be a suggestion made to any respectable woman in the Homeric tradition: women weave. Even Helen weaves, and she is – as everyone is keen to stress, even her – a terrible wife. But for Penelope, weaving plays an integral part in her story, and her freedom from unwanted entanglements with the suitors: the literal saves her from the metaphorical. And just as Agamemnon’s homecoming was dictated by Clytemnestra’s weaving – the strange straitjacket which she uses to paralyse him – so is Odysseus’ homecoming decided by Penelope’s weaving. Both women use this most traditional skill for deceitful purposes: the difference is that Penelope is using deceit to help her husband, while Clytemnestra used it against hers.
The story of Penelope and her weaving is told three times by three different people at three different moments in the Odyssey, with almost unvarying language. We can see that it is an important plot point, from the repetition alone. So let’s look at it in more detail. The first time we hear it is in Book Two, when Antinous – the most obnoxious of Penelope’s suitors – is speaking to Telemachus. Don’t blame us suitors for hanging around the place. Blame your dear mother: she’s the cunning one.13 He goes on to explain that Penelope has cheated the suitors for almost four years: she promised she would remarry once she had woven a shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. Laertes – to be clear – is not dead at the point when Penelope makes this offer; indeed, he survives beyond the end of the poem. But making a shroud for a not-yet-dead father-in-law is a perfectly respectable thing for Penelope to do: it means that, when he does die, he will be laid out appropriately. To do less would be disrespectful.
The suitors agree to this bargain, and Penelope begins her task. But here is the cunning part: by day she weaves the shroud, by night she secretly unravels it. Astonishingly, this trick deceives the suitors for more than three years. One wonders how they could be deceived for quite so long （did they believe it was an especially massive shroud? Did they think basic woven garments took ten or twenty times longer to make than they actually did? Sadly, Antinous does not say）。 Even in the fourth year, the suitors didn’t tumble to the trick: one of Penelope’s maids snitched on her. For those of us who have ever wondered if Penelope might have been a little tempted by one or more of these young men who occupy her home for so long, this seems to be a valid textual reason why she might not have remarried: these suitors are idiots. And she has been used to a relationship （albeit long ago） with Odysseus, a man who is assuredly not stupid. So, in this fourth year of weaving and unweaving, Antinous continues, the suitors caught Penelope in the act of undoing her work and forced her to finish the shroud. Now her delaying strategy is concluded, she must choose one of them.
There are a couple of points to consider in this story. The first is one that is all too often overlooked. Weaving is not something you can unravel quickly, like knitting or crochet （where each stitch is looped into another stitch, so if you remove the last one from your knitting needles or crochet hook and pull on the thread, the whole thing can be undone very easily）。 Weaving is a much more laborious process to undo: every line of fabric must be unmade by passing the shuttle over and under the threads in the exact same way it was made. Penelope has taken on a Sisyphean task: to make a few inches of cloth every day, to undo it again every night. The sheer physical effort involved in such a thankless task – staring at the threads by torchlight, hunching over the loom – is considerable. And that is before we consider the psychological strain of spending years making something and then undoing it, over and over again. In order to avoid giving up on Odysseus, Penelope has effectively sentenced herself to years of hard labour.