The second point is to ask whose shroud Penelope is weaving. It is ostensibly a shroud for Laertes, but is it really a shroud for Odysseus? She has delayed remarriage for several years by this point: the war must have ended five or six years before she began the project. She knows that she cannot delay indefinitely, only postpone the inevitable in the hope that Odysseus makes it home before she finishes. So is she weaving the shroud for her marriage to a man she loves, or loved long ago? She bursts into tears repeatedly in the Odyssey: doesn’t this suggest a woman who is under enormous emotional strain? There are parallels, as mentioned above, with Clytemnestra. But Clytemnestra is using her weaving prowess to create a trap for her husband, Penelope is using hers to try and avoid being trapped herself.
The second time the story of the weaving and unweaving is told, it is three-quarters of the way through the poem, and this time it is Penelope who relates it to an interested stranger who has arrived at her palace. We know the stranger is the disguised Odysseus （enchanted by Athene so Penelope doesn’t recognize him. Although after a twenty-year absence, perhaps she would not have known him anyway）。 But Penelope believes she is talking to an old beggar. I weave deceit, she says,14 before explaining the whole story, almost word-for-word as it was told in Book Two. There could be no more perfect phrase to describe this couple than dolous tolopeuō – ‘I weave tricks’ or ‘deceit’。 That is another difference between Clytemnestra and Penelope: Clytemnestra works against her husband precisely because they are in no way alike. He could sacrifice Iphigenia, whereas she never could; he is gullible where she is conniving. But for Penelope and Odysseus, deceit is their unifying characteristic. He can barely open his mouth without fibbing; why would his wife value honesty? She adds details which Antinous did not mention: I can’t find another scheme to avoid marriage,15 she says. My parents are urging me to remarry. In this pair of lines, we can hear a terrible isolation in Penelope’s words. She has held out as long as she could, alone, and used up every idea she had. We already know she has a somewhat erratic relationship with Telemachus, who has lied to her, hidden from her and shouted at her during this poem. And now we discover that her parents are also keen for her to marry again. The energy it must have taken to hold out against all the suitors, a recalcitrant child, parents who seem to have sided with her enemies: and all that on no sleep because she has stayed up till all hours unweaving a shroud in the dark. No wonder she cries.
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This weaving scene is – directly and indirectly – the inspiration for many visual representations of Penelope. There is a lovely example of a fifth-century BCE red-figure skyphos （two-handled wine cup） in the Archaeological Museum of Chiusi in Tuscany.16 Penelope sits on a hard chair, ankles crossed. She wears a long draping robe, which gathers over her feet; her toes peep out from under the hem. She has a veil over her hair, too: her posture and dress are equally demure. But her right elbow rests on her right thigh, and her bowed head rests on her right hand. Her eyelids droop: she is clearly exhausted. A young man – Telemachus – stands in front of her, holding his pair of spears. Is he speaking to her, or trying to get her attention? The pot is slightly damaged so we can’t read his expression. But either way, it doesn’t seem to be working. Behind her, we see the reason for her fatigue: a loom on which is woven a length of fabric. The pattern is intricate: Pegasus and Medusa are travelling across the cloth, from left to right, at a gallop. The speed and movement of these tiny figures in the background are a direct contrast to the stillness and exhaustion of Penelope in the foreground. Their energy has come at the cost of her own.
Penelope is almost always shown sitting down. Visitors to the Musée d’Orsay can see a mid-nineteenth-century interpretation of Penelope, by Jules Cavelier.17 This gleaming white sculpture echoes the version of her we saw on the Chiusi pot, but this Penelope is very definitely fast asleep. She, too, has her legs crossed as she sits in an upright chair. But her hands are in her lap, and her head has drooped so far forward that your neck aches to look at her. She, too, is worn out by her night-time unweaving, and has simply had to give in to it and sleep.
She is awake in the American artist David Ligare’s picture, Penelope, from 1980.18 This modern Penelope sits on a chair, its curved legs casting shadows across a tiled floor. She is outside, facing the sun, her head turned towards the viewer. She looks pensive, rather than tired, and the sea is calm behind her. Her legs are crossed in the characteristic pose, but her left foot rests on a small grey brick. The painting has an almost photographic quality, and yet it is full of references to other, ancient art: is the brick beneath her foot a jokey reference to the plinths on which ancient statuary is often placed? Or is it a modern echo of the small footstool shown on a beautiful grave marker in Athens’ National Archaeological Museum?19 This particular grave stele is attributed to the fifth-century BCE sculptor Callimachus, and shows Hegeso – an Athenian woman – sitting on a klismos, a chair with exactly the same curved legs as the one Penelope sits on in the Ligare painting. Either way, the painting offers us a calm, thoughtful Penelope, her hands resting neatly in her lap, the underside of her right foot dirty next to the hem of her long white dress.