Feminist Criticism

Homer’s Odyssey focuses primarily on Telemachus and Ulysses, with Penelope flitting in and out of the story. Though she plays a major role in Ithaca and in the decisions of Telemachus, she remains an enigmatic character whose motives and thoughts are never fully explained. Stallings ventures into Penelope’s mind and explores the emotions she experiences while Homer describes her as “bereft of thought and motion”.
Scholars have long since viewed Penelope as the archetypal faithful wife, one who is cunning enough to defend the home while her husband is away, and whose loyalty, emotionally and physically, never wavers. Homer concedes that Penelope is indeed cunning, but he also often describes her as overwhelmed by the difficulties of fending off so many suitors for so long. In doing this and simultaneously demanding that she be a wholly devoted spouse, he rids her of her potential to be a fully developed character within the Odyssey. He also dooms her to be second-best to Ulysses, who is shrewd enough to outwit his opponents but as a man is not prone to collapsing upon a couch at the end of each scene. Furthermore, Ulysses’ infidelity is acceptable and excused because of his gender: though he spends an extended amount of time of his own volition with women who are most certainly not his wife, he is in no way reviled as Penelope is for her mere inability to rid herself of unwanted suitors. Stallings reverses the classical patriarchal ideology by both giving voice to Penelope and challenging the “faithful wife” archetype in “The Wife of the Man of Many Wiles”. The title of the poem addresses this with an ironic bow to the traditional masculine-oriented belief: Penelope, the subject of the poem, is again pushed aside in favor of an acclamation of Ulysses, and is named only as his wife. Stallings implies, through Penelope, that Penelope was not in fact faithful to her husband during his extended absence. However, she does not condemn her to yet another archetype, that of the unfaithful wife. Stallings explores the nuances of Penelope’s feelings towards Ulysses, partially masked and therefore all the more poignant, with cool diction and allusions to Penelope’s pain at being left behind and at having played second best to Ulysses’ mistresses, and to her dual pain in causing Ulysses grief and pleasure in forcing him to taste his own bitter medicine. Stallings allows the silent Penelope to speak and after ages of reticence and expand out of her confinement to a two-dimensional stereotype. Whether Penelope was unfaithful or not, by questioning the assumption Stallings frees her of the patriarchal classical bonds.