How is Penelope portrayed in the Odyssey?

How is Penelope portrayed in the Odyssey?

Wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus. Penelope spends her days in the palace pining for the husband who left for Troy twenty years earlier and never returned. Homer portrays her as sometimes flighty and excitable but also clever and steadfastly true to her husband.

What is Penelope’s role in Odysseus homecoming?

Penelope’s strength in keeping the highest standards in her function as a wife, woman and mother contributes to the success of Odysseus’ homecoming by keeping the home and family for him to come back to. Through many examples Homer indicates to us the standards of those times.

Why is Penelope significant?

There is no doubt that Penelope plays a significant role in The Odyssey. She is after all, the end goal of the hero and narrator Odysseus. Penelope is able to keep the dream she shares of reuniting with Odysseus in marriage alive by stalling until his return.

Who is Penelope in Odysseus?

Penelope, in Greek mythology, a daughter of Icarius of Sparta and the nymph Periboea and wife of the hero Odysseus. They had one son, Telemachus.

How was Penelope portrayed in the story?

Homer portrays Penelope as loyal, patient, and the ideal wife, as he contrasts her to Clytemnestra who killed Agamemnon upon his return from Troy. Penelope emerges as a virtuous, yet complex and powerful character who is regarded by later Greek tradition as the epitome of a respectable and faithful wife.

What did Penelope do while Odysseus was gone?

On Odysseus’s return, disguised as an old beggar, he finds that Penelope has remained faithful. She has devised tricks to delay the suitors, one of which is to pretend to be weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father Laertes and claiming that she will choose a suitor when she has finished.

How was Penelope courageous in The Odyssey?

She believes she can belong to one man only and she remains faithful to this idea no matter what. It is also important to note that her faith makes her that courageous and wise. Like any other hero, Penelope is guided by her faith. She performs heroic deeds in the name of her ideas.

What are Penelope’s goals?

It is Precisely this the best reputation which is presented in the Odyssey as the most valued goal in life. Penelope’s responsibility is to develop and maintain the best reputation. As wife she must preserve the reputation of her husband, her family, and must maintain the system of the household.

Why was Penelope a hero?

The journey of Penelope is much more implied than that of Odysseus but, Penelope nonetheless shows her claim to the title of a hero through her compassion, mental strength, and loyalty. These traits that Penelope possesses are further emphasized through her grief over …show more content…

What kind of person is Penelope?

Some critics dismiss Penelope’s role in The Odyssey as a paragon of marital fidelity — a serious and industrious character, a devoted wife and mother, but one who lacks the fascination and zest for life that some of Homer’s immortal women display.

What major character trait does Penelope share with Odysseus?

Odysseus’s wife and Telemachus’s mother. In the beginning of the story, Penelope’s most prominent qualities are passivity, loyalty, and patience (along with beauty and skill at the loom) – the age-old feminine virtues. She does very little but lie in bed and weep.

What was Penelope’s trick Odyssey?

The emblem of Penelope’s cleverness is the device by which she tricks her suitors for three years, her weaving. She uses the weaving to buy herself time, but the weaving is itself an image of time. Time is a weaving and unweaving; it makes and unmakes beings and relations.