None of that has any bearing on my enjoyment of the story. Why do i care? i have no idea - it's just something that's niggling in my brain a little, so i'm putting it out there for the geniuses amongst you. and although this is just a short story and i hate to be the one poking around at the teeth of my gift horse, i am just wondering if this is just the glossing of an author who had a great idea and wanted to force it in, or if this is a claim penelope can actually make here. I am the laziest researcher today, and my half-assed googling gave me nothing suggesting this. From them she inherits this fragment of their gift, to spin thread and link it to men, to weave the shape of their fates on her loom. especially this line:Ī queen who can trace her ancestry back through her grandmother’s grandmother to the three daughters of Necessity. and yet, penelope eventually succeeds and gets her happy ending with all her insides intact, which don't get me wrong, i am all sorts of happy for her, but i'm just questioning the plausibility of this within the constraints of the greek worldview. And a trace is not enough.īut she seems to be overstepping her place by even trying, right? i'm no classics scholar, but i do know the gods get really pissed when mortals forget their mortal limitations. Only a woman, a mortal woman, with a trace of the divine in her veins. Each thread is a life, and each life is a thousand thousand choices she is not goddess enough to control them. The threads fight her, their orderly arrangement belying their potential for chaos. She wants to weep, seeing what she has woven. whereas the fates were capital-g goddesses whose power was undisputed.and yes, penelope struggles here, with the manipulation of the threads: which is nice and all for diversity and parlor tricks, but doesn't have the same pull as a goddess.
my understanding is that while helen of troy had zeus for a daddy, and could therefore claim a little divinity on college applications, penelope's mother was "just" a naiad. This story offers an answer, and on first glance it seems to be a satisfying and reasonable one, drawing from other corners of classical mythology and wrapping it all up in a tidy bow.īut, and this is where i need someone with a better background in greek mythology to step up. where the heck did heathcliff go for those three years? what were bertha and miss havisham like before all their madness and disappointments? how did gertrude and claudius hook up? and, here - what was up with penelope and that weaving/unweaving cycle? was it just the weary stereotypy of woman endlessly waiting for her man to come home? I do love stories like this - stories that take a well-known work as their foundation and then poke around in it to locate the parts of the story that stick out in our minds as unfinished or unexplored.
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