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