Emmanuelle Malhappe on Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

This guest blog is by Emmanuelle Malhappe, French poet, short story author, playwright, and psychoanalyst. For a longer bio, please see below. 

Emmanuelle Malhappe

Masculine and Feminine in The Odyssey

Penelope is not Ulysses' wife. She is not waiting for her husband to come back, whatever we may think about faithfulness.

 

Because Penelope is not a woman. She is not even an archetype. She is a character.

 

A character Homer invented who embodies an idea. In my view, Penelope is the feminine in every human being.

In a certain sense, Homer wrote his own version of Genesis. In the Bible, Eve is created from Adam. Not from one of his ribs, as in the mistranslations of some hermeneutical traditions, but from one of his sides. Adam could not remain alone. Not because he was bored, which would make his woman just company for him. He could not exist without her, because no one can be just half of a human being.

 

Ulysses is not a man. He's not Penelope's husband. He's a character Homer invented who also embodies an idea.

 

But what idea?

 

As all readers of Homer know, Ulysses went away for ten years, and then it took him ten more years to return to Ithaca. During that time, Penelope wove and unwove the shroud for her father-in-law.

 

Do you see the symmetry?

Ten years to go, ten years to come back for Ulysses.

Twenty years of weaving and unweaving for Penelope.

 

Both Ulysses and Penelope are doing the same things in different ways.

Ulysses is making war, and he experiences many things, visits many countries, loves many women. In a certain sense, we can say that Ulysses is our “hurry, hurry” side. He is always doing something. He represents the part of us that longs to do things, to have experiences.

Penelope, on the other hand, is weaving not only fabric but the fabric of her life and Ulysses’. During the day, she's weaving. During the night, she unweaves. Why? Not because of the suitors who want to marry her.

 

No. She's weaving and unweaving because she’s like a writer.

 

She embodies the creative side of every human being.

 

In each of us, there are two appetites, and both are appetites for learning. One to discover the world, to perceive it. The other to transform those experiences into thoughts, and sometimes into artistic works. One appetite for the world, the other from the world. That's what being a human being is.

 

As the aphorist and philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila wrote, “The absence of contemplative life turns the active life of a society into a swarm of pestilent rats.”

 

Without Penelope, Ulysses is not a human being: he’s a rat.

 

Penelope is the part every person must have to be not just a “featherless biped,” as Plato described it, but a human being. Ulysses is the part that every human must have to experience the world.

Without experience, no creation is possible.

But without creative work, without weaving, experience cannot be transformed into what makes us human—namely language.

The writer Robert Graves, following Samuel Butler, suggested that Homer might have been a woman. Many classics scholars now believe, however, that Homer’s works come from an oral tradition rather than the work of a single author. But if the author of The Odyssey consists of multiple entities rather than just one, that only reinforces the epic’s feminine side: an entity who is but goes unacknowledged.

From the characters of Penelope and Ulysses, we can see that the feminine is embodied not only in women, and the masculine is not just embodied in men—fortunately! But those two forces are manifested in each of us, as with yin and yang.

 

Our feminine part is our poetic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Our masculine part is our pragmatic side, whether you are a man or a woman.

Nobody can be a human being having just one of those two sides.

When Penelope weaves and unweaves, she embodies the beautiful idea that there cannot be a human being without words. Penelope’s fabric is poetry. She might be Homer herself in a vertiginous mise en abîme. Homer, who gave voice to her characters, represented herself in The Odyssey as a weaver.

Every poet knows very well what Homer/Penelope goes through. You write all day, and then, the next morning, when you look at what you wrote the day before, you have to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.

 

But wait! There’s more. Despite all your efforts, the more you write, the more language eludes you.

 

And being a poet is knowing that, and still continuing to weave and unweave, to write and unwrite. Because creation is not only about producing a result; a collection of words is above all a path. What is important is to keep on creating. That’s what Penelope teaches us.

 

So Ulysses and Penelope are not a couple in the sense of wife and husband. They are a couple as two inseparable parts of every human being. Nevertheless—and Homer knew this—marriage may always be a reinterpretation of this first couple where the feminine and masculine try to work together; not only between men and women, but also inside each of us, uniting in a creative way our will to have experiences and our need to transform them into internal memories and spiritual aims.

Emmanuelle Malhappe began her career teaching literature and poetics at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, and subsequently became a psychoanalyst. She has written plays, short stories, essays, radio programs, and poetry. Her poetry collection, Entre est le pays (Between Is the Land) was published by Éditions L’Harmattan in 2025. Her collection blending poetry and philosophy, Éclats de femme, silence du féminin (Fragments of Woman, Silence of the Feminine), was published by Éditions Ubik-Art Moresa  in 2025. Also in 2025, the same publisher released her book poetry book  J’ai posé ma main (I Placed My Hand). She received the Gaston Baissette Short Story Prize for her collection La Solitude des cygnes (The Solitude of Swans).

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writers I Can't Stop Reading, Part 7: Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros zoomed onto the literary scene in 1984 with the novel The House on Mango Street. Since then, her work has become part of the canon, assigned to schoolchildren, displayed in multiple anthologies.

Somehow that enshrining of Cisneros’s work in a smooth marble niche has blurred some of the most important qualities in her writing. She is a daring author who constantly presents her readers with new vistas, writing books that deserve to be considered classics because they speak to core human experiences in language that shoots electric currents right to the reader’s imagination. Cisneros’s writing is wise, funny, sexy, and thought-provoking, often on the same page.

