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'inauthentic'.42 The most recent edition of the Odyssey, however, explains it as follows: 'Penelope uses this apparent digression . . .to explain and justify her own conduct . . .Penelope's analysis of the actions of Helen is calculated to draw the listener's (Odysseus') attention to a comparison with her own behaviour . . .She seeks to justify [her steadfastness].' The editors add, however, 'Equally, she attempts to win sympathy for Helen by showing that her actions were the result of divine influence: she could not recognize her infatuation for what it was until the consequences of her action were visible'.43 Helen on this reading is being set up first as a counter-example to Penelope, but second as a sympathetic figure, led to err by the gods. The Odyssey opens with Zeus declaring that humans are wrong to blame the gods for their own tendency to transgress and thus to be punished (1.3243). The sexual and social transgression of Aegisthus is Zeus' example. Aegisthus is a model for the suitors, whose transgressions and punishment structure the moral discourse of the epic. Here, however, Penelope allows a different sense of causation for that exemplary narrative of sexual and social transgression, Helen. |
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The figure of Helen, then, does not simply 'mediate' between the poles of the bad Clytemnestra and the good Penelope (as a structuralist account might put it). Rather we have detailed here a more complex rhetoric of exemplarity. On the one hand, the exemplary wife, Penelope, is not only invested with an uncertainty and trickiness to match her husband's wariness and to ground Agamemnon's warnings, but also is subordinated to Clytemnestra, as the exemplary is construed as exceptional. On the other hand, the parallel between Helen and Clytemnestra that Odysseus develops, is manipulated in quite different ways in the text, as Telemachus is entertained by Helen, and carries home a memorial of her for his own wedding, and as Penelope 'sympathetically' explores their difference. The polarized discourse of transgression and fulfilment of a female role slips, as exemplary becomes exceptional, framed by the suspicion of the transgressive; and as the transgressive becomes the site of a pedagogical and sympathetic encounter. With Helen hosting at home in Sparta, what image of the patriarchal oikos can stand unmined by suspicion, untested by wariness? Stanford highlights the problem neatly if un-self-consciously. As I quoted him earlier, he says that Agamemnon's misogyny is a case of 'generalizing from his personal experience'. The full gloss is 'generalizing from his personal experience of one woman (or two, if we include Helen)'. The conditional with which the figure of Helen is invested destabilizes the polarized evaluative discourse. (The 'if' in 'wife'?) Helen is (to be) included, for sure; Helen counts but for what? As Helen's tale is recounted in the Odyssey, it becomes harder and harder to account for her |
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42 Good discussion and bibliography in Katz (1990) 1837. |
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43 Fernandez-Galiano and Heubeck (1991) ad loc. |
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