Homer’s Odyssey has been retold for nearly 3,000 years. But who was Penelope beyond the loyal wife who waited 20 years? With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey’s huge success, people are visualizing the movie star Anne Hathaway as Penelope.
But yes, the audiences are asking again: was there a real woman behind the myth?
In the epic poem by Homer written circa 8th century BC, Penelope is Queen of Ithaca and wife of Odysseus. After Odysseus has spent 10 years fighting at Troy, he then spends another 10 years attempting to get home. Meanwhile, Penelope is holding the country together.
Her problems: 108 suitors have descended into the palace, eating all of Odysseus’s food, and putting pressure on her to marry someone new. Her son, Telemachus, is young and as there is no king, the throne is up for grabs.
Penelope’s now infamous loom ploy to hold back the suitors is that of a burial shroud. She tells the suitors that she will choose a husband when she has completed a shroud for Odysseus’s father, Laertes. Then, she painstakingly unravels her work at night, buying time and maintaining hope that Odysseus will return.
As the scholars of antiquity attest, Penelope is not merely ‘sitting passively’. In the words of one, “What she’s really doing is holding open a place for him to return to.” She is managing the kingdom, securing her son’s succession and successfully outsmarting powerful men.
Was Penelope a Real Historical Figure?
This is where fiction becomes fact.
In the Odyssey, Homer provides very few details of Penelope’s parentage and later authors were to fill the gap. In Homer’s epic poem, she is stated as being the daughter of Icarius, king of Lacedaemon and mother (according to later sources) to be Periboea or Polycaste. She is related to the kings of Sparta and is even considered to be the granddaughter of Zeus.
The truth is, we cannot prove that there was ever a ‘Queen Penelope of Ithaca’. However, as Natalie Haynes and her contemporaries, authors who write extensively on the Bronze Age Greek world explain, we can learn a lot about Penelope by thinking of her as ‘an ideal of female agency’.
Through an analysis of literature, archaeology, language and DNA in ‘Penelope’s Bones’, research has revealed that, in the Bronze Age Greek world, ‘ women are generally defined by secondary roles, yet they appear indispensable to any plot’. In other words, ‘The Odyssey would not be the Odyssey without a Penelope.’
We know through archaeological discoveries that Bronze Age Greek women were textile weavers, ran households and occasionally had political authority. However, we now understand that weaving was far more than a domestic chore. It was a display of economic power, and by controlling the shroud Penelope effectively controls the time for succession.
Although we may never uncover Penelope’s bones, her story is surely a reflection of those Mycenaean Queens who had to face war, separation and the treacherous politics of the court.
Anne Hathaway’s Penelope in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
His ‘most ambitious’ movie of all time with a £150 million budget, filmed on IMAX 70mm, this new adaptation sees Matt Damon in the lead role as Odysseus with Tom Holland portraying Telemachus, and Anne Hathaway stepped into the role of Penelope.
What’s Hathaway’s vision of Penelope? Certainly not that of a damsel in distress.
Hathaway states: “I think there’s a way to think about her that she is just kind of passively, quietly waiting. But I didn’t see her like that. I saw her as this incredible, active, ride-or-die partner.” She describes Penelope as having ‘a sense of danger’ and of being a character that ‘genuinely loves with her whole fiery soul.’
To play the role, Hathaway learned how to weave, joking about the ‘work’, though admitting that she found the rhythm ‘therapeutic’. She admits to adding some imperfections into her weaving, as after all, Penelope’s shroud is unfinished.