Since the penelops is consistently mentioned in the company of geese, it must have had something in common with them, and several scholars have explored a connection between the penelops, Penelope, and geese. In other words, what follows is primarily about the diachronic (rather than historical) dimensions of Penelope, and my suggestion is that these dimensions are also synchronically active in the Odyssey. I do think this kind of figure is likely to have substantial and deep roots, but my main point is that her qualities are palpably present in the Odyssey. I will instead attempt to uncover a set of affiliations that describes Penelope as a particular kind of mythological character.
I will not make any claims regarding the antecedents of Penelope as a mythological figure, or try to imagine what she might have been before the Odyssey took its familiar shape. What follows is one way of trying to reconstruct some of Penelope’s mythological background, not in a sense of origins, of something left in the past, but in a sense of something present and active in the Odyssey as we know it. They are relevant, however, in a more general way because they are about the mythological persona of Penelope, and this persona reaches its fullest manifestation in the Odyssey in Books 19 to 23, beginning with the dialogue between Penelope and disguised Odysseus and ending with their open embrace and a night together. By virtue of being concerned with questions both fundamental and overarching, the observations that follow will not apply directly to the dialogue in Book 19.
In this chapter, I am pulling even further back to an even larger frame, to look at Penelope’s own intrinsic relatedness to just such a transition. So far I have argued that Penelope’s myths, above all the Pandareid myths, have special affinity to their poetic environment in the Odyssey, namely a crisis and a turning point from dissolution to “light and life,” which in the Odyssey is marked by the festival of Apollo.
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