Nowhere is that truer than in her epic novel, Caramelo, or Puro Cuento, first released in 2002. The reviews were primarily chatty and upbeat, but most of them seemed to miss that this is a great American novel, a book that speaks eloquently to fundamental experiences, both in North America and in human life. Caramelo is the saga of one family on both sides of the U.S./Mexican border, stretching over two huge countries and three generations. The depth of the passions, aspirations, disappointments, frustrations, and exhaltations in the book is breathtaking. Each chapter is almost self-contained, a polished turquoise set in silver, but each gem adds to the long necklace of the story.

Cisneros’s use of metaphor in the book is sensational. There are precious few writers who come up with such stellar figurative language on a consistent basis. Here’s a passage from Caramelo where Soledad, the grandmother of the main character, falls in love as a young woman, and the narration follows her thoughts:

In that kiss, they swallowed one another, swallowed the room, the sky, darkness, fear, and it was beautiful to feel so much a part of everything and bigger than everything. Soledad was no longer Soledad Reyes, Soledad on this earth with her two dresses, her one pair of shoes, her unfinished caramelo rebozo, she was not a girl anymore with sad eyes, not herself, just herself, only herself. But all things little and large, great and small, important and unassuming. A puddle of rain and the feather that fell shattering the sky inside it, the lit votive candles flickering through blue cobalt glass at the cathedral, the opening notes of a waltz without a name, a clay bowl of rice in bean broth, a steaming clod of horse dung. Everything, oh, my God, everything. A great flood, an overwhelming joy, and it was good and joyous and blessed.

So much for the doctrine of Original Sin!

To understand Cisneros’s gifts as a writer it’s worth remembering that she started out as a poet when she enrolled in the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poetry is undervalued to this day—her book Loose Woman has some terrific poems. That poetic sensibility is the foundation of her prose—she’s a storyteller, but the telling is as important as the outcome.

There are so many achievement in Caramelo it’s difficult to parse them all. Cisneros threads real and surprising historical characters into this chronicle that I imagine includes a lot of her own family history, historical characters such as the ventriloquist Señor Wences; and the siren of Mexican film, Tongolele. Cisneros presents a complex portrayal of Mexico itself, a country with a glorious and tragic history. I enjoyed her command of the look and feel of different decades and their clothing, so all the layers of time seem authentic. Some characters in the book, living and dead, engagingly talk back to the author, asking her to exclude certain episodes or change her account of some events. In the end, the author tells all, more or less.

Yes, Caramelo has some mushy passages, particularly at the very end, but what great book doesn’t have warts? Ulysses has many more. Caramelo is not a page-turner. Neither is Ulysses.

Caramelo contains a lot of Spanish, and it’s impressive that Cisneros draws on the linguistic traditions of English and Spanish fluently. She places the Spanish in contexts that makes it understandable. Well, for the most part.

It’s time to take Sandra Cisneros out of the marble niche she’s been confined to and recognize her as one of the great living authors of the U.S.A.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 6: Endings

On what note do you end a book of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction? With a crescendo, like a classical symphony? One famous example of that is the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, where Molly Bloom’s soliloquy goes on in an eight-page, nonstop sentence and ends in breathless affirmations.

Or do you finish with a quiet image that lingers, leaving the reader to ponder:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies    

When a new planet swims into his ken;  

Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes    

He stared at the Pacific—and all his men 

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—    

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

—John Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Ending with a stunning image—“Silent, upon a peak in Darien”—can sometimes be more effective than a crescendo, since it’s understated and allows the reader to measure and experience the full impact of the ending.

But how you end a book depends entirely on what comes before the finale, and how the last act fits organically with the rest of the book. A book is a living organism. You can’t change one thing without affecting each morsel of the text. The ending has to fit with the rest of the book or it will feel manipulative or tacked on.

I once made an attempt to write a young adult novel. I was having real problems with the ending, but I couldn’t identify the problem. I showed my draft to one of the experts in the field, Marilyn Sachs, award-winning author of more than 30 books, including Veronica Ganz and The Bear’s House. One thing Marilyn told me is that you should never try to tie up all the loose ends when you conclude a book. Life is messy. Any denouement that neatly packages all the unsolved questions feels artificial.

In general, the ending has to be different from the rest of the book. If everything is the same at the end of a book, the reader feels as if there is no story, nothing learned or gained. If the middle of the book is wracked with doubt, the ending could well be calm and/or resolved. If the world the book depicts is full of certainty and self-assurance, the ending might involve questioning. If the book is about pain and loss and mourning, the ending often conveys a sense of grounding and renewal. If the story involves childhood innocence, then experience and maturity and wisdom could be the gateway at the end.

In thinking about books that consist of shorter pieces—poems, short stories, or essays—the impact of the last piece is not as important as that of the best piece. The nature of a collection of shorter pieces is that they tend to stand alone. For that reason, the most enduring thing about a book of that sort is not the closing note, but the most memorable note. The exception would be the collection where the final piece is the best piece. Does anyone remember what the last story is in Raymond Carver’s book Cathedral? But you probably do remember the title story, because it’s such an amazing piece. Do you remember the last poem of Mary Oliver’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection American Primitive? Most likely no, but you might remember “In Blackwater Woods,” the poem in the collection that lives on, retyped by countless fans on their websites and shared from person to person, with its stunning final lines.

Other recent posts on writing topics:
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